Obama shows for whom the bell tolls with ‘Hemingway’ speechwriter

One night last week Cody Keenan, the chief White House speechwriter President Barack Obama has christened "Hemingway", knew he needed help.

Keenan had spent 15 days holed up in a hotel room in Honolulu as the president holidayed nearby, and seven more in a windowless office in the basement of the West Wing trying to turn a blank computer screen into a 6,000-word State of the Union first draft. The lonesome process had finally got to him.

So the burly 34-year-old former high school quarterback left his White House office and trudged in the freezing rain to the nearby apartment of one of his closest friends in the administration, Benjamin J Rhodes.

It was after midnight, but Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser and the writer of many of the president's foreign policy speeches, was up reading To Kill a Mockingbird to his four-week-old daughter. The two men poured two single- malt Scotch whiskies and, with the baby resting quietly, began triage on Keenan's prose. By 5am a more succinct draft was on its way to the president.

“You’re alone in a room writing for so many days by yourself, and you eventually need someone to talk to,” Rhodes said. “A single-malt Scotch can also help.”

Last night, Obama delivered his next-to-last State of the Union address from a text written, rewritten, revised and sweated over by Keenan.

Everyman prose

In all the policy pronouncements about tax increases on the rich and tax cuts for the middle class, Obama’s remarks were certain to address the struggles of ordinary Americans in some of the gritty, Everyman prose that has become Keenan’s trademark.

"He reminds me of some of the folks I grew up with in the old days in Chicago journalism – those hard-bitten, big-hearted, passionate writers who brought the stories of people to life," said David Axelrod, a longtime adviser to Obama and a former newspaper reporter.

Keenan, who is not shy but did not want to talk about himself on a day when attention was on the president, declined to be interviewed for this article.

There are typically two ways that Obama – the author of the highly regarded Dreams From My Father who writes large parts of his own speeches – responds to one of Keenan's first drafts. If the president likes it, he will lightly mark up the original copy with lines through sentences and words in the margins.

In the worst-case scenario, Obama will take out a yellow legal pad and, in his neat penmanship, rewrite the entire speech.

Keenan, the president's chief speechwriter for nearly all of the second term, is a different breed than his predecessor, Jon Favreau, who was known for his ability to write lofty, big-picture speeches about hope and change. Keenan focuses far more on individual, hard-work stories as parables for what is difficult but still possible in America.

“Today in America, a teacher spent extra time with a student who needed it, and did her part to lift America’s graduation rate to its highest level in more than three decades,” Obama said in the opening lines of last year’s State of the Union address, written by Keenan.

The president went on: “A farmer prepared for the spring after the strongest five-year stretch of farm exports in our history. A rural doctor gave a young child the first prescription to treat asthma that his mother could afford. A man took the bus home from the graveyard shift, bone-tired but dreaming big dreams for his son.”

Choked up

Favreau described Keenan as the type of person who gets choked up over a really good car commercial.

“You would think in a past life Cody was the head of the United Auto Workers and grew up in Detroit and worked in a factory,” Favreau said.

In fact, Keenan, born in Chicago, went to high school in the wealthy town of Ridgefield, Connecticut, in Fairfield county, where he threw more football interceptions than touchdowns, voraciously read spy novels and was president of the student body.

He graduated from Northwestern University, and rolled into Washington at the age of 21 with just a fraternity brother’s couch to crash on and a cocky attitude. He quickly rose through the ranks in the office of senator Edward Kennedy and then attended the John F Kennedy school of government at Harvard. He joined the Obama campaign speechwriting team in 2007 and then took on writing commencement addresses and eulogies at the White House. Shortly after Obama was re-elected in 2012, Favreau left to write television scripts and Keenan took over.

Obama now refers to Keenan as “Hemingway,” in no small part because of a heavy beard Keenan regularly grows and then shaves. At the White House, Keenan has used his perch to befriend some of the many people who pass through, including comedians such as Zach Galifianakis and Stephen Colbert.

Sam Seaborn

“We went and had one or five large and delicious Old Fashioneds when I was in Washington,” Colbert said. “I told him you’re Sam Seaborn from the show

The West Wing

,” a reference to the deputy communications director played on the series by Rob Lowe.

“I mean, Cody Keenan: it sounds like a made-up name.”

For the 2009 White House correspondents’ association dinner, Keenan dressed up like a pirate for a photo in the Oval Office sitting next to Obama. The picture was shown as Obama made a joke about how he was willing to meet with even the country’s most menacing enemies.

In a statement, Obama said he relied “on Cody not just to share my vision but to help tell America’s story”.

“He’s a brilliant writer,” Obama added. “He’s relentless. His girlfriend and I are glad he finally got rid of the Hemingway beard.”

White House aides say that for the second year in a row there was no need for a yellow legal pad for Obama to rewrite Keenan’s first draft.

“Two years in a row is very impressive,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a senior adviser to the president. “A lot of times in the first draft that doesn’t happen. Not all speechwriters can just do that in the State of the Union.”

Last night the rest of the country got a chance to decide whether they agreed with Obama’s assessment of the first draft.