On one occasion during my stint in the Reagan White House, I found myself in the West Wing, watching the State of the Union message on TV with the rest of the domestic policy staff. As President Reagan delivered the speech, the staffers’ heads began to nod, one by one, like those little spring-necked dolls you sometimes see in curio shops: “That’s my sentence,” said one. “That’s my sentence,” said another. “Whoops!” someone else interjected. “He ad-libbed that last line.” And so it went, issue after issue, policy statement after policy statement.

That is what writing for the president or for any other major political figure is like. The speeches are group projects from beginning to end. Speechwriters not only have to share credit with their colleagues, but also with the policy experts and political advisors who provide much of the raw material at the beginning of the process and review the final drafts at the end. Even then, and even if he has already contributed heavily to the drafting, the speaker himself very often tweaks the speech right up to the moment he gives it.

Because so many very smart people are involved in the process, it is more than a little obnoxious when one member of the team tries to hog all the credit. But it happens. Peggy Noonan was one particularly egregious example of this self-aggrandizement and Mike Gerson, apparently, is another. At least that’s the story that Matthew Scully, Gerson’s White House colleague, tells in the current issue of the Atlantic.

Scully looked at the first chapter of Gerson’s forthcoming book, Heroic Conservatism, and couldn’t contain his indignation over Gerson’s grandstanding any longer. As he writes in the Atlantic: “Without fear of contradiction -– because it’s all in the presidential records -– I can report here that Michael Gerson never wrote a single speech by himself for President Bush. From beginning to end, every notable speech, and a huge proportion of the rest, was written by a team of speechwriters, working in the same office and on the same computer. Few lines of note were written by Mike, and none at all that come to mind from the post-9/11 addresses –- not even ‘axis of evil’”

So how was it that Bob Woodward and other major Washington journalists credited Gerson with writing “all of Bush’s memorable post-9/11 speeches”? Simple: Gerson told them.

For example, stories of Gerson writing Bush’s speeches in longhand on yellow legal pads at a nearby Starbucks were all part of the myth that Gerson created for himself. Thus, when Gerson, Scully and John McConnell, the third member of the presidential speechwriting team, were working on a State of the Union address in the White House, Gerson suddenly excused himself to go to an unspecified appointment. Only later did his colleagues learn that while they were slaving away anonymously back at the office, Gerson was at a local Starbucks with a legal pad pretending to craft the whole speech himself for the benefit of a reporter.

“Mike’s conduct,” says Scully, “is just the most familiar and depressing of Washington stories –- a history of self-seeking and media manipulation that is only more distasteful for being cast in such lofty terms.”

The story is both familiar and depressing but, having been there myself, I can understand how it happens. During my own days in the granite wedding-cake building next to the White House –- where many members of the president’s staff are quartered –- ensconced in a 19th Century office with French windows, a balcony and a marble fireplace, I would often muse about writing a book of my own about my experiences. I even had a title in mind. I would call it Following the Trumpets. And I never wrote for President Reagan on a regular basis -- just occasionally. Most of the speeches I wrote were for top advisors, like Ed Meese and budget director Jim Miller.

I’m glad that my innate laziness –- I won’t say it was modesty -– kept me from making such a fool of myself. I can only hope that Mike Gerson won’t one day regret writing Heroic Conservatism.

At one of the Ragan speechwriter conferences some years ago, a neophyte speechwriter asked, “When does it stop being your speech?” In other words, when do the edits and revisions made by others reach the point that the speechwriter can no longer claim authorship?

To which I replied, rather too sharply, I’m afraid, “When is it ever ‘your’ speech?” The speech belongs to the speaker, and speechwriters belong in the background.