From COMM 455 student Jake Fedechko:

A blog posting from a West Virginia newspaper discusses Ken Hechler (left), a speechwriter for Harry S. Truman, who discusses the JW Society and the fact that he actually met and interacted with JW:

“Then I thought to myself: will the time ever come when I write something for a future candidate, and some smart-ass youngster tells me it is totally useless? Well, just that happened during Bob Kennedy’s campaign in 1968 when Adam Walinsky and his buddies shunted aside one of my superlative efforts. One of the Carter speech writers had done some research on Judson Welliver, and presented a rollicking account of the “deathless prose” which Welliver wrote for Harding and Coolidge. 

As the only person present who had actually met Welliver, I gave a more charitable profile of an elderly man who had once been the top political writer in Washington in the days of Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. 

What I appreciated about Welliver was that he befriended a struggling young graduate student like myself and unlocked many secrets of the great legislative battles in Congress early in this century when Teddy Roosevelt’s followers were trying to democratize Congress.”