Late speechwriter was never at a loss for words

Patricia Smith, mother of Sean Smith, one of four Americans killed in the 2012 terror attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, speaks on the first day of the 2016 Republican National Convention. The speech included fiery rhetoric about Hillary Clinton, but the Maryland Republican who wrote it, Richard J. Cross, wound up voting for Clinton in 2016. File photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images.

MILWAUKEE – The last time there was a full-blown Republican National Convention, in 2016 in Cleveland, a GOP strategist from Maryland spent most of his days cloistered in an RNC hotel suite, churning out speeches for convention speakers.

Richard J. Cross III was part of an elite squad of writers who were brought in by the RNC just for the convention, where Donald Trump was first nominated for president. The most prominent speech he wrote there was for Patricia Smith, the mother of one of the Americans killed in the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

“If Hillary Clinton can’t give us the truth, why should we give her the presidency?” Smith boomed, bringing Republicans to their feet.

National media outlets took note. The New Yorker magazine called Smith’s speech the epitome of “the weaponization of grief.”

But as he moved through Cleveland that convention week, wearing a black baseball cap with the image of his hero Richard Nixon pulled low on his face, Cross harbored a secret that he fully articulated just a month later: He was thinking of voting for Hillary Clinton.

“I may yet have to vote for her because of the epic deficiencies of my own party’s nominee,” he wrote in a powerful commentary for The Baltimore Sun that appeared on Aug. 17, 2016.

In the end, vote for Clinton is exactly what he did.

It was a surprise to some Republican associates, but it shouldn’t have been entirely unexpected. Cross, who had worked for the late U.S. Rep. Helen Delich Bentley (R-Md.) and for former Gov. Bob Ehrlich (R), both in Annapolis and when Ehrlich served on Capitol Hill, was a raging political moderate. He often tweaked the GOP of the 2010s in a blog called “Cross Purposes”and in occasional columns for the Sun. He hated extremists on both sides of the political divide – and his declaration that Clinton was preferable to Trump caused great consternation among some of his friends.

“That was the official nail in the coffin for Richard” with many Republicans, said Ellen “EJ” McNulty, a former Ehrlich administration official who herself has become a Trump critic within the GOP. “That was the excommunication.”

Though he could be painfully shy, Cross collected friends from across the political spectrum, who were dazzled by his brilliant prose, depths of political knowledge, pop culture obsessions and mischievous streak. He enjoyed regularly assembling a diverse group of friends for breakfast at Jimmy’s in Fells Point, just to chew the political fat.

Today, these friends wonder what Cross would think about the state of U.S. politics.

“He’d be appalled,” McNulty said.

But they’ll never know. Cross was found dead in his Fells Point apartment, the victim of an apparent heart attack, in 2017. He was just 51 years old.

At this convention, some of the Maryland Republican delegates who knew him well are mourning his absence from the political scene.

Don Murphy, a former state lawmaker who has been a delegate to every Republican National Convention since 2000, said he thinks of Cross in the same way he thinks about Joe Steffen, another deceased former top aide to Ehrlich occasionally called “The Prince of Darkness,” because he seemed to enjoy scuffling with political opponents and pushing Democrats out of state government.

Steffen also died in 2017, at the age of 57.

While Cross could cut a political opponent with wicked prose, Steffen was more of a brawler who enjoyed political combat. Steffen was also more of a conventional conservative.

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“They were competitive men and such amazing, smart political operators,” said Nicolee Ambrose, the Republican National Committeewoman for Maryland.

Murphy said Cross and Steffen consumed politics and thought about strategy all the time.

“I can’t even believe they’re gone,” he said. “Who’s replacing those people [in the state GOP]? No one did. No one ever did.”

The 2016 assignment was not the first time Cross and his prose were evident at a Republican National Convention. He co-wrote the platform that the GOP adopted at its 2000 convention in Philadelphia.

Having worked for Bentley for many years, Cross was always inclined to aid aspiring women political leaders when he could. When Ambrose ran to become the state’s GOP committeewoman, Cross helped with strategy and writing projects. He also advised Laura Neuman, the former appointed Anne Arundel County executive – not just as she took office and prepared for a tough 2014 GOP primary, which she wound up losing, but also as she navigated changing her voter registration to independent (she later became a Democrat).

“I had heard about him for a long time, working for Gov. Ehrlich, and we became good friends,” Ambrose said.

Cross, she added, was so smart “he could literally do all of his work for the week in an hour.”

But, she noted with a rueful laugh, “Bored men could get into trouble.”

That was certainly one Republican school of thought after Cross wrote his Sun commentary about the 2016 White House election. It’s a stunning and eloquent screed, full of passion, humanity, political history and pop culture references. Cross wrote that he could “never” vote for Trump, and wavered between voting for Clinton – “the most divisive political figure in the past 25 years” or “a kooky Libertarian.”

“I look around me; everything just feels awful and sad,” he said. “The divisions in our national discourse are great, and there is no political hero waiting to rescue us from ourselves. Instead, we’re confronted by the awful spectacle of a ‘Mothra versus Godzilla’ election. And, just like in the movies, no matters who wins, Tokyo suffers.”

Cross wrote that he was particularly offended by Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric: “President Eisenhower would have never proposed banning Muslims from America. Nor would President Nixon. Nor would President Reagan. Donald Trump has betrayed and perverted their legacies. Consequently, I no longer recognize my party.”

At the end of the piece, Cross concluded, “the only prospect more terrifying than voting for Hillary Clinton is not voting for her.”

Soon Cross would be wearing a Clinton campaign button, McNulty recalled. And while he described himself as “GOP to the core,” he spent the last few years of his life as a political independent.

“I miss Richard Cross,” McNulty lamented, “because now we have no one speaking truth to power. Richard called it as he saw it and he was almost always right.”

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