Boe’s Work Is Our Work Now

Well, Boe Workman is retiring this Friday, after a career that began with rhetoric scholarship, continued with political work and self-employment, and concluded with a short stint as the head of CEO communications at AARP of … 33 years and five CEOs, two of whom published books with Boe’s name on the cover.

Somewhere around the end of the first third of that period, I met Boe, in the grand hallway of the Mayflower Hotel, at an annual speechwriting conference that I used to organize as a side-hustle to help subsidize my ambitions as a magazine journalist. Despite my dilettante-ish relationship with a profession he’d given his work life to, Boe took a liking to me, and over the next few years treated me as if I was the devoted professional shepherd that the world’s lonely speechwriters deserved.

When I began to try to become that person—eventually founding the Professional Speechwriters Association—Boe attended (and thus helped fund) pretty much every important event I convened. He served as an Advisory Counselor at the PSA, and became a founding member in a sister organization, the Executive Communication Council. At Boe’s urging, AARP even hosted the PSA World Conference one post-COVID year, and Boe gave the closing keynote speech—a learned longview of rhetoric beginning with Aristotle.

In a business where I have a lot of friends, Boe’s just about the best friend I’ve ever had. I’ve tried to be just as faithful to him. About 15 years ago, he trusted me to share an “ethical will” he’d written—an essay, to tell his friends and his family someday, “what my life was all about.” He let me share a part of it with the other speechwriters:

I am a firm believer in and practitioner of rhetorical perspective, having made its study and practice my chosen profession. As a writer, and especially as a speechwriter, I believe in the power of rhetoric to initiate and energize ideas, and in the principle of public discourse to illuminate, refine and resolve public issues.

As Isocrates wrote in The Antidosis, “There is no institution devised by man which the power of speech has not helped us to establish. For this it is which has laid down laws concerning things just and unjust, and things honorable and base; and if it were not for these ordinances we should not be able to live with one another. It is by this also that we confute the bad and extol the good. Through this we educate the ignorant and appraise the wise; for the power to speak well is taken as the surest index of a sound understanding, and discourse which is true and lawful and just is the outward image of a good and faithful soul … We shall find that none of the things that are done with intelligence take place without the help of speech, but that in all our actions as well as in all our thoughts speech is our guide, and it is most employed by those who have the most wisdom.”

My Aristotelian belief is that “what makes a man a sophist is not his skill, but his moral purpose,” and that in the long run (sometimes a very long run) the worse cannot be made to appear the better reason.

With this Frankfort, Indiana-raised, University of Indiana-educated sophist, I’ve shared many triumphs and troubles—and tears, mostly from laughing at a thousand jokes and stories we’ve exchanged over mid-conference nightcaps.

Like the powerful people Boe has worked for over these years, I’ve been deeply, quietly, often unwittingly influenced by his ideas, offered in his pretension-proof Indiana accent with a combination of humility and self-confidence I don’t think I’ve ever quite encountered in another person.

The result? See that line above, about public discourse “to illuminate, refine and resolve public issues”? My company’s motto, hashed out in a conference room at a visioning session years after I read Boe’s life mission: “Professional leadership communication, to promote greater social understanding.” 

Boe plans to stay in touch with us and may even do some writing here soon. But ultimately, his work is our work now. And we’ll only do it justice if we choose to accept it and commit to it as an ancient human purpose bordering on a religion, as Boe did.

Thank you, Boe. 

For everything.