The scene: It’s 2016 and Barack Obama is minutes from delivering a rousing address to thousands of cheering fans in Athens, Greece, as part of the last diplomatic tour of his presidency. But the remarks are trapped on speechwriter Terry Szuplat’s laptop—which isn’t working. The look on Szuplat’s face is one of wide-eyed panic.
This wasn’t the first time technical difficulties threatened to derail planned remarks to a crowd hanging on the president’s every word. Szuplat weathered his share of Veep-like incidents during his eight years as a White House speechwriter—like the time several pages at the lectern were accidentally left blank (prompting Obama to wing it), or when a speech got off to a late start because of a broken toner cartridge.
And yet, laptop crashes and teleprompter snafus aren’t what most people remember after seeing and hearing the man many consider one of the great orators of our time. They remember the words he spoke—particularly in somber moments, after mass shootings, natural disasters and racial strife, when a weary nation needed words of reassurance from its commander in chief.
Terry Szuplat wrote many of those words.
The Massachusetts native didn’t set out to become a speechwriter. He came to the D.C. area in 1991, an American University undergrad intent on becoming an attorney. There was just one problem later, he says: “I didn’t get accepted by a single law school.”
After college, he landed a job as a researcher with the Moynihan Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy, a bipartisan entity tasked with recommending protocol changes for classified information and security clearances. That’s when he met his future wife, Mary. She was working for one of the commissioners, a PBS journalist.
“This was back before the internet,” Szuplat recalls. “One day I had to hand-deliver a floppy disk” to PBS headquarters in Alexandria. “While I was delivering it, I met the journalist’s assistant.”
Their first date was at Kramerbooks & Afterwords (now Kramers) in Dupont Circle, followed by a second date to a ball for Bill Clinton’s 1997 inauguration. “I was 20-something, so I didn’t own a tuxedo,” he says. “I had to run down to the tuxedo store.”
Szuplat’s career took a turn in 1998, when, at age 25, he landed a job on the speechwriting team for then-Defense Secretary William Cohen. He later worked as a staffer for the Senate Armed Services Committee and—after Republicans regained control of the Senate in 2002—as a self-employed speechwriter and Democratic political consultant.
The opportunity to join Obama’s team came in early 2009, but first he had to pass a writing test. The assignment: To wordsmith a hypothetical address to the nation on the eve of Air Force One’s departure to the Middle East to sign a historic peace accord. (Evidence, perhaps, that Szuplat’s portfolio also includes fiction and fantasy.) He passed the test with flying colors.
His first “actual” presidential speech, delivered about four months after Obama took office, was a commencement address at the U.S. Naval Academy. Szuplat remembers being in a weekly writers meeting in the West Wing office of senior advisor David Axelrod a short time later “when Obama just waltzed in, tossing a football. He asked, ‘Where’s the new guy?,’ came over, shook my hand and said, ‘Thanks for the speech. Great job.’ I always remember that. A president has a thousand reasons not to take the time to say thank you. But he did.”
Szuplat would pen nearly 500 speeches for Obama over the president’s two terms in office, many of them in times of crisis. To put himself in the right headspace, he often wrote with an actual person in mind. After the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, he thought about his daughter, then a first-grader at Glebe Elementary in Arlington.
Four months later, his conservative Uncle Dan, a New Englander, was the face he envisioned while writing an address in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing. He says his uncle complimented the speech despite having ideological differences with the administration.
Szuplat seldom had time for writer’s block. Tragedies such as the June 2016 shooting at Orlando’s Pulse Nightclub, which left 49 dead and 53 more wounded, demanded an immediate response.
“That happened on a Saturday night,” he recalls. “I woke up expecting to have a normal quiet Sunday morning, but these reports were starting to come in. The president’s going to speak in two hours. I started writing in my pajamas.”
Though he had an office in D.C.—first in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and later in the West Wing—Szuplat made a point of coming home most evenings to Mary and their two children in Waverly Hills. Dinnertime and bedtime were sacrosanct. He’d often flip open his laptop and go back to work once the kids were tucked in. “My neighbors would say they could tell if something important was happening because the light was on in my home office.”
Today their son, Jack, is a junior at Drew University in New Jersey, daughter Claire is a freshman at Loyola Marymount in Baltimore, and he and Mary are empty nesters. They have more time to dine out at favorite local spots like Pie-Tanza at the Lee Harrison Shops and Thai Noy in Westover.
With his White House days behind him, Szuplat founded his own speechwriting and communications consulting firm, Global Voices. He also teaches a course on political speechwriting at his alma mater, American University, where he is an adjunct professor.
“It’s not just how to write political speeches themselves, but how to understand and consume them as citizens,” he explains. “I think it’s important to be discerning, especially with leaders who choose not to tell the truth. It’s not a theory class. We don’t spend lots of time analyzing Aristotle, Cicero and Plato. I have no patience for that. It’s a hands-on, skills-based workshop.”
In September, he published his first book: Say It Well: Find Your Voice, Speak Your Mind, Inspire Any Audience (HarperCollins).
What’s the biggest difference between writing a speech and a 350-page book? “Speeches are shorter. You can bang most out in a day or two, if you really have to,” he says. “A book took over my life for three years. Actually, it took over my family’s life for three years.”
While the book has received accolades from a veritable who’s who of influential figures—including former Obama lead speechwriter Jon Favreau (now a co-host of the Pod Save America podcast) and Columbia Business School professor and author Dorie Clark—Szuplat has one regret.
“My publisher said their readers generally prefer a professional narrator for [the audio version of] these how-to books. I wish I’d pushed back. The whole book is about my journey to become a more effective public speaker. It would have been wonderful to actually read that aloud.”
Then again, he says, narrator Sean Patrick Hopkins does a fine and convincing job: “Fortunately, most people don’t know what my voice sounds like.”