I'm Jonathan K. Parton, welcome to K-Part.

From a famed civil rights speech to a president's decision to resign or not, to a historic acceptance

speech that would have broken the glass ceiling in the White House, all of these speeches

and much more make up the fascinating new book by Jeff Nussbaum entitled, Undelivered,

the never heard speeches that would have rewritten history.

This has been a personal fascination for Nussbaum, who's served as a speechwriter for notable

politicians, including Joe Biden, first as vice presidential nominee, and then recently

as president.

In this conversation, first recorded on May 27th for Washington Post Live, Nussbaum talks

about undelivered speeches by John Lewis, Richard Nixon, Hillary Clinton.

He talks about why George W. Bush sounded better on paper rather than in person.

He talks about what convinced then Senator Joe Biden that Nussbaum was someone he could work with.

Jeff Nussbaum, welcome to K-Part on Washington Post Live.

Hey, it's good to be with you, Jonathan.

And it's great to see you again. I guess the key question here is, what's so fascinating to you

about the speeches never given?

Yeah, well, first of all, thank you for allowing me to indulge this obsession.

So I appreciate that. But for me, it started election night 2000. I was the kid's speechwriter

for Al Gore. I'm clearly not the kid's speechwriter anymore. And I was holding, and since,

and then lost three speeches he didn't give that night, a victory, a concession, and then we

thought he might win the popular, win the electoral college, but lose the popular vote.

But I spent several years after that thinking how different our history would have been.

...