The Eulogy
It was June in Washington D.C. As he sat waiting in the hallway, Cody Keenan saw his boss turn the corner and stride towards him. Cody stood, gathered his things, and followed President Barack Obama through the door and into the Oval Office.
In his seventh year of working for the President (his third as head speechwriter), Cody had long ago shed the jitters that gripped newcomers the first few times they stepped onto the Commander In Chief’s home court. As he writes in Grace: President Obama and Ten Days In The Battle For America,
“Being in the room didn’t intimidate me anymore,” Cody writes. “I couldn’t, however, say the same about my job. To be a speechwriter for Barack Obama is f*cking terrifying.”
President Obama settled into his chair behind his giant desk.
“Ok, show me what you’ve got,” the President said.
Cody had just finished the latest draft of a heavier flavor of Presidential address: A eulogy.
A few days earlier, President Obama had been asked to speak at the funeral for the victims of the Charleston church shooting, a tragic event that underscored the enduring legacy of racial violence and injustice in America. Cody and the President had settled on an important belief that week: That the shooting demanded something deeply resonant from the President. They had wrestled with the proper angle to take with the eulogy, and had decided to strike a delicate, three-part balance with the address. They were going to attempt to deliver a speech that honored the victims, reflected on how far the country had come, and illuminated how far it obviously still had to go.
After flipping through a few pages of the eulogy, Obama dismissed Cody and told him he’d give him his thoughts later that day. The wait was short. A half-hour later, Obama’s assistant, Ferial Govashiri, called Cody to come back upstairs.
Obama was standing with his hands on his hips, framed by the afternoon light streaming through the tall Oval Office windows. He held a marked-up draft of the eulogy in one hand. He turned Cody’s way.
“Look,” he said. “This is well written. I could probably deliver it as is.” He said that a lot. He never meant it. He was setting up for a “but.” “But we have several days, so let’s make it better.”
The President walked over to where Keenan sat.
“You took a half swing on this,” he said. “Take a full swing.”
Keenan did.
Armed with a second wind (and more than a few edits in the President’s handwriting), Keenan wrote a lot and slept very little over the next week. Working around the clock, he put the eulogy through multiple deep revisions, with Obama still making final tweaks to the speech as Air Force One departed on its way to the funeral in Charleston.
Then, on June 26th, 2015, in front of an emotional audience, Obama delivered.
His impassioned pleas for justice and unity brought the crowd to their feet, creating a defining moment of his presidency. As the President’s words echoed through the crowd, I can imagine Cody Keenan standing there, feeling a profound sense of pride—not just for his part in an address that moved the hearts of millions, but for the feedback-fueled second effort that elevated the speech and its impact to a whole new level.
The same second effort that the President of the United States had ignited in Keenan with a few simple words.
The Power of Magical Feedback
Cody Keenan, like most great writers, admits that he rarely nails things on the first draft. And with a speech as important as the Charleston eulogy, I’m sure he had mentally accounted for several revisions before he expected to land something the President would approve of.
But that moment where he was pushed, the moment where Obama told him to “take a full swing,” the moment where he was told that his work was good, but not yet near good enough, catalyzed something profound inside of Keenan. Obama’s ask went far beyond mere surface edits; it challenged Keenan to completely re-architect the speech from the ground up. This was an immense undertaking that demanded all his creative energy, pushing him to endure sleepless nights and the frustration of complex, interconnected revisions. But with Obama's feedback ringing in his ears, Keenan found a way to not only refine his message, but to also artfully weave in layers of historical context, emotional depth, and literary richness from several of Obama's favorite authors. Watch the speech. It's incredible work - all sparked, fueled, and kept aflame by a President who insisted on excellence.
Most of us will never write a speech for the President, or have to wrestle with how best to talk about the legacy of race relations in America. But all of us can learn an important lesson from the exchange and the process that underpin this story of Keenan and President Obama. A story about the magic of feedback - and what it can create when it's packaged, timed, and delivered just right.
While acknowledging the effort a first attempt requires, magical feedback (like the kind Obama gave Keenan) reminds people where the bar for great work resides and ignites something within them that powers a second wave of effort—effort that pushes their work past good enough and out into a realm only sufficiently captured with words like distinct, moving, and powerful.
So how can you deliver feedback like this?
How can you create the kind of second wind that powers great work?
Good news. Thanks to the research, we know exactly how - including the simple phrase that you can use to deliver the same kind of magical feedback with your team.
Interested? You can read about it here.
Author’s Note: If you want to get technical, this essay is a work of historical fiction. Cody Keenan is real, as is his book Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America. The details of the story (including the feedback from President Obama) are from real occurrences covered in the book. However, for the purposes of this essay, I’ve changed the sequence of events a bit for narrative coherence and thematic emphasis. The “take a full swing” feedback President Obama gave Keenan was actually in reference to another speech, given a few months earlier to honor the anniversary of the Selma civil rights marches. For the more accurate, more detailed sequencing of events (and, more importantly, for a really fun look inside the life of a Presidential speechwriter), give Grace a read. It’s a great book.