Capturing The Voice Of A President 48:04

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Well, welcome to the Jason and Alice podcast. I'm Jason Chaffetz. Appreciate you giving up a little bit of your time. I think you're really going to enjoy this because not only are we going to mention a few things in the news, we're going to highlight the stupid because there's always somebody doing something stupid somewhere. But then we're going to get on the line with Mark Thiessen. Now, you've seen Mark on Fox News. You probably heard him, probably read a lot, and you've heard him through other people because he's a great guy.

He's one of the most prolific and successful speech writers out there. And he's done this, you know, at the highest levels from former when they were currently in office presidents, secretaries of defense, things like that. And he's a super talented, witty person. He understands and somehow is able to capture the voice of.

of the people that he's that he's writing for but i think you're going to be fascinated by this i've gotten to know him a little bit but i really want to ask him about that process of being a speech writer and what it's like and how he got there and and uh what fascinates him because this is one of the more coveted jobs more difficult jobs and um but boy you get proximity

to the most powerful people in politics, and he's done it at the highest levels for a long period of time. So Mark Thiessen, we're going to have a conversation with him. But first, I want to mention a few things in the news, some more important than others, some less important. But coming up is the Michigan-Washington National Championship game in football. Now, a lot of...

interesting things happening in sports. But you know what? This is sort of the pinnacle of football. I'm glad they're moving to a broader playoff system. I think that is going to be a better, smarter way. But I think you can, after the results of the bowl games and everything that happened, say these are the two best teams in football. And I'm glad to see these undefeated teams actually meeting football

for the national championship on Monday night. It's going to be exciting. So congratulations to two great programs and really looking forward to that. Immigration. You know, one of the things that we hear about is people like Gavin Newsom, who is the governor of California, and he is saying, hey, he's going to give free health care to everybody who's here illegally. He just believes in principle that's what we should do. Well,

If that isn't a magnet to attract people that are here illegally, I don't know what is. Because I believe you've got to enforce the current law, got to lock down the border, get rid of the rewards and incentives like free health care, reject amnesty. I mean, if you want to solve this problem, you don't need some comprehensive bill that Joe Biden is saying that you need. You can just enforce the current law. In fact,

Back in the day, that was the comprehensive immigration reform where the policies and principles and the immigration law that was put into place. That was it. And if you want to advocate for it, go ahead and pass that out in the Senate there, Chuck Schumer, if you are so adamant about it, but you can't.

I want also to everybody understand the true cost here because there are literally millions, millions of people coming here illegally. If you come through the port of entry, want to claim asylum, you know, you can do that. We legally and lawfully admit about a million people each year through our various programs. There are some 90 different types of visas. But when you don't go through the port of entry,

The law says you shall be detained and you shall be deported. That's what the law says. And that's what the Biden administration is not doing. And that is what is fundamentally wrong. But I want people to understand the millions of people are coming here. Guess what? They want housing. They need health care. I guess they get it for free over in California. They're going to want jobs. They're going to get their kids educated. Who's going to pay for that? It's going to be you and me and law abiding citizens who've been paying taxes for

We're already $34 trillion in debt. We think we can just do this? And by the way, for young people, for people that are struggling with housing issues, no matter what your age,

Guess what? When you pour millions of people into the system asking for and needing more rental units, guess what? The price of rent is going to go up. The demand is surging right now because we have millions of people that actually need to have those types of accommodations.

And that's why it's going to make rents go up and make life much more expensive for, again, law-abiding citizens. All right, time to bring on the stupid because, you know what? There's always somebody doing something stupid somewhere.

All right. You have to go back to, and we could do this just about every week with Corrine Jean-Pierre, the White House spokesperson. She is put out there by the president and the vice president to be the spokesperson. And when she misspeaks, they, rare to none, do you ever hear them clean that up or pull it back?

She went out there on another network and said that Joe Biden is doing all he can to secure the border. I mean, that is such gaslighting. That is absolutely fundamentally not true. On day one, the Biden-Harris administration changed the policies that were put in place that were actually locking down the border. He's gone out and told people you're not going to be deported. They are engaged in catch and release.

They do have something. Eighty five thousand unaccompanied minors that came across the border that they can't account for. They don't know where they went, where they are. Unbelievable that she can think she can just go out there and tell the American people that Joe Biden's doing all he can to lock down the border. That is just a flat out lie. Don't think that we're so stupid. That is a stupid comment. All right. Time to bring on.

Somebody who knows the White House knows it really well. I'm really excited about this. Let's get together and have a conversation with Mark Thiessen. Mark Thiessen here.

Mark, Jason Chaffetz. Hey, Jason. How are you, man? Thank you so much for joining us. I was afraid, you know, with caller ID and everything that you might not pick up, so I appreciate it. I picked up instantly, but I saw your name. No, listen. I got to tell you, I have watched you through the years, and when you come on Fox, I just, I really got to listen because I don't always agree with you, and I got a long list of things I can tell you where you were wrong.

But I know you've thought it through. I know you've got a good perspective. And you have a unique perspective. I mean, your background and what you've done and how you've done it, it's really good and it's really compelling. And you know what else I really dig about what happens when you come on? If somebody else is on at the same time and they say something stupid, you're pretty good at getting back in their grill saying, no, that ain't right. And I love it.

Well, thank you. I appreciate that. And I feel the same way about you. And I always think of Ronald Reagan's adage that my 80% friend is not my 20% enemy. So I probably think we, I figure we agree on more than we disagree on, even if we disagree strongly on the things we do. Yes, exactly. So, but Mark, not everybody ascends to the heights that you did in the White House and whatnot. But so let's go back. I want to go back to

I'm Mark and I was born in. Let's start there and tell us a little bit about your family growing up, what life was like, and then we'll just go from there. Yeah, I grew up in that hotbed of right-wing conservatism called Manhattan, New York. I grew up on East 72nd Street.

raised by a single mother who was a refugee from Poland after World War II. She fought in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis. Wow.

So it was part of the resistance that took back the Capitol for 63 days and held it. And then, of course, Warsaw fell and she was a prisoner of war, made her way to was taken to Germany by the by by the Germans to a POW camp liberated by George Patton, who went too far into Germany and had to go back. But he took the prisoners of war that he had liberated. So if it hadn't been for Patton,

being who he was, then she would have grown. I would have probably been born in East Germany or communist Poland. And she made her way back to she was liberated, went to serve out the war in the Polish army under British command, ended up in London. Her family told her, don't come back. The communists have taken over. You don't want to come back here. So she stayed, got learned English and got her medical degree at the same time at National University of Ireland.

And then came over here. She did both at the same time. That's not the easiest. That's not the easiest route. Yeah.

Yeah, we didn't tell her patients that. But she learned English while learning medicine in Ireland. And then she was a stateless refugee because, you know, the Polish government didn't recognize her. And America welcomed her and brought her over here. And she settled in New York. She was a doctor who treated heroin addicts. So she worked in clinics.

South Bronx and in, in, in Harlem. Um, and for, for decades, she, uh, she, uh, she treated, uh, she treated heroin addicts in some of the toughest neighborhoods in New York and raised me, um, as a single mother. My dad wasn't in the picture for, for most of my childhood. And, uh, and so were you the only child? I was the only child. Yeah. I was the, I was an only, I was an only child growing up in New York. Uh,

And and yeah, she raised me. She raised me as a freedom fighter because she was a freedom fighter. She put her life on the line to fight against the Nazis. And my formative, of course, experience was the 1980s and the battle against communism. That was when solidarity movement and martial law took place. And Ronald Reagan stood with the solidarity movement. In fact, this summer, I took my whole family to Poland,

uh to teach them about communism when we went to gdansk to the lenin shipyard and actually spent an hour with lech faunsa um really wow yes how cool is that you know because we had gone back to poland a bunch of times for anniversaries of the uprising and

And I have four kids and they had seen Poland. They knew the country. They knew about their mother's history. They learned a lot about World War Two. And I just realized I had over I had just because of why we were there, we really hadn't done communism. So we did a week long communism tour of Eastern Europe and talk learning about the what it was like under communism, why it was such a horrible system and how it.

The Polish people rose up to overthrow it. Well, you know, I mean, what family doesn't get together and says, hey, kids, let's go have a tour on communism as opposed to going to Disney World? I mean, that is more common than not, is it? I mean, show me the family that hasn't gone overseas for the communism tour. Yeah, well, it was a great experience, and they're great kids. That's good. I mean, well, that's amazing, you know, because...

Those are the formative years, right? They're going to learn and experience and see things and good for you.

But let's go back here a little bit. I mean, were you like a latchkey kid where you basically mom was there in the morning, you'd go off to school and then, you know, you came home and she was still working? I mean, how did that all work? I mean, you know, she was a single mother working, you know, I mean, treating heroin addicts isn't the most lucrative form of medicine. So, you know, she was able to support us.

But she did it because it gave her a little bit more freedom than if she was in a private practice where she had to be on call all the time. But, you know, yeah, I was. I got to go to school. I went to a school a few blocks away from my home, and I'd come home and do my homework. I grew up playing ice hockey. That was my sport. And my kids are all actually – two of my four kids are hockey players. One's playing at Amherst right now, and my daughter is coming to Dartmouth to play hockey. So I've got two kids who are much better.

hockey players than I ever was. That's pretty good. Okay, so you great. So were you also a nerd? Or were you like, No, I was just all about athletics. And I was convinced I was going to play in the National Hockey League when I got older. Well, every every kid who plays hockey is convinced he's going to play in the National Hockey League. So that was my dream. But of course, I didn't, I didn't have I didn't have the opportunities to put in the work as as my kids have had and

get to college hockey. So I ended up going to college, not for sports. I went to a school that did not have a football team or a hockey team. I went to Vassar College in upstate New York. Oh, another real conservative outlet. Well, you know, I wasn't conservative then.

Interestingly enough, I was I was an anti-communist. I was I was what you what they used to call. People probably don't know it anymore. A Scoop Jackson Democrat. I was a I was I was virulently anti-communist, cared a lot about freedom. But I wasn't. But I didn't consider myself a conservative. My mom was a liberal Democrat. And so I sort of was raised with those values. And it wasn't until I got to Vassar that I became a conservative. Vassar turned me.

What what happened? I mean, was it because you actually started thinking it through? I mean, I like to joke with people. I say, yeah, I was associated with the Democratic Party until I learned to read and write. And then I figured it out. I took me a little longer than you. So I I got to Vassar. And of course, the big thing in the night, I just cared about freedom. This freedom has always been my my driving point and standing with the oppressed people who are struggling under despotic regimes.

uh just because of my family history and so the big fight back then was south africa and it was the apartheid movement regime in south africa so i joined the student coalition against apartheid and racism and i helped organize protests against the you know pushing for divestment and all the rest of this stuff and

And one day I was talking to some friends of mine who were conservatives on campus, and they said to me, "Have you heard about this thing called necklacing?" And I said, "What's necklacing?" And they showed me this video. Back then it was VHS tapes. What the African National Congress used to do is to, this was the Windy Mandela wing of the African National Congress, if they thought somebody was collaborating with the apartheid regime, they would have a mock trial and then they would execute them by taking a tire, filling it with gasoline and setting them on fire.

And they had video of this. And I was horrified by this. And so I went to the next meeting of the Student Coalition Against Apartheid and Racism. And we had it was led by this sort of this this draft Dodger white South African kid who was sort of a Rastafarian type, very charismatic. And, you know, he he led the meeting and at the end he opened it up for ideas.

And I raised my hand and I talked about this and I said, you know, we need to police our own movement. We got to condemn this. We should put out a statement. And it was met with like crickets. No, no, no interest whatsoever. And so it didn't go over very well. Next day, I come back to my dorm after class and there's a note pushed under my door that I had been purged.

They voted to kick me out. So, you know, Donald Reagan always used to say, you know, that I didn't leave the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party left me. Well, I didn't leave the left. The left actually kicked me out. They actually voted on it and they left. Yes. And it was unanimous. He's out of here. I was purged. And so I was taking a train up to from from New York to Poughkeepsie for college. And just soon after this happened on Christmas break,

And I saw a guy who I knew who was the editor of the conservative newspaper. And I sat down next to him and I told him I was chatting and I told him what happened. And he said, well, why don't you come write for us? And I said, well, not a conservative. And he said, I don't care. We don't care. You can write whatever you want. You can be the liberal columnist of the conservative at the conservative newspaper. And I was like, OK. And, you know, I sort of it was the contrast between the sort of the intolerance of the left and

and the openness of the right. He didn't care that I was a liberal, he just thought I was smart and interesting and had a different point of view and wanted to have debate, wanted to have a discussion of ideas. And so I started out as the liberal columnist at the conservative newspaper and started hanging out with conservatives. I started reading National Review.

I started listening to Ronald Reagan and I became a conservative. And by the time I graduated, I was the editor in chief of the conservative newspaper at Vassar. They tried to shut down my newspaper because we had a censorship fight and Bill Buckley came in and helped me raise money to keep it going. And so Bill Buckley became a mentor of mine.

and sort of joined the conservative movement. I got an internship in the Reagan administration in the last year of the Reagan administration. So I came to Washington in 1998. So I can consider myself a Reagan alum just by the skin of my teeth as a college intern in 1988. And that was it. I came to join the Reagan revolution and I'm still trying to, I'm still trying to be part of the Reagan revolution, even though the Reagan revolution is less Reagan than it used to be. But I, you know,

And, you know, the philosophy that caused me to walk into that room of fellow liberals or fellow leftists and call them out and police our movement, I still have that. I still I still I will do the same thing to conservatives. If I think people on our side are doing something wrong or saying something wrong or like that, I think we the big problem we have in politics on both the left

from the right today is that people don't take seriously the need to police their movement. You look at this on the left with all the antisemitism, right? They've just allowed this stuff to creep into their universities, into Congress. You've got, you know, no one has, no one, the Democrats would never call out, you know, Rashida Tlaib or Ilhan Omar.

And they've got a responsibility to police their movement and keep the people who belong in the fever swamps in the fever swamps. And similarly, I think we do. We have a responsibility to call out people who go, who, you know, I think we've done a better job of it than they have. I think we have fewer, I don't think, I don't know, we have any open anti-Semites like they do in Congress. But, you know, it's our job to police our own movements and to make sure that we're upholding the right principles and that people who don't share our principles and are trying to take advantage of the wave

you know, get thrown overboard. Yeah, you've never struck me as bashful as somebody would hold back in expressing interview. But you know what? That's what our founders envisioned, right? They wanted vigorous debate. They wanted thoughtful leadership that would provide perspective so that you could make the best informed decision. And you don't get that if you don't get the kind of

all around the horn, if you will, of thought. And, you know, I loved what Margaret Thatcher said, right? She said, first, you got to win the argument, then you go win the votes. And that's the whole point is that you got to actually do that. And so,

Your point about policing is well said because I think one of the great threats that we have is this whole notion of tolerance. And it's always amazing to me that the most tolerant person

Are you always the least tolerant people when it comes to, you know, the idea that you might disagree with them? But, oh, we got to tolerate all of this. And that's how this anti-Semitism starts to creep into the system. And next thing you know, you got kids rioting at a school trying to attack a teacher who just was showing her support for, you know, the fact that she liked, you know, the state of Israel.

Yeah. You know, it's interesting. There's there's there's there's there's times for tolerance and there's times for not for not being tolerant. And there are things you should be tolerant of. We should be tolerant of the of disagree. Legitimate disagreements. Exactly. You know, I'm sure you and I disagree on stuff. I don't know what it is, but, you know, on some foreign policy topics, whatever. And, you know, we're all we're on the same team and we got to have that debate and we have to have that discussion. And we can have that discussion as two people who are.

you know, I hope I can say friends and who are on the same team. And we're just discussing and debating and trying to figure out the best way forward and look at each other as two people who love America and want this place to make a place a better place. And we just disagree, right?

And then there are the people who are marching in Harvard and chanting from the river to the sea or marching in Charlottesville and chanting the Jews will not replace us. And I've got no tolerance for that. And so we have to keep the bigots

And the and the and the and those people to the alt right keep it alt right there. The problem with the alt left is it isn't alt anymore. It's become part of the left. And and they haven't done a good enough job of distinguishing between what is honest disagreement within the movement and what is just unacceptable thinking that that really needs to be. It's like a virus that needs to be purged.

And there's a difference, and we have to recognize that. Yeah, you know, when I first got to Congress, 2009 is when I was sworn in, I thought, hey, you know what, we're all fighting for the same thing. We just happen to disagree with the route in which we want to get there. But when I left in 2017, I thought, nah, that's not true anymore. I really –

I increasingly thought there is a group of people that hates America and they hate freedom. They hate liberty. They hate a democracy. They hate a republic. And they're trying to tear it down. I mean, not all of them. There's some good Democrats out there, but I'm just saying there were far too many and a growing number of them. Yeah, I think you're right. I think that exists.

And and that needs to be opposed. And I think we have to I think we on our side have to do a job, a good job of distinguishing between people who we disagree with, but who come at their views honestly. And people really just hate. You know, I agree with you. There are people out there who, you know, I mean, they say they hit their country. They're trying to, you know, brag about it. Yeah.

yeah our country was founded to perpetuate slavery well you don't love america if you think a country was founded to perpetuate slavery you think i mean how could you yeah right you know it's it's what it's actually correct but dude if you really believe that then how can you love it it's it's it's an evil institution so all right so let's let's go let's go back for a second let's go back for a second so

You're going to school. You got an inspirational mother that you're obviously I can tell just the way you talk about her, very close to her and lover. And and you're now you're off on your own and you're willing to walk into rooms and kind of challenge the status quo and the thoughts. But when did you make the leap? Like, I think you went to go work for Jesse Helms, correct? I did. But how does how do you go from one? Was that the first on the hill type of job?

That was my first job on the Hill. So I worked my first year. I worked for a guy named Charlie Black at a firm called Black Manifort Stone and Kelly was my first job, which no one had heard of until recently. And what were you doing there?

I was just a junior researcher. It was my first job out of college. And I was a good writer. So I started doing some writing work. I ended up writing speeches for Jonas Savimbi, who was the leader of the Angolan rebels, who was a client of the firm. And so I think I'm the only person who's written speeches for George W. Bush and Jonas Savimbi. But-

You know, I worked there for a while and I really learned a lot, but I also learned I didn't want to be a I didn't want to be a master of the universe. I didn't want to be a lobbyist. I didn't just want I wanted to take the skills I learned and apply them to the fight for for my ideals. So I went off and I wanted to help Jack Kemp become president of the United States. I went to work for Empower America and Kemp didn't run. But I ended up going to California and working on a on a on Michael

Huffington Senate race, where he almost beat Dianne Feinstein. Huffington lost, but we took the Senate back. And so I came back to DC and it just so happens that the guy who ran Jesse Helms' first campaign was Charlie Black.

And so Charlie, he was looking for a spokesman. He had just become chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And Charlie recommended me and I met with him and I spent seven glorious years working on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for Jesse Helms, fighting the UN, fighting treaties to Helms, always to say, America never lost a war or won a treaty. So we'd take all these arms control treaties that the left was trying to, you know,

tie up America's hands with Lilliputian threads of treaties and all the rest of it. And we had just had a grand old time. It was probably some of the best years of my life working on Capitol Hill. So not everybody can write a speech. Not everybody can deliver a speech. So what was it in your background or upbringing that

allowed you to put pen to paper and actually say, wow, this is the way you should say this.

And I don't know. I just always I always knew how to write. I always I had I had a love for it. I enjoyed it. I liked reading. I like books. I liked I wrote fiction as a kid, though. I haven't done that for a long, long time. I just I enjoyed writing. And one of the great things I found is that when you're a 20 something who has no business being in a room with really important people, if you can write something.

and they need you to write something they'll let you in the room and so i got into as a as a young 20-something in washington i got into all sorts of rooms i had no business being in because i could write the speech because i could write the op-ed because i could write the uh you know i could write what needed to be right to communicate the ideas that they wanted to get through and i sort of uh jesse helms became a mentor to me and and uh i wrote i wrote uh speeches for him and was his spokesman on the foreign relations committee

And then he, Helms used to hold up all these arms control treaties, and he would always invite the living former secretaries of defense to testify against them. And at the time, the leading ones were Dick Cheney, Cap Weinberger, and Don Rumsfeld.

And Rumsfeld was in private sector. He didn't have a policy staff. And so he needed a little help with his testimony when he testified before the committee. So I ended up finding myself helping to write his testimony. And then Bush won, and Rumsfeld had to do his confirmation testimony. And so I found myself in the Pentagon and the transition office helping him to write confirmation testimony. And then a few months later, I got a call saying, Secretary would like to see you. And he asked me to be his chief speechwriter. And so I went to the Pentagon.

and worked with Rumsfeld, thought I was going to spend several years writing speeches about defense transformation and modernization and all the defense budgets and how we're going to rebuild our military. And then I was in the building when the planes hit on September 11, 2001. Felt the building shake, smelled the smoke, lost a good friend at the point of impact. And all of a sudden I spent the next three years

traveling 250 000 miles around the world with don rumsfeld uh visiting 50 countries going to the battlefronts of the middle east first first trip of a secretary of defense into afghanistan while the taliban were still in kabul and we were at bagram airbase i saw you know we handed out bagram back to the taliban as a uh as a beautiful modern military base when i got there it was a

blown out soviet air base with carcasses of mig jet fighters all over the place they told us don't step off of the tarmac as the whole base is a minefield um and we met with the northern alliance and and planned the the operation to uh take back kabul and drive the uh the taliban and al-qaeda out of the country and

I was in the first visit into Iraq after the fall of Saddam, traveled all over the world, made a defense ministerial. You name it. I had a front row seat to history. You're listening to Jason in the House. We'll be right back. From the Fox News Podcast Network. I'm Janice Dean, Fox News senior meteorologist. Be sure to subscribe to the Janice Dean podcast at Fox News podcast dot com or wherever you listen to your podcasts. And don't forget to spread the sunshine.

It is amazing. You know, our son who's a practicing attorney now, but he made, he was an English major and he, cause he loved to write. And it's with the point you made at the beginning, there is so true. If you could write, you're a really valuable player. I, for people out there that are, you know, young people that are thinking about, well, what should I do? Where should I go? Learn to write because I don't care what sector of the economy, business, whatever,

you're going to have to write and those that can write will excel far ahead of those that can't write. But speeches are policy. So, but let's, but I want to distinguish it too. And maybe you look at them and say, Oh, they're the same, but how do you capture somebody's voice? I mean, president Bush is different than Donald Rumsfeld, which is different than Jesse Helms. So,

They all have distinct cadence and a way of delivering a line. How do you, I mean, maybe it's just innate and you're like a super freak, but how did you, like, how do you, how do you capture the voice of the person you're writing for?

Some of it was innate. I mean, you know, here's a guy from Manhattan who captured the voice of Jesse Helms, right? I remember the greatest compliment I ever got was when Mrs. Helms came up to me after a speech and said, I don't know where Jesse ends and you begin, which was the nicest thing anyone had ever said to me. And the truth be told, the way you capture somebody's voice if you're writing for a principal is you've got to spend a lot of time with them.

And not when they're just publicly speaking, not when they're in meetings, but in downtime, traveling and all the rest of it. I just got to know Jesse Helms and I'd sit and listen to how he talked to his family, how he talked to his friends, how he talked to his staff, him in conversation. And it just sort of it starts to echo in your brain.

the cadences, the voices, the expressions and all the rest of it. The same thing with Don Rumsfeld, very particular way of speaking, as everyone who watches press conferences during the war on terror knows. I would, when I sat down with Rumsfeld and he asked me, offered me the job, he said, what do you need to take the job? And I said, I need to be, I need to have access to you. I need to be in meetings. I need to be there, not just when you're planning a speech, but when you're making decisions, when you're planning things. And so he gave me with the,

very small exception of a few very covert, uh,

uh subjects i had full access to him the entire time i was there i was in every meeting that i wanted to be in i had open door policy and i just sat there and one of the things i did in addition to what one of the reason i was that was important was one because i was able to absorb his priorities so if you're a writer and you don't have access to your principal then you know stuff goes through the staffing process and they say well the secretary would never say this or the president would never say this and you're like well i was just in the room with him and he said it and that's why it's in the speech you know um

But I would also write down his expressions. And like if he used the, you know, he'd start a meeting and he'd say, who's Nickel? You know, or, you know, I have a minimum of high regard for that thought. Or, you know, he just had these ways of saying things. And I kept a running list of them and I would work them into his speeches. So by the time he got it, my goal was to give him the speech that he would have written himself, both substantively and stylistically, if he had had 40 hours to work on him. That's sort of the speechwriter's job.

And same same with Bush. We had we met with him all the time. I was in the Oval Office all the time with him when I was in the White House and just got his voice, got his priorities, got his got, you know, got his got his agenda, what he wanted to say and and just execute it. Well, you know, it depends on the person, but.

George Bush, President Bush, had a great way of communicating. He unfairly, I thought, got ridiculed about this, that, and the other. And I'm convinced they were going to try to do that to him no matter what. But the guy, given his education and his background and all that. But he had a way of communicating that connected with people.

So if but he would tell jokes, right? I mean, he would he would be lighthearted. He would make people feel comfortable. What's the secret sauce for doing that? Because, again, that's that's hard to capture. And it's got to be a little nerve wracking when you present a president or even any one of the people you work for. But it's certainly a president thing.

you know, here's a potential, you know, one liner that you can throw out there to try to capture the essence of what we're trying to communicate.

Well, first of all, he loved self-deprecating jokes and making fun of himself. And he thought the fact that people underestimated him or mis-underestimated him, that that was the source of his power because they underestimated him. And there's nothing wrong with that. He was actually a really smart cat, as he would say. He would always call people cats. But, you know, he would... And so, yeah, he was... The way to do it is to...

to if you spend a lot of time with him, you know what he wants to say. He was he was you know, people would always ask me, well, you know, how does speech writing work? Do you like get the policy and then tell the president what to say? It's like, no, it's the opposite. I'll tell you a story that illustrates it. Right. So during the war on terror, we would sometimes do we you know, when when we

When we released-- when we sent Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the CIA detainees to Guantanamo and released him from CIA custody, he did a speech unveiling the CIA interrogation program. I was brought-- I was read into the program. I had classified briefings. The draft I wrote was a classified-- was top secret code word until the day of delivery, right?

And so it's and it was a very successful speech. And so he liked it. And so he said he wanted to do more stuff like that. So he asked me to, you know, sometimes he would say, I want to give the right of speech on this. I want you to go to the NSC, get read into this program, write the speech, and then they'll tell you what they'll decide what we can say and what we can't. And so it was one of these speeches I was working on, which was had been classified up until the day before delivery, which meant a lot of people didn't know about it, didn't know what was in it.

And so we had a speech meeting the day before the speech was being delivered in the Oval Office. And normally a speech meeting would be two or three of the speechwriters who were working on the speech. Maybe Karl Rove would come in. Maybe Steve Hadley, who was the national security advisor. Maybe Josh Bolton, the chief of staff, would come in. And that was it. Twenty people showed up in the Oval because they hadn't known about the speech, hadn't known what it was about. And everyone was freaking out because the worst thing you can be is not in the know in the White House. And so they all had concerns. And so they were tearing apart the draft.

and complaining about this, saying this was wrong, saying that was wrong. Bush just whistled and he said, stop, enough. This meeting is an absolute disaster. Thiessen, go back to your office. Everybody, send your comments in to Thiessen. We're going to reconvene at 2:00 PM and go over a new draft of the speech.

So I go back to my office in the West Wing and I'm thinking, holy crap, I'm going to get fired. It's an absolute, the president's giving a speech tomorrow and it's an absolute chaos. And the phone in my office rings and the caller ID says POTUS and he says, get down here.

So I go down, back down to the awful Oval Office with the other speechwriters. And we walk in and he's like, hey, lads, ready for the real speech meeting? And he said, that speech is exactly what I wanted to say. Just ignore the comments you get in. Just connect with Hadley and make sure he's happy with it. And we made some edits and we're good to go. And everybody kept sending in comments and drafts and rewrites. And I just...

threw them in the trash can because that's what the president said I should do. So he was a guy who knew what he wanted to say. And that's really important too. It's like, you know, you can't, you can't fake it. It's really in a speech. If the speechwriter is coming up with all the ideas and all the policy and all the rest of it for somebody that doesn't work in the long run, you have to, you know, everybody I worked for as a speechwriter had very,

very clear values, very clear ideas, very clear agenda, knew who they were, knew what they wanted, why they were in this game, what they wanted to accomplish for the American people and how they wanted to say it and do it. And you've just got to channel that. And that's what I tried to do. Well, you've had an amazing array of experiences. I mean, it's just the people that you bump into and and the experiences in the behind the scenes. I mean, you could now you've written some books.

Tell us real quickly about those books, and then I've got a set of rapid questions I need to ask you to truly get to know you.

So my my first book was the it was called Courting Disaster, and it was the inside story of the CIA interrogation program. So as I hinted at, I didn't hit, I sort of mentioned I had been put into the CIA interrogation program. And I remember when I was given I was cleared into the program and I was going to get briefed by the CIA. So I went up to a to a skiff in the NSC and I sat down and these three people from the two gentlemen and a lady came in to the room and sat down with me.

and uh started to brief me on the interrogation program the intelligence that it had gained why it wasn't torture why how the techniques actually worked all of this stuff was at that time completely like the highest level of classification you could possibly have details of terrorist plots that had been disrupted and all the rest of it and i'm sitting there and these guys are talking about the program in the first person like we did this and we did that and we did and i realized all of a sudden i was sitting with the guy who waterboarded khalid sheikh muhammad

And he's telling me about it. Because he actually did it. Yeah, because he actually did it. And so I got read into this program in a level of detail that nobody ever, ever had outside of the CIA. And of course, it was classified. And then Barack Obama comes in and declassifies everything. Right. And and try and shuts it down.

uh which i thought was a bad thing for our country um and so i had all the intelligence um you know and all the detail and all the knowledge and so i wrote a book explaining exactly what had happened uh why we did it what we did how how how all the lies you had heard about what was being done in cia and all the rest of it and you know the first line of my book was like i shouldn't be writing this book and you shouldn't be able to read it

this should all still be classified so it was a big it was the world's largest intelligence dump of top secret information except barack obama had made it legal wow wow um all right let me i i mean i could go on for hours with you you've probably got so many fun stories here but we want to learn a little bit more about you as a person so i'm going to ask you a few rapid questions

Yeah. And I don't care how many speeches you've written. You're not properly prepared for this. So. OK. Strap in. OK, you ready? All right. What was your high school mascot? We didn't have one. It's now the Rhino. But it's the Rhino. But they made it the Rhino. I went to a school called Taft in Watertown, Connecticut. And back then it was just called the Big Red. But there was no mascot. They adopted the Rhino and everybody loves the Rhino. It's just not there for me.

All right. What was the first concert you ever went to? Madonna. Madonna.

Really? The Lightly Virgin tour. And I'm actually, I'm working on an essay right now for the Post. I know it's supposed to be rapid, but I'm doing a big essay on all the concerts I've gone to. I just came back from Huntington Beach, California for the Darker Waves Festival with my wife where we saw Echo and the Bunnymen, Tears for Fears, New Order, Psychedelic Furs. Psychedelic Furs.

I go to probably 50 shows a year. Do you really? Oh, yeah. Okay, I had no idea. Okay, first of all, I think we... I'm a huge concert goer. Every type of music you could name, 80s, standards, country. I just love live music. I'm a huge live music fan. All right, that's something I did not know about you and that we have...

in Breaking Way on the Jason in the House podcast. I had no idea. Madonna is your first concert. I would have never associated that with Mark. These and I just would have, I wouldn't have, if you gave me a hundred guesses, I probably wouldn't have said Madonna. I grew up in New York City literally as a teenager because back then the drinking age was 18. So as a high school student, you could get into all these clubs. So I was going to like Studio 54. I was going to Danceteria, which is the club where she got her start. So I saw her before she was famous.

And that was the first show I ever went to. Well, you and I were born in the same year, evidently, according to my great crack history research on Wikipedia. And so I totally get it because Madonna at the time, as we were growing up, it was a big deal. All right. What was your very – we've got to go fast because I've only got a short minute. First job, the first job you had.

The first job I had was selling Italian ices out of a push cart on the streets of Manhattan in front of St. Patrick's Cathedral. That's actually fairly impressive. All right. If you could meet one person, you call up them, say, hey, guess what, honey? We got a special treat. Anybody in history, dead or alive, and you could break bread with them, have them over for dinner, who would it be? John Paul II. John Paul II.

Interesting. All right. What about if it wasn't a religious figure? Who would you pick? Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan. Did you get to meet him?

I, you know, I shook his hand and I had a photo with him, but I never got to meet him. I, after I left, I wrote an op-ed about his, uh, about his speech at the 19th farewell speech at the 1992 convention. And he wrote me a nice letter saying that he had read it and, uh, thanking me for serving in his administration. But that, that was the extent of it. Well, that's nice. At some point when we're together, I'll tell you a little bit about my story with Ronald Reagan. Another thing, another thing. All right. Uh, last two things. Um,

Favorite menu item at Taco Bell. Oh, I don't like Taco Bell. Oh, there's not. There's no beef. It's fake beef. I don't know. This is a huge fight. OK, well, you can redeem yourself or fail this this eating portion totally by answering this question. Pineapple on pizza. Yes or no.

No way. I'm from New York, man. You have redeemed yourself. You are back in the good. The judges like that. Or my favorite was Little Vincent's on 73rd and 2nd, which just closed. But this cheese slice from New York, not even Sicilian, not in none of these topics. Cheese slice, maybe pepperoni. There you go. So you're back in good graces on the food front. Yeah. All right. Last question. I don't really like Taco Bell. Do you? There's so much better Mexican you could have. My gosh.

I love good Mexican food, but I do love Taco Bell. Both can be true at the same time. Drop the chalupa. How dare you? Last question. Best advice you ever got?

Be true to yourself and what you believe and damn the consequences. That's good. My mother just taught me to stay true to my, to care about ideas and to stay true. And I've done that. And be willing to risk everything for what you believe in. Because there's a lot of people who risk a lot more. People who died for what they believe in. I'm just being a, if I have to take some slings and arrow on Twitter, I don't care.

Mark Thiessen, you'll see him on Fox News a lot and an amazing background in that book, I'm sure is fascinating. But thanks for joining us. I really do appreciate it. Thank you for having me on. I'd love to get all your answers to this. Have you ever had someone interview you for your podcast? Yeah, yeah. And it took me a little bit. Yeah. But yes. I want to hear that. I want to be on the other side of this. I want to hear all these questions, all the questions you've been asking me sometime. Mark, thanks again. I do appreciate it.

See, I told you, Mark Thiessen is just amazing. I had no idea that he attended so many concerts with his wife. Because I met him, you've seen him on TV. It doesn't strike me like the guy that would do that. But boy, he's had an impact on a lot of things. And when you're sitting there in the White House interacting with the president, you're going to have some influence. And the words you write, the way you write them, the way they get incorporated

embedded into speeches and I love the stories that he told so Mark Thiessen can't thank him enough for for joining us I would appreciate it if you could rate this podcast subscribe to it I want to remind people you can listen ad-free with a Fox News podcast plus subscription on Apple podcasts and Amazon Prime members can listen to this show ad-free on the Amazon music app

Appreciate you listening to this Jason in the House podcast. Again, rate it, review it, subscribe to it. And we'll be back again next week with another great guest. I'm Jason Chaffetz. This has been Jason in the House.

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