New book offers view inside Gov. Mark Sanford’s office (+ video)

Barton Swain knew he had a great story to tell about working in Mark Sanford’s press office during the then-governor’s second term.

He saw a popular, genial politician in public who treated his staff harshly, rudely inside the State House. Sanford was never satisfied, earning scorn from the people hired to help him.

A trained writer used to polishing words, Swaim was forced to adopt his boss’ verbal idiosyncrasies, such as “given the fact that” and “inasmuch,” into speeches and letters.

And Swaim watched Sanford muddle through as his political star faded under the lights of news cameras after the governor’s secret affair became a worldwide scandal.

In a pep talk to staffers after everyone learned he was not hiking on the Appalachian Trail, the governor – once considered a presidential prospect – discussed how prisoners found hope in a Nazi concentration camp.

“We’re not in a concentration camp. So let’s not stay in the dumps,” Swaim recalled the governor saying in his new book “The Speechwriter.”

Swaim, who now works at a South Carolina libertarian-leaning think tank and advocacy group, sat down with The State last week ahead of the Tuesday release of his book. The State published an excerpt of the book Saturday.

Here are excepts of the conversation with Swaim:

What led you to write this book?

“About a month in I knew that wanted to write something, because I’m a writer. You see crazy things, you want to write about them. And it was a crazy place. Politics itself is crazy. The boss was an extremely difficult man. And the staff sort of admired him but kind of hated him, too. So there’s this strange dynamic, and I thought, ‘This place is insane” and a lot of days I didn’t like it, but I thought, ‘You have to write about this.’ ”

What were you trying to accomplish with the book?

Swaim said he did not want a “bitter, I-got-you-back” political memoir. “I was pretty low on the totem pole ... I wasn’t privy to all kinds of stuff. So I didn’t want to write about that. ... It’s really about me and just the things I saw and I experienced and I suffered through.”

What was it like to work there?

“There’s a strange kind of camaraderie that you have in a political office. .... And then you have this strange relationship with the boss. I did have to interact with him, not every day, but enough. The people I worked with were extremely competent, very fast-paced, highly intelligent, able to read a complicated bill very quickly and come up with the meaning, able to debate openly in a really articulate way. So I had a lot of admiration for them. And they also are very funny. ... The things that I would hear, I thought, ‘This place, it’s horrible, but it’s also the funniest place I have ever been in.’ The combination of laughing uproariously and yet going to work every day, as I mention in the book, wanting to vomit, because who knows what disaster was coming, who knows how you were going to get raked over the coals by the boss in front of everybody.”

What was your reaction when you learned about Sanford’s Argentinian mistress in 2009?

“I don’t think any of us in the office anticipated in any way what happened. Gov. Sanford was not the kind of guy you thought would have this kind of scandal happen to him. Maybe some other kind of scandal, but not his one. It took me a couple of days to even process what the world had happened. It sort of sounds like a cliche to wake up and thought you dreamed it, but I literally woke the next day and thought I had dreamed it.

“The really disappointing thing was how you realize day after day how many things that this is going to affect. It wasn’t just going to be a matter of clean-up with the press or explain some things and move on. Every issue that we care about, every issue we had worked on was now at a dead end. There was no way you were going to talk about anything else for the foreseeable future.

“There was a comical aspect to it as well that I try to talk about in the book. The governor used to like to mention hyperinflation in Argentina in the 1980s. You couldn’t put that in the talking points anymore. And multiply that times 1,000 and that’s what that year-and-a-half after Argentina was like, just a slow realization of all the things that you’re now going to have to do and now things you couldn’t do that were related to your job.”

You use pseudonyms for the office staff and never refer to Sanford by name in your book. Why did you use that device?

“I didn’t want to use (real) names at all and my editor was OK with that, but she wanted me to use the real names for public figures and she was OK with fake names for the rest. There’s one or two public figures where I gave them false names just because I didn’t want a headache.” Swaim said not using real names makes the book more universal and less about the Sanford administration from 2008-2011. “It’s sort of my way of encouraging the reader to think more broadly about it and not (about) just who’s zooming who.”

Using false names and tinkering with chronology has led to some criticism that this book contains fiction. What’s your reaction?

“I’ll let them read and tell me what’s false. I don’t think they’re going to tell me anything is false. If they want to quibble about some remark, that’s fine. But the book is true as I experienced it. Any autobiography or memoir depends on a certain trust between you and the reader. You’re just going to have to take my word on some stuff.”

Some former Sanford staffers have said you betrayed a trust by writing the book. What do you say to that?

“There’s a bad way you go about (writing a book like) this and a good way. The bad way would be to tattle and make people look foolish when they really don’t deserve it or when they trusted you. I don’t think I have done that in this book. To such a person, I would say, ‘Read the book and I dare you not to enjoy it and laugh.’ “

Do you think all politicians are mean to their staffs like Sanford?

“I don’t they are all like that. A good number are and, having written this book, I’ve heard a lot of tales from people. ... The difference between Mark Sanford to a reporter or to a member of the public and Mark Sanford to his staff was unbelievable. It was almost like when he would talk to people in the public or talk to reporters, and we would say this in the office, it was almost like they sucked all the niceness out of him. And you go back into the office, he would be an absolute beast — unreasonable, mean, just looking for excuses to humiliate people.”

Were you surprised he won a seat in Congress in 2013?

“He’s about ambition. He’s not about failure. He doesn’t consider himself a failure and never will. And he will never stop trying to get to the next level. I wasn’t surprised at all when he ran, and I wasn’t surprised when he won because he had a lot of credibility on things conservative Republicans care about. He worked really hard to build up credibility on spending, taxes and so forth. And everybody knows for all his antics on Argentina, he’s a serious guy on those bread-and-butter issues.”

This story was originally published July 11, 2015 at 6:58 PM.