As a former presidential speechwriter, I’ve long frowned upon political staffers who, trusted to be discreet, leave their jobs and spill the beans about their bosses in tell-all memoirs. I make an exception, though, for Barton Swaim, whose book, The Speechwriter, is one of the most entertaining and illuminating political books of the past few years. Swaim wrote speeches, op-eds, and letters for Mark Sanford when he was governor of South Carolina and a rising star in the Republican Party (he is now a Congressman). During Swaim’s tenure, Sanford fell from gubernatorial grace after revelations that he had vanished for days from the state to conduct an adulterous affair with a mistress in South America. Swaim’s book reveals the tortured, and often comical, relationship between the politician and his staff. But it is Swaim’s ongoing self-education in how to write “well” for a linguistically-challenged pol that is the most amusing part of the story. Somehow Swaim manages to convey the absurd rhetorical demands of his boss, and the general unpleasantness of working for him, with humor, grace, and a very deft writer’s touch.