Finding the right words for a rarely speechless US president

It was June 2015 and the only time during Barack Obama’s presidency that he “ran out of words” to offer solace to an American public struggling with another mass shooting.

Remarks delivered the day after a white supremacist murdered nine African Americans at a church in Charleston, South Carolina were the 14th time Obama addressed the nation after a mass shooting, but it was finding the words for the eulogy for Clementa Pinckney, the church’s pastor and one of the victims, that would be among the hardest tasks of his presidency.

That job fell to Cody Keenan, Obama’s chief speech writer who was charged with finding something new to say about a subject the president had to speak about all too often.

“There is no way to run out of words,” Keenan says. “You can always come up with words; you can always find some inspiration.”

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In his new book Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America, the 42-year-old from Chicago writes about how he and Obama found that inspiration. Keenan brings readers on a fly-on-the-wall journey inside the White House during a whirlwind 10 days when he helped Obama pen one of the standout speeches of his presidency.

It was a defining period in Obama’s presidency. In that short time, the US Supreme Court legalised same-sex marriage and upheld a key part of his landmark law that made healthcare affordable for Americans. While awaiting those court rulings, Keenan toiled with finding a fresh response for Obama to a mass shooting that exposed the country’s tragically routine struggle with racism and gun violence.

In Keenan’s memoir, he writes about how Obama admitted to his chief wordsmith that he really did not know what he wanted to say in the eulogy. He recalls Obama setting him next-to-impossible instructions: talk about guns, race, the Confederate flag – an enduring symbol of racism in the US – and “the pain it stirs up in so many citizens, and wrap it all up in grace”.

“I was just kind of standing there going: ‘What the f**k does that mean?’ Now I have to go figure this out,” Keenan recalls.

Some of the words they ultimately found were unscripted and not spoken, but sung. Obama’s famous “Amazing Grace” speech, singing the hymn in an impromptu finish, exemplified his power as one of this generation’s greatest orators to capture the emotional charge of a dramatic moment in US political life and help lead Americans through a traumatic event that was difficult to understand.

[ Cody Keenan: How I wrote Barack Obama’s speeches ]

Keenan wanted to write about this period because of the “sheer magnitude of those events all packed into 10 days”. Another reason was, he says, because the issues of marriage equality, affordable healthcare and the flag all asked fundamental questions of American society: does the country believe all Americans are created equal and what will people do to protect that?

“Each of those events went at something primal and unanswered about this country and over those 10 days we answered them as a country probably as well as you could,” he says.

In a passage of Irish interest, Keenan revisits Obama’s 2011 trip to Ireland to explain Obama’s “unique gifts” to appeal to a broad political coalition. He writes that his walk around the home of his Irish ancestor Fulmouth Kearney in Moneygall, Co Offaly “moved him” and how it showed “a family connection made no less real by his black skin”.

“A lot of people in Ireland kind of chuckle over the whole Moneygall thing but why should that great, great, great grandfather be any different from a Kenyan great, great, great grandfather. It’s the same thing and he really was moved by it,” says Keenan.

The former speech writer knows the limits of speeches. He concedes that they will not restore much-needed grace to US politics, though he believes they can set a vision for how to go about it.

“It actually comes down to the rest of us pushing back on misinformation and hatred, and voting in every single election. It is going to require a whole new generation of people who want to serve and change the way politics and government work,” he says.

As a “proud Democrat”, Keenan is tired of “living in a gerontocracy” where most of the country’s political leaders are in their 70s.

“It is time for some fresh blood who actually look more like the rest of the country and have lived more like the rest of the country,” he says.

Keenan recalls Michelle Obama’s recent remarks at the unveiling of the former first couple’s White House portraits and how she said someone like her was never to supposed to be there.

His hope is that Obama’s greatest legacy will be “this whole generation of people running for office who aren’t supposed to be running for office, people who are more representative of the country as a whole, not just through background, but upbringing, economic status and life experience”.

Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America by Cody Keenan is published by Mariner Books at £25 (€28.60)