Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History Read Online Free Page A

seriousness of expression; not even Ronald Reagan, the most adept television speaker, smiled much in the course of a speech from his desk. It also calls for a short, intense speech, twenty minutes tops; tuning out, mental or physical, becomes rampant as attention spans shorten. When the speaker wants to exhort or solemnify, or add a sense of occasion to the forum, or cover a lot more than one subject, he takes the cameras out on location. That’s when we see the State of the Union address making a prop of Congress, or a “convention speech” outlining avision of America. On these occasions, the speaker must decide whether to speak to the people in the hall or to look at the camera and try to reach the people at home; I’ve always felt that a great-hall speech should be directed to the people on the scene, leaving the viewer at home with the sense of being an onlooker once removed; the recipient takes in the speech as an event to be observed and feels not like the specific target of the speaker but like an extension of a vast audience. One-on-one sells; one-on-a-million thrills.
    To the handshake, shape, pulse, and occasion or forum, add the fifth step: focus. A “great” speech need not start out great and stay great all the way through to a great finish. It should first engage the interest, and allow a dip for the audience to get comfortable as the speaker works his way into the theme; then it should build toward its key moment well ahead of the peroration. Here is how political economist John Stuart Mill defined the art of the orator: “Everything important to his purpose was said at the exact moment when he had brought the minds of his audience into the state most fitted to receive it.”
    Note the word “purpose.” A speech should be made for a good reason. No worthy speech was ever made to sound off, to feed the speaker’s ego, to flatter or intimidate the crowd. Fidel Castro makes that kind of speech, running to seven hours long, and no rhetorical ramble of that sort is honored by inclusion here. Why not? Because a great speech is made for a high purpose—to inspire, to ennoble, to instruct, to rally, to lead.
    What about quotation in a speech? In the past, orators occasionally studded their rhetoric with references to ancient Greeks, but now quotation seems to be a must. Usually it is tossed in to show a little erudition, a crutch when a speech is limping along and needs a touch of class. I did that a moment ago with John Stuart Mill; his point about preparing the audience for the message is apt, but it doesn’t sing; I should have stolen his idea and phrased it more forcefully. If I’d felt I had to use a direct quotation, I should have found a dramatic context. Richard Nixon, closeted in a small room off the Oval Office, used to tell his speechwriters, “Never give me a naked quote. Put it in a little story.” He was right. Try this: John Stuart Mill loved a woman for twenty years, but she was married; only when her husband died did the philosopher have the chance to marry the widow who had been his lifelong inspiration. Harriet Mill helped teach her inarticulate new husband the art of oratory. They worked together on his masterpiece,
On Liberty
, but she died before it was published; the heartbroken philosopher dedicated it to the woman he had waited for, loved, and lost, and in an article about oratory, he must have remembered what she told him: “Everything important to his purpose….”There you have a little story, a utilitarian trick to put a little flesh on the bones of quotation.
    Are all the speeches herein “great” speeches—thrilling, profound orations delivered on momentous occasions? Of course not. Some are merely famous speeches. Mark Twain on speechmaking is humor on wry. Kissinger on isolationism won’t knock your emotional socks off; in fact, any speech by a living politician is hard to categorize as “great” until the speaker is elevated to iconhood, dispatched down to