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ANDY ROONEY
Friends, Romans, Country One of several difficulties with writ-ing a column, in addition to the problem of writing anything, is the gap in time between the day a column is written and the day it’s published. I submit what I’ve written to my editor at the Tribune Syndicate on Wednesday for publication Friday or Saturday in most of the 120 or so papers that run it. While I don’t often write about anything that’s immediate news, I inevitably refer to current events, and having to write three days in ad-vance of publication is a problem. It’s a problem this week because there are things I know I would like to have said about President Bush’s second inaugural address. I can’t say them, however, because, as I write, I don’t know what they are. Bush hasn’t given the speech yet so I don’t know what’s in it. By the time this is printed, it’ll be at least 48 hours old. Even without knowing what Bush is going to read to us, there are things I’d like to say about presidential speeches in general. For one thing, it isn’t always possible to express an idea accurately with words. Ideas are intangible, frangible and, put into sentences they often come out with a different meaning than the writer intended. That’s a problem for Presidents. Next, the President does not write speeches himself, and that seems wrong. Why doesn’t he? Is it because he doesn’t write very well? Is he so busy he doesn’t have time? It isn’t important enough for him to skip some of the meaningless photo opportunities he gives the press where he’s kissing babies, greeting foreign diplomats or World Series winners? My comments are not only about President George W. Bush. For example, I don’t think any President in re-cent history has written his own inaugural address. Abraham Lincoln ap-parently wrote his own second inaugural address, and it was not only the best, it was also the shortest. Inaugural addresses are usually longer than any of us are interested in listening to be-cause they’re composed by professional writers searching for a clever phrase the newspapers will quote. The public that listens to an inaugural speech by a President may know he didn’t write it but people don’t think of his words as someone else’s as they listen. It seems to me that the honest thing for any President to say after he finishes the speech, President Bush in this case, is, “This speech was written for me by Michael Gerson, Matthew Scully and David Frum. I approve of the ideas they expressed in it.” Gerson is 40 years old and makes $157,000 a year, but for the rest of his life he’ll be known as having been a presidential speechwriter, and that’s pro-bably worth more than the salary. He is an evangelical Christian, so this week’s inaugural speech will certainly have conveyed the feeling that President Bush believes God is on our side in the war in Iraq. If He is, He has a strange way of showing it. To deflect the impression that the President doesn’t have much to do with an inaugural speech, there’s usually a story released to the press about how much a President changes the words he’s been given. The fact remains, he didn’t write it. In the 1960s, I was approached by someone representing Richard Nixon, who asked me to write a speech Nixon would give in New York. I was flattered, but I had not voted for Nixon and said so. The woman was not put off, though, and said she simply wanted someone who knew how to write. She didn’t care what the writer’s political opinions were. Over the years, some presidential inaugural addresses must have been put down on paper by writers who did not vote for the men delivering them. It seems likely that we give too much importance to what a President says in his inaugural address. We expect more of words than they can give us. Presi-dent Bush wanted his speech to sound good and he wanted some quotable passages in it for the newspapers but he didn’t write it and should have said so.
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