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Books

The best American political memoir in a generation

In The Speechwriter, Barton Swaim recounts his struggles to write badly enough to satisfy Governor Mark Sanford

8 August 2015

9:00 AM

8 August 2015

9:00 AM

The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics Barton Swaim

Simon & Schuster, pp.224, £16.50, ISBN: 9781476769929

In June 2009, the good people of South Carolina lost Mark Sanford, their governor. Per his instructions, his staff told the press that he was ‘hiking the Appalachian trail’. When he turned up six days later at an airport in Atlanta, Georgia, he said that he had scratched the hike in favour of something more ‘exotic’.

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