Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (146 page)

In foreign affairs, I’ll continue our policy of peace through strength. I’ll move toward further cuts in strategic and conventional arsenals of both the United States and the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc and NATO. I’ll modernize and preserve our technological edge, and that includes strategic defense. And a priority, ban chemical and biological weapons from the face of the earth. That will be a priority with me. And I intend to speak for freedom, stand for freedom, be a patient friend to anyone, East or West, who will fight for freedom.

It seems to me the presidency provides an incomparable opportunity for “gentle persuasion.”

And I hope to stand for a new harmony, a greater tolerance. We’ve come far, but I think we need a new harmony among the races in our country. And we’re on a journey into a new century, and we’ve got to leave that tired old baggage of bigotry behind.

Some people who are enjoying our prosperity are forgetting—forgotten what it’s for. But they diminish our triumph when they act as if wealth is an end in itself.

And there are those who’ve dropped their standards along the ways, as if ethics were too heavy and slowed their rise to the top. There’s graft in city hall and there’s greed on Wall Street and there’s influence peddling in Washington, and the small corruptions of everyday ambition.

But, you see, I believe public service is honorable. And every time I hear that someone has breached the public trust, it breaks my heart.

And I wonder sometimes if we’ve forgotten who we are. But we’re the people who sundered a nation rather than allow a sin called slavery—and we’re the people who rose from the ghettos and the deserts.

And we weren’t saints, but we lived by standards. We celebrated the individual, but we weren’t self-centered. We were practical, but we didn’t live only for material things. We believed in getting ahead, but blind ambition wasn’t our way.

The fact is, prosperity has a purpose. It’s to allow us to pursue “the better angels,” to give us time to think and grow. Prosperity with a purpose means taking your idealism and making it concrete by certain acts of goodness. It means helping a child from an unhappy home learn how to read—and I thank my wife, Barbara, for all her work in helping people to read and all her work for literacy in this country. It means teaching troubled children through your presence that there is such a thing as reliable love. Some would say it’s soft and insufficiently tough to care about these things. But where is it written that we must act as if we do not care, as if we’re not moved? Well, I am moved. I want a kinder, and gentler nation.

Two men this year ask for your support. And you must know us.

As for me, I’ve held high office and done the work of democracy day by day. Yes, my parents were prosperous; and their children sure were lucky. But there were lessons we had to learn about life. John Kennedy discovered poverty when he campaigned in West Virginia; there were children who had no milk. And young Teddy Roosevelt met the new America when he roamed the immigrant streets of New York. And I learned a few things about life in a place called Texas. And when I was working on this part of the speech, Barbara came in and asked what I was doing, and I looked up and I said I’m working hard. And she said, “Oh, dear, don’t worry. Relax. Sit back. Take off your shoes and put up your silver foot.”

Now, we moved to west Texas forty years ago, forty years ago this year. And the war was over, and we wanted to get out and make it on our own. And those were exciting days. We lived in a little shotgun house, one room for the three of us. Worked in the oil business and then started my own.

And in time we had six children. Moved from the shotgun to a duplex apartment to a house. And lived the dream—high school football on Friday nights, Little League, neighborhood barbecue.

People don’t see their own experience as symbolic of an era, but of course we were. And so was everyone else who was taking a chance and pushing into unknown territory with kids and a dog and a car. But the big thing I learned is the satisfaction of creating jobs, which meant creating opportunity, which meant happy families, who in turn could do more to help others and enhance their own lives. I learned that a good done by a single good job could be felt in ways you can’t imagine.

It’s been said that I’m not the most compelling speaker, and there are actually those who claim that I don’t always communicate in the clearest, most concise way. But I dare them to keep it up. Go ahead, make my twenty-four-hour time period. Now, I may not be the most eloquent, but I learned that early on that eloquence won’t draw oil from the ground. And I may sometimes be a little awkward, but there’s nothing self-conscious in my love of country. And I’m a quiet man, but I hear the quiet people others don’t—the ones who raise the family, pay the taxes, meet the mortgage. And I hear them and I am moved, and their concerns are mine.

A president must be many things. He must be a shrewd protector of America’s interests, and he must be an idealist who leads those who move for a freer and more democratic planet.

And he must see to it that government intrudes as little as possible in the lives of the people; and yet remember that it is right and proper that a nation’s leader take an interest in the nation’s character. And he must be able to define—and lead—a mission.

For seven and a half years I’ve worked with a president—I’ve seen what crosses that big desk. I’ve seen the unexpected crisis that arrives in a cable in a young aide’s hand. And I’ve seen the problems that simmer on for decades and suddenly demand resolution. And I’ve seen modest decisions made with anguish, and crucial decisions made with dispatch.

And so I know that what it all comes down to, this election—what it all comes down to, after all the shouting and the cheers—is the man at the desk. And who should sit at that desk.

My friends, I am that man.

I say it—I say it without boast or bravado. I’ve fought for my country, I’ve served, I’ve built—and I’ll go from the hills to the hollows, from the cities to the suburbs to the loneliest town on the quietest street, to take our message of hope and growth for every American to every American.

I will keep America moving forward, always forward—for a better America, for an endless, enduring dream and a thousand points of light.

This is my mission. And I will complete it.

Thank you. You know, it is customary to end an address with a pledge, or saying, that holds a special meaning. And I’ve chosen one that we all know by heart, one that we all learned in school. And I ask everyone in this great hall to stand and join me in this. We all know it.

“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Thank you. God bless you.

After six years of
perestroika
, with the Soviet Union’s economy crumbling and its constituent republics demanding more power, a group of Communist hard-liners and KGB generals staged a coup to return to autocratic central rule. The military forces would not fire on the people, however; the coup failed, its leaders were arrested, and a chastened and subdued Mikhail Gorbachev returned to Moscow to negotiate a loose confederation of republics.

On September 3, 1991, during a session of the Congress of People’s Deputies, the leader who had been criticized for taking half-measures and for trusting villainous aides—who had, after all, set in train the events he could not control—made a brief defense of himself before calling for a new constitutional framework. A feisty and charismatic presence at the rostrum, enjoying the sound of his own extemporaneous words, Mr. Gorbachev has rarely made a memorable speech, because he does not take the time to prepare a coherent address. When he does read a speech on a formal occasion, as at the UN, his presentation turns as leaden as his bureaucratic prose. In this passage spoken at a critical moment in his nation’s history, he refers to himself in the third person, which is a good technique in critical self-appraisal. His use of the stark verb “spit” at the end to admonish those who had shown their contempt for him, is especially vivid.

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DISTINGUISHED MEMBERS OF
the Congress, in the past week the people have decided on their fate, not only in the parliaments, not only in public conflicts and clashes of views and in the meetings, but also on the barricades.

We have seen a tragedy. We’ve seen bloodletting.

My evaluation of this is known to all of you. I had in mind to present
them to you in fuller form if I was going to speak as a person presenting a report. But here I will limit myself to saying that everything that has occurred has been a very hard lesson for me to learn.

But at the same time it confirms that despite the high drama of these events, as a result of this coup d’état against the constitution, despite the fact that it made everything in our country even more tense than it was on the day before the signature of the new union treaty on a union of sovereign states, which is designed to strengthen our cooperation, and despite the fact that we have lost time for solving economic problems and despite the fact that the social situation in the country is on the verge of catastrophe—despite all of this, I say that this coup d’ état did confirm that what we have been doing since 1985 made it possible to create new realities and a new basis for our country so that from the very beginning, and this was stated on the eighteenth when this mission came to the Crimea, that it was condemned to failure.

The people did not accept it. The army stayed side by side with the people. For the first time, we saw a new generation that has come into existence in these last several years and that was willing to give up its lives for these new realities.

We’ve seen that we did not work in vain, you and I in our new thinking, in forming new relations between the government and the people who, at that difficult moment, decided with the democrats and against the putschists. We thus have accomplished something.

And of course we made many mistakes at the same time in this connection, as concerns our direction and these revolutionary transformations which we are undertaking, and this includes Gorbachev, too.

Gorbachev has changed to the extent that he has remained devoted to the choice he made in 1985. If there have been mistakes, if there have been miscalculations in tactics and in measures—but he also did not notice that it was necessary to move more rapidly along the path of liberating ourselves from those totalitarian structures.

What is more, he was not able—I know that not only at public meetings but even in the Congress, people say anything they want about the president, but while I am president, I think there should be some understanding of my position.

Today you have a president. Tomorrow you may have another president. In any case, we are all one, side by side, and we shouldn’t spit on each other. This is just my reaction to all of these doubts that have been cast on my conduct.

In 1965, a young polemicist, a Goldwater “true believer” fresh from writing editorials for the conservative
St. Louis Globe-Democrat
, was hired by Richard Nixon to work at his New York law firm on political articles and speeches. Pat Buchanan treated his typewriter like an anvil, pounding furiously, in bursts, fingers unable to keep up with his thoughts. He had his own style—gutsy, brawling, declarative, unequivocal—that his older and politically more sophisticated colleagues had to soften.

After four years in the Nixon White House as one of the three senior speechwriters, including a stint writing “red meat” speeches for Vice-President Spiro Agnew (see p. 805), Buchanan began a career in and out of the opinion media, returning for a time to serve as President Reagan’s communications director. Privately amiable and polite, publicly combative, he took the plunge into his own presidential candidacy in 1992, surprising President Bush in New Hampshire with a 38 percent protest vote. Three years later, on March 20, 1995, he returned to Manchester, New Hampshire, to launch his second campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. This time, his message of social conservatism, nativism, and foreign-policy anti-internationalism had a new and resonant wrinkle: economic populism.

At first scorned by party elders steeped in free-market, laissez-faire economic philosophy, Buchanan touched a nerve among workers concerned about loss of jobs to foreign producers. His positions, hammered home on the stump, in small gatherings and on talk radio, had an impact; he stunned Senator Bob Dole, long considered the front-runner for the Republican 1996 nomination, with a victory in the New Hampshire primary before running out of gas in South Carolina.

In this passage from his announcement speech, note the way he tells a story. That was advice taken from Nixon, who told his speechwriters, “Whenever you get a chance in a speech, tell the people a story. They’ll tune out a speech, but they’ll listen to a story.” He also uses traditional “pointer phrases,” like “I say to you,” setting up the point to follow. An effective technique is the juxtaposition of short, declarative sentences: “This campaign is about you. We are on your side.” Buchanan also likes to use “America first,” aware of its 1930s isolationist connotation, taking a delight in rubbing it into his internationalist detractors.

***

…THREE YEARS AGO
when I came to New Hampshire, I went up to the North Country on one of my first visits. I went up to the James River paper mill. It was a bad day, just before Christmas, and many of the workers at the plant had just been laid off. They were sullen and they were angry and they didn’t want to talk to anyone.