I WAS NEVER A BIRD ON THE UNPINIONED WING,” the elderly Winston
Churchill once told a young, aspiring politician. “You see, my boy,
when I got up to speak, I always knew precisely where every noun
and adjective would go, and how every piece of punctuation would
bed into my speech. By contrast, the best parliamentary orators,
like Lloyd George, F.E. Smith, or even that shit Aneurin Bevan,
their phrases were dictated by some inner God within.”
Why is the inner God within so totally absent from today’s
political oratory? Why does the prospect of listening to either
candidate in this coming presidential election, let alone both of
them, seem so unedifying to so many Americans? The standard of our
political discourse is presently as low as at any time in living
memory; so where have all the orators gone?
The issues are as pressing and dramatic as ever. The GDP of the
United States will soon be overtaken by that of China—possibly even
within the term of the next president. The Iranians are building a
nuclear bomb and publicly threatening to use it against Israel.
Today’s recession has been longer than any since the Great
Depression. Statesmen of an earlier era of public speaking would be
able to fashion from these crises a living body of words that would
have stiffened the electorate’s sinews and summoned up its
blood.
Yet in the last State of the Union address, this was all
President Obama was able to say: “Anyone who tells you that America
is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn’t know what
they’re talking about.” To imagine how a Churchill or a Frederick
Douglass or a Ronald Reagan would have ended that sentence after
the comma, with wit or fireworks or evisceration, is to appreciate
the dearth of genius in modern political oratory.
Once touted as a rhetorician in the mold of JFK, President Obama
has been a sore disappointment oratorically. The fluency seems to
come only when he’s seeking votes, rather than attempting to
inspire the nation. His inaugural address, Cairo speech, Nobel
acceptance speech, and four State of the Unions ought each to have
throbbed with phrases that speak to the ages, yet can you quote
even a single sentence from any of them? By contrast, consider the
quotable lines that simply flooded from a single speech of JFK’s,
his inaugural: “Let the word go forth… that the torch has been
passed to a new generation of Americans.” “Let every nation know…
that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship,
support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the
success of liberty.” “Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let
us never fear to negotiate.” “Ask not what your country can do for
you—ask what you can do for your country.” “All this will not be
finished in the first 100 days…” And so on and so thrillingly
on.
In a sense, it’s our own fault. We let our politicians get away
with their appalling clichés, truisms, cringemaking personal
references, and unfunny jokes by awarding them with ecstatic
applause because they are celebrities who have turned up to speak.
President Obama’s utterly banal commencement address to Barnard
College recently—“Never forget that the most important example a
young girl will ever follow is that of her parent.” “I wanted to do
my part to shape a better world.” “We look forward, not back.”—was
interrupted by applause (including whoops and highpitched shrieks)
no fewer than 36 times, and by respectful laughter 22 times. Small
wonder that politicians think they can say anything, however
cringemakingly mawkish. After the shootings in Tucson and the
tragic murder of a 9-year-old girl there, Obama thought it fit to
say: “If there are rain puddles in heaven, Christina is jumping in
them today.”
By a sad lack of contrast, the self-laceration inflicted by the
Republican Party in its 27 presidential primary debates between May
2011 and March 2012 proved the almost total paucity of great
oratory on its side of the aisle too. Admittedly, there is little
opportunity to show Churchillian rhetorical skills when given only
30 seconds for a rebuttal, let alone five seconds to say “yes” or
“no” to a reporter’s question. Yet even when Mitt Romney had the
podium entirely to himself for his recent commencement address at
Liberty University, he still came out with remarks such as “Among
the things in life that can be put off, being there when it matters
most isn’t one of them,” and “It is not a matter of what we are
asking of life, but rather what life is asking of us.” Swap “life”
for “country,” and you’ve got what JFK said in his inaugural
address, except that President Kennedy said it half a century ago,
and better.
There is a real possibility that the real issues at stake in
these elections—nothing less than a great clash between the
Keynesian and Hayekian economic philosophies—will be fought out in
a pedestrian and occasionally toe-curlingly embarrassing Vernacular
that will fall desperately below the level of events, while the
media convinces itself that only a candidate’s gaffes can be
considered newsworthy.
HOW WONDERFULLY REFRESHING and timely, therefore, that the
Morgan Library in New York is putting on an exhibition of the
political writings and speeches of perhaps the greatest orator of
the 20th century. Between June 8 and September 23, it is hosting
“Churchill: The Power of Words,” which I believe to be the single
most impressive collection of Churchilliana to arrive in America
since Churchill himself left her shores for the last time in 1961.
Dozens of original documents, artifacts, and recordings relating to
his mastery over the spoken and written word underline how it was
possible for Churchill, by the use of language alone, to warn the
world of the rise of Nazism and subsequently to steel it to the
sacrifices needed for victory.
You can see the handwritten notes of his speech from—eerily
enough—September 11, 1940, delivered during the London Blitz, about
how Adolf Hitler “hopes by killing large numbers of civilians, and
women and children, that he will terrorize and cow the people of
this mighty imperial city.… Little does he know the spirit of the
British nation.” There are Churchill’s letters to his Brooklyn-born
mother about fighting in Afghanistan, a letter from his doctor
after he was run over on Fifth Avenue (“the postaccident
convalescence necessitates the use of alcoholic spirits especially
at mealtimes”), the Iron Curtain speech that warned against
Communism, and the grant of U.S. citizenship signed by JFK, among
other fascinating documents.
They show that although Churchill might not have spoken “on the
unpinioned wing,” but rather with the notes carefully curated at
Churchill College, Cambridge, and now displayed at the Morgan, he
most certainly did have “the inner God within” when he growled his
spirit of defiance against Fascists and Stalinists alike. Nor did
his power of words require warfare and hostility for them to
enthuse and inspire; they worked in peacetime too. Never having
employed a speechwriter, Churchill spoke to his audience words that
his listeners therefore knew came unalloyed and unaltered directly
from his heart. Our modern politicians should try it sometime. And
he didn’t even have a teleprompter.
