In the September issue of Speechwriter's Newsletter, a columnist argues that the only thing a speechwriter should care about is the money溶ot the justice of the cause or the virtue of the speaker.

Daniel Ellsberg may beg to differ. In early July擁n case you missed it勇lsberg wrote a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times. He said a President Bush speech the week before預n argument for staying the course in Iraq�"evoked in me a sense of familiarity, but not nostalgia."

Working at the State Department and the Department of Defense in the 1960s, Ellsberg wrote similar speeches for Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, and people in their administrations.

A note particularly reminiscent in Bush's speech was his reference to "a time of testing." "We have more work to do, and there will be tough moments that test America's resolve," he said.

This theme recalled a passage in my 1965 draft [for a speech ultimately never delivered by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara] that, for reasons that will be evident, I have never chosen to reproduce before. I ended by painting a picture of communist China as "an opponent that views international politics as a whole as a vast guerrilla struggle ... intimidating, ambushing, demoralizing and weakening those who would uphold an alternative world order."

"We are being tested," I wrote. "Have we the guts, the grit, the determination to stick with a frustrating, bloody, difficult course as long as it takes to see it through. ...? The Asian communists are sure that we have not." Tuesday, Bush said: Our adversaries "believe that free societies are essentially corrupt and decadent, and with a few hard blows they can force us to retreat."

His speechwriters, like me, then faced this question from the other side. To meet the enemy's test of resolve, how long must the American public support troops as they kill and die in a foreign land? Their answer came in the same workmanlike evasions that served Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon: "as long as we are needed [and not a day longer] ... until the fight is won."

I can scarcely bear to reread my own proposed response in 1965 to that question, which drew on a famous riposte by the late U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson during the Cuban missile crisis:

"There is only one answer for us to give. It was made ... by an American statesman ... in the midst of another crisis that tested our resolution. Till hell freezes over."

It doesn't feel any better to hear similar words from another president 40 years on, nor will they read any better to his speechwriters years from now. But the human pain they foretell will not be mainly theirs."