Grace by Cody Keegan

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Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America
By Cody Keegan
Mariner Books 2022

White House speechwriters are always the neediest, yappiest Pomerianans in the Capitol kennel, and maybe that’s understandable, given the essential impossibility of their job, which usually consists of somehow transforming incoherent presidential burblings into passable eloquence without ever revealing to the president in question that he has the rhetorical abilities of a ripe cantaloupe. Presidential speech writers tend to live in a weird shadow-world of denial and play-acting, telling everybody – sometimes even telling themselves, the poor schmucks – that all they’re doing is channeling or refining the sentiments of their bosse, when everybody in the world knows otherwise. 

Oddly, this torment is probably only increased when the president in question actually does have some rhetorical ability. There’s no risk of a Herbert Hoover or a George Bush (take your pick which one) quibbling with you about scansion, but a wordsmith, or someone with delusions of being one, might see the very position of speech writer as some awkward combination of competition and personal insult. 

How much more awkward, then, when the president in question is actually a fine writer, very likely more talented than his speechwriting staff? For one possible answer, there is now Grace, the new memoir by President Barack Obama’s chief White House speechwriter Cody Keenan, who focuses his fascinating (and, naturally, readable) account on ten days in 2015, when a series of major social and political events gave repeated occasions for soaring oratory. For Keegan and others on the writing staff, this translated into many sleepless nights laboring over their keyboards, but throughout the book, President Obama himself is always both the final editor but also the most talented contributor, the one most likely to “find the Muse” on any sticky passage. This would read like mere hagiography were it not for the evidence of Obama’s own books. 

Since this is a Beltway memoir, readers will know to prepare themselves for bilge and bunkum in roughly equal measure. There’s the standard boilerplate about the Oval Office, for instance:

The first time you walk into the Oval Office, your mouth goes dry. It happens to everybody … the gravitas of it squeezes the air from your lungs like pressure at the sea floor. The quality of the light is different, sharper somehow, like you just walked onto live television, everyone’s watching you, and everything that’s about to happen carries more weight than it would anywhere else. If your self-importance swells while ascending the White House driveway for a meeting with the president, the Oval Office punctures it right away. 

(The Oval Office is an oddly-shaped room in an old building; this kind of LSD swooning only happens to credulous dweebs.) 

And there are also a few gestures at the writer-as-tough-guy-hero gambit so familiar from writer memoirs and so doomed to failure. “I swigged black coffee,” Keegan writes, “as each of the president’s senior advisors took turns updating everyone else on what their team was doing to keep the workstreams moving.” 

But Keegan keeps the silly posturing to a minimum, thankfully, and instead gives readers a valuable and oddly gripping look inside both the workings of the White House and the personality of its president. True, Keegan almost always marries those things to his own wobbly temperament, but the actual exchanges are intensely interesting even so. “The truth is,” Obama tells him during the work on one speech, “I don’t want to be doing this. I’d rather be hanging out with my girls, or playing golf, or drinking a martini.” “And they say you’re not American,” Keegan quips in response. Obama blurts out a laugh, and then we get this:

There was a gap between the public perception of my job and the hidden agony of it. Political junkie who’d consumed every episode of The West Wing presumed that being chief speechwriter for Barack Obama must be the coolest job in the world. Sometimes they were right! Most of the time, though, I was sitting alone at  the computer, bereft of sunlight, freaking out about what to write, stewing in a toxic mix of pressure, stress, and self-doubt.

It was the best and worst job in the West Wing.

These personal glimpses – of President Obama, that is, not our whinging author – are paired all through the book by repeated references to what could be called professional ones: Obama the writer, always respectfully taking the drafts of his speech men and, with a regularity that will make readers smile wistfully, improving those drafts. “I poured a bourbon and opened the gray manilla folder of edits,” Keegan tells us at one such point among many. “What he’d done to the speech was extraordinary. And he’d said he had nothing to say.” 

The events of that fraught June in 2015 form the center of Keegan’s book, but later events can’t help but come up. President Obama, eloquent, poised, judicial, yielded the White House, after all, to an idiot. Overnight, the country went from a president who could often write better than his speech writers to one who couldn’t successfully read what others wrote, even with the aid of large phonetic breakdowns. Keegan can’t resist getting in his digs:

For the next four years, the Trump administration was a nightmare for the idea of a pluralistic democracy, an endless litany of policies and rhetoric aimed at punishing historically marginalized groups of Americans while protecting the cruelty of people who did the same. Underscoring that his brand of economic populism was bullshit, Trump cut taxes for the richest Americans, gutted environmental protections, and held a (premature) victory celebration in the Rose Garden after the House of Representatives voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act and snatch health insurance from millions of working Americans, all while using the powers of the presidency to enrich his own family. 

But as its title loudly signals, Grace is not a book about Donald Trump or what we must now call the Trump Era. Instead, it’s a heartfelt look at how one gifted president crafted his communication with the nation and the world. It takes its place as one of the most interesting Obama administration memoirs so far written. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News. A compilation of his writing can be found at SteveDonoghue.com.