Aaron Sorkin on The American President and The West Wing

Aaron Sorkin set me up for a lifetime of heartbreak. As a kid, I was ensorcelled by The American President, Sorkin’s 1995 film, the dress rehearsal for The West Wing four years later, and the beginning of his lifelong flirtation with civic virtue — and, inadvertently, my profession studying presidents. Andrew Shepherd, the widowed Commander-in-Chief, spoke in full sentences about gun control, civic duty, and moral responsibility. I didn’t want to marry him. I wanted to study him — which turned out to be its own kind of delusion.

President Shepherd (Michael Douglas), despite a 66 percent approval rating, spends most of the movie losing ground — his crime bill stalls, he forgets to sign his daughter’s permission slip, his love life becomes scandal, and his silence leaves space for conservative rival Senator Bob Rumson (Richard Dreyfuss) to accuse him of being a man without “family values.” Meanwhile, Michael J. Fox, who plays caffeinated squirrel of an aide Lewis Rothschild, channels the conscience of the American public, pushing Shepherd to act on their behalf. And when he finally does, he delivers the best speech I’ve ever seen any president, real or imagined, give in my lifetime. 

“Whatever your particular problem is,” Shepherd says, steady and unsparing, “I promise you, Bob Rumson is not the least bit interested in solving it. He’s interested in two things, and two things only: making you afraid of it, and telling you who’s to blame for it.” Then comes the dagger: “That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections.”

When I re-watched the movie 30 years later — as a presidential historian watching Trump’s reelection returns — the experience was brutal. The distance between Sorkin’s imagined president and the reality of American politics felt cavernous: empathy replaced by grievance, rhetoric by noise, public service by self-interest. The country had reelected Shepherd’s feral heir, but this one incited an insurrection and called it patriotism. Sorkin’s brand of idealism suddenly felt like science fiction — an elegy for a republic that mistook grift for governance.

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On the film’s anniversary, I talked to Sorkin about the president he invented, the ones we got in real life, and what’s changed. Turns out, everything.

Every D.C. insider claims The West Wing put them on their path. Have you met anyone, like me, who was shaped by The American President instead?

Last September, the White House had a reception celebrating the 25th anniversary of The West Wing. And I met a bunch of people there who talked about The American President and The West Wing — but The American President was the beginning of their career in public service. 

That was the Biden White House, right? Have you heard the same thing from other administrations? I’m wondering about Trump staffers.  

It was in the Biden White House. [The American President] was [an influence] in the Obama White House, it was in the Bush White House, and the Clinton White House. I honestly don’t know anyone in the Trump White House. 

I’ve always had a strange affinity for Shepherd’s nemesis, Bob Rumson — the slick, moralizing senator who fit right into the Contract With America [Newt Gingrich’s 1994 Republican manifesto that weaponized moral indignation into strategy] era I grew up in. His outrage once felt ordinary; now it feels almost quaint. Do you see any parallels in today’s post-bipartisan landscape?

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I’ve never written anything that I didn’t wish I could have back and write again, but something as early in my career as The American President sort of feels like my high school yearbook picture. I do wish I could have it back again. One of the things I would do is work on that character. I don’t ​​think that was fair really to that character. However, even in that unfair iteration, no, I don’t see any parallel. All I see in the Republican Party today is a creepy, weird fealty to someone who doesn’t deserve it. 

The average screenplay is about 120 pages long. The first draft of The American President was over 350 pages long. I delivered it to Rob Reiner in a shopping bag. And one of the reasons for that: I wrote a lot about Bob Rumson. The idea was that when he was a widower, that was kind of an armor he had against what was then the attack du jour against the left, which was that they don’t have any family values. However, when he began dating that armor went away, and suddenly he could be attacked, and that’s what I used, [the] Richard Dreyfuss [character] for, and that was unfair. 

It fits that era, though, doesn’t it? I still love telling people the press once dubbed George H. W. Bush “Rubbers” because he talked about family planning so much — right up until he became Reagan’s VP and dropped it entirely.

Anyone watching [The American President] for the first time today, would think it was quaint. It’s part of the time machine. What woke was in ’94 was family values. 

Early on in the research for The American President, I didn’t know what I was doing, I really didn’t know what I was going to write, except that it was going to be Robert Redford as a widowed president of the United States.

At the 11th hour, [Redford] and Rob Reiner had a falling out. When Redford dropped out, actually Warren Beatty wanted to play the part, which I thought would be great, but as Warren said, nobody likes to see you fall in love with your wife. So, it wasn’t Warren, it was Michael [J. Fox].

But at the time, all I knew was Robert Redford’s playing a widower president of the United States, and we didn’t have an understanding of the personal lives of these people or that there was a personal life. Clinton changed that, popular culture changed that. But my research began with the president’s Daily Diary from a bunch of different administrations going back. It’s simply an accounting of what the President did that day, minute by minute. At 7:25 a.m., he met with the following people in the Oval Office, 8 a.m. he was in the Residence. What I was overcome with was the idea that this is just a regular guy in a temp job, and it’s the regular guy part that really got me interested. So the president trying to ask a woman out on a date. The president trying to get her flowers, that kind of thing.

I remembered the first time I read H.W. Bush’s Daily Diary — not for any reason, just for fun — and he was dieting. He ate like a very Nineties, cottage cheese-starvation diet. And then he ordered a pizza for dinner. 

It’s so great you see that stuff. I had to go check on Hoover for October 29th, 1929, which was the day the stock market crashed. And I saw that at 4 o’clock, he had to attend a cocktail reception for something. And that would have been right when the stock market was closing. And I thought, he probably had a couple [drinks at] that cocktail reception. He probably had a few. 

Yes, I hope so. One of the most surprising things I found in Woodrow Wilson’s letters was when he wrote to his wife, “I will assail you with my lovemaking.” 

That’s fantastic. Speaking of Woodrow Wilson, there was something [about his biography] that made its way into The American President… Did Wilson have a girlfriend? 

He did, yes. And about six months after promising to “assail” his wife Ellen, she died — and he married that girlfriend.

The assailing didn’t go as well as you’d hope. I’m just going to be going around today telling people I’m going to assail them with my lovemaking. 

Honestly, I use that line all the time. It’s a good reminder that presidents are people, too. You remind us of that constantly — though I’m not sure it’s true anymore. I just testified before Congress, and my depressing takeaway was that there’s no there there. But anyway —

Yes, yes, I think having the “the there there” is as important as, you know, as the intellect and confidence. You know, I have a daughter, and ever since she was born 24 years ago, I’ve believed that the easiest thing in the world to do is for one parent to empathize with another parent. If you tell me you’re a parent, I feel like I know the important stuff about you already. So, when we were separating kids from their parents at the border, I just thought, “This can’t be. Is there there there? Anybody? You’re a parent? You can’t do that. You just can’t.” 

That’s what’s different about your presidents — they’re Sisyphian in their beliefs that they can do good. 

Sysphian is right, well put. A bunch of the stuff that fell away from that 350-page screenplay became the opening of the pilot episode of The West Wing, and I told the cast, these people are going to fail as often as they’re gonna succeed. They’re gonna slip on banana peels, but they’re always gonna be trying to do the right thing. 

Shepherd’s a political anomaly — a widower, a single dad, and somehow untouchable because of it. Do you think someone like that could survive the modern political crucible and actually win the White House today? Would that still command respect, or is that impossible to imagine today? 

If a widower were to run today, particularly if that widower was the Democrat, somehow the candidate would be responsible for their spouse’s death. The boundaries wouldn’t be there. Is this forever? I don’t know. Maybe we’re just in this period of darkness. But that’s the way it is today. 

When you wrote The American President, who did you imagine the viewers — or the electorate — to be? The voters in that world seemed grounded in kitchen-table concerns: the economy, their kids’ futures, a basic faith that government might still work for them. Do you see a difference between that imagined electorate and the one you’d write for now?

I’m a sports fan, and one of the things team sports is great for is having completely irrational likes and dislikes, right? I truly love the city of Boston. I love being there. I love everything about Boston. So, why do I hate them when they’re playing the Yankees? It’s just the way it is. I’m a Yankees fan, they’ve got the Red Sox, they’ve got the Celtics, who I hate. And these irrational likes and dislikes make watching sports more fun. This has become our politics, but much more serious. People vote for the candidate that is going to piss off their enemies. 

And there’s a crisis of authenticity today that Shepherd never suffered from — he was always unmistakably himself. Trump, for all his chaos, struck many voters as the most authentic option. So I wonder how you think Shepherd’s sincerity and steadiness would play with today’s electorate. Would authenticity still resonate? 

I think that if we were having this conversation 10 years ago, before [Trump riding down] the escalator [in 2015], it would be a much different conversation. During Covid, I binged every Netflix documentary about cults — NXIVM and the Way Down Cult and Sarah Lawrence, everything. And what they all have in common is this weird, passionate devotion to an utterly unremarkable person. That’s where I feel we are now. I see the man-on-the-street interviews where people are calling Donald Trump authentic and honest, and he means what he says, [I think] you got to be kidding me. What’s new is this strange, cult-like devotion to the very last person who would deserve it. The electorate changed, and I’m not good at explaining what changed it. Maybe the left drove people out of their minds. 

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Look, [The American President] is a romantic comedy, but the two political issues at the heart of it were guns and the environment, right? The movie wouldn’t get made today — a studio wouldn’t agree to make it — because they would know you’ve just alienated half the potential audience, which wasn’t the case in 1995. The heroes I wrote in those two stories, they did things even though it would cost them popularity, which is not something you see professional politicians of either party do very often. I like writing romantically and idealistically and that’s what happens. You know, I suppose I should have made them lose more. 

Alexis Coe is an American presidential historian, senior fellow at New America, and the author of, most recently, the New York Times bestselling You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington. Her book Young Jack: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1957 will be out next year.