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Book Review: Matt Latimer's "Speech-Less"
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For those of us fortunate enough to serve as a presidential appointee, post-White House employment typically points to one of two directions. The first, more common route is to add the impressive gig to a resume, cherish the experience, and open a new chapter in life.
The other is to contribute further into presidential history by writing a personal memoir. Such stories have the potential for a historic slice into presidential life, but far more often, they go the less classy route of mindless divulgence.
Former Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer is certainly guilty of the latter. Rather than impressing upon us the wonderment of what he calls his “dream job,” he winds up sounding like nothing more than a spoiled child in his just-released book, Speech-Less: Tales of a White House Survivor.
The story begins in his small hometown of Flint, Michigan, where the ambitious youngster learns to value independence and small-government principles, coming of age with liberal parents in the days of Ronald Reagan. Soon, he grows to admire “Republican glitterati” such as Bob Dole, Kate O’Beirne, and his favorite, Kay Bailey Hutchison.
The young man who convinced his mother to vote Republican (“just this once” for George H.W. Bush) wound up taking a job on Capitol Hill, earning far less than his law degree could demand in a firm. His first DC job working for Sen. Spence Abraham turned out to be a far less glamorous endeavor than this bright-eyed and naïve kid could have ever imagined. He laments of the autopen used to sign hundreds of letters (as if a busy Congressman is going to spend his time doing such a thing), and gripes that his fellow Republicans just weren’t conservative enough to his liking.
When he finally came face-to-face with Hutchison herself, his disappointment in her dry personality was almost enough to make him run back to Flint.
He pressed on, believing in the Movement that had brought him to Washington in the first place. After a stint working for Sen. John Kyl and his own personal experiences with heavy-hitters such as Sen. John McCain, Latimer moved on to become Donald Rumsfeld’s speechwriter.
Like many stories that involve a young dreamer, moving from a small town to the big city in search of stardom, our main character winds up discovering that working as a public servant is not all he cracks it up to be. While he claims his move to Washington was a way to help foster the conservative principles he believed in, a hefty chunk of the book is a theme on Latimer’s sense of entitlement and everyone else’s failure to see what a star he thinks he is.
After the Kyl experience (one I would deem a successful one, though Latimer is again disappointed), Donald Rumsfeld enters and saves the day. The portrayal of “Rummy” is a thoughtful, insightful view into the operations of the Pentagon. The flattery stops there however, and one can only assume that Rumsfeld gets a shining review only because he has been willing to prop Latimer up on a pedestal. (Latimer has claimed he will be responsible for assisting Rumsfeld with the writing of his own memoir, though there has been speculation as to the truth of this.)
The up-and-coming speechwriter finally made his way to the White House, with less than two years remaining of the Bush Administration. Obtaining any sort of work for the president takes a certain amount of political moxie, and there is no doubt Latimer had what it took. His connection to head-speechwriter, Marc Thiessen, via Rumsfeld won him an office in the West Wing and personal contact with President Bush.
“At the White House, [I] was a commissioned officer, apparently a big deal.” Apparently? Once again, Latimer became disenchanted by the process of working in the federal government, and now wants the whole world to know what a grand disappointment it was to be so close to the leader of the free world. Disappointing, he claims, because hardly a person in the office, including the president, had a clue about conservatism and their responsibility to its principles.
Additionally, he demystifies the speechwriting process for President Bush as an ineffective operation where creativity was rarely encouraged. We writers were often assigned to pieces as a team, not as star individuals, and the job was far more important than Latimer would care to admit. We served at the pleasure of the President of the United States of America, and the only words that mattered were his.
His loyalty is so weak, in fact, that he gives a royal lashing to Thiessen, the man responsible for recommending Latimer to the president in the first place. The portrayal of Thiessen is an immature gripe about the personality of a man whose love for President Bush went just as deep as for his own family—a noble quality for any appointee. And O’Beirne, a woman he had once admired from his home in Flint and later connected him to Rumsfeld, receives no credit for the door help she had opened for him.
Latimer claims he left the White House because he “was facing some hard truths about the party and movement I loved and the public officials I’d chased around for autographs only a dozen years earlier.”
Latimer only loves one thing, and it’s not the conservative movement. He loves himself. His autograph is one conservatives should not be seeking, if only for the non-endorsement of gossip, then for the lack of principle this man possesses.
