Speechwright: An Insider's Take on Political Rhetoric

Four: On the Campaign Trail

32 • chapter two public projection of the self you want your listeners to hear and see. A speech isn’t just about eloquent words. Oratorical thrills don’t always do the job. Sometimes you just have to let your argument speak for itself by being yourself. King’s appearance that night was a quiet triumph of personal charisma over rhetorical eloquence, although I may not have put it in those words. King himself had provided a kind of eloquence by his very presence. This may seem a strange judgment, since Dr. King is, of course, legendary for his oratorical powers, for inspiring thousands of people gathered by the Lincoln Memorial, or a few hundred in a black church. But that night he wasn’t in his oratorical, prophetic mode. The measured cadences of his speech, the way he stood, the sound of his voice, and his presence all bore the unmistakable stamp of authenticity and authority. His words did not make King eloquent; his persona gave his ordinary words a quiet eloquence. You didn’t have to agree with him—I didn’t agree with his views on the war in Vietnam—in order to know that his public utterances were sincere and that he really believed in what he was saying. And that sense of personal truth-telling may well be the beginning of wisdom for a speechwright. You are writing the words, but the words have to come to life through the speaker’s personality, not yours. So I had unconsciously learned an important lesson as a speechwright, years before I became a speechwright. C h a P t e r t h r e e Becoming a Speechwright In 1966, while still teaching at Abington High, I was asked to become a member of the master teachers program at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. I would continue to be paid by my high school, but for two years (if my option was picked up by Penn, which it was) I would be teaching a course in the methods of teaching English at Penn and, most importantly, evaluating Penn student teachers of English, on-site, as they did their practice teaching in Philadelphia and suburban high schools. At the end of two years I would be returning to my high school. I was looking forward to becoming a classroom teacher again, because, as I have said, I loved teaching, but the experience of being a master teacher was something I never regretted. It was while I was working at Penn that one day in April 1967 I was in the university library reading a copy of New York, which at that time was the magazine of the World Journal Tribune, the last gasp of three once-great New York newspapers that had joined together in the hope that survival could be found in an uneasy union of opposites. An article I read, “The New New Nixon,” written by a reporter named Nick Thimmesch, portrayed Nixon as a serious contender for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination. This was not exactly a consensus view at the time, despite Nixon’s personal triumph as a Republican spokesman in the congressional elections of 1966, in which Republicans in Congress made a startling comeback after the Goldwater debacle of 1964. AlthoughNixonwasheldtoberituallyimpurebymostactivistconservatives, • 33 34 • chapter three I had always found him intriguing. In fact, I had cast my vote for him in 1960, a decision frowned upon by members of my family who took their Democratic politics straight, no chaser. Some relatives, I believe, may have suspected that college had warped my mind, and I think there was a general feeling I was a bit eccentric. After all, this was 1960, and John F. Kennedy was running for president, an Irish Catholic, like us. My view was that, yes, he was Irish; yes, he was Catholic; yes, he was handsome and charming; but, no, he wasn’t “like us” at all. He had never hung around on a street corner or bar, swept streets, or worked in the blueprint room in his life. He was the son of a very rich man. This is not to take anything away from his abilities. The same points could be made about Bill Buckley, but no one ever claimed Bill, another rich man’s son, was “like us.” Everyone I knew was crazy about Kennedy, but I voted for quirky, uptight Nixon...