It is a custom of long standing among families that prize Jewish
scholarship for the groom to deliver an original Talmudic insight
at the engagement party. This essentially involves laying out some
legal question and offering some novel approach to its
adjudication. Since only about 30 percent of Yeshiva students ever
reach that level of juridical creativity, a lot of frantic tutoring
often precedes these events. (In recent years, a counter-custom has
evolved, where the groom gets about two sentences out of his mouth
and his friends drown him out by breaking into song. Then he sits
down in mock resignation.)
Some 50 years ago, a friend of my father made his presentation
flawlessly. The crowd at the party was abuzz. Everyone could
recognize the excellence of style, while the scholarly types were
also praising the content. Finally, his old Lithuanian Rabbi, no
doubt suffering from years of being underappreciated by his
congregation, began to “confess” to people that he had taught the
material to the young man. The upshot was a familial humiliation
that eventually drove the couple apart; the wedding was
canceled.
The moral of the story is simple and I have lived by it through
many projects as a ghost-writer. The operative slogan is: “I get
the cash, he gets the credit.” The speaker must be able to bank on
his quote not being haunted by the ghost.
With this in mind, I was disturbed to read in the June 6 issue
of U.S. News and World Report an excerpt from the new book
by Douglas Brinkley, The Boys of Pointe du Hoc. It was all
about the wonderful speech that Ronald Reagan delivered in 1984 on
the 40th anniversary of the D-Day invasion at Normandy. It
celebrated the heroic climb up the jagged rock face of Pointe du
Hoc by 225 soldiers into the teeth of fierce resistance from guns
the Germans had mounted at the peak. Ninety-nine men survived and
won the skirmish to disable those guns, enabling reinforcements to
land safely to reach the battlefields.
Of those, 62 were in attendance four decades later when Reagan
proclaimed, with tears in his eyes: “These are the boys of Pointe
du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the
champions who helped free a continent. And these are the heroes who
helped end a war.”
There is no one outside direct family members and teachers who
affected my life more deeply than Ronald Reagan. I have written a
great deal about him in a number of venues including one essay that
was read by Nancy Reagan, who asked a mutual friend to convey to me
her appreciation. In that spirit, I was excited to see that
Brinkley had written the book and that U.S. News was
running the segment. I sat down to read with relish but to my
dismay none of it was about Reagan. It was about Peggy Noonan,
tracking her odyssey as a novice speechwriter going through
laborious stages of penning this classic peroration.
Let me make one thing perfectly clear. That is not Peggy
Noonan’s speech. Nor did Theodore Sorensen say: “Ask not what your
country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”
Victor Gold did not say: “Extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no
vice and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” And we
love you, Peter Robinson, but it was not you who declared: “Mr.
Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”
The orations of great men are theirs alone. They represent their
ideas and express their dreams. They are the bridge between the
vision of one person and the heart of a nation. No important leader
ever uttered a public sentiment with conviction because he found it
on a piece of paper that someone handed him in the office. “Write
them on the slate of your heart,” said the prophet, and the Ronald
Reagans and John F. Kennedys and Barry Goldwaters heed that
admonition.
The task of a speechwriter is a technical one. It is to help
arrange a format for the passionate expressions of a person too
busy to attend to every aspect. No President runs to John Updike to
ask him to write speeches. Herman Wouk worked in the Nixon White
House, but not in that capacity. Speechwriters are kids out of
college with some literary facility whose job it is to be ciphers,
to shrink their own persona into invisibility, to silence whatever
poetry is in their soul and to be a bullhorn for the voice of the
President, his intellect, his emotion, his vision, his program.
It was not a factotum or an amanuensis who stood at Pointe du
Hoc that day. It was Ronald Wilson Reagan: he was the man who took
the cliffs.
