By Coral Gables Gazette staff
Two days after its publication, a newly released work of American political history comes to Coral Gables. Books & Books presents an evening with Ben Rhodes on Thursday, May 28, at 7 p.m. at the Coral Gables Congregational United Church of Christ. Rhodes will appear in conversation with L. Felice Gorordo for the release of All We Say: The Battle for American Identity — A History in 15 Speeches. Tickets are required and include one copy of the book.
The event is among the first stops on a national tour for a book that arrives at an unusually charged moment. All We Say tells the story of the United States through fifteen speeches — some iconic, others long forgotten — tracing the history of America’s argument over its own identity, from the Constitutional Convention to the present day. It is the work of a writer who spent a decade inside that argument at the highest level, and who has now stepped back to examine it across 250 years.
The book and its argument
The organizing premise of All We Say is that the question of American identity has never been settled — that it was contested at the founding, contested through the Civil War and the civil rights movement, and remains contested now. Rhodes traces the history through a portrait of America as a nation divided between two stories: one of inheritance, power, and exclusion, the other of equality, striving, and belonging.
The 15 speeches span the full sweep of that division. They include Benjamin Franklin’s call for compromise at the Constitutional Convention, Alexander Stephens’ argument that white supremacy was the cornerstone of the Confederacy, Martin Luther King’s articulation of true equality, and Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric on executive power and national identity. Each speech is treated not merely as a historical artifact but as an episode in a continuing argument — evidence that, as Rhodes frames it, history is a living argument rather than a settled record.
Rhodes served as Deputy National Security Adviser under President Obama and spent a decade as one of his principal speechwriters. That background gives All We Say a distinctive vantage point. Rhodes is not analyzing oratory from the outside; he is writing as someone who has sat in the room where speeches are drafted, who understands the gap between what a speaker intends and what an audience receives, and who has thought seriously about why certain words take hold and others dissolve. The book draws on that experience to examine not just what these speeches said, but why they endured — or why they should have.
Advance readers have noted that the book is particularly well-timed, arriving in the nation’s 250th anniversary year as a moment for reflection on how America started and what it has become. Praise has come from a range of literary and intellectual voices: Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Fredrik Logevall called it a work that carries off a brilliant conceit beautifully, while Pulitzer Prize–winning essayist Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah wrote that it asks readers to remember that oratory is always a form of moral persuasion, a contest of ideas.
The conversation and the moderator
Rhodes will be in conversation with L. Felice Gorordo, a Coral Gables–based executive whose career has moved across technology, finance, and public service. Gorordo served as CEO of eMerge Americas, the platform credited with helping establish Miami as a hemispheric technology hub, and most recently as the United States Executive Director at the World Bank, where he represented the U.S. government on the board of an institution that deploys roughly $130 billion annually in emerging markets. Earlier in his career he served in the White House under both Presidents Obama and George W. Bush.
The pairing is well-suited to the material. Rhodes’s book is ultimately about the relationship between language and power — about who gets to define a nation and how that definition gets contested. Gorordo brings to the conversation a career that has operated at the intersection of those same forces: in government, in capital markets, and in the civic infrastructure of a city that is itself a contested and evolving story about American identity.
About Books & Books and the venue
Books & Books is Coral Gables’ independent bookstore and one of the most active literary event venues in South Florida, presenting author events throughout the year at its Miracle Mile location and at partner venues across the city. The Coral Gables Congregational United Church of Christ — located across from the Biltmore Hotel on De Soto Boulevard — provides a fitting setting for an evening organized around the history of American oratory: a historic sanctuary with the acoustic presence and civic gravity that the subject demands.
