By LEE BALLARD

I used to be a ghost.  I was invisible, but you could see my handiwork.  I watched and listened as others spoke my ideas, smiling when my words were quoted in the press.

That’s right:  I was a ghost writer.  My name never appeared on books, magazine articles, thank-you notes, boardroom resolutions, resumes, movie treatments, business proposals, poems, speeches, letters and, once, an article for a scholarly journal.

I thought of those days during the disastrous speeches by Romney and Ryan at the Republican National Convention.  And I did some smiling last month when I visited old friends in a Chicago suburb.  You see, I wrote a series of love letters in college that helped their romance along.  Neither of us mentioned the letters.  I guessed he never told her.

Ghosting might be the second-oldest profession.  Alexander Hamilton wrote George Washington’s Farewell Address.  Franklin Roosevelt spoke the words, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” but it was Louis Howe who coined them.  Most of John Kennedy’s memorable lines were written by Ted Sorenson.  Gerald Ford brought in comedy writer Robert Orben to lighten up his verbiage.

An interesting ghostwriting moment came when President George W. Bush was selling the Iraq War.  He assigned the job of “messaging” the war to speechwriter David Frum.  Sorenson did say, “The man who controls the pen has a great deal of influence over what ultimately becomes presidential policy.”  Frum’s assignment went beyond influence.

Most of the time I was only asked to take the client’s ideas and craft them into flowing rhetoric.  The meat and potatoes were cooked; I provided the gravy.  But not always.  Sometimes I even had to do the shopping.

The chairman of a large bank once asked me to write a speech for him.  His instructions, more or less, were:  “Here’s the subject they want me to talk about.  Make me look good.”  And I did.

Well, a few months later, my office phone rang.  “Mr. Ballard,” a familiar voice said, “we have a problem.  The press is asking for our corporate policy on a certain subject, and we don’t have one.  Didn’t you write a speech for the chairman a while back on that subject?”  I said I did.  Did I have a copy?  I did.  A messenger would be right over, she said.  I protested that I had written it without input from the chairman.

“Did he give the speech?”

“Yes.”

“The messenger will be there in 15 minutes.”

One speech for that chairman I regret.  I wrote the speech he gave to bank officers about competition among Texas banks for loans.  The speech told the officers to get busy selling loans.  Not long after, Texas banks collapsed from bad loans.

Looking back, I feel sorry for my clients ─ that they had to hire me.  The very process of writing is, after all, the process of thinking. 

When we write, we’re constantly seeking ideas, sifting and winnowing, accepting and rejecting, developing and discarding.  We follow lines of logic and discover new questions.  We’re sometimes forced to change our minds.  We challenge a simplistic idea, and it crumbles.  We research.  We interview.  But we try to go beyond our sources to new conclusions.

True, we elect and hire people for their ability to make good decisions, not their ability to talk about them.  But it’s a shame that intellectual rigor is regarded as a luxury.  I’m happy that President Obama is a writer as well as a leader.

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Lee Ballard lives in Mars Hill.