Bit Player

In 1958, just weeks after Army Private First Class Stephen Hess completed his two-year military career, he received an unexpected call to join President Dwight Eisenhower's speechwriting team. The twenty-five-year-old Hess found himself at the center of American political life. And a career was born.In the coming decades, Hess would find himself on assignmentsassisting Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan. In this book he brings the reader into White House offices, along to political party conventions and inside presidential campaigns, from protest rallies to white-tie dinners, while bumping up against some of the world's most famous people and going behind the scenes of dramatic political moments at the United Nations in New York and UNESCO in Paris.Bit Player follows Hess as he begins a second career as a Brookings Institution scholar producing books on the presidencyand the media while also monitoring the achievements and failures of successive presidential administrations for television and newspapers.Now in his mid-eighties, Hess looks back at what he describes as concentric circles of research, travel, advising, writing, and teaching. His book is rich with insight into contemporary American democracy, poignant in its reflections of avoidable missteps by even the best and most experienced leaders, and consistently good-humored in the author's self-awareness of his own role behind the scenes of political power.