As he fine-tuned his presidential acceptance speech this week, Bob Dole turned from a novelist to a political biographer for help in remaining true to his often-expressed preference for authenticity over image.
Two days before delivering what may be the most important speech of his career, Dole stopped working with New York novelist Mark Helprin–who had crafted a well-regarded speech Dole used to announce his resignation from the Senate in May–and turned to popular historian Richard Norton Smith.
Smith, who worked for Dole as a Senate speechwriter from 1979 through the mid-1980s, has written biographies of Herbert Hoover, Thomas E. Dewey and George Washington. He is now directing a renovation of exhibits at the Gerald R. Ford Museum in Grand Rapids, Mich.
The most important rule for a successful speechwriter, Smith says, is the same as for a successful biographer: Stay in the background.
“A biographer puts aside his own identity,” Smith says. “If he doesn’t become another person, he at the very least tries to climb inside another person’s views. That’s what a speechwriter does.”
Helprin, whose novels include “Memoir from Antproof Case,” is also a Wall Street Journal editorial writer. Helprin won praise for Dole’s successful farewell address and raised hopes he could help the candidate express an overarching Republican vision.
It revealed something of Dole’s character that, in a moment of stress and doubt, he turned from the fiction writer to a biographer and historian.
Smith would not comment on his work revising the speech for Dole, but a campaign source said Dole was more comfortable with someone he trusted to help him express his own words.
On Wednesday, Smith and another longtime Dole speechwriter, Kerry Tymchuk, recast the last four paragraphs of the 40-minute speech. Smith said he worked in Grand Rapids and gave Dole revisions by phone.
Dole had worked on the speech since April, when the first draft by Helprin reached his hands. He revised it for months, crossing out words that didn’t feel right and adding those that did, advisers have said.
Dole also spent hours practicing in front of a TelePrompTer.
Smith, 42, studied government at Harvard University before going on to a distinguished career as a historian. He does not have a Ph.D., which appealed to Dole, who can be disdainful of theorists. He is the author of eight books, including “Thomas E. Dewey and His Times,” which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1983.
Among the speeches he has written for Dole are a eulogy of Richard Nixon in 1994 and the farewell speech Dole gave on the Senate floor when he officially resigned in June.
