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A POLITICAL SPEECH can boost a politician’s ratings or even secure a place in the history books. But save an office seeker’s life? Sounds like a movie script that even Hollywood might pass on.
But truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. And truth be told, a 50-page speech did in fact save Teddy Roosevelt’s life.
Campaigning on the Bull Moose ticket for a third term in office in October 1912, Roosevelt was making his way through a crowd that had gathered in front of the Hotel Gilpatrick in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, when would-be assassin John Schrank pulled out a .32 caliber gun, pointed it at the former president’s chest, and pulled the trigger. Luckily much of the force of the bullet was absorbed by the dense pages, which he had tucked into his jacket pocket. Although the bullet lodged itself just short of his lung, Roosevelt, in true Rough Rider style, initially refused medical attention. Instead, he pulled himself up to the podium and started speaking.
“Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose,” he said, blood staining through his white vest. “Fortunately I had my manuscript. You see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet — there is where the bullet went through. It probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so I cannot make a very long speech. But I will try my best.”
Try he did, ad-libbing much of the words because the bullet had ruptured a hole through the paper, rendering huge chunks unreadable. Remarkably, Roosevelt spoke for a full 90 minutes before going to the hospital.
The slug was never removed.
Right Words, Right Time
Most political speeches given in America don’t have quite as colorful a history — and don’t make as big an impact on the speaker or the nation. But many have become nearly as memorable. Sometimes it’s the words themselves that stand out, particularly when delivered at a decisive moment in history.
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats helped pull America out of the depression, at least psychologically. Ronald Reagan’s speech in 1986 following the Challenger disaster soothed a stunned nation. More recently, in an address to Congress and the nation, President George W. Bush provided one voice following the September 11 terrorist attacks in what one reporter called “a presidential speech for the ages.”
As Newsweek wrote a few days later, “Americans rally round a president in a crisis but require a credible figure in the role. Bush, by the end of the week, had become that man in the voters’ eyes.”
Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 1995 address to the United Nation’s Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing was powerful because the moment, the message, and the messenger came together as one, says Michael Waldman IOP 1999, a former Kennedy School lecturer and speechwriter for President Bill Clinton. “That’s really what makes a great speech.”
In 1984, Massachusetts State Representative Alice Wolf MPA 1978, IOP 1994 was moved by Geraldine Ferraro IOP 1998 when she spoke in Cambridge during her bid for vice president — a milestone for the nation.
“It was partially the circumstance — she was the first female nominee in history — and she was a normal woman doing it,” Wolf says. “After the meeting, I was floating.”
Others vividly remember Robert Kennedy’s 1968 impromptu Indianapolis announcement that Martin Luther King, Jr., had just been shot. Despite fear of riots, Kennedy refused a police escort to the mostly black neighborhood where he spoke.
“People were actually afraid of the reaction to RFK’s speech,” Waldman says. “Kennedy said that his own brother had been killed by a white man. He helped turn hatred into love and found a common note of suffering with his audience.”
“The majority of the people had not yet heard the news. Those that did were angry. RFK went up there, without prepared text, and was both collected and noticeably shaken,” says Eric Schnure, a former member of Vice President Al Gore’s speechwriting team. “I don’t think any speechwriter could have achieved that. It really shows how powerful speeches can be when they come from the heart.”
Marie Danziger, director of the school’s Communications Program, isn’t surprised that Robert Kennedy’s speech resonates with so many people.
“In the end, most audiences are looking for wisdom and guidance from political speakers, as if we were listening to sermons,” Danziger says. They aren’t easily persuaded by rational argument alone — something early Greek orators recognized and canonized in theories that became the foundation for contemporary public speaking.
“A clear, rational argument (logos) is crucial,” she says, explaining Aristotle’s three forms of rhetoric. “But in the end, emotional impact (pathos) and personal credibility (ethos) are even more important.”
Ronald Reagan, a former actor and baseball announcer, understood this. He “spoke in warm, velvety tones that enveloped listeners and made them feel good,” writes Professor David Gergen IOP 1984 in Essence of Power, his chronicle of working as a speechwriter for four presidents. “Woven into almost every speech Reagan gave, especially on memorable occasions, was an evocation of what America had been and could be again. Liberty, heroism, honor, a love of country, a love of God…they went deep with Reagan, and as he discovered from years on the speaking circuit, they went deep with most Americans.”
Richard Nixon also understood this in 1952, when he gave the “Checkers” speech — considered to be one of the most successful political speeches in history. Nixon, then a senator who had just been chosen as Dwight D. Eisenhower’s running mate, bypassed logos when trying to clear his name from charges of having a secret campaign fund. Instead, he played up ethos and pathos, drumming up public sympathy. With his wife sitting besides him, he apologized to a sea of Americans on television and appealed to the senses: Senate offices are expensive to run! My wife never owned a mink coat!
“But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat,” he said in this now-famous line. “I always tell her she would look good in anything.” The clincher was when he explained why a Texas supporter had sent a cocker spaniel to the family as a gift. “Our little girl Tricia, the six-year-old, named it Checkers,” Nixon said, affectionately. “And you know, the kids, like all kids, loved the dog, and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we are going to keep it.”
Style Counts
Unfortunately, Nixon’s “Checkers” speech was the exception to the rule. His usual “style” as a speaker didn’t always mesh with the public. And style, many believe, can make or break a speaker in the court of popular opinion. Nixon disliked press conferences, holding fewer than 30 during his presidency, compared with FDR, who held 30 by his third month. And although he employed the first formally structured White House speechwriting office, his writers didn’t have regular access to him. “Nixon was famously aloof and preferred that most of his staff communicate with him on paper rather than face-to-face,” Gergen said. There was often a clumsiness about him. “His words were out of sync with the rest of him.”
Gerald Ford also got pegged as a bumbler — an unfair label, says Gergen. Calvin Coolidge hated public speaking and rarely spoke “off the cuff.” When a reporter bet his co-workers that he could get the president to say three words, Coolidge allegedly replied, “You lose.”
Harry Truman didn’t hate public speaking but shunned flowery language, opting instead for the straightforward.
“I try to deliver my speeches simply and directly,” he once said. “I don’t go for theatrics. I do not believe that the American people expect their speakers to be entertainers.”
Truman would probably scoff at the direction of political speeches today. For starters, the sheer volume for presidents has increased. Waldman, Clinton’s speechwriter, said his boss spoke on average about 550 times in a typical nonelection year, compared with Ronald Reagan (about 320 times) and Harry Truman (80 times).
And the day of the BIG political speech is gone, say skeptics, with obligatory stump speeches meant to appeal primarily to party loyalists. More and more, politicians are turning into the entertainers that Truman shunned, hitting the daytime and late-night talk show circuit to deliver their message. Clinton on MTV. Kerry on Jon Stewart. Bush on Regis.
For some, popular TV lets them be funny and human in ways that conventional speech formats don’t. Others, however, know they can’t pull off the humor.
“I’m not a tub-thumping, stump-kicking speaker,” said Vice President Dick Cheney to the Los Angeles Times when asked about his style. “I’m a fairly serious person, talking about serious issues. I don’t expect to do anything out of character.”
That’s critical, says Danziger. Find your own style, even if it isn’t ready for David Letterman, and stick to it. “Inexperienced speakers try to imitate someone they admire, or reach for all the usual political jargon,” she says. “They lose our attention and trust in the process.”
Bush’s chief speechwriter Mike Gerson, comparing his boss’s style with John Kennedy’s, insists that Bush “won’t say things that he’s not comfortable with.” Instead, “characteristic of President Kennedy, he puts an emphasis on elevated language and combines it with a west Texan directness.”
“Who the speaker is speaks as loudly as anything he says,” writes Gergen — a point that is often lost on politicians and their staffs. “I have drafted enough presidential speeches over the years to know the temptation to string together a series of sound bites, spice in a few facts, dress it up with quotes from a classic, and deliver it to the Oval Office — Domino Speechwriting, guaranteed within 30 minutes. It doesn’t take long to realize, however, that the best-written speech since Cicero will fall flat in the mouth of the wrong person.”
Which is why many politicians, with the exception of modern-day presidents, write their own speeches or occasionally turn to staffers for help (as George Washington did when Alexander Hamilton and James Madison helped draft his farewell address). Abraham Lincoln wrote his own copy, producing seminal speeches that “redefined the conception of our country and its founding principles,” says Waldman. The “Gettsyburg Address” commemorated the most devastating battle of the Civil War. The “Emancipation Proclamation” called for an end to slavery.
Wilbert Young SEF 1988, mayor of Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania also writes his own. “I used to work on Capitol Hill and wrote speeches for other elected officials,” he says. “But even if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t use speechwriters much. There’s an advantage to having your own style and being confident with where you want to go, rather than have someone take you where you want to go.”
“You hit the ball out of the park when writing and speaker feel like one,” says Danziger. “When you can’t tell the dancer from the dance.”
Representative Barbara Jordan IOP 1972 did this beautifully throughout her career with a voice described by Newsday as having the “the timbre of a trumpet and enunciation that would shame many network newscasters.” As Clinton said at her funeral in 1996, “When Barbara Jordan talked, we listened.’’
The personal also helps.
Michael Dukakis wasn’t considered the most stirring of speakers, but he did understand the importance of this. Most memorable, says Ira Jackson MPA 1976, was his surprisingly successful acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention in Atlanta, when he was running for president in 1988. Emerging from the floor to Neil Diamond’s “Coming to America,” Dukakis talked about his Greek heritage. Beyond the words, says Jackson, “perhaps the most important elements were the warm, personal immigrant story that helped reveal a human dimension that the public hadn’t seen before...Dukakis left Atlanta ahead 17 percent in the polls.”
John Kerry may not have received quite as big a “bump” in
the polls following his passionate acceptance speech in July, in Boston, but like Dukakis, his use of the personal (his family, Vietnam) helped elevate his status from a ho-hum speaker to someone who had “nailed it,” as Joe Klein of Time magazine said. The buzz the next day was that Kerry had exceeded expectations and had given the speech of his life.
Hillary Rodham Clinton also has a knack for the personal, says Laura Schiller, one of her former speechwriters.
“One of the reasons, ironically, that all of us loved working for her was that she didn’t need speechwriting. She had such a good sense of what she wanted to say,” Schiller says. “We were there to help her, but you knew she’d be fine on her own.”
Like the first lady, Schiller says that President Clinton “could probably say it better off the top of his head than anyone could write it. He’s a brilliant orator who has a way of taking words off of the page and connecting with an audience. Any audience. There aren’t many people who can connect like Bill Clinton.”
Likened to a “jazz improviser” who “riffs all over the place,” Clinton is famous for his sermonlike speeches. “A pulpit in a black church brings out the best in Clinton,” wrote Nixon speechwriter William Safire in the New York Times.
Politics brought out the best in John Kennedy, whose “Ask Not” speech galvanized a generation to go into public service. Ted Sorensen IOP 2003 served as Kennedy’s chief counsel. Aside from set occasions like the State of the Union or the Democratic Convention, he says that Kennedy usually ad-libbed entire speeches, especially on the campaign trail.
“He was a very articulate man,” Sorensen says, adding, “I’m proud of the role that I played in many of his speeches, but President Kennedy authored all of them.”
So does former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, considered by many as one of the nation’s greatest living orators. Deeply passionate, his self-penned 1999 Forum address at the Kennedy School was dubbed a “masterpiece” by the Boston Globe, as were two 1984 speeches: one at the Democratic National Convention, where he challenged Reagan’s vision of America as “a shining city on a hill,” as well as “E Pur Si Muove,” that followed the Democrats’ loss to Reagan that year.
FDR also wrote his own. He was so connected to his work that by the time he went to give a speech he knew it almost by heart and barely needed to look at the written pages.
You Don’t Have to Be a Politician
Elected officials aren’t the only speakers who connect with the public. Danziger says that some of the best public speaking comes from nonpoliticians telling their stories “with an honesty that goes right to the gut…. Unfortunately, most politicians are too polished, too ‘handled’ to move me, maybe because they’re speaking someone else’s words.”
Jesse Jackson rouses crowds whenever he speaks, no matter the topic. John L. Lewis, chief spokesperson for unionized coal miners for more than 40 years, filled his speeches with bombastic phrases such as “I am temperamentally incapable of sitting with you in sackcloth and ashes, endlessly intoning.” Eleanor Roosevelt, the first woman to speak in front of a national convention, gave voice to people without access to power, as did abolitionist Frederick Douglass, whose speeches were so persuasive that he was asked by the American Anti-Slavery Society to tour around the country for the cause. Patrick Henry’s stirring “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!” speech in 1775 kindled the flames of the American Revolution. Susan B. Anthony’s 1873 speech supporting a woman’s right to vote followed her arrest for casting an illegal vote in the presidential election inspired generations of women.
And perhaps the granddaddy of all speakers was nonpolitician Martin Luther King, Jr., whose 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech was heard by 200,000 people.
“We witness the emotional power, but it’s more than that,” Waldman says. “It’s striking. It goes back to the core founding ideals….King quoted the Declaration of Independence directly. It was powerful because he tapped into the most primal, patriotic, shared values.”
“His speech was powerful because he was speaking to what a whole race, even the country, was feeling,” says Wilbert Young. “It’s the same for all great speakers. They know how to use words to rally people and bring them together to make them stronger.”
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