Abstract

The Voiceless Speechwriter
Shaun Crowe
 

It shouldn’t surprise us that speechwriters pen the most compelling books on political life. After all, their primary function is to forge a coherent narrative out of a disparate reality, to create comprehensibility out of complexity. By applying literary tools to political persuasion, they’re essentially public storytellers.

The genre’s most obvious example, and the book against which all such attempts are inevitably judged, is Don Watson’s Recollections of a Bleeding Heart. Reflecting on his time as Paul Keating’s speechwriter, Watson managed to do two remarkable things: he painted both an intimate portrait of a Prime Minister and a memorable picture of Australia in the early 1990s. With a novelist’s instinct for detail and character, Watson showed that the speechwriter is well positioned to understand both the mechanics of government and the sweep of history.

When viewed alongside Watson, James Button’s recent offering, Speechless, is, in many ways, the anti-Recollections. Not because Button is a bad writer (he certainly isn’t), but because he simply wasn’t given the same access. Where Watson’s evocative portrait gave us an insight into Keating the man (no reader could forget his mercurial Keating, consistently choosing the company of Mahler over his advisers and colleagues), Button’s time as Kevin Rudd’s speechwriter was largely defined by the Prime Minister's absence.

Formerly a journalist at The Age, and also a son of the former Labor minister John Button, James was asked by the Rudd government in late 2008 to help the ALP frame a narrative around its legislative achievements. Whilst the party was proud of its response to the Global Financial Crisis, it still felt a lack of public traction; it sensed that, rather than possessing a coherent image, Rudd’s policies were perceived as ad-hoc.

Conscious of having lived under John’s paternal shadow of public service, Speechless conveys the unique magnetism of politics. Indeed, having existed largely on the edge of public life, in amongst the snug world of the commentary class, James felt stongly drawn towards a more active form of contribution. He ultimately knew that, if he received the call to duty, he wouldn't be able to resist involving himself directly in the unfolding wave of Australian history. 

But, as is often the case, the ideals in his head didn’t quite match the reality on the ground. Where he thought he would be engaged in the daily process of articulating Labor’s identity, he found himself on the awkward periphery. Given minimal access to the man for whom he was trying to speak (Button met Rudd only a handful of times), he felt both impotent and confused. Indeed, in the relatively few times in which he was given responsibility over a speech, little remained of his original words: the spirit was exorcised and the substance removed. Sometimes, if he was lucky, the title remained.

However, as an artefact of the Rudd years, this absence, this seeming non-story, isn’t without its insight; in fact, the insight might just be the absence. As a microcosm of the government’s broader successes and failures, Button’s experience is telling.

The book emphasises the role of trust in the politician-speechwriter relationship. From Reagan to Keating, Button argues that these teams, as they’re built on the placing of words in another’s mouth, require mutual belief and a healthy lack of suspicion. What he found was that, with Kevin Rudd, this was constitutionally difficult, if not pathologically impossible.

Whilst Button links this with an inability to tell an overarching story of government (by spurning the work of others, he was constantly writing on the run) its point appears broadly relevant. Rudd isn’t a Shakespearean character, but his tragedy does seem centered around this fatal flaw: Hamlet had his doubt, Othello his jealously, Macbeth his ambition. Kevin, in the end, had his failure to trust.

This is all a tremendous shame: not just for Rudd and Labor, but also for this book. When Button is talking about the people close to him, he’s both perceptive and moving. James’ experience in Canberra pushes him to reflect on his father, someone whose political nature also shaped, and often undermined, his personal relationships.

The book’s finest chapters grapple with this spectre. James’ drive to understand his brother’s death, and his father's subsequent melancholy, show his considerable gifts for observation and empathy; they tell the story of a politician, but also of a father and man. At its best, Speechless is deeply personal exploration of how ambition and conviction collide with family and life.

Like Watson, Button should be read for doing two things extremely well: he documents an important period of Australian history, whilst examining the human stories that drove it. It’s not Button’s fault that the person that should have been at its centre, Kevin Rudd, couldn’t trust the painter enough to sit still. 

Shaun Crowe is a doctoral candidate at the Australian National University and the Research Manager at the Centre for the Study of Australian Politics.

James Button, Speechless: A Year In My Father's Business, Melbourne University Press 2012.