Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (60 page)

Let me say one word further. I feel entirely satisfied with the treatment I have received on my trial. Considering all the circumstances, it has been more generous than I expected. But I feel no consciousness of guilt. I have stated from the first what was my intention, and what was not. I never had any design against the liberty of any person, nor any disposition to commit treason or incite slaves to rebel or make any general insurrection. I never encouraged any man to do so, but always discouraged any idea of that kind.

Let me say, also, in regard to the statements made by some of those who were connected with me, I hear it has been stated by some of them that I have induced them to join me. But the contrary is true. I do not say this to injure them, but as regretting their weakness. Not one but joined me of his own accord, and the greater part at his own expense. A number of them I never saw, and never had a word of conversation with, till the day they came to me, and that was for the purpose I have stated.

Now I have done.

For King Edward VIII to marry Wallis Simpson, a divorcée, he was required by the religious and political establishment to abdicate the British throne. On December 11, 1936, the former king, now the duke of Windsor, spoke to an international audience from Windsor Castle in the radio broadcast of his farewell address.

Although Winston Churchill is often credited with writing the farewell, the duke of Windsor denied such reports and said that Churchill added only a few phrases to the speech that he himself wrote. This is probably true, although his friend and aide Walter Monckton surely had a hand in the drafting. Lord Beaverbrook called it “a triumph of natural and sincere eloquence,” but Lady Ravensdale considered it “hot-making and melodramatic.” The abdicating king’s mother, Queen Mary, wrote bitterly of “the failure of my Son in not carrying on the duties and responsibilities of the Sovereign of our great Empire,” and many commoners in Britain felt he had “let down the side” by putting love before duty; Albert Julius, a jeweler in Piccadilly, a generation later traced the decline of British moral and political power to that day. But Churchill, in bidding farewell to the ex-monarch after the speech, quoted poet Andrew Marvell’s ode on the beheading of Charles I: “He nothing common did or mean / Upon that memorable scene.”

Succeeded by his brother, George VI, the duke of Windsor was introduced on the broadcast by his brother’s instructions as “His Royal Highness Prince Edward.” Legend has it that Edward VIII’s reference to “radio” rather than “wireless” was responsible for making the older term obsolete, but the address itself contains neither word. In America, radio listeners in the early-morning hours were moved by the brave-sounding words over the crackling signal; the anthologist, then six, learned of the impact a speech could have as he listened with his mother, who cried at the royal reference to “the woman I love.”

***

AT LONG LAST
I am able to say a few words of my own. I have never wanted to withhold anything, but until now it has not been constitutionally possible for me to speak.

A few hours ago I discharged my last duty as king and emperor, and now that I have been succeeded by my brother, the duke of York, my first words must be to declare my allegiance to him. This I do with all my heart.

You all know the reasons which have impelled me to renounce the throne. But I want you to understand that in making up my mind I did not forget the country or the empire, which, as prince of Wales and lately as king, I have for twenty-five years tried to serve.

But you must believe me when I tell you that I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as king as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love.

And I want you to know that the decision I have made has been mine and mine alone. This was a thing I had to judge entirely for myself. The other person most nearly concerned has tried up to the last to persuade me to take a different course.

I have made this, the most serious decision of my life, only upon the single thought of what would, in the end, be best for all.

This decision has been made less difficult to me by the sure knowledge that my brother, with his long training in the public affairs of this country and with his fine qualities, will be able to take my place forthwith without interruption or injury to the life and progress of the empire. And he has one matchless blessing, enjoyed by so many of you, and not bestowed on me—a happy home with his wife and children.

During these hard days I have been comforted by Her Majesty my mother and by my family. The ministers of the crown and, in particular, Mr. Baldwin, the prime minister, have always treated me with full consideration. There has never been any constitutional difference between me and them, and between me and Parliament. Bred in the constitutional tradition by my father, I should never have allowed any such issue to arise.

Ever since I was prince of Wales, and later on when I occupied the throne, I have been treated with the greatest kindness by all classes of the people wherever I have lived or journeyed throughout the empire. For that I am very grateful.

I now quit altogether public affairs, and I lay down my burden. It may
be some time before I return to my native land, but I shall always follow the fortunes of the British race and empire with profound interest, and if at any time in the future I can be found of service to His Majesty in a private station, I shall not fail.

And now, we all have a new king. I wish him and you, his people, happiness and prosperity with all my heart. God bless you all! God save the king!

On July 4, 1939, Lou Gehrig stood before a crowd of more than sixty thousand fans in Yankee Stadium to bid farewell to a game in which he’d become legendary. Within two years of that tearful speech, the baseball great was dead of a paralyzing disease that still bears his name.

In spite of the fatal ailment, however, the “Iron Horse” heroically spoke in 1939 of his great fortune in teammates and family. As first baseman of the New York Yankees, Gehrig had played 2,130 consecutive games, a major-league record; with a career batting average of .340, he became known as the Pride of the Yankees.

The emotion of his farewell speech wells up in this direct address to his fans, particularly in the repeated assertion of “Sure, I’m lucky.”

***

FANS, FOR THE
past two weeks you have been reading about a bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. I have been in ballparks for seventeen years and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans.

Look at these grand men. Which of you wouldn’t consider it the highlight of his career just to associate with them for even one day?

Sure, I’m lucky. Who wouldn’t consider it an honor to have known Jacob Ruppert; also the builder of baseball’s greatest empire, Ed Barrow; to have spent six years with that wonderful little fellow Miller Huggins; then to have spent the next nine years with that outstanding leader, that smart student of psychology—the best manager in baseball today—Joe McCarthy!

Sure, I’m lucky. When the New York Giants, a team you would give your right arm to beat, and vice versa, sends you a gift, that’s something! When everybody down to the groundskeepers and those boys in white coats remember you with trophies, that’s something.

When you have a wonderful mother-in-law who takes sides with you in squabbles against her own daughter, that’s something. When you have a father and mother who work all their lives so that you can have an education and build your body, it’s a blessing! When you have a wife who has been a tower of strength and shown more courage than you dreamed existed, that’s the finest I know.

So I close in saying that I might have had a tough break; but I have an awful lot to live for!

As a soldier, the man who had served in World War II as supreme commander of the Allied powers in the Far East, and later as commander of the UN forces in Korea, was aloof, magisterial, decisive, and brilliant; as a speaker, the man who transfixed a joint meeting of Congress after being fired for insubordination by Harry Truman was purposeful, serious, disingenuous about his nonpartisanship, and in the end devastatingly sentimental.

The MacArthur style was usually unabashedly florid. After taking the Japanese surrender aboard the USS
Missouri
on September 2, 1945, he condemned war in these terms: “If we will not devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door. The problem basically is theological and involves a spiritual recrudescence and improvement of human character that will synchronize with our almost matchless advances… of the past two thousand years.” Only Douglas MacArthur would write and say a mouthfilling, unfamiliar word like “recrudescence” instead of “revival” (and, in fact, the sense of “breaking out afresh” is rooted in the return of a rash and is unsuited for association with spirituality). On another occasion, in his “duty, honor, country” address at West Point in 1962 (see p. 83), he showed himself to be the master of the high style of formal hortatory oratory.

His “Old soldiers never die” speech, as it came to be known, is different: the tone is subdued, the cadences thoughtful. the vision strategic. Its voice is not martial but orderly, as arguments are marshaled: “With this brief insight into the surrounding areas, I now turn to the Korean conflict.” Though the April 19, 1951, speech about that war—called “conflict”—is remembered for its tear-jerking peroration, it reads decades later like a sober exposition of a view of warfare that holds up well against the ambiguities of Vietnam.

I stand on this rostrum with a sense of deep humility and great pride—humility in the wake of those great American architects of our history who have stood here before me, pride in the reflection that this forum of legislative debate represents human liberty in the purest form yet devised.

Here are centered the hopes and aspirations and faiths of the entire human race.

I do not stand here as advocate for any partisan cause, for the issues are fundamental and reach quite beyond the realm of partisan consideration. They must be resolved on the highest plane of national interest if our course is to prove sound and our future protected.

***

I TRUST, THEREFORE
, that you will do me the justice of receiving that which I have to say as solely expressing the considered viewpoint of a fellow American.

I address you with neither rancor nor bitterness in the fading twilight of life, with but one purpose in mind: to serve my country.

The issues are global, and so interlocked that to consider the problems of one sector oblivious to those of another is but to court disaster for the whole. While Asia is commonly referred to as the gateway to Europe, it is no less true that Europe is the gateway to Asia, and the broad influence of the one cannot fail to have its impact upon the other. There are those who claim our strength is inadequate to protect on both fronts, that we cannot divide our effort. I can think of no greater expression of defeatism.

If a potential enemy can divide his strength on two fronts, it is for us to counter his effort. The Communist threat is a global one. Its successful advance in one sector threatens the destruction of every other sector. You cannot appease or otherwise surrender to communism in Asia without simultaneously undermining our efforts to halt its advance in Europe.

Beyond pointing out these general truisms, I shall confine my discussion to the general areas of Asia.

Before one may objectively assess the situation now existing there, he must comprehend something of Asia’s past and the revolutionary changes which have marked her course up to the present. Long exploited by the so-called colonial powers, with little opportunity to achieve any degree of social justice, individual dignity, or a higher standard of life such as guided our own noble administration of the Philippines, the peoples of Asia found their opportunity in the war just past to throw off the shackles of colonialism and now see the dawn of new opportunity, and heretofore unfelt dignity, and the self-respect of political freedom.

Mustering half of the earth’s population, and 60 percent of its natural
resources, these peoples are rapidly consolidating a new force, both moral and material, with which to raise the living standard and erect adaptations of the design of modern progress to their own distinct cultural environments.

Whether one adheres to the concept of colonization or not, this is the direction of Asian progress and it may not be stopped. It is a corollary to the shift of the world economic frontiers as the whole epicenter of world affairs rotates back toward the area whence it started.

In this situation, it becomes vital that our own country orient its policies in consonance with this basic evolutionary condition rather than pursue a course blind to the reality that the colonial era is now past and the Asian peoples covet the right to shape their own free destiny. What they seek now is friendly guidance, understanding, and support, not imperious direction; the dignity of equality, not the shame of subjugation.

Their prewar standard of life, pitifully low, is infinitely lower now in the devastation left in war’s wake. World ideologies play little part in Asian thinking and are little understood.

What the people strive for is the opportunity for a little more food in their stomachs, a little better clothing on their backs, a little firmer roof over their heads, and the realization of a normal nationalist urge for political freedom.