A Valedictorian’s New Address

In 2003, Jon Favreau spoke to an audience of hundreds on Fitton Field. Today, as chief speechwriter in the White House, his words reach billions.

 

By John Marchese

 

The 27-year-old man who bustles into a crowded restaurant three blocks from the White House on the frigid last night of winter could be mistaken for any ordinary member of the flock of young people who migrate to Washington after each election season, carrying their idealism and ambition into new government jobs.

 Jon Favreau is medium-height and next-door-neighbor handsome, with hair shorn so close that it seems the opposite of a hairstyle. He wears a conservative suit and muted tie and carries his work home in the obligatory messenger bag. If Favreau is trying to blend in, he’s succeeding. His manner is friendly and easygoing, and he quickly apologizes for being a little late for an already late dinner date. 

It is only when Favreau settles at the table and places not one, but two Blackberries next to his water glass that he gives away any indication of his unique position in this town of power. One device is White House issue, and during the next few hours, as he works his way through black bean soup and crab cakes (with which he sips first a mojito, and then a beer), he is getting real-time updates from Los Angeles. His boss, President Barack Obama, is there taping an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. “It seems to be going pretty well,” Favreau reports, divulging no details.

A little more than five years after delivering the valedictory address at the College on a drizzly May day, Jon Favreau has moved into a ground-floor office in the West Wing of the White House, where he leads a team of half a dozen presidential speech writers. The youngest chief in the department’s history, he helps give voice to a chief executive whose rhetorical skills are anything but ordinary—penning words that are nearly immediately influential around the globe and certain to be, some of them, the lasting stuff of history. The speeches on which he has collaborated with Obama, first as the long-shot candidate and now as the new president, have received accolades from many quarters. Like any good ghostwriter, Favreau tries hard to hide in plain sight, but somehow he can’t help standing out.

“Jon is a young man of extraordinary talent,” says associate professor of history, Stephanie Yuhl—his former teacher at Holy Cross and valedictory speech adviser, who has kept in regular contact with him since graduation. “But he comes across as ordinary in the best way—unpretentious, very grounded, quick-witted and easygoing.” Still, Favreau’s new responsibility and propinquity to power could fluster any young person, no matter how grounded and easygoing.

“Luckily, there’s no time to really think about it,” Favreau says, “which is good because it would freak you out if you did.”