Three keys to running a powerful rhetoric factory

Robert Schlesinger set out to write a book of White House speechwriting history. He produced a how-to manual for executive communications

It’s hard to imagine a fellow having better pedigree to write a book in the history of White House speechwriters than Robert Schelsinger, whose father was the late historian and presidential speechwriter Arthur Schlesinger.

To whom much is given much is expected, and young Robert delivers in White House Ghosts, an at-once comprehensive and breezily anecdotal book about “presidents and their speechwriters.”

The reviews have been positive, but like any good writer, Schlesinger was still wrestling when he spoke with Ragan.com with doubts he’d harbored from the book’s proposal stage four years ago through the 15-hour-a-day, seven-day weeks of the run up to the publisher’s deadline.

“Is anybody going to read this?”

All we could tell him is that everybody, at least everybody in our business, ought to read this—and their bosses should, too.