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I’m Sitting Where History Gets Made, People!

I'm in D.C. today having a nice meet-and-greet with political bloggers, and I find myself in a Starbucks on Connecticut Avenue. Who's sitting next to me right now, you ask?

He chews up uni-ball pens by the packet, scribbling out Bush's most acclaimed speeches in longhand on a yellow legal pad. He sometimes takes days to produce a first draft. And he does some of his best writing in the nearest Starbucks, where his muse is the largest latte on the menu and the ambient noise of an espresso machine. When he was crafting Bush's inaugural address, he waited in pre-dawn darkness for the coffee shop to open at 5:30 a.m. near his home in Alexandria, Va. (The real West Wing speechwriter's office is a windowless room in the basement.)

That'd be Michael Gerson, who also wrote — or took credit for writing — Bush's State of the Union address following 9/11. Attentive Jewcy readers may recall an earlier post about another Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully's poisoned pen portrait of his colleague in the Atlantic:

 My most vivid memory of Mike at Starbucks is one I have labored in vain to shake. We were working on a State of the Union address in John’s office when suddenly Mike was called away for an unspecified appointment, leaving us to “keep going.” We learned only later, from a chance conversation with his secretary, where he had gone, and it was a piece of Washington self-promotion for the ages: At the precise moment when the State of the Union address was being drafted at the White House by John and me, Mike was off pretending to craft the State of the Union in longhand for the benefit of a reporter.

Have these stirrers and chocolate-covered espresso beans have heard Churchillian rhetoric in the making? It's the guy sitting next to Mike — now a WaPo columnist and Council of Foreign Relations bigwig — who's doing the writing. Point, Scully.

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