The sun is setting by the ocean. I am again reading a book of letters varied people have written about events in their life. Some are happy, some are poignant and sad. Few were written with the consciousness that the words would be read a hundred years or more in the future.
In this day of keyboards, it is doubtful that much of our writing will endure e-mail deletions and crashed hard drives in 100 years. It is equally doubtful that the art of writing in the cursive script has much of a future.
I often have hoped that inspiration will visit, and I could write something enduring I could capture on a handwritten page. Everybody who writes occasionally hopes that they would leave some lasting thoughts behind.
Great speeches are like those letters. Our appreciation of public address has also declined, except perhaps for the early years of Barack Obama. The three best speech writers of modern times just happened to have worked for the three best platform speakers in the business. Choosing between Reagan's Peggy Noonan (Challenger Speech) and Ted Kennedy's Robert Shrum is difficult at best. A sizable percentage of scholars vote for JFK's Ted Sorenson.
Bill Clinton's Press Secretary Mike Mc Curry once told Sorenson "Every kid that comes to Washington wants to be you. Just out of the University of Nebraska's law school, Sorensen arrived in Washington, D.C. "unbelievably green," as he later admitted. "I had no legislative experience, no political experience. I'd never written a speech. I'd hardly been out of Nebraska."
Sorensen was soon involved in the authorship of Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize-winning book Profiles in Courage (1955). There is significant evidence Sorenson actually wrote the book. Whether or not those allegations are true, Sorenson always made it a point to assert that since JFK ultimately stood behind the words, he was the true author. But then there were cases in which Kennedy's voice gave out in the 1960 campaign, and Sorenson read his speeches to an audience. Reporters later looked and saw the notebook he used had nothing but blank pages.
Sorenson went on to co-author some of the most memorable presidential speeches of the last century, including Kennedy's inaugural address, the "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, and the American University commencement address on peace.
Contrast the way the current occupant of the Oval Office addresses the great questions of state with John Kennedy's approach. Be very scared and very sad.
Even after John Kennedy died, Sorensen was always emphatic in terming JFK as the "true author." In his book on Kennedy from 1965, Sorenson explained the rhetorical style of Jack Kennedy. It's still great advice and I'll append it below.
Many remember the story of a politician who resigned as a Cabinet member to return home and run for the US Senate. After he arrived and said a few remarks, he put his paper away and said, "now I have a few words." One senses that Donald Trump believes political speeches are "mere words" and that what he says simply does not have serious implications. When he does employ a speechwriter, it most probably is Stephen Miller, whose appearances on television evoke memories of Hitler's Goebbels. Mr. Miller is a "white nationalist."
Sorensen noted in 2008, "Kennedy's rhetoric when he was president turned out to be a key to his success," he told an interviewer in 2008. "His 'mere words' about Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba helped resolve the worst crisis the world has ever known without the U.S. having to fire a shot."
Interestingly Ted Sorenson also said this in a New York Times piece published on the 1960 campaign two months before his 2010 death, how there existed "far more substance and nuance than in what now passes for political debate in our increasingly commercialized, sound-bite Twitter culture, in which extremist rhetoric requires presidents to respond to outrageous claims." If only he knew what was to come.
FINAL THOUGHTS
The best Nobel Prize acceptance speech was that of William Faulkner in 1949. He was writing at the height of the Atomic Age — another time of threats and dystopian premonitions. We too live in an "Age of Anxiety" a cultural phenomenon alive and well today under different circumstances. Faulkner reflected back them on how soul-killing it is to write from a place of fear rather than a place of hope
"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."
In 1963, President John F. Kennedy summed up Winston Churchill's achievements, saying, "In the dark days and darker nights when England stood alone — and most men save Englishmen despaired of England's life — he mobilized the English language and sent it into battle."
It takes courage to speak out. We are all aware of what it's like to deal with the consequences of having our dreams broken. We also lack the ability to look into tomorrow and know what the outcomes will be. That was what Ronald Reagan wrote of in that incredible last letter that at the end of the day there would always be bright dawn for America. But he also cautioned that what took generations of Americans to build could be lost, if we were not very careful.
Under the Trump era, we have seen the President go after the press as "fake news". In 1938, Winston Churchill said dictators were afraid of the power of words. "A state of society where men may not speak their minds cannot long endure."
Like it or not, we each just may be actors in a great unfolding drama that defines the world over generations. Robert Kennedy once noted, "There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of a comfortable past which, in fact, never existed."
A more apt description of our era would be hard to find. Just as all the great demagogues do from Huey Long to Joe McCarthy, Donald Trump has been doing indecent things and lying for years and years. Will history look back at our time and say that we individually chickened out, when our freedom was at maximum peril? People are going to look back at this era and ask what were you doing when all these unjust things came down?
With all the indecency emanating from Donald Trump and his white nationalist base, we must each ask ourselves, what we are doing during this time? To listen to the White House, there are only "alternate facts" and two sides when it comes to the truth. But we all know the reality. And there’s only side: simple and objective truth.
MANY BLESSINGS - NOEL
PS- For those who might want to raise their voices and mobilize the English Language to oppose Donald or deliver a speech on everything and anything else, here's advice from the best in the business.
"The Kennedy style of speech-writing--our style, I am not reluctant to say, for he never pretended that he had time to prepare first drafts for all his speeches--evolved gradually over the years." Ted Sorenson
"We were not conscious of following the elaborate techniques later ascribed to these speeches by literary analysts. Neither of us had any special training in composition, linguistics or semantics. Our chief criterion was always audience comprehension and comfort, and this meant: (1) short speeches, short clauses, and short words, wherever possible; (2) a series of points or propositions in numbered or logical sequence wherever appropriate; and (3) the construction of sentences, phrases, and paragraphs in such a manner as to simplify, clarify and emphasize.
The test of a text was not how it appeared to the eye, but how it sounded to the ear. His best paragraphs, when reading aloud, often had a cadence, not unlike blank verse--indeed at times, keywords would rhyme. He was fond of alliterative sentences, not solely for reasons of rhetoric but to reinforce the audience's recollection of his reasoning. Sentences began, however incorrect some may have regarded it, with "And" or "But" whenever that simplified and shortened the text. His frequent use of dashes was of doubtful grammatical standing--but it simplified the delivery and even the publication of a speech in a manner no comma, parenthesis or semicolon could match.
Words were regarded as tools of precision, to be chosen and applied with a craftsman's care to whatever the situation required. He liked to be exact. But if the situation required a certain vagueness, he would deliberately choose a word of varying interpretations rather than bury his imprecision in ponderous prose.
For he disliked verbosity and pomposity in his own remarks as much as he disliked them in others. He wanted both his message and his language to be plain and unpretentious, but never patronizing. He wanted his major policy statements to be positive, specific, and definite, avoiding the use of "suggest," "perhaps" and "possible alternatives for consideration." At the same time, his emphasis on a course of reason--rejecting the extremes of either side--helped produce the parallel construction and use of contrasts with which he later became identified. He had a weakness for one unnecessary phrase: "The harsh facts of the matter are . . ."--but with few other exceptions his sentences were lean and crisp. . . .
He used little or no slang, dialect, legalistic terms, contractions, clichés, elaborate metaphors, or ornate figures of speech. He refused to be folksy or to include any phrase or image he considered corny, tasteless, or trite. He rarely used words he considered hackneyed: "humble," "dynamic," "glorious." He used none of the customary word fillers (e.g., "And I say to you that is a legitimate question and here is my answer"). And he did not hesitate to depart from strict rules of English usage when he thought adherence to them (e.g., "Our agenda are long") would grate on the listener's ear.
No speech was more than 20 to 30 minutes in duration. They were all too short and too crowded with facts to permit any excess of generalities and sentimentalities. His texts wasted no words and his delivery wasted no time."
(From - Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy. Harper & Row, 1965. Reprinted in 2009 as Kennedy: The Classic Biography)
