The 2,988 Words That Changed a Presidency: An Etymology: ‘When Bush didn’t seem lost, he often seemed scared. When he didn’t seem scared, he often seemed angry. None of this soothed the public. ”It was beginning to look like Bring Me the Head of Osama bin Laden starring Ronald Colman,” one White House official remembered.

The president knew he had not yet said the right things. He returned from Camp David the weekend after the attacks with an intense desire to make a major speech. His aides agreed.’

A blow-by-blow of the deliberations of Bush’s speechwriting team in shaping the address to Congress. They contended with problems including the lack of resolution about how the U.S. would respond, administration reluctance to share too much information with its own speechwriters, and Shrub’s ineloquence, which would mean that some of their finest writing would seem too strange emanating from his mouth. For all the talk about how reassuring the speech ended up being, the emperor truly has no clothes on. The inherent premise of a “presidential” speech ghostwritten by a group of speechwriters has always felt like a jarring charade more than anything else. Doesn’t the public feel the effrontery of being so much victims of inherent spin and manipulation by the image-mongers? Do they really think that these are the ideas of the man in front of the camera? “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” he might as well say. New York Times [name: “FMHreader”, password: “FMHreader”]