Review: The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics

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. Ignoring his own wife and children, Swaim became "fixated instead on pleasing a man who could not be pleased." Worst of all, Sanford was a man who "knew bad writing when he saw it, except when he was the author." Imagine someone cringing at the exclamation that he had "cracked the code" for writing letters in Sanford's voice, and you have some sense of the depth of Swaim's despair.

As miserable as Swaim was in his futile effort to craft eloquent words for a man who had "no knowledge of your personhood," he's generous in his admiration for some of the principled stands Sanford took against his benighted opponents in the South Carolina legislature. One involved his veto of an unenforceable law intended to curb teenagers' ATV injuries. Another was his refusal to yield to calls for his impeachment in 2010. 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. Sanford's escapade became fodder for late-night comedians, while for Swaim and his colleagues, the "one thing that changed definitely for the worse was the sheer embarrassment of being a writer for a disgraced politician."

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

Shelf Talker: This memoir by a former speechwriter for ex-South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford is a humorous and sobering glimpse inside the modern political crucible.

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