In Defense of the Ghostwriter

I once watched a man cry at his own father’s funeral over words that I had written.

He stood at the lectern, steadied himself, and delivered the eulogy story by story — the last fishing trip, the life lessons about showing up, the secret of reading the perfect putt, and the closing benediction that broke his voice because it was true. Every ounce of grief was his, but every syllable was mine. And when he finished, not a single soul present believed they had witnessed a fraud. They believed they had witnessed a son memorializing his father . . . and they were right.

That is the duty of the ghostwriter. And official Washington — the same city that will sell you access, influence, and a photo click for the right price — would prefer you never think about it too hard.

For some reason, we have collectively decided that ghostwriting is the political class’ dirty secret. The op-ed under the Senator’s byline. The CEO’s apology. The moving tribute from the House floor. The condolence note from the Cabinet Secretary. The “personal” letter that made a stranger feel known. Someone else wrote nearly all of it and the public (sensing as much) has convicted the whole enterprise of dishonesty. The verdict feels sophisticated and it feels like we’re seeing the trees through the fog.

It is, in fact, one of the dumbest ideas in American public life. And the people most eager to preach against it are usually the biggest hypocrites in the room.

Consider who is doing the accusing.

We live in the age of the curated self: the influencer who stages “candid” photographs for ninety minutes, the executive whose seemingly-spontaneous LinkedIn wisdom was drafted by a communications team of four, the activist who brands raw authenticity while running every single character past a consultant. This is a culture that has made “authentic” its highest, most coveted word . . . and the emptiest one all at the same time. It manufactures sincerity by the truckload and then clutches its pearls at the notion that a Member of Congress didn’t personally type his own op-ed.

Spare me. The accuser wagging a finger at your ghostwriter has three people managing his own image, and he knows it. So let’s retire the pretense and tell the truth about where words come from.

They have always come from many hands. President George Washington’s Farewell Address — the nearest thing we possess to American scripture outside of our founding documents — was drafted in significant part by Alexander Hamilton. President John F. Kennedy had Sorensen, and only a fool would argue that the infamous “ask not” speech is a lie because a Midwesterner from the Plains helped a Bostonian Brahmin find the right cadence. We do not read those words and feel cheated. We read them and feel the weight of the moments and the fortitude of the men who stood behind every line, regardless of who first set them to paper. The solitary genius, alone at their desk, channeling pure unassisted self if a modern vanity . . . a romantic fiction we invented and then mistook for a moral standard. For most of human history, the great words spoken by great men were collaborative, edited, argued over, and handed down. Authorship and authenticity were never the same thing.

But the piece of ghostwriting I love most was never spoken aloud at all.

Fifty-seven years ago last month, as Apollo 11 descended toward the Sea of Tranquility, a speechwriter named Bill Safire sat down and drafted the words a President prays he will never need. He titled the memo plainly: “In Event of Moon Disaster.” It was the statement that President Richard Nixon would deliver if the ascent engine failed and Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were left to die in the silence of the Moon’s surface, a quarter-million miles from every soul who loved them.

Read it now and it still catches your breath in your chest.

“Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.” Safire wrote of a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown, to a corner of another world that would be forever mankind. He instructed that before the statement, President Nixon should telephone each of the widows-to-be. He also instructed that after the statement, a clergyman should commend their souls to the deep, as in a burial at sea, and close with the Lord’s Prayer.

President Nixon never gave the speech. Those American heroes came home. And so the finest thing Bill Safire may have ever written sat in a file for three decades, unspoken, unheard, doing its work by never being needed. Here is the point the cynics never grasp: those words were not diminished by belonging to another man’s mouth, or coming from another man’s pen, or by never leaving the page. They were a gift — prepared in the dark, held in reserve, ready to give a grieving nation language for a sorrow it could not have found on its own.

That is the craft at its highest. Not deception, but preparation . . . perhaps even love of a strange and disciplined kind.

There is theology in all of this, if you will permit me a moment of it. The oldest tradition I know teaches that the Word had to become flesh before it could mean anything — that language, however perfect, is inert until someone embodies it, lives inside it, answers for it. This is what twenty years of crafting other men’s messages has taught me. A leader is not paid to be a stylist. He is paid to know what he believes, to choose whom he trusts to render it, and to stand in front of a crowd, a camera, or a grieving family and mean it without flinching. That is the entire job. The words are the cheapest part and they always have been. What is scarce is a human being willing to own them when owning them costs something. I can hand a man the most luminous sentence ever built, and it is worth precisely nothing until he stands up and makes it his own.

But I owe you an honest caveat, because there is a line and it is bright.

A writer sharpening a Member of Congress’ genuine convictions is practicing a craft. A writer inventing a “personal” story that never happened, heroism that wasn’t earned, hardship that was never suffered, or faith that was never held is committing fraud. The first individual renders a man’s voice. The second manufactures a man who does not exist. One is the oldest honest tradition in public life while the other is a lie, and no amount of eloquence will ever wash it clean.

The test has nothing to do with who held the pen. Can the man who signs it stand behind every word? Would he say it to your face, under oath, on the day it costs him the election? If yes, then the ghost did his work and did it honorably. If not, it was never the writing that was false . . . it was the man.

So keep your mythology about authenticity. Authenticity was never a matter of penmanship and the people shouting loudest about it are (more often than not) the least authentic in the room. It is a matter of ownership and whether the one who signs the letter or speaks the words will still own them when owning them is hard.

So to every leader whose name goes on the page, hear this:

Find the message. Trust the hand that crafted it. Then stand up and mean every word. Because the moment you sign your name, they stop being my words . . . and they become yours.

Rob Burgess is a national Republican strategist, and Chief Executive Officer at Connector, Inc. — a boutique government relations, public affairs, and political strategy firm with offices in Washington, D.C.