When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches that shape the world – and why we need them. Philip Collins
not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom – symbolizing an end as well as a beginning – signifying renewal as well as change. For I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forebears prescribed nearly a century and three-quarters ago.
Before he began writing, Kennedy insisted that his speechwriter Ted Sorensen read all the previous inaugural addresses. Sorensen concluded that the best speech of all was Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and resolved to keep his drafting simple, or at least to prune the finished text of ornamentation. A lot of hard work goes into making a speech sound simple. Sorensen has said that ‘no Kennedy speech ever underwent so many drafts. Each paragraph was reworded, reworked and reduced’. This opening sentence began as: ‘We celebrate today not a victory of party but the sacrament of democracy’ and was then changed to: ‘We celebrate today not a victory of party but a convention of freedom’. The final completed version has a better balance and does the required thing – required for Kennedy as it had been for Jefferson – which is to bring the nation back together. The 1960 election had been one of the closest of recent times. The difference in votes between the two candidates was tiny, although Kennedy emerged with a majority in the electoral college. America was, as it usually is, split between two competing visions of how it should be governed. Kennedy thus signals at once the function of the inaugural address, which is to heal fresh wounds.
The campaign had contained a famous incident that shows us that rhetoric is visual as well as oral. Kennedy and Nixon had taken part in the first televised presidential debates. The verdict of the radio audience was that the debate had been a draw. If pressed, that audience would probably have awarded the debate to Nixon. The television audience took a clear and differing view. Nixon looked tense and ill at ease, perspiring under a heavy five o’clock shadow. The professionally made up Kennedy was by contrast a picture of relaxation. This marks the moment television began to play a big part in American politics, although the impact of presidential debates on the outcome is exaggerated. It is not likely that many since 1960 have made much difference.
Kennedy, in fact, did give an inaugural speech that would fit neatly into the television schedule. He was determined to keep it short. ‘It’s more effective that way,’ he said, ‘and I don’t want people to think I’m a windbag.’ At under 2,000 words, 1961’s was the shortest inaugural speech since 1905. It worked: as Harry S. Truman said afterwards, ‘it was short, to the point, and in language anyone can understand … Even I could understand it, and therefore, the people can.’
The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe – the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God. We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans – born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage – and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.
The central theme of the speech is time passing: a new generation has arrived. This rather empty chronological point was given substance by the fact that Kennedy sat next to his predecessor, the seventy-year-old Dwight Eisenhower, once the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe while Kennedy had been a navy lieutenant in the Pacific. The young men Kennedy proposed to bring into his administration were visible behind the new president as he spoke.
The final text had not only undergone many mutations in the drafting. It had also had a number of previous airings on the campaign trail. Repetition of this sort would be assailed as plagiarism or lack of imagination now. In his acceptance speech in Los Angeles, for example, Kennedy had said ‘man … has taken into his mortal hands the power to exterminate the entire species some seven times over’, which is a less polished version of what we have here. The line ‘it is time, in short, for a new generation of Americans’ has here acquired the light of a metaphorical torch.
This opening signals something unusual for a presidential Inaugural. Kennedy has ordered this speech to be exclusively about foreign policy. Domestic questions, which were plentiful and problematic – a third recession in seven years, the highest unemployment for two decades and the oppression of black Americans – were weeded out. This is the origin of the flat phrase ‘today at home and around the world’, which has the air of not being at all crafted. It was in fact inserted by Kennedy at the last moment because he suddenly took fright at the realisation that, as a speech devoted to foreign affairs, his Inaugural might read like an evasion on civil rights at home. The effect of seeking to have it both ways is that it doesn’t work. Trying to patch the omission makes the absence of domestic topics glaring. It would have been better to leave out the reference, as his speechwriter had, because then the audience appreciates that the omission was a choice. A perfunctory inclusion makes the audience feel that it must have been an error.
Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, 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. This much we pledge – and more. To those old allies whose cultural and spiritual origins we share, we pledge the loyalty of faithful friends. United there is little we cannot do in a host of cooperative ventures. Divided there is little we can do – for we dare not meet a powerful challenge at odds and split asunder. To those new states whom we welcome to the ranks of the free, we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny. We shall not always expect to find them supporting our view. But we shall always hope to find them strongly supporting their own freedom – and to remember that, in the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.
The survival of liberty is, as a subject for a speech, ‘nobly conceived’, as John Steinbeck put it at the time. But words are close to deeds for a president, and Kennedy has, ever since then, faced the accusation that he locked himself into the stance of the cold warrior in the short time he governed with the pledge to ‘pay any price, bear any burden’ in the defence of liberty. Critics have drawn a straight line that runs through the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the peril of the Cuban Missile Crisis to Vietnam and beyond.
Kennedy’s rhetoric has both a lineage and a legacy. The lineage runs in the commitment to liberating the oppressed around the globe, which is an echo of Woodrow Wilson’s internationalism. The legacy ensues in the echoes from 1963 that are audible in the first inaugural addresses of both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, and in George W. Bush’s rhetoric against tyranny in his second Inaugural, after 9/11. ‘When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.’ That could have been Kennedy; in fact it was Bush.
Bear in mind, though, that the calculation changes over time, and the same words in defence of liberty have one charge in 1961 and quite another forty years later. For Kennedy the threat to American liberty was real and domestic, as nuclear annihilation would respect no boundaries. By the time Clinton and Bush come to make speeches in the name of the liberal international order the demands are different. The question has become solely whether America should be out in the world helping to police liberty. But here Sorensen’s writing is as sonorous as anywhere, and we see one of the dangers of rhetoric, which is that it can run away with the speaker. The words have a grandeur which, in the hindsight of the troubles to come, is skirting closer to hubris than Kennedy might have meant. Indeed, a famous later speech, at the American University in Washington in 1963, treated a similar topic in a much more emollient fashion.
Finally, to those nations who would make themselves our adversary, we offer not a pledge but a request: that both sides begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction. We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed. But neither can two great and powerful groups of nations take comfort from our present course – both sides overburdened by the cost