Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (78 page)

When a man is lying in a shell hole, if he just stays there all day, a German will get to him eventually. The hell with that idea. The hell with taking it. My men don’t dig foxholes. I don’t want them to. Foxholes only slow up an offensive. Keep moving. And don’t give the enemy time to dig one either. We’ll win this war, but we’ll win it only by fighting and by showing the Germans that we’ve got more guts than they have; or ever will have.

War is a bloody, killing business. You’ve got to spill their blood, or they will spill yours. Rip them up the belly. Shoot them in the guts. When shells are hitting all around you and you wipe the dirt off your face and realize that instead of dirt it’s the blood and guts of what once was your best friend beside you, you’ll know what to do!

I don’t want to get any messages saying, “I am holding my position.” We are not holding a goddamned thing. Let the Germans do that. We are advancing constantly and we are not interested in holding on to anything, except the enemy’s balls. We are going to twist his balls and kick the living shit out of him all of the time. Our basic plan of operation is to advance and to keep on advancing regardless of whether we have to go over, under, or through the enemy.

From time to time there will be some complaints that we are pushing our people too hard. I don’t give a good goddamn about such complaints. I believe in the old and sound rule that an ounce of sweat will save a gallon of blood. The harder
we
push, the more Germans we will kill. The more Germans we kill, the fewer of our men will be killed. Pushing means fewer casualties. I want you all to remember that.

There is one great thing that you men will all be able to say after this war is over and you are home once again. You may be thankful that twenty years from now, when you are sitting by the fireplace with your grandson on your knee and he asks you what you did in the great World War II, you won’t have to shift him to the other knee, cough, and say, “Well, your granddaddy shoveled shit in Louisiana.” No, sir, you can look him straight in the eye and say, “Son, your granddaddy rode with the Great Third Army and a son-of-a-goddamned-bitch named Georgie Patton!”

That is all.

One minute Faulkner was a journeyman literary-type author and romantic poet and the next I guess it was when the Depression began he found a voice in the fictional Yoknapatawpha county of Mississippi, his characters transcending their setting to make their case about the capacity of human beings to endure suffering and emerge ennobled if still in pain

Then he won the Nobel prize for
The Sound and the Fury
and
As I Lay Dying
and the quiet life of the artist in Oxford Miss was over and he became a big name and the stream of consciousness technique was accepted as a proper literary form so long as you didn’t use it too much

Then he went to Stockholm and on December 10, 1950, gave a better short speech than most writers write and it proved you didn’t have to be a nihilist to be taken seriously you could be affirmative and even optimistic and still be considered gutsy

Remember the key word is prevail it means win but isn’t so corny

***

I FEEL THAT
this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work—a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and
women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question, When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

Six weeks after the failure of American-backed rebels at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs, President John F. Kennedy met General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna and apparently impressed him as indecisive. The Soviet leader first tested him on Berlin, forcing the issue of the Allied power’s access to that divided city. Kennedy went on U.S. television to say that he would take the nation to war, if necessary, to defend Berlin. Khrushchev’s response was not to risk a war but to erect the Berlin Wall. A year later, in the Cuban missile “eyeball to eyeball” confrontation, Kennedy rebuffed another Communist probe.

By 1963, the youthful American president had established his bona fides as a staunch defender of the West against Communist expansionism. On June 26, 1963, as more than a million Berliners lined the streets to shout “Ken-ned-dee,” and with red cloth hanging from the Brandenburg Gate to prevent East Berliners from seeing the reception, he addressed a throng in Rudolf Wilde Platz.

The short, almost shouted speech—implicitly based on John Donne’s idea that no man is an island—employs repetition skillfully, both in the “Let them come to Berlin” lines and the “
Ich bin ein Berliner
” theme stated fore and aft.

***

I AM PROUD
to come to this city as the guest of your distinguished mayor, who has symbolized throughout the world the fighting spirit of West Berlin. And I am proud to visit the Federal Republic with your distinguished chancellor, who for so many years has committed Germany to democracy and freedom and progress, and to come here in the company of my fellow American General Clay, who has been in this city during its great moments of crisis and will come again if ever needed.

Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was
Civis Romanus sum
. Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is
Ich bin ein Berliner
.

I appreciate my interpreter translating my German!

There are many people in the world who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin. There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin. And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin. And there are even a few who say that it is true that communism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress.
Lass’ sie nach Berlin kommen
. Let them come to Berlin.

Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us. I want to say, on behalf of my countrymen, who live many miles away on the other side of the Atlantic, who are far distant from you, that they take the greatest pride that they have been able to share with you, even from a distance, the story of the last eighteen years. I know of no town, no city, that has been besieged for eighteen years that still lives with the vitality and the force, and the hope and the determination of the city of West Berlin. While the wall is the most obvious and vivid demonstration of the failures of the Communist system, for all the world to see, we take no satisfaction in it, for it is, as your mayor has said, an offense not only against history but an offense against humanity, separating families, dividing husbands and wives and brothers and sisters, and dividing a people who wish to be joined together.

What is true of this city is true of Germany—real, lasting peace in Europe can never be assured as long as one German out of four is denied the elementary right of free men, and that is to make a free choice. In eighteen years of peace and good faith, this generation of Germans has earned the right to be free, including the right to unite their families and their nation in lasting peace, with good will to all people. You live in a defended island of freedom, but your life is part of the main. So let me ask you, as I close, to lift your eyes beyond the dangers of today, to the hopes of tomorrow, beyond the freedom merely of this city of Berlin, or your country of Germany, to the advance of freedom everywhere, beyond the wall to the day of peace with justice, beyond yourselves and ourselves to all mankind.

Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free. When all are free, then we can look forward to that day when this city will be joined as one and this country and this great continent of Europe
in a peaceful and hopeful globe. When that day finally comes, as it will, the people of West Berlin can take sober satisfaction in the fact that they were in the front lines for almost two decades.

All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words
Ich bin ein Berliner
.

Conservative Republican Dirksen of Illinois came to national attention denouncing moderate Thomas E. Dewey of New York at a GOP convention for having “led us down the road to defeat.” In later years, the senator became more likable, especially to journalists who enjoyed his colorful dramatics in a deep baritone and dubbed him the Wizard of Ooze.

Here is an example of a “little speech” of little legislative import, but touching a chord of symbolism that reverberates long after speeches on weighty matters have lost their zing.

Dirksen periodically submitted a bill to the Senate to establish a national floral symbol, much as the American bald eagle was the animal symbol (over the objection of Benjamin Franklin, who preferred the turkey). Others thought no national flower should be chosen, reflecting the idea of the United States as a bouquet of many states’ flowers, but Dirksen vainly plumped for the marigold. This speech was given on April 17, 1967; in 1986, Congress decided to adopt a national floral symbol, and President Reagan signed the bill so designating the rose.

***

MR. PRESIDENT: ON
January 8, 1965, I introduced Senate Joint Resolution 19, to designate the American marigold—
Tagetes erecta
—as the national floral emblem of the United States. Today I am introducing the same resolution with the suggestion that it again be referred to the Committee on the Judiciary.

The American flag is not a mere assembly of colors, stripes, and stars but, in fact, truly symbolizes our origin, development, and growth.

The American eagle, king of the skies, is so truly representative of our might and power.

A national floral emblem should represent the virtues of our land and be national in character.

The marigold is a native of North America and can in truth and in fact be called an American flower.

It is national in character, for it grows and thrives in every one of the fifty states of this nation. It conquers the extremes of temperature. It well withstands the summer sun and the evening chill.

Its robustness reflects the hardihood and character of the generations who pioneered and built this land into a great nation. It is not temperamental about fertility. It resists its natural enemies, the insects. It is self-reliant and requires little attention. Its spectacular colors—lemon and orange, rich brown and deep mahogany—befit the imaginative qualities of this nation.

It is as sprightly as the daffodil, as colorful as the rose, as resolute as the zinnia, as delicate as the carnation, as haughty as the chrysanthemum, as aggressive as the petunia, as ubiquitous as the violet, and as stately as the snapdragon.

It beguiles the senses and ennobles the spirit of man. It is the delight of the amateur gardener and a constant challenge to the professional.