Even if I were on board his racing yacht when George David, retired chief executive officer of United Technologies, threw a division vice president overboard, watched him sink like a stone, and ordered the chief financial officer to declare the body a depreciated asset, I would never, never tell you about it.
And I would certainly never write a book about it.
As a former executive speechwriter, I’ve had access to and relationships with a number of top dogs — and part of the unspoken understanding was that I wouldn’t go off and write a book about whether their mothers dressed them very pretty.
To be a speechwriter or a public relations spokesman is not quite the same as being a priest or a lawyer, but there is some expectation of discretion.
Scott McClellan’s book about his experiences as President Bush’s press secretary, for example, was hot news for about 10 minutes, not so much for what it said, but because a supposed inside player was willing to spill the beans.
In truth, what the book seemed to suggest is that McClellan wasn’t really an insider at all — and apparently for good reason.
Kiss And Tell
The name of the game seems to be kiss-and-tell books about powerful leaders, which, one suspects, will push most staff flunkies further and further from the close relationships they need to do the jobs right.
Ever since the McClellan book was published, I’ve been flooded with inquiries from publishers who want me to write a book about my stint as a “special assistant” to former Gov. John Rowland. But my value to Rowland and to the good people of Connecticut demanded a relationship between us that sort of assumed I wouldn’t write a book about the bags of gold and boxes of cigars I flew down to the Cayman Islands, on behalf of grateful state contractors.
And how could I write a book about my days as a speechwriter for The Hartford Insurance Group’s Pete Thomas, CEO during the ITT merger years, which Thomas referred to as the period when the Idiot Telephone Technicians ran the show? I couldn’t tell you that.
It wouldn’t be appropriate for me to disclose that after larger-than-life UTC boss Harry Gray gobbled up Carrier air conditioning and Otis elevator and lots of other stuff, he considered a hostile takeover of Costa Rica.
Of course, the one way for big bosses to protect themselves against tell-all books is to simply be so open about everything that there’s little left to tell.
Discreet Veil
Robert Daniell, a former CEO of UTC and perhaps the most normal, low-key, least mentally ill powerful corporate executive I ever worked for, would occasionally say in public that he prospered in marketing and corporate management because he had been a mediocre engineer and the company had to give him something to do.
That would have made a great book chapter but Bob said it out loud, even if he didn’t quite mean it.
I like what Michael Fullilove, director of the global issues program at the Lowy Institute in Australia, wrote in a review of JFK speechwriter Ted Sorenson’s new book about the Kennedy years. “The speechwriter’s code of silence requires that a discreet veil be drawn over the drafting process.” Of course, Fulliloove goes on to write that the code is broken with great regularity — which I think is a detriment to the speechwriting craft — and other senior staff jobs as well.
No, the time that the editor of the Hartford Business Journal ran naked through the newsroom screaming “copy boy, copy boy where’s the copy boy,” will go to the grave with me.
Maybe I’ll write a novel. Fiction. Sort of.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
