Mention the name of former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford and there's at least a fair chance the response will be, "hiking the Appalachian Trail," a reference to the feeble story his aides offered to cover up Sanford's secret trip to Argentina to visit his mistress in June 2009. Barton Swaim's memoir of the nearly four years he spent as one of Sanford's beleaguered speechwriters during that time is a candid, witty look inside the world of high-stakes politics.
Like his predecessors, Swaim's early success with Sanford was followed almost immediately by the discovery that his boss was a petty tyrant when it came to the demands he placed on his overworked and underpaid staff. As miserable as Swaim was in his futile effort to craft eloquent words for a man who had "no knowledge of your personhood," and for all his bitterness over the mistreatment he endured, Swaim is a wounded idealist, not a cynic. "He was everything a politician should be--a politician in the best sense of that word, if it has a best sense," he writes of Sanford in the book's concluding chapter.
The account of Sanford's romantic misadventure is entitled "The Fall." That title doesn't refer to a season of the year, but instead to the way Sanford immolated his political prospects, at a time when hints were being dropped about a possible place on a Republican national ticket.
In 2013, Mark Sanford overcame his embarrassment to win re-election to his old seat in Congress. When he went about selecting his Washington staff, it's doubtful he considered hiring Barton Swaim. That's Sanford's loss. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer