Obama's voice

It’s been less than six years since Adam Frankel ’03 walked out of FitzRandolph Gate, but his words have already been heard by millions.

Frankel, a senior speechwriter for President Obama, is involved in writing both major policy addresses and larger, thematic speeches. Frankel explained that each piece of writing is a “real collaboration” with the president.

“We’re under no illusions about who the best speechwriter is,” Frankel said in a phone interview Thursday with The Daily Princetonian. “[Obama] is an extraordinarily gifted writer,” he explained.

Frankel and the other speechwriters also work extensively with White House senior adviser David Axelrod and members of the policy staff. Obama personally reviews and edits every speech, Frankel said, adding that he communicates directly with the president a few times every week.

Frankel said working in the White House is never predictable.

“There aren’t really average days around here,” he said. “There’s a calendar of events, so you know what’s coming down the pipe — what bills are going to be signed when and what requires remarks.”

From Prospect Avenue to Pennsylvania Avenue

Frankel’s career has been political from the start. After graduating from Princeton, he took part in a summer counterterrorism fellowship and then studied at the London School of Economics (LSE) on a Fulbright Scholarship.

Wilson School professor Stanley Katz, a friend of Frankel’s, noted that Frankel’s accomplishments at the LSE were especially impressive.

“He somehow wrangled a job to be a speechwriter for [current British prime minister] Gordon Brown, the then-chancellor of the Exchequer,” Katz said. “Any American who is just in town for two months and can do that in London … must have a feel for how things work.”

Before earning a degree from the LSE, Frankel left London to work on the 2004 presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.). While on the campaign trail, he met Jon Favreau, who now serves as Obama’s chief speechwriter. After working for Kerry, Frankel returned to London to finish his degree and then took a part-time job at the Council on Foreign Relations research center back in the United States.

Frankel also resumed a project he started during his senior year at Princeton: working with former White House adviser and speechwriter Theodore Sorensen, whom former president John F. Kennedy once described as his “intellectual blood bank.”

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Frankel helped Sorensen write an autobiography, “Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History,” which was published last year. In an interview with the ‘Prince,’ Sorensen described Frankel’s assistance on the project as “indispensable,” noting that Frankel served not just as a researcher, but also as the eyes for the visually handicapped Sorensen.

“[Frankel] is extremely bright, hard-working, articulate and diligent, and I can’t say enough about him,” Sorensen said. “He was a very thorough researcher, and he was able to find information that jogged my memory.”

Frankel said his work with Sorensen helped him forge his way as a political speechwriter.

“[Sorensen] is the master when it comes to speechwriting, so there’s no better preparation for a speechwriter than to study at his foot,” he said. “It’s hard for me to identify the lessons I learned from him, just because there were so many, but it was a deeply rewarding experience.”

After joining the Obama campaign in March 2007, Frankel spent some time that summer working on another book, this time with Rep. Patrick Murphy (D-Pa.). They wrote “Taking the Hill: From Philly to Baghdad to the United States Congress,” which was published in 2008.

Frankel described the book-writing process as “difficult,” as he and Murphy were both busy with other projects at the time.

“The congressman was running for re-election with a young family, and I was working,” he explained. “Both of us had full-time jobs that took up a lot of time, so we would write that book when we got home at night.”

Frankel credited Princeton with improving his writing ability. He worked at the Writing Center and was a member of the University Press Club, and as a columnist for the ‘Prince,’ he authored columns including “How Bush ruined a good case for war with Iraq,” “Thoughtful liberals should protest Bush, not Iraq” and “Bush’s chilly foreign policy hearkens to Cold War.”

Frankel also started the Princeton chapter of the Student Global AIDS Campaign and served as president of the College Democrats.

Katz said that, though he never taught Frankel, the two saw each other often during Frankel’s years at Princeton.

“We used to have lunch a couple of times per semester … He was in Ivy Club, and he used to take me to lunch there,” Katz explained, adding that the two met by chance even before Frankel was a freshman.

“He came as a high school junior to Princeton with his father,” Katz said. “I was sitting in my office, and they knocked on my door and asked if I could tell them something about the Wilson School. The next year, his mother, who it turns out I knew, asked if I would talk to her son who was applying to Princeton.”

Over the next few years, the two saw each other regularly, and Katz arranged to have Wilson School professor emeritus Richard Ullman advise Frankel’s 139-page thesis, titled “Awake, Mighty Giant: The Past, Present, and Future of the U.S. Response to Global AIDS.”

“He’s a political nut and a policy wonk,” Katz said. “To be fair, he had a great connection. His great uncle is Newt Minow, who … was a kind of major Democratic figure in Chicago. [Frankel] always had interesting things to say, and I was pleased because I think undergraduates, until recently, didn’t have much interest in politics. [But] I always learned from him.”

Through that interest in politics, Frankel has come to share what Sorensen calls the “Obama point of view.”

“Adam Frankel, is also very talented, creative and, I might add, loyal,” Sorenson said.

So, has the young alumnus penned any of Obama’s most famous lines?

Frankel had a simple response: “I’m not going to get into that.”