Personally Penning the Speech of His Life

He began in earnest a month ago, recording his thoughts in elegant longhand on legal-sized paper he kept bundled in a manila folder.

During early mornings in his hotel rooms or late nights on his plane, Sen. John F. Kerry mused about Revolutionary War history and the writings of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. He reread letters his father wrote to his mother over the years, and his own political speeches.

By Wednesday, when he returned to his Beacon Hill townhouse after a five-day tour of the country, the Democratic presidential hopeful had essentially finished the speech he hopes will define him to a nation -- minus a few last-minute tweaks.

Advisors say the Massachusetts senator will deliver an acceptance address at tonight’s close of the Democratic National Convention that will give Americans a fuller sense of his aspirations for the country, laying out concrete plans about jobs, energy, healthcare and the nation’s security.

Above all, Kerry’s speech will have been personal -- not only in its content but in its creation.

Eschewing his usual method of finessing and fiddling with drafts submitted by aides, Kerry took on the bulk of the writing himself, spending hours hunched over a pad of paper during a recent stay in Nantucket. He cut and pasted together handwritten passages, then gave them to aides to type up.

“I do use a computer, but not for this,” Kerry told reporters aboard his plane on a recent flight. “I find I write better, more effectively, with a piece of paper where I can see it, scratch it out.”

Jonathan Winer, who worked for a decade as one of Kerry’s top Senate aides, said that when it came to major speeches, Kerry wanted “a very personal, physical, almost tactile connection with the process of writing.”

Tonight, the stakes will be high: Political observers said Kerry’s oration would be one of his best opportunities to win over the small sliver of the electorate that remained undecided about the 2004 election.

“I can’t think of a speech that has been so important to a candidacy,” said Bruce Cain, director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley.

Kerry’s advisors agree that tonight’s address is critical.

“It is one of the big moments of the campaign,” said senior advisor Tad Devine. “The acceptance speech at the convention is the first real opportunity for a challenger to become known on the public stage.”

Above all, Kerry’s aides are hoping that the senator will be able to give voters a deeper sense of his life story and persuade them of his credentials, especially on national security.

The campaign attempted to reinforce that theme on Wednesday, when the decorated Navy lieutenant, who commanded a Swift boat on Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, clambered aboard a water taxi with 13 of his crewmates from Vietnam and crossed Boston Harbor to the site of his first convention rally, held on a waterfront plaza.

Meanwhile, his advisors pressed the case that Kerry was better equipped than President Bush to keep the country safe from terrorist attack, touting the endorsement of 12 retired generals and admirals at a Boston hotel news conference.

But analysts said Kerry also had a stylistic case to make in tonight’s address.

Known for his “Senate-speak” -- a tendency to engorge sentences with multiple clauses and qualifiers -- Kerry’s often ponderous rhetoric could come across as even more leaden when contrasted to the stirring speeches delivered by former President Clinton and Illinois Senate candidate Barack Obama earlier in the week, according to some political experts.

“This isn’t the time for nuance or subtlety or indirection,” said one Democratic strategist who did not want to be named. “He needs, for once, to push past that 19th century oratorical style.... The premium is on clarity, simplicity, directness.”

Although Kerry’s process of speech-writing was essentially a solitary one, he did reach out to a far-flung network of friends and advisors, soliciting suggestions about tone, themes and rhetoric. He showed drafts of his speech to his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, and to his daughters.

“I want you to know I’ve been getting a lot of advice about this speech I have to give on Thursday night,” the candidate told supporters at a Philadelphia rally Tuesday evening.

Kerry’s wife and the wife of his running mate, Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, “have been saying to me, ‘Well, you’ve got to be sure to put some details in there,’ ” he recounted. “And my daughters, Vanessa and Alex, have been saying to me, ‘Well, be short. And be direct.’

“And the Edwards’ kids, Jack and Emma Claire, have said, ‘Make sure that you mention SpongeBob SquarePants,’ ” Kerry said. “So I’ve got a lot of tough instructions here.”