My last two postings have been on “groupthink,” and the evidence that it is alive and well in the current White House.

Before I leave the subject, at least for now, I’d like to recommend a fable by James Thurber that seems particularly pertinent these days. Thurber (1894-1961) was a writer and cartoonist with a notably mordant sense of humor.

Case in point is his fable entitled, “The Owl Who Was God.” The crux of the story is that when the forest animals discover that the owl can see in the dark, they decide that he is the greatest and wisest of all animals, and they ask him to be their leader. (The few skeptics who want to know if the owl can see in the daytime as well are hooted out of the community for asking such a silly question.)

Thurber’s fable concludes as follows:

When the owl appeared among the animals it was high noon and the sun was shining brightly. He walked very slowly, which gave him an appearance of great dignity, and he peered about him with large, staring eyes, which gave him an air of tremendous importance. “He's God!” screamed a Plymouth Rock hen. And the others took up the cry “He's God!” So they followed him wherever he went and when he began to bump into things they began to bump into things, too. Finally he came to a concrete highway and he started up the middle of it and all the other creatures followed him. Presently a hawk, who was acting as outrider, observed a truck coming toward them at fifty miles an hour, and he reported to the secretary bird and the secretary bird reported to the owl. “There's danger ahead,” said the secretary bird. “To wit?” said the owl. The secretary bird told him. “Aren't you afraid?” he asked. “Who?” said the owl calmly, for he could not see the truck. “He's God!” cried all the creatures again, and they were still crying “He's God!” when the truck hit them and ran them down. Some of the animals were merely injured, but most of them, including the owl, were killed.

Moral: You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.

A traveler came upon a group of three hard-at-work stonemasons, and asked each in turn what he was doing.

The first said, “I am sanding down this block of marble.”

The second said, “I am preparing a foundation.”

The third said, “I am building a cathedral.”

In my nearly 25 years as a speechwriter, I have encountered that story in numerous incarnations. The details vary widely, as does the identity of the author, whenever this particular story is credited with an author. But the moral is always the same: the third mason is the one endowed with vision.

Finally, in church last Sunday, I stumbled on the story again. This time the source was convincingly documented. It is to be found in the Rule of St. Benedict (available in a modern translation by Joan Chittister).

St. Benedict was the inspiration for the monastic movement of the Middle Ages. He founded the great monastery of Monte Cassino in Italy, where he wrote his rule about 530 A.D. The rule became the model for monastic living for Catholic and, later, Anglican religious orders.

So the story, which may well have been old when Benedict recorded it, has been around for some 1500 years or more. It is not nearly as old as the parables of Jesus, or the fables of Aesop (who lived six centuries before the Christian era), but it is old enough to demonstrate the durability of a good story. The best stories are the oldest. They are not the best because they are the oldest, they are the oldest because they are the best. They survive because they continue to appeal to successive generations of listeners.

A strange, even bizarre, exhibit is currently underway at the National Museum of Health and Medicine, on the campus of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

The exhibit commemorates the 125th anniversary of the assassination of our 20th President, James Abram Garfield. Among the items on view are three of the President’s vertebrae, with a red plastic probe running through them to mark the path of the assassin’s bullet.

Garfield was shot by a disappointed office-seeker named Charles Guiteau on July 2, 1881. The wound itself was not mortal, but the unsanitary medical practices then in use – which included surgeons probing wounds with unwashed fingers and unsterilized instruments – caused a severe infection. Garfield died on September 19.

Because Garfield was in office for only a few months, he is one of our lesser-known Presidents. This is unfortunate, because he is a very interesting character.

Born in 1831, he was the last President to be born in a log cabin. His father died when he was two, leaving him to support his widowed mother and to scrape an education as best he could. Young Garfield worked as a farm hand, carpenter and canal boatman, and later helped pay his way through college by preaching Sunday sermons. In fact, he has the distinction of being the only President of the United States to have served as an ordained minister.

Garfield became a classics professor and later president of what is today Hiram College in Ohio. Entering politics, he was elected to the Ohio state senate in 1859, and was admitted to the bar the following year. When the Civil War broke out, he joined the Union Army and proved himself equally successful as a soldier, attaining the rank of brigadier general at the age of 31.

Because of his skills honed as a preacher and a lawyer, Garfield enjoyed a considerable reputation as an orator. A popular story tells how he was in New York City in April of 1865 when the news broke that President Lincoln had been murdered by John Wilkes Booth. An angry mob gathered in the vicinity of Wall Street, ready to wreak bloody vengeance on anyone so much as suspected of harboring pro-Southern sympathies.

But as the tension reached the flash point, Garfield appeared on a balcony, holding an American flag. “Fellow citizens!” he called out in a booming voice. “God reigns, and the government at Washington still lives!”

Incredibly, the sheer drama of the moment quieted the crowd. The people dispersed and the city was spared a riot. Small wonder that Garfield would later be called the “Preacher President.”

And it was as the Preacher President that he would be remembered. As late as 1929, a church was erected in McLean, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, named the Garfield Memorial Christian Church, in honor of our only President to have been a clergyman.

Internet resources on President James Garfield include:

Oxford-educated David Ogilvy (1911-1999) was a giant in 20th Century advertising. The founder of Ogilvy & Mather, one of the world’s leading advertising, marketing and PR firms, he pioneered the concept of “branding” and was noted for his classy promotions. It was Ogilvy who invented The Man in the Hathaway Shirt, for example, and persuaded Commander Whitehead to be the spokesman for his own Schweppes Tonic.

Ogilvy was the successful author of Confessions of an Advertising Man and Ogilvy on Advertising. A fine writer himself, he appreciated the importance of speechwriting.

He once put is this way:

“Most of the great leaders I have known have had the ability to inspire people with their speeches. If you cannot write inspiring speeches yourself, use ghostwriters – but use good ones. [Franklin] Roosevelt used Archibald MacLeish, Robert Sherwood and Judge Rosenman. That is why his speeches were more inspiring than those of any of the Presidents we have had since.”

As Iraq teeters precariously on the edge of full-scale civil war, and as the evidence accumulates that the current debacle was caused by bad planning on the part of the civilians in Washington, I find myself thinking of two exhibitions of military intelligence – one by a career soldier, and one by a soldier in a play.

The career soldier is General Colin Powell, for whom I had the honor of writing speeches for three years. In his memoirs, General Powell offers this account of a strategy session on Bosnia in 1993:

My constant, unwelcome message at all the meetings on Bosnia was simply that we should not commit military forces until we had a clear political objective … The debate exploded at one session when Madelaine Albright, our ambassador to the UN, asked me in frustration: “What’s the use of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” I thought I would have an aneurysm. American GIs were not toy soldiers to be moved around on some sort of global game board. I patiently explained that we had used our armed forces more than two dozen times in the preceding three years for war, peacekeeping, disaster relief and humanitarian assistance. But in every one of those cases we had a clear goal and had matched our military commitment to that goal. As a result, we had been successful in every case. I told Ambassador Albright that the U.S. military would carry out any mission it was handed, but my advice would always be that the tough political goals had to be set first. Then we would accomplish the mission.

The other soldier is the British general, John (“Gentlemanly Johnny”) Burgoyne – a historical character who appears in The Devil’s Disciple, Bernard Shaw’s satiric play about the American Revolution. The play is set in upstate New York, just before the Battle of Saratoga in 1777, and includes this devastating exchange between the sardonic, intellectual Burgoyne (himself an amateur playwright), and Burgoyne’s plodding, unimaginative aide, Major Swindon:

BURGOYNE
Have you heard the news from Springtown?

BURGOYNE
What a pity! What a pity!

It is a pity – it is a tragedy – that our soldiers in Iraq should be paying the price in blood for the blunders of the civilians in Washington, some of whom never spent a day in uniform themselves. Our men and women in the military deserve much better than that.

In my last posting, I quoted the character of General John Burgoyne from Bernard Shaw’s play, The Devil’s Disciple. Like Shaw’s Julius Caesar (see Caesar and Cleopatra), Shaw’s Burgoyne is altogether more appealing on stage than he was in real life.

The real Burgoyne (1722-1792) was, admittedly, a man of intelligence and charm, who enjoyed a modest reputation as a wit and a playwright. But he owed his rise as a soldier more to an aristocratic marriage and clever politicking than military talent. He was also something of a fatuous ass.

During the campaign leading up to his humiliating defeat at Saratoga in 1777, Burgoyne made use (unwillingly, he claimed) of Indian irregulars. To make sure that his dubious allies behaved as proper soldiers, he gave them a long and detailed lecture (of which they did not understand one word) explaining to them the rules of civilized warfare that they were expected to follow.

This travesty was to afford Edmund Burke, a member of Parliament known for his eloquence but not for his humor, a rare occasion for hilarity.

The House of Commons rocked with laughter as Burke parodied Burgoyne’s address to the Indians. He said it was as if the keeper of the London zoo had harangued the wild animals before setting them loose on the populace: “My gentle lions, my humane bears, my tender-hearted hyenas, go forth! But I exhort you, as you are Christians and members of a civilized society, to take care not to hurt any man, woman, or child.”

Burke was notorious for the length of his speeches. He was nicknamed the “Dinner Bell,” because when he rose to speak, members would take it as their cue to go off for dinner. But on this occasion at least, even though he spoke for more than three hours, Burke held his audience. Apparently, the honorable members were too exhausted from laughing to go anywhere.

The cover story of this month’s issue of Speechwriter’s Newsletter is devoted to an amusing and instructive article on what happens when a freelance speechwriter is called in at the last minute to write a short speech for a major occasion -- and the writer and the client are both vague about what the effort will cost.

For me, the money quote (Sorry!) of the article is this: “We can debate whether freelancers should charge by the project, by the spoken minute or by the hour, but one thing is clear: $85 an hour is too low a rate for a freelance speechwriter to charge, especially for a rush job which should command a premium. Why? Because – again, especially during a rush job – it’s impossible to credibly tally enough hours to reach a reasonable total fee for the job.”

SN thinks that $150 an hour is the minimum that an experienced speechwriter should charge – and gets no argument from a freelance speechwriter like me.

Thornton Wilder was right: Writers are patsies, because we do it for love. Perhaps that is true of artists in general, but I can think of at least one exception to this rule – the painter James MacNeill Whistler.

Whistler may be best remembered for the rather stodgy portrait he did of his mother, but most of his other works were anything but grey and black. In fact, one of them – “The Falling Rocket” – drew from the famed critic John Ruskin the scathing comment that he had “never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.”

Whistler retaliated by suing Ruskin for libel, demanding a thousand pounds in damages. He didn’t get the money, but he managed to get the last word while being cross-examined by Ruskin’s lawyer.

The lawyer demanded to know how long it took Whistler to “knock off” one of his paintings.

Whistler replied that he could sometimes “knock off” a painting in a matter of a few days.

The lawyer’s voice rose insinuatingly: “And that was the labor for which you asked two hundred guineas?”

“No,” Whistler replied stoutly. “It was for the knowledge gained through a lifetime.”

It is the knowledge gained through a lifetime that really determines what a speechwriter is worth. Very often, the writing time may be brief. What the client is paying you for is your ability to make the topic of the moment seem fresh, lively arresting, humorous, inspiring – or all of the above. If you can do that, and if the worth of the speech is confirmed by the reaction of the audience, then you deserve to be compensated accordingly – whether you’ve devoted two weeks or two days to the project

Speechwriting can be a satisfying and lucrative career. But our jobs hang by a thread, and we can never afford to forget that.

There are two ways of dealing with this insecurity. One is by using speechwriting as a stepping-stone to an editorial or managerial position. The other is by cultivating speechwriter survival skills.

Here are some tips I’ve picked up over the course of my own career:

First: Always remember that you have two clients: the person you write for -- and yourself. And you are just as important as the client.

There's no conflict of interest here. If you're working to make your client look good, you're also making yourself look good. For example: You're hired to write speeches? Offer to ghost an article or op/ed for your client. If it gets published, the client looks good and you've got another choice writing sample to add to your portfolio; something to show potential employers that you’re good at different kinds of writing.

Second: Be visible.

One reason why speechwriters are so vulnerable is that we're often faceless, anonymous beings. Some of us think that being invisible makes us secure. Wrong. Don't assume that if you keep you're head down and do a good job, you're safe, because you're not.

Be visible. Be visible within the organization. Volunteer for projects that will help you grow professionally, win you friends and allies, and add to your portfolio. Offer to write an article for the company magazine, for instance.

Be visible outside the organization as well. Look for opportunities to speak and write outside of your job. Build a network, because some day it may be your lifeline.

Third: Always have a contingency plan. Always be prepared for the possibility that you may find yourself suddenly unemployed.

That means belonging to professional societies that have job banks; that means cultivating recruiters before you need them; that means scouting potential employers.

It also means learning how to market yourself. Here again, I recommend seeking opportunities to speak and to publish outside of your regular job. I know that freelance speechwriting on the side can be a dicey proposition, but you can still write an article, review a book, and add otherwise add writings samples to your portfolio.

I've always liked General George Patton's definition of success. Patton said that success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom. And he was right.

Everybody falls at one time or other, sometimes through no fault of one's own. But how high you bounce depends on you.

Rep. Katherine Harris (R-FL) told interviewers in Orlando last week that God did not intend for the United States to be a "nation of secular laws" and that the separation of church and state is a "lie we have been told" to keep religious people out of politics. She added that “If you're not electing Christians, then in essence you are going to legislate sin.”

Rep. Rep. Harris is a two-term member of Congress and a candidate in the September 5 Republican primary for the U.S. Senate.

She should know better.

Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution stipulates that all federal and state officials “shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation to support this Constitution.”

That same article of the Constitution – which Rep. Harris as a member of Congress is sworn to uphold – goes on to say that “no religious test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

No word there about electing Christians. In fact, if non-Christians had been barred from holding federal office at the dawn of the Republic, such venerable patriots as John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin and very likely George Washington would have been excluded. Adams was a Unitarian and, while the religious opinions of the other three have been debated at great length by historians, not one of them could be called an orthodox Christian.

For more than two centuries, a furious controversy has raged over the question of whether this nation was founded as a nation “under God,” or under the principles of reason, without reference to a Deity. Very likely, the truth lies somewhere between the two extremes.

If the Founding Fathers made no reference to God in the Constitution, it was probably because they recognized that most of their countrymen held strong views on the subject of religion. Wisely, they concluded that it was going to be hard enough to ratify the Constitution as it was, without dividing the nation along religious lines. So they maintained a discreet silence.

But George Washington probably spoke for all the framers of the Constitution in a famous letter he wrote shortly after he became President. It was a letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, and it is one of the noblest declarations ever penned in defense of freedom of conscience. Washington wrote:

“The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy – a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.

“It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”

Amen!

A person may be a good citizen of the United States whether that person is a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, or a member of any other faith – or is a person of no faith at all. That is a truth that was recognized from our first days as a nation; it is a truth that we disregard today at our peril.