The fall in 99 I wrote the White House Thanksgiving proclamation, which is the reason that we celebrate Thanksgiving today, is because the president issues this proclamation.

It's kind of a formality now, but it goes all way back to George Washington, Lincoln, everyone issued it.

And they wrote it themselves.

I mean, literally like sat down and wrote it themselves, you know, with a quill pen in the White House.

They didn't have big staffs back in those days. And so 99 I wrote it. Like literally sat

down and wrote myself. You talk about the pressure that you have, you know, knowing that you're

writing down this thing that's studied by historians.

And so I wrote it, I was really proud of it.

They printed up on this big parchment paper,

kind of formal and everything.

And I put a copy in the mail and I sent it to Sorkin.

I said, just FYI, here you go,

I thought you might want to check this out.

And I didn't think much of it.

Year later, November of 2000, I go and I put on the West Wing and I watch the Thanksgiving episode.

And the episode is about the writing of the Thanksgiving proclamation.

And this repeating theme throughout the entire episode is about like how the

speech orders are running around you know talking about how they need to write the

Thanksgiving proclamation and the climactic scene very end Martin Sheen you know playing president Bartlett

He's about to walk out of the Oval Office and go into the rose garden to read this Thanksgiving proclamation and he looks down it's like you know the climax and everything he looks down is like you know the climax and everything he looks

down and he said and he just reads the first line of the paper in front of him and

the line that he reads is the exact same first line of the proclamation that I wrote.

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