"Speech-less: Tales of a White House Survivor,"

Latimer dropped by Salon's New York office and chatted with Kerry Lauerman about the book, putting words in the mouth of the most important person in the world, the corrosive legacy of Karl Rove, and the attacks he's getting from Bush loyalists. 

What was your reaction to the article by your former White House boss, William McGurn,  in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, really criticizing your book, calling it kiss and tell?

I know Bill very well and it's disappointing that he did that, but after he left the White House early I was promoted to be one of the top speechwriters for the president. Some of the things he said have already been debunked on the Internet. There is a group of people who are former Bush administration officials who had a lot of power and are out of power now and don't like that. And they don't like other people who they don't feel [are] in their club, are allowed to speak. And that's just natural when you lose power.

His spin, which others are picking up, is that: "Left unmentioned is that Matt is on Mr. Rumsfeld's payroll, working on the former Defense Secretary's memoirs." That true?

I don't know if you know Donald Rumsfeld, but anyone who knows Donald Rumsfeld knows that Donald Rumsfeld is writing his own memoirs. Nobody does that for him but him.

But are you working with him?

I'm actually on the publisher's payroll, but they asked me to help him along with a number of other people get his things together, his notes together, and help him write his memoir. But I've never discussed the book with him. He's never asked about it. The only thing he ever asked me about the book was, he said, "Are you gonna dump all over my wife Joyce?" Joyce is beloved universally, and I said, "You know, I've been waiting to get even with her for five years, Mr. Secretary." But that's all we ever said about it.

I wanted to ask about was your relationship between the two men. You clearly never hit it off with Bush. Why do you think that was?

I was with Secretary Rumsfeld in a much closer relationship all the way through the Abu Ghraib scandal up to his resignation. I traveled all over the place with him. But I knew the president pretty well. I was in most of the speechwriting meetings, especially in his last year. And what I tried to do with the book was to offer people a different glimpse of these people than they'd actually seen. People want to know what's it's like to be there. I'm not writing the definitive portrait of Donald Rumsfeld or George W Bush. There'll be a million books that are going to do that, and there are different opinions about both of those people than I may have had. This is just my glimpse of it from a speechwriter's perspective.

I'm curious about the craft of speechwriting itself. You're part ventriloquist, and partly trying to get inside these guys' heads. It seems as though you were able to do that much more comfortably with Rumsfeld than with Bush. I'm curious whether there was a reason you might not have been able to connect with him.

When I got to the White House, the president's top speechwriters said that the president had learned how to write speeches at Yale, when he was a student. And the Yale way of writing speeches was, you have a very tight introduction, Point A, Point B, Point C, a peroration, and a conclusion. I didn't know what a peroration was (it was a summary). It was an organized way of writing a speech, but it was also lifeless, uninteresting, and not eloquent. I said, The president can't possibly want to have speeches like that. And they said, Well, they'd prefer a flat speech to an eloquent speech, as long as it follows this ABC rigid logic. Logic isn't quite the word, because logic isn't so bad. Basically, it's just a very simplistic way of doing a speech. When I first met with the president about a speech that I'd written, it wasn't an exchange where we thought, Let's discuss what your ideas are for the speech. It was more: Here's what we're going to do. A-B-C, this is what I want to say. At least with me, there wasn't this interaction.

The process with Rumsfeld's sounds  more collaborative.

Yeah. And I also worked for Senator Kyle and it was much more collaborative too.

You write intriguingly about the way Bush speaks about himself. He's like an actor in a play  complaining to the writers about his character. He says (referring to the initial financial bailout plan) "Why the hell did I support it if I didn't believe it would pass?" and later "Why did I sign onto this proposal if I don't understand what it does?" as if he were a character that someone else is writing, manipulating. Was that common?

The president, to his credit, never became a Washington person, whether for better or worse. When he got elected he was very much the same person that he was when he left office eight years later. He tended to be somebody who was very self-aware and blunt. When he was frustrated about something he let everybody know, and expressed it. I do think that, in the economic crisis in particular, he was put in a position where not only he, but most of us who were writing the speeches didn't understand what was going on because we were being told different things.

There's a  scene where a few White House counsel tell the speechwriters that Bush really needs a line like FDR's "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Is that going through your mind when you're a speechwriter for the president, that you really need to come up with lines like that all the time? Or that you could solve this problem with the right turn of phrase?

That is really a problem with speeches these days. It's a very easy temptation for a presidential advisor to think, Oh, we'll just give a wonderful eloquent speech and solve all the problems. You see that happening with President Obama now. A speech isn't going to solve anything, especially when you give them a dozen times a week. People just stop listening. But they wanted us to give them an FDR phrase. And here we were being compared with Herbert Hoover! We came up with something like, Anxiety feeds on anxiety. Which isn't exactly a stirring call-to-arms!

Are you haunted by those moments where you think, Oh, if I'd only come up with a better sentence or a different approach?

I always thought that the best approach to speeches was to give less of them, and to put more thought into them. We used to give speeches because the president was going to a political event, and they wanted a reason for him to go so that the taxpayers could pay half the bill or something. St. Patrick's Day is an example. The president gave three speeches on St. Patrick's Day. And people would cover it. So it's hard to come up with eloquent lines when it becomes an assembly line operation.

Are there any great lines that you're particularly proud of getting through?

One of my favorite lines, which I talk about in the book, was a joke about Jessica Simpson. It was a terrible controversy, because the jokes are always so controversial in the White House, because lawyers (and I'm a reformed lawyer) get hypersensitive about everything you say. So the president's going to the USO, and he says, "People credit the turn around in Iraq to lots of different things, but we all know the real reason was that Jessica Simpson was deployed to Baghdad." I just thought that would be funny. And only because the president interceded and thought that it was funny did it make it in. It was the only line remembered from the whole speech. But as a speechwriter, I would watch the audience erasing speeches from their mind as the president was delivering them. That's how dull they'd become.

I wanted to ask about Rumsfeld and Abu Ghraib. You were by his side throughout the testimony and through his resignation. Do you regret anything you worked with him on?

Well, as you pointed out, the goal of a speechwriter is to try as best you can to submerge your thoughts and put their thoughts on paper, to try and explain what they think has happened. So it's not really whether I regret having said something, it's did I do the best I could to reflect what his views were at the time. I tried to do that. I'm sure someone could have done it better, but we did our best, and I think I reflected Rumsfeld's thinking.

Do you think words could have altered the course of his history?

I don't know. In the book, I talk about the moment when we overheard him saying to the president, "I don't want to be a rock in your knapsack," and he'd offered to resign. Apparently he'd offered to resign twice, and the president didn't want to do that. It's up to Rumsfeld to say this, but it may have been for the best. He'd tried to resign, and the president didn't want him to, I think because they knew he'd be a lightning rod. And a lightning rod has a lot of use for a president.

You have a couple of really acid depictions of Karl Rove in the book. You're tough on Bush, but you clearly have a certain amount of loyalty and warmth toward him. Rove doesn't come off quite so well, and I wonder how much you blame Rove for the big political miscues Bush took the last few years.

I wasn't in the Bush administration for all eight years, but I was a Republican. I'd paid my dues. I started working for Bob Dole in 1996, so I say this with some interest in the Republican Party. I thought Karl Rove was going to be great. I was excited when he became the architect, if you will, for the Bush administration. If you look at it, he got a lot of power in the latter years of the administration before he left. He was in charge of policy, of politics, of overseeing personnel. And in every single respect I think that it was an unparalleled tragedy, a disaster.

We didn't advance a single piece of conservative legislation in the Congress, we lost the House, the Senate, the presidency. There was the whole 51 percent mentality of try to get whatever kind of majority you can get and who cares about everybody else, which wasn't helpful. Then of course the personnel issues in the Justice department. I saw the same things happen at the Department of Defense, which I talk about in my book, and it was basically a situation of sending these young people, well-meaning probably, with thin credentials, into these different departments and deciding who belongs in the club or not.

Related to that, I wanted to ask about the speeches that Bush gave during the campaign of 2008. They were presidential trips, but really motivated to help GOP campaigns, and he'd give speeches and make appearances so that they could be funded by taxpayers. You have a great line in the book: "Speeches in effect became Muzak for whatever political event the administration thought important."

Every presidential administration I think does this kind of thing to some degree. It is the way Washington works. But yes, we knew that was happening. But the other thing is we would give speeches just because we wanted something to do. They wanted the president to look busy and act like he was doing something. And that isn't the best use for a speech.