In April of 2013, three days after the Boston Marathon bombing, at a memorial in the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston, President Obama said:

It was a beautiful day to be in Boston—a day that explains why a poet once wrote that this town is not just a capital, not just a place. Boston, he said, “is the perfect state of grace.”

And then, in an instant, the day’s beauty was shattered. A celebration became a tragedy. And so, we come together to pray, and mourn, and measure our loss. But we also come together today to reclaim that state of grace—to reaffirm that the spirit of this city is undaunted, and the spirit of this country shall remain undimmed.

He was able to say this, in part, because he had spent years in Boston as a law student, learning to love the city. But he was also able to speak those particular words because of the man responsible for helping him to craft that speech, Terry Szuplat. In that instance, Szuplat’s experience and skill as a speechwriter were outdone only by his sense of personal connection to the tragedy. As a foreign policy and national security speechwriter, he was not the automatic choice to write that speech. He requested it. As a native Cape Codder who often spent the holidays with relatives in Boston, he wanted to add his own love of the city to the memories he knew the President cherished.

Growing up in East Falmouth, Terry did not expect that one day he would be writing speeches for world leaders. He credits his father, a plumber, and his mother, who worked at the town library, for his opportunity to attend...