I served in a number of positions in the Reagan Administration before joining the President’s staff as a speechwriter. With few exceptions, all who served Mr. Reagan throughout the government deserved high marks and would go on to excel in their later (usually non-government) careers.

In early June, on his primetime Fox News show, Sean Hannity probed the Budweiser transgender- and public-relations fiasco with Mark Penn.

Not long ago, a major business school asked me to participate in a discussion among senior communications leaders from the corporate, political, academic, journalistic, and consulting worlds. Each had involvement in at least two of those arenas; I in all.

Early on the morning of Tuesday, April 25, I received a text message from Peter Robinson that John Raisian, Director of the Hoover Institution (1989-2015), had passed away. Nine days earlier Hoover Senior Fellow John Cogan had conveyed to me John’s desire that I post the statement now elsewhere on this site.

We developed the tactic described in the Global Energy Company case study (see 30th anniversary page) several years before the time of the case. It was for an environmental negotiation that another client was having with the U.S. Government.

I think of speaking styles of recent presidents in terms of music. Here is what I mean:

In the last three years clients have asked us to help develop messaging for products and services, both B-to-C and B-to-B. The key in these assignments is less about the game and more about clarity. Here is a Q&A set we recently developed for the Israeli-American security partnership Sapere:

“Recovering a company’s reputation” leads the case list on our 30th anniversary landing page. The case is of U.S. Sugar. With activist incitement, the media had branded the company a “slave labor” employer and an environmental polluter. All widely false, but no one was listening to the company’s protests.

Remember this: When trust in you is zero, you have eight syllables to recover it.

For most readers, the opinion section of a newspaper or news site is stimulating entertainment. For me, the most consequential are strategic moves on a chess board.

This will be a blog on current uses of strategic messaging. Most entries will run 200 words or fewer. But we thought that we would mark the re launch with an account of events that shaped the founders of the White House Writers Group and in which we participated.