Fact-checking is Job 1 for any White House: Speechwriter

The role of a White House speechwriter is often glamorized — often by none other than former White House speechwriters themselves. We tell breathless tales of meeting with the president or first lady to hear what they want to say in their speeches; working late into the night to come up with the perfect turn of phrase to capture their voices; traveling the country and the world and seeing audiences inspired by their words.

But the truth is that one of the most important and time-consuming parts of our jobs in the Obama White House, as in all recent administrations, was also the least glamorous: fact-checking.

Every speech my colleagues and I wrote for the president or first lady was subjected to a painstaking review by the White House Research Department. And those folks were merciless.

If a speech contained a statistic they couldn’t independently verify, they would ask us to produce the source — and if they deemed that source insufficiently reputable, we cut the statistic from the speech.

If language in a speech seemed to contradict something the president or first lady had said elsewhere, they would point out the discrepancy so we could reconcile it.

If they saw an acknowledgment from the president or first lady at the top of a speech, such as “Thanks so much to my good friend, Mayor so-and-so, for joining us here today, she’s been a real leader on X issue,” they would ask us to confirm that the mayor was indeed coming to the event and was truly a good friend as opposed to just an acquaintance. They might also email a bunch of articles they found in local newspapers criticizing that mayor's work on X issue and advise us to tone down the praise.

The words “always” and “never” were just asking for it. Researchers had an uncanny ability to find the one obscure exception to any blanket statement we wished to make.

It was exhausting. When it’s 11 p.m. the night before a big speech, and you’ve been working around the clock for days, the last thing you want in your inbox is an email from a fact-checker that starts, “Thanks for sending the latest draft, we have some flags …” and then goes on for pages, picking apart the words you’ve poured your heart into crafting.

While our fact-checkers occasionally drove us crazy, we were incredibly grateful for their work. It is an awesome — and terrifying — responsibility to write speeches for the leader of the free world and his or her spouse. Their words can affect markets and cause international incidents. And through their speeches, the president and first lady speak directly to the American people about their most pressing and personal concerns.

This was not an abstract, intellectual exercise for us. We would often get to know people affected by the issues we were writing about — the parents who lost their son on 9/11 when he went up and down the stairs of a burning building to lead others to safety, the soldier who suffered life-threatening injuries but defied all odds to walk again — and we would stay in touch long after the speech was delivered.

We would read letters the president and first lady received: From the man who had gotten a job as a dishwasher and was proud that he could now afford to donate a few cans each week to the church food pantry his family had relied on when he was unemployed. From the woman who heard the first lady’s speech decrying Donald Trump’s boasts about sexual assault and decided she would no longer feel ashamed about what had happened to her.

Some of the letters were supportive, some were highly critical. Often, they would start with something like, “I’m sure no one will ever read this, but just in case someone does …”  That hesitation followed by vulnerability and hope got us every time.

The thought of the president or first lady inadvertently saying something untrue to any of these people because we hadn’t thoroughly checked it — that was unbearable to us, and it would have been unacceptable to them.

In the Obama White House, our ultimate bosses were the people we served — the people who paid our salaries and entrusted us with their aspirations, their worries and their high expectations. We felt that we always owed them the truth. We should all insist on nothing less from the current occupant of the Oval Office and his staff.

Sarah Hurwitz was first lady Michelle Obama’s chief speechwriter from 2010 to 2017. She will be a spring semester fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University.

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