Former US president Barack Obama consults with his chief speechwriter Cody Keenan and senior presidential speechwriter David Litt in the Oval Office. It was June 2015 and the only time during Barack Obama’s presidency that he “ran out of words” to offer solace to an American public struggling with another mass shooting. Remarks delivered the day after a white supremacist murdered nine African Americans at a church in Charleston, South Carolina were the 14th time Obama addressed the nation after a mass shooting, but it was finding the words for the eulogy for Clementa Pinckney, the church’s pastor and one...