Cody Keenan: ...how stressful & rewarding it is to work as President Obama's Speechwriter

Nobody Told Me!

Business, Entrepreneurship

4.2 • 671 Ratings

🗓️ 1 November 2022

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Our guest, Cody Keenan, had a front row seat to history, serving as President Barack Obama’s Chief White House speechwriter and post-presidential collaborator. Cody has written about the experience in the New York Times bestseller, "Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America". It's a fascinating account of what he considers to be the ten most dramatic days of the Obama presidency. His website is codykeenan.com

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Laura Owens. And I'm Jan Black. Our guest on this episode,
0:15.0	Cody Keenan, had a front row seat to history serving as President Barack Obama's chief
0:20.4	White House speechwriter and post-presidential
0:22.8	collaborator. Cody has written a spellbinding account of what he considers to be the 10 most
0:28.5	dramatic days of the Obama presidency. The book is a New York Times bestseller, and it's called
0:34.4	Grace, President Obama and 10 Days in the Battle for America.
0:39.3	Cody, we thank you so much for joining us.
0:42.0	Hi, Laura. Hi, Jan. Thanks for having me on.
0:44.0	We have always been fascinated by presidential speech writing.
0:48.3	So there's a lot we would like to ask you.
0:50.7	But beginning with the basics, what made you decide to write this book?
0:56.6	Well, a couple things. It's just a story that demanded to be told. The sheer magnitude of all
1:02.0	of these events that happened in just one 10-day stretch when I was telling friends I was writing
1:07.0	this book. When I was telling the president, I was writing this book. People remembered all these
1:10.2	things happened, but not necessarily in the same week.
1:12.4	We had the white supremacist slaughter in Charleston.
1:16.1	We were working on, we were preparing for two Supreme Court cases that would decide whether or not
1:20.3	millions people got to keep their health insurance, whether or not millions of people got to
1:24.2	marry who they loved or not.
1:25.9	And all this time, we're also deciding whether or not to write a
1:28.4	eulogy for President Obama to go deliver in Charleston. But beyond that, it's also what all these
1:33.6	events meant. You know, each one of them spoke to whether or not we actually believe that all of us
	...

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