Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (5 page)

And on delivery, caveat stentor: when preparing a speech, beware of undeliverable words. “Undeliverable” is one such tripword; it may look easy enough on the page, and it may be easy to pronounce in the mind when read silently, but when the moment comes to push it past your lips, such a word invites a stumble. And if you practice a tripword out loud, and put a check mark over it in your text, you will be all the more sure to stumble. As a young speechwriter, I drafted remarks for New York City’s official greeter, whose assignment was to welcome Syngman Rhee of South Korea. I referred to the visiting president’s “indomitable will”; the greeter, a bumbling former ambassador, knew he would say something like “indomatabubble” and asked for a synonym. When I gave him
“indefatigable,” he fired me on the spot; somebody else had to slip him “steadfast.” In retrospect, I now see I was intransigent. (That’s my penance: in reading this aloud, I will surely stumble over “intransigent.”) Embrace the thin word; eschew the fat.

Beware, too, of words that may vaguely trouble your listeners. A moment ago, I quoted Wilson saying, “Passion is the pith of eloquence.” I know what “pith” means—“nub, core, quintessence”—and so do you. But I would never stand in front of an audience and say “pith”; it sounds like a vulgar word being spoken with a lisp. Nobody would criticize you for it, but you as the speaker or speechwriter are responsible for preventing those little internal winces in the minds of your listeners. They distract attention from the message you want to get across. While we are on the subject of troubling vocabulary, observe how the great speeches steer clear of forty-dollar words. Big words, or terms chosen for their strangeness—I almost said “unfamiliarity”—are a sign of pretension. What do you do when you have a delicious word, one with a little poetry in it, that is just the right word for the meaning—but you know it will sail over the head of your audience? You can use it, just as FDR used “infamy,” and thereby stretch the vocabulary of your listeners. But it is best if you subtly define it in passing, as if you were adding emphasis—as I did a moment ago, with “cynosure, the brilliant object of guidance.” Who knows that a cynosure is a constellation in the heavens that sailors steered by, even among those who use the cliché “cynosure of all eyes”? Who will know what “deltoids” are, when I refer to them in a moment? The speaker will; if he subtly helps his audience, nobody should notice the medicine go down.

I admit that what you have in your hands is a heavy book. Intellectually weighty, too, but the meaning I have in mind is “hefty”—2.4 pounds, to be exact—nothing to slip into pocket or purse on your way to a speech doctor’s office. “This I freely assert,” said the verb-conscious Franklin Roosevelt, “and I hope my friends in the press do not change that to ‘admit.’” The weight of this book is a boon to both mental and physical health. I once received a thick anthology from Sidney Perelman, the great humorist—it was called
The Most of S. J. Perelman
—and the inscription read, “To William Safire, together with a small jar of antiphlogiston to rub on his deltoids, should you read this compendium in bed.” That sent me to the dictionary: “the deltoids” are the book-holding muscles of the shoulder and Antiphlogiston was the name of a soothing ointment that was rubbed out by Ben-Gay. I pick up Perelman’s big book now and then; lifting it gives me a lift, as I hope this volume will do for you. (It would have been lighter but for the stream of speeches brought in by my chief of research,
Jeffrey McQuain, and my editorial aide, Ann Elise Rubin; thanks, too, to Jeanne Smith of the Library of Congress, and to Professor Janet Coryell for hard-to-find speeches by women, and to Gerald Howard and Emma Lewis from W. W. Norton, the intrepid publishers. We have just saved a page of acknowledgments.)

You are now an abnormally sophisticated audience. You know the tricks of the speech trade, some of the devices of the phrasemaker and speechwriter, and you expect the speaker now to summarize—to tell ’em what he told ’em.

Sorry; there’s a secret eleventh step: cross ’em up now and then. This is, after all, a speech meant to be read, not spoken; the metaphoric listener is really a reader who can skip back as no real listener easily can. You, dear speech reader, are lending not your ears but your eyes, which are much more perceptive and analytic organs. After receiving the moral directions summarized on the tablets he brought down from Mount Sinai, Moses spoke to the people of Israel—but nowhere is it written that he found a need to summarize the Ten Commandments.

What every audience needs, however, is a sense of completion; what the speaker needs is a way out on a high note. That’s a necessary ingredient to shapeliness. That calls for a peroration.

A peroration, my friends, is a devastating defense against the dread disease of dribbling-off. It should start with a quiet, declarative sentence; it should build in a series of semicolons; it should employ the puissance of parallelism; it should make the farthest rafter reverberate with the action and passion of our time, and—throwing aside all rules of short sentences or self-quotation—it should reach into the hearts and souls of a transfixed humankind to say, “This—this!—is the end of the best damned speech you’ve ever had the good fortune to experience.” (Sustained applause, punctuated by “Bravo!” “Let us march!” and “You tell ’em, Buster!”—followed by some smart-aleck pundit wrinkling his nose and wondering aloud, “But what did he really say?”)

Pericles was a cautious general, a stern imperialist, an ardent patron of the arts, and a radical politician. Although he was born an aristocrat around the turn of the fifth century
B.C
., his “graces of persuasion,” in Cicero’s phrase, did much to curb the power of the aristocracy and extend democracy to the citizens of the city-state of Athens. For example, he pressed successfully for the payment of fees to jurors and, later, to public officials—which made it possible for a poor man to hold public office.

Fewer than forty thousand males made up the polity of Athens, and all were members of the Assembly. It chose by lot the Council of Five Hundred, fifty from each tribe, to manage its affairs, and elected juries of a hundred to a thousand men to decide cases. This was before lawyers came on the scene; each man was his own pleader, and a citizen required a mastery of the art of oratory to gain or defeat justice. Pericles was reputed to be one of the most eloquent at these meetings of the democratic legislature, exceeded only by fourth-century Greek orator Demosthenes.

“Reputed” is a necessary qualifier because we have no text of these Greek speeches. The reputation of Pericles rests on the writings of historian Thucydides, in his
History of the Peloponnesian War
. “With reference to the speeches in this history,” the chronicler wrote candidly, “…some I heard myself, others I got from various quarters; it was in all cases difficult to carry them word for word in one’s memory, so my habit has been to make my speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the various occasions, of course adhering as closely as possible to what they really said.”

Fortunately, Thucydides was a friend of Pericles and was probably present at the delivery of this oration. Here, then, are portions of a translation of one historian’s recollection of what the orator Pericles said at
the funeral of soldiers killed in the first year of the war. Athens was soon to be destroyed; the purpose of this speech (like that of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address over two millennia later) was to use the occasion of a eulogy for the fallen to examine the cause for which they fell.

***

MANY OF THOSE
who have spoken before me on these occasions have commended the author of that law which we now are obeying for having instituted an oration to the honor of those who sacrifice their lives in fighting for their country. For my part, I think it sufficient for men who have proved their virtue in action, by action to be honored for it—by such as you see the public gratitude now performing about this funeral; and that the virtues of many ought not to be endangered by the management of any one person when their credit must precariously depend on his oration, which may be good and may be bad….

We are happy in a form of government which cannot envy the laws of our neighbors—for it hath served as a model to others, but is original at Athens. And this our form, as committed not to the few but to the whole body of the people, is called a democracy. How different soever in a private capacity, we all enjoy the same general equality our laws are fitted to preserve; and superior honors just as we excel. The public administration is not confined to a particular family but is attainable only by merit. Poverty is not a hindrance, since whoever is able to serve his country meets with no obstacle to preferment from his first obscurity. The offices of the state we go through without obstructions from one another, and live together in the mutual endearments of private life without suspicions, not angry with a neighbor for following the bent of his own humor, nor putting on that countenance of discontent which pains though it cannot punish—so that in private life we converse without diffidence or damage, while we dare not on any account offend against the public, through the reverence we bear to the magistrates and the laws, chiefly to those enacted for redress of the injured, and to those unwritten. a breach of which is thought a disgrace.

Our laws have further provided for the mind most frequent intermissions of care by the appointment of public recreations and sacrifices throughout the year, elegantly performed with a peculiar pomp, the daily delight of which is a charm that puts melancholy to flight. The grandeur of this our Athens causeth the produce of the whole earth to be imported here, by which we reap a familiar enjoyment, not more of the delicacies of our own growth than of those of other nations.

In the affairs of war we excel those of our enemies, who adhere to methods opposite to our own. For we lay open Athens to general resort, nor ever drive any stranger from us whom either improvement or curiosity hath brought amongst us, lest any enemy should hurt us by seeing what is never concealed. We place not so great a confidence in the preparatives and artifices of war as in the native warmth of our souls impelling us to action. In point of education the youth of some peoples are inured, by a course of laborious exercise, to support toil and exercise like men, but we, notwithstanding our easy and elegant way of life, face all the dangers of war as intrepidly as they….

In our manner of living we show an elegance tempered with frugality, and we cultivate philosophy without enervating the mind. We display our wealth in the season of beneficence, and not in the vanity of discourse. A confession of poverty is disgrace to no man; no effort to avoid it is disgrace indeed. There is visible in the same persons an attention to their own private concerns and those of the public; and in others engaged in the labors of life there is a competent skill in the affairs of government. For we are the only people who think him that does not meddle in state affairs not indolent but good for nothing. And yet we pass the soundest judgments and are quick at catching the right apprehensions of things, not thinking that words are prejudicial to actions, but rather the not being duly prepared by previous debate before we are obliged to proceed to execution. Herein consists our distinguishing excellence, that in the hour of action we show the greatest courage, and yet debate beforehand the expediency of our measures. The courage of others is the result of ignorance; deliberation makes them cowards. And those undoubtedly must be owned to have the greatest souls, who, most acutely sensible of the miseries of war and the sweets of peace, are not hence in the least deterred from facing danger.

In acts of beneficence, further, we differ from the many. We preserve friends not by receiving, but by conferring, obligations. For he who does a kindness hath the advantage over him who, by the law of gratitude, becomes a debtor to his benefactor. The person obliged is compelled to act the more insipid part, conscious that a return of kindness is merely a payment and not an obligation. And we alone are splendidly beneficent to others, not so much from interested motives as for the credit of pure liberality. I shall sum up what yet remains by only adding that our Athens in general is the school of Greece, and that every single Athenian amongst us is excellently formed, by his personal qualification, for all the various scenes of active life, acting with a most graceful demeanor and a most ready habit of dispatch.

That I have not on this occasion made use of a pomp of words, but the truth of facts, that height to which by such a conduct this state hath risen, is an undeniable proof. For we are now the only people of the world who are found by experience to be greater than in report….

In the just defense of such a state, these victims of their own valor, scorning the ruin threatened to it, have valiantly fought and bravely died. And every one of those who survive is ready, I am persuaded, to sacrifice life in such a cause. And for this reason have I enlarged so much on national points, to give the clearest proof that in the present war we have more at stake than men whose public advantages are not so valuable, and to illustrate, by actual evidence, how great a commendation is due to them who are now my subject, and the greatest part of which they have already received. For the encomiums with which I have celebrated the state have been earned for it by the bravery of these and of men like these. And such compliments might be thought too high and exaggerated if passed on any Greeks but them alone.

The fatal period to which these gallant souls are now reduced is the surest evidence of their merit—an evidence begun in their lives and completed in their deaths. For it is a debt of justice to pay superior honors to men who have devoted their lives in fighting for their country, though inferior to others in every virtue but that of valor. Their last service effaceth all former demerits—it extends to the public; their private demeanors reached only to a few. Yet not one of these was at all induced to shrink from danger, through fondness of those delights which the peaceful affluent life bestows—not one was the less lavish of his life, through that flattering hope attendance upon want, that poverty at length might be exchanged for affluence. One passion there was in their minds much stronger than these—the desire of vengeance on their enemies. Regarding this as the most honorable prize of dangers, they boldly rushed towards the mark to glut revenge and then to satisfy those secondary passions. The uncertain event they had already secured in hope; what their eyes showed plainly must be done they trusted their own valor to accomplish, thinking it more glorious to defend themselves and die in the attempt than to yield and live. From the reproach of cowardice, indeed, they fled, but presented their bodies to the shock of battle; when, insensible of fear, but triumphing in hope, in the doubtful charge they instantly dropped—and thus discharged the duty which brave men owed to their country.