On Thursday, March 8, 1990, twenty years since I had last seen President Richard Nixon, he visited Washington, DC, to give a speech to the Republican Conference, meaning all the Republican members in the House of Representatives. Although most conference meetings consisted of weekly members-only sessions (sometimes excluding staff), occasionally an outside speaker would be invited, and this time it was the former president, once a member of the House himself. My current boss, House Republican Leader Bob Michel, for whom I had been working for thirteen years, designated me to be the official greeter.

At the appointed time, I...

My introduction to the magic, manipulations, and Machiavellian machinations of political rhetoric came in 1948, when I was thirteen, a freshman in St. Michael’s High School in downtown Jersey City. One day our history teacher, Mr. Furlong, told us a story of a then-well-known local politician—the irrepressible, rotund (he weighed, it was said, 350 pounds) raconteur and oratorical master T. James Tumulty, who would later become a one-term congressman. Tumulty, as I recall, had committed some sort of sin against mayor-for-life Frank Hague’s Democratic political machine that had ruled the city for forty years. His error was no doubt...

In 1966, while still teaching at Abington High, I was asked to become a member of the master teachers program at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. I would continue to be paid by my high school, but for two years (if my option was picked up by Penn, which it was) I would be teaching a course in the methods of teaching English at Penn and, most importantly, evaluating Penn student teachers of English, on-site, as they did their practice teaching in Philadelphia and suburban high schools. At the end of two years I would be returning...

Nineteen-sixty-eight was a weird year in American politics; a mean, ugly, desperate year of war and assassinations; a year without pity; a year of angry words in the streets of burning cities, shouted by rioters and by hundreds of thousands of college students protesting the United States’ involvement in trying to help the people of South Vietnam escape a Communist takeover. There were angry words by politicians, but also inspirational words, words that pleaded or threatened or cajoled, fiery denunciations, blistering adjectives, furious phrases, unwarranted claims, personal attacks, folksy little anecdotes, zingers, chanted slogans, one-liners, and barbaric yawps. There was...

On Tuesday, January 21, 1969, I stood between Bryce Harlow and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the shortest and tallest Nixon White House staffers, and was sworn in as assistant to the president of the United States.

My office was room 118 on the first floor of what was then called the Executive Office Building (EOB), to which the speechwriters had been assigned (or was it consigned?). The building was, and remains today, a marvelous granite grotesque of pillared and porticoed Victorian fantasies next door to the White House, a monument to a lost age of conspicuous consumption. It is a piece...

For as long as I can remember, my mind has worked best when I am dealing with a situation that can be understood in narrative form. Tell me a story and I’ll know what you want and where you’re going. In the decades since I left the White House, I have often thought of what story form would best suit my brief stay at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

Melodrama?Bill Gavin, an average guy, as in Hitchcock movies, is suddenly caught in a trap, desperate to get out, but how can he manage it?

Tragedy?Gavin, a...

The most important aspect about my work for Jim Buckley from 1972 to 1976 is that it took place not just in a senatorial office but also in what he and his staff saw as a besieged outpost of the conservative movement. In the pre-Reagan age, conservatism was looked down upon by the liberal establishment (yes, it does exist, and it was then even more powerful and more contemptuous toward conservatism than it is today in politics, academia, and media). Conservatives were seen as either malicious, crazy, or just incurably stupid or all three—depending on one’s point of view....

Late November 1976. The office suite of Senator James L. Buckley: If something doesn’t happen soon, I’ll be out of a job in little more than a month. My wife, three children, all depending on me. A mortgage, little savings. Jim’s defeat still haunts me. I’ve made a lot of phone calls, had lunch with a few people, but the election was bad for Republicans, and no one has any tips about jobs opening up. There aren’t that many new Republican members coming in. There are few things more depressing than sitting at your desk in an office whose boss...

In 1978, as I was learning about how to write in the House, I got a call from Marty Anderson. He asked me to attend another meeting at Reagan’s home. Reagan was going on the campaign trail for Republican congressional candidates. He needed a stump speech. Would I be willing to give it a try?

The same group was there as the last time I had visited the Reagan home, minus one or two, plus Lyn Nofziger, Reagan’s canny, no-nonsense press aide. Dick Wirthlin briefed us about his polling, various aides spoke on the topics of their expertise, and that...

At some point in the late 1980s, I forget exactly when, I began to be afflicted by doubts about what I was doing to earn my living. It wasn’t a crisis of the spirit (to use the phrase I coined for Nixon so long ago). I had no political or ideological second thoughts. In fact, if anything, my long political experience had deepened and strengthened my conservative views. I still loved working for Bob Michel. I could still grind out the stuff, and Bob wasn’t complaining. So what was the problem?

I was the problem. Someone once said that speechwriting...