Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (3 page)

The same applies to Oliver Cromwell’s expression of displeasure to the English Parliament, concluding with the ultimate dismissal: “Depart, I say: and let us have done with you. In the name of God—go!” Not until two centuries after Cromwell’s death did the historian Thomas Carlyle assemble bits and pieces of what the Lord Protector’s contemporaries said he said into a half-quoted, half-narrated account. I include it here as the best approximation of what the regicidal spurner of a crown said that memorable day, but we should not assume—as many histories and quotation
books do—the words attributed to him are from a transcript of Cromwell’s dispersal of a legislature.

A similar simulation can happen here, and did recently. General George Patton’s powerful exhortation, laced with pungent profanity, to American troops before D-Day—so forcefully delivered by the actor George C. Scott in the movie entitled
Patton
—is used to great effect by motivation gurus in and out of the military. But that was a fine scriptwriter’s version of what Patton said just before the Normandy invasion. Other versions of the general’s go-get-’em rouser can be found in the published
Patton Papers
and on the Internet. Evidently the controversial leader gave roughly the same speech several times to different groups of soldiers, and some took notes. No recording was made. I laid out all the accounts I could find, spoke to the editor of the
Patton Papers
, and, conjuring the ghost of Carlyle, assembled a good approximation of long excerpts from the salty, savage, inspiring pep talk by “Old Blood and Guts.” But don’t take a patchwork quilt for a blanket.

Now to a more general review: What about the technique of speechwriting and speechmaking—how is it changing, and why? (And in today’s speeches and introductions, are we overusing the technique of internal dialogue?)

Major addresses—talks running forty minutes or more, laying out a comprehensive point of view, report, program, critique, case, or vision—have in recent years been going out of style. Happily for those who like a full meal of oratory, as well as for those who like the sound of their own voices, we still have exceptions to this squeezing down of oratory at quadrennial national political conventions and frequently in the U.S. Senate. But from commencement ceremonies to eulogies, from lectures to sermons, brevity is now considered the soul of wisdom as much as wit.

Speech doctors are performing major surgery. Sentences are shortening. (By a lot.) On television, time is money, and you’d better get your point across in a hurry or the channel-cruising viewer with the clicker at the ready will wipe your face from the screen. On the stump, the rip-snorting harangues of yesteryear are being replaced by instant coffee-klatches in primary season and air-kissing “drop-bys” at October fund-raisers. (When television news does cover a candidate’s stump speaking, it is usually to show a reporter standing in front summarizing the muffled message in less than a half minute.) In lecture halls and garden clubs, nervous moderators ask speakers to hold their prepared remarks to twenty minutes and allow a half hour for Q. and A. At testimonial dinners, after-dinner speakers are warned that the audience is
filled with overfed people who have been dragooned into attending and are worried about their baby-sitters at home. In the United States, though speech has never been freer, it has also never been shorter.

This does not presage the end of the formal, meat-and-potatoes spellbinder. As the more recent entries in this collection show, sustained eloquence is not dead. Whatever revolutionary changes may occur in the media of transmission and reception, I believe that human beings will continue to seek leadership or instruction through the speaking voice of another person who presents a position in an organized and persuasive fashion.

Certain elements of classic oratory are sure to remain: salutations, for example—from FDR’s warm “My friends” to Napoleon’s “Soldiers!” to Lenin’s “Comrades”—will begin speeches, though the traditional “My countrymen” that used to open presidential inaugural addresses has now become “My fellow Americans,” which more directly encompasses women, or the slightly less inclusive “My fellow citizens.” (Unfortunately, the story of FDR addressing the Daughters of the American Revolution as “My fellow immigrants” is apocryphal. My favorite is the catchy opener by Demosthenes in his classic oration “On the Crown,” directed at his accuser, Aeschines, an acolyte of Philip of Macedon: “Accursed scribbler!”)

But there is no denying the trends in the new millennium toward brevity, toward personal interchange, toward visual aids (including a Big Brotherly image of a speaker’s face on a huge screen alongside him), and toward conflict. President Bill Clinton’s sermon-speech in a Memphis church is an example included herein of modern old-fashioned oratory, seen in person by hundreds. Another speech following his grand jury testimony—both the mild draft reported to have been prepared for him and the more defiant speech he gave—was short, pointed, and seen on television by tens of millions.

Because those who stage public presentations want large audiences, and because most members of those audiences want a show, the pressure is on to provide direct, personal conflict. In politics, debates between candidates delivering short speeches draw more attention than thoughtful or passionate (scorned as “set”) speeches by stand-alone candidates about the issues being debated. The clash is the thing; the retort and riposte (exemplified by the Bentsen-Quayle debate herein) gets the play, as the return is watched more closely than the serve.

In the same way, the confrontational interview is more exciting and draws a more rapt audience than the thought-provoking conversation. In lecture halls across the United States, where celebrated guest speakers in every field draw substantial fees for an hour on stage (and I’m the last
one to knock that), the trend has not only been toward setting aside half the time to answer questions from the floor, but toward the interview-speech, where the speaker’s views are drawn out by the interviewer, thereby breaking up the presentation into easily chewable bites. The old suspension bridge between speaker and listener is shortened to an attention span.

A hybrid form of prepared address is coming into vogue to overcome the dismay of audiences that begin to fidget as soon as the person on the podium puts on spectacles and begins to read. That is the quasi-extemporaneous “building block” speech. In this presentation, the idea is to appear to be ad-libbing while not rambling off on tangents. The speaker maintains eye contact with the audience in a room that has not been darkened. He has before him a single, large index card with a dozen or so “talking points” on it. Each point is a building block—a subtheme illustrated by an anecdote or well-rehearsed riff—that can be assembled into a coherent talk. Some can be left out if time is short; fresh, topical blocks can be inserted to make the speech seem genuinely off-the-cuff. (That expression comes from notes surreptitiously made on a shirt cuff, perhaps by a student cheating on a test or by the progenitor of this technique.) For verisimilitude, the speaker will pause occasionally, seem to think about what he will say next, emit a few uhs and ahs, and plunge ahead toward the prepared peroration that has been fairly well committed to memory. I saw Charles de Gaulle do this at a state dinner in Paris to an audience of Americans who believed he was saying whatever came into his head. (The game was given away by an interpreter who had a written translation ready.)

Wait a minute. Before we indulge in longing for the good old days of Lincoln shouting out words he had written by candlelight to a throng that could hardly hear him, or decry the decline of the splendid oration, let us not forget (or, as Ronald Reagan would have said in his resolutely upbeat style, let us always remember) the past legions of stupefying orators. I have a leather-bound set of
Modern Eloquence
stuffing my bookshelf that every antiquarian bookseller is eager to push out the door. Though cheap enough, it was no bargain; I went through all twelve volumes, page by dreary page, and have inflicted none of its sustained somnolence on the reader of this collection.

Is there a future for truly modern eloquence? (We know the future is secure for internal dialogue.) Yes, but it will have to adapt to the new needs of the audience—more likely to be one person than a thousand—as driven by new methods of transmission. Radio, pioneered by Theodore Roosevelt (why didn’t they use the invention to record the “speech that
saved his life,” as anthologized herein?), was used by his cousin Franklin to speak to millions in a person-to-person style, in contrast to declaiming to thousands, as Teddy did, in an orator-to-multitude style. Television made possible both the intimate, informal but teleprompted speech from a Queen Anne chair, with a wall of fake books in the background (they can have my
Modern Eloquence
set), and the use of a cheering crowd as backdrop to an eyeball contact with the viewer at home.

The convergence of television and computer screen, Internet and Outernet, may make possible interactive communication with tomorrow’s speaker and an audience adept at video games. This would turn a formerly passive listener into a kind of participant in the speaker’s remarks, deconstructing his text to fit the listener’s preference or to reflect his anger. From a speaker’s or speechwriter’s viewpoint, the possibility of instantaneous worldwide or community-wide reaction by responding clickers would enable him to measure a speech’s impact second by second and to adjust it on the fly to make a more favorable impression—unless the speaker preferred to pose as an iconoclast choosing rational persuasion rather than emotional manipulation. O brave new world, that might have such speeches in it.

I used to be a writer. Now my son, a Web site analyst, calls me a “content provider.” “That’s cool,” as Lincoln wrote long before cool was cool. I believe that when the moment is critical, and when the forum or mode of communication is dramatic, then the content of what is said and the way it is spoken will result in what future generations will judge to be “a great speech.” The novelist and prime minister Benjamin Disraeli said, “With words we govern men.” (Three quotations in a single paragraph? There’s a hard-and-fast speechwriting rule forbidding that. “I hate quotations,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson. “Tell me what
you
know.” That makes four; as long as we know the rules, we can break them.)

Do not begin by mining the gold in this book’s speeches for nuggets, sound bites, or sight nibbles. Instead, place yourself in the moments they were spoken, in the places where the orator stood, and then read them, silently or aloud, for their content. That’s why these speeches are complete or their excerpts are long. Although more than a few of these presentations of ideas are considered immortal, they were spoken by mortals to move other mortals. I like to think this method of making minds meet has a shining future.

FRIENDS, READERS, STUDENTS OF RHETORIC, WOULD-BE ORATORS: LEND ME YOUR EARS
.

Please understand—that is only a metaphor. “Your ears” is a figure of speech; all I seek is your attention to speeches by historic figures.

That little rhetorical antithesis—figure of speech, speech by figures—is known as a contrapuntal turnaround. Lincoln used the device in switching the cynical “might makes right” to the moral “right makes might”; John Kennedy did the same with never negotiating out of fear, but never fearing to negotiate. That’s the way some phrasemakers do their thing—we contrapunt and pray—to provide a speech with some quotable nugget. Since the 1970s, as speeches were recorded on tape, they have been known as sound bites.

But, sound bites and zingers, aphorisms and epigrams, are for quotation anthologists. The study of one-liners is engaging if you like the smorgasbord or quick review, but here we offer the meat and potatoes of oratory—oral communication in context, human persuasion in action.

To stir the blood of patriots, we have Daniel Webster reminding us of the meaning of sacrifice at Bunker Hill; we have Judge Learned Hand transcending superpatriotism on “I Am an American Day”; we have Douglas MacArthur calling West Point cadets to “duty, honor, country.”

To sound the clarion of war, we have the virgin queen, Elizabeth I, defying the Spanish Armada; we have Patrick Henry (or Judge St. George Tucker, who may have coined the phrase in retrospect) crying, “Give me liberty, or give me death”; we have Winston Churchill, in Britain’s finest hour, calling for “blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”

To honor the memory of our illustrious dead, we have Henry Lee’s tribute to the man who was “first in war, first in peace”; and we have John F. Kennedy using his eulogy at the funeral of poet Robert Frost to pay tribute to the arts in America.

To recall the clash of hot debate, we have Cicero lashing into Catiline; we have Stephen Douglas’s reply to Lincoln, and portions of the first televised confrontation between presidential candidates.

To watch the accused reach heights of defiance against injustice, we have Irish rebel Robert Emmet warning his sentencers, “Let no man
write my epitaph”; we have Gandhi of India professing his religious faith in a secular court; we have dissident Anatoly Shcharansky expressing his contempt of his Communist judges.

To see how powerful figures best take their leave, we hear Socrates before taking the hemlock; we hear abolitionist John Brown foreseeing the blood of civil war; we hear the simple good-bye of first baseman Lou Gehrig at Yankee Stadium; we hear Dwight Eisenhower startle his old friends with a warning about a “military-industrial complex.”

To stir our soul, we listen to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount; Lincoln’s curious sermon at his second inaugural; Rabbi Louis Finkelstein at the White House; and Billy Graham preaching the gospel.

To enrich and uplift our spirit, we have Louis Pasteur on education; Mark Twain on stage fright; Senator Everett Dirksen on his beloved marigolds; William Faulkner on how mankind will not merely endure but prevail. We have Secretary of State Dean Acheson present at the creation of the Cold War and Boris Yeltsin at its effective end.