Mark Katz (3:25)
It's January of 1995. I'm in a it's Washington, D.C. on a Saturday night. I'm in a holding room in a hotel wearing a tuxedo. In my left hand is a draft of a spirit speech I've written. In my right hand is an egg timer. I'm doing deep breathing exercises because I know at any moment through that door will walk the President of the United States. I only have 12 minutes, so I can't explain to you how I came to write humor speeches with Bill Clinton over the course of his two terms in office, but I can tell you that this was a particularly bad time to be doing it just a few months earlier. There are worse times to come. I didn't know that just a few months earlier he'd received a severe REBUKE of the 1994 midterm elections, Newt Gingrich, the 105th Congress, the Contract With America. And at that moment he seemed like a guy halfway through a failed term. And they knew that in 1995 had to be a good year for him or 96 would be his last. And they set out a plan to kind of get back on track. And part of that plan included the State of the Union address early in 95. And they put together such an ambitious State of the Union address, so chock full of agenda setting, mantle stealing back ideas that it set a record for time. He gave a speech that night that was one hour and six minutes long. And the next day in the news, all the pundits and all the Washington press corps could talk about. All they could talk about was how long his speech was, forgetting about what he had said. And everyone at the White House was very upset that they had missed yet another opportunity. Everyone but me, because I was there that week writing a humorous speech for him. Every year he gives four humor speeches. You may have heard of the White House Correspondence Dinner or the Gridiron Dinner. This is one I promise you, you haven't heard of. It's called the Alfalfa Club. 300 very important Washington insiders all there to hear a humorous speech from the President and really to take his measure. And I got to the White House Friday morning and realized this was a great moment, that all of a sudden this speech had a reason to be relevant in a way that it didn't the day before. And I wanted to make this speech the comic answer to the crisis du jour. How he could come back with a comic retort to this silly accusation he had given a speech to Toulon was too long. And the answer was simple enough. Everyday egg timer. And the whole idea was that the President would walk up to the podium in this hotel room where he's about to give a speech, set his egg timer to 5 minutes and place it on the corner of the podium, unleashing a room full of laughter and applause at someone who's doing self directed humor at his own expense. And I was actually very secretly pleased with the idea and the many pages of jokes I'd written about a guy about to give a speech on the heels of a speech he had given that was far too long. Until the next day when I was in this holding room waiting for the President with the egg timer in one hand and the speech in the other. And I could tell from the moment he walked in that something was terribly amiss. He was not happy to be there. I said, hello, hello, Mr. President. Just a grim look. A moment later, the first lady comes into the room. Didn't even get the grim look. She never made eye contact with me. She stayed by the door as though she thought herself invisible, just waiting for whatever this meeting was to be over. And the first words the President said to me that night was, you can put that egg timer away now. I wanted to make sure that I understood him, so I said, no egg timer. And he said, that's a joke on my State of the Union address, isn't it? He seemed only about 80% sure. And I said, yes, it is, ignoring for the moment what else he might have thought it was a joke about. And he said, well, there's no way I'm going to let those unpleasant people have the satisfaction of that joke. There's no way I'm doing it. I was at a loss. I didn't know what to do. So, so then I said to him, that's exactly why you have to do it, because these people have been making fun of you for two days. All of a sudden, the free floating anger that he brought into this room is now directed at Me, and I'm looking up at the big, mean, angry president and the tone of my voice was just that urgent, as though I was talking about something of moral imperative, of global importance. And it actually surprised me, the tone of my voice, and I think it surprised him. And I went about trying to explain to him something that was self evident to me, that had eluded him, why the self directed joke was the answer to this particular problem. Well, his response to my argument was a very strong nonverbal response. He reached down and relieved me of my egg timer. He took it forcibly from my hands and placed it on a mantle a few feet away, as though he was a parent taking a sharp instrument away from a child. He turned back to me and he says, gives me the full measure of his glare and he says, what else? Well, you know what? There really wasn't that much what else. The egg timer was the organizing principle of the speech. And more than that, it had taken on such importance to me that it struggled to explain to other people. To me, the egg timer was hubris itself. It was what he needed. It was a compass back from the road, the missteps he had taken and that he needed to be the biggest person in that room that night and have that joke at his expense. And I guess it's because I felt so strongly about this egg timer, of all things, that I did the bravest thing I've ever done in my life. And I don't say that to brag because I would be up here a very long time if I had to come up with the second bravest thing I've ever done in my life. I got nothing. But the bravest thing I've ever done in my life was when I reached for this egg. Time brought it back into his sphere of vision and I said to him, well, in case you change your mind after his unequivocal rejection of the egg timer, that was like Christina Crawford asking of mommy dearest, are you absolutely certain you don't want me to use a wire hanger? And I realized I was in trouble. And I shot a look over to the first lady, sending out a silent plea for help. Hello, healthcare lady. I'm hemorrhaging over here. Nothing. No response. And there I am, looking up again. The big, mean, angry president is staring me down, just waiting to hear what's coming out of my. Because he can't believe it. I go on to explain to him the joke part of the joke, which I'd yet to get to. I said, the best part is after the Egg timer goes off for the first time. You keep on adding more time for as many times as you like. I promised them. There was a big laugh each time and there was a manic tone to my comic pitch, like I'm Maury Amsterdam at gunpoint. And by the way, this room was plenty tense before I introduced the tick, tick, tick of a time bomb into it. And with the last ring of the bell, time had run out on me. The President turned on his heels and walked out of the room. First lady followed him out. And I felt many things at that moment. I felt petrified, way in over my head, slightly moist, but oddly exhilarated in a way that I never would have guessed. I stood up for what, and in a way that was ill advised, I had found the courage of my convictions and they were embodied, of all things, in an egg timer. And I was also very confused at that moment because I honestly had no idea what speech he was going to give. He left the room to go give a speech I didn't know. He had pages and pages of jokes about a mind numbing, soul deadening speech that wouldn't end. And I didn't think those were going to make the cut at this point. I didn't know what speech he was going to give. So I walked out of the room and I handed the egg timer to an aide, an advanced aide who's out there. The egg timer now basted in palm sweat. And I said, the President's going to need this at his seat up at the Daisy. Would you bring this up there? Not, not telling him the piece of information that would have got him fired or imprisoned. So I walked into the ballroom, 300 of the most important people you can assemble in a room in Washington. And I go and take my seat in the, in the corner of the room where the ghostwriters go and sit and presents up on the Daisy and throughout the dinner. And this is no ordinary dais, by the way. On this dais is former presidents, Supreme Court Justices, two thirds of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are up there and they're all talking among themselves and eating their dinner. The President's head is down, writing furiously as though he's doing the essay section on a final exam. And finally comes this part of the night when he gives a speech. And I was really very curious to hear what was going to come out of his mouth. Not surprisingly, he did not open with the egg timer, nor did he use any of the pages of gentle, self effacing humor that were there for him right on the Page. He launched into a mean, mean, meandering drive by diatribe of a speech that I can only give you a sense of by. And I got special dispensation to use notes for this. Just a few of the lines he said to the room that night. Just a few, just to give you a sense. Turned to President Bush. President Bush, you don't have to put up with this crap anymore. Why are you here? Then he starts going around the room settling old scores. Senator Bennett Johnson was in the room. He had voted against the president's budget in 1994 and he was now named the president of the Alfalfa Club. So he said this to him. I'm glad Ben Johnson is alfalfa president now. Maybe I'll get to vote against his buddy. Then he does a little self pitying. He says, we deserve to lose in November. All we did was a good job. Then when one of his many jokes went awry, he had this saver in his pocket. You guys like to dish it out, but you don't like to take it. I've noticed that about all of you. And at one point he turned to Senator Pete Domenici and I can't explain this other than just to read the word on the page. He said, turn to Senator Pete Dominchy and says, do you dye your hair? No one in the room knew what to make of that. Well, at some point during the speech, initially I was hoping to hear the jokes that I was familiar with and knew that would help him get to the speech. But as the speech really digressed, I started hoping he wouldn't say the jokes that were on the page. Now this was so bad. It was every man for himself. And a few terrible jokes later, he finished his speech and sat back down. A terrible speech was over, the night was over. He thank you very much. Before he sat back down. As he's dying up there and no one can read a room like this guy. This guy can read a room like Kreskin. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out an egg timer and he says, maybe this will help. And it did. He got his only real genuine laugh of the night. The room was so anxious to respond to something positive that he had said. It was like a lifesaver. They were throwing him life preserver. Then after he used the egg timer, sat back down. Terrible speech was over and the evening was over and he left in a hurry. And I left through another exit in a hurry. I knew he didn't want to see me and I wasn't particularly Interested in seeing him. Next morning, I'm up. First train back to New York, like 7:00 in the morning. It felt like a prison break getting out of Washington, D.C. and I come back to New York, to my life here as a freelance writer in the greatest city in the world. Very pleased to have escaped that night. And really, I thought it was the last speech I would ever write for him. I couldn't imagine that I would ever find myself back in a room with him. And that Monday morning I went to go get the Washington Post, and in the Style section, which is the sports pages of kind of intramural Washington politics, there was a front page story about the terrible ill humored humor speech the President had given that night. And it was a debacle, absolute debacle. And in the, you know, you can be replaced with an egg. Time. And in the speech in this article, people in the article said, did he know? It was a humorous speech they couldn't figure out in the White House. Of course, the drill becomes who's to blame. And thankfully, I was exonerated by a transcript that showed that the words I'd written and the words he had spoken really didn't correspond at all. And, you know, I was upset that he had missed a second opportunity in a week to have a good speech and to have a shining moment. And I regretted that. And I regretted that he had missed an opportunity on that night to kind of use the subtext of coded language to admit a mistake and to show that he was bigger than the problems that he faced, those of his own making and other problems, and failed to kind of reassure the people in the room who supported him and unnerved the people who did not by being bigger than they were. And I regretted that. And maybe he did too, because on Thursday I went to go pick up my tuxedo at the dry cleaner that had been soaked in sweat, got back to get my mail and found a note in my mail from the White House. And I opened it up and it was a note from the President of the United States, addressed to me. Dear Mark, thank you for your help with the alfalfa dinner. You're a funny man. The egg timer was great. Best Bill Clinton.
