What Makes a Great Speech Great?
Claire Berlinski ·
Jul 16, 2010 at 5:24am
Apparently, Paules is locked, loaded, and ready to explain. Perhaps we should start by compiling a list of the ten greatest speeches in history. Ideas, anyone? I'll contribute the obvious candidate. Everyone but me has to justify his choice. I don't have to because that needs no justification.
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Jun '10
Re: What Makes a Great Speech Great?
Claire, I'm not ready to explain anything yet. There is a process at work here, and I'm willing to listen and learn from experts in the craft. The only thing I can offer at the present is that speech writing is like any good writing; it relies on pith and clarity for its power. I lecture my own students as follows: "Pithy prose packs punch."
Jun '10
Re: What Makes a Great Speech Great?
I'll be in my garden for the next two hours laying brick. Did you know that Winston Churchill was a master brick mason? Aside from the physical workout it's a marvelous form of meditation. I will check back in later to see if this thread goes anywhere.
Jun '10
Re: What Makes a Great Speech Great?
A great speech also teaches you something you didn't know, but should know, like....
Reagan's Normandy Speech: Commemorating the 40th Anniversary of the Normandy Invasion, D-Day, Given: 6/6/1984
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEIqdcHbc8I
Re: What Makes a Great Speech Great?
I'll play, but I don't know if this is what you had in mind: Thucydides: Pericles's Funeral Oration.
Two quotes that could be powerful, again today, in the right context:
May '10
Re: What Makes a Great Speech Great?
Does fiction count? My favorite speech of all time is the St. Crispen's Day speech from Shakespeare's Henry V. It starts by taking a contrary view -- we don't need any more troops than we have right here -- and then builds up to crescendo of inspiration that speaks to leadership, heart, history, really the whole human endeavor. Its also brief ;-)
http://www.chronique.com/Library/Knights/crispen.htm
Relative to Peter and Claire's project I think what is powerful is turning conventional wisdom upside down and inspiring an audience to think about a tired topic in a whole new way. Not just suggesting that the conventional wisdom -- Israel abuses democracy -- is wrong, but stating the opposite case -- Israel represents the purest form of democracy in action.
May '10
Re: What Makes a Great Speech Great?
I nominate Churchill's wartime speech to the House of Commons.
The words "blood, toil, tears, and sweat" went on to glory.
May '10
Re: What Makes a Great Speech Great?
Oooops, meant to say "second the nomination".
May '10
Re: What Makes a Great Speech Great?
For moral clarity, I'll go with Netanyahu's speech to Congress a couple weeks after 9/11. Also, Paules, for a concise defense of Israel and pithy destruction of opposing arguments, see George Gilder's The Israel Test from a year or so back. Brief and unassailable.
Jun '10
Re: What Makes a Great Speech Great?
Maybe, the best impromptu speech I've heard:
Robert Kennedy Announcing the Assasination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Indiana 1968
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6mxL2cqxrA
Re: What Makes a Great Speech Great?
Sure, why shouldn't fiction count? By the way, if you're looking for candidates, try this.
Jun '10
Re: What Makes a Great Speech Great?
Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Harvard Address.
A great speech is prophetic...
"But the fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started. The forces of Evil have begun their decisive offensive, you can feel their pressure, and yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?"
May '10
Re: What Makes a Great Speech Great?
Allen Packwood, the director of the Churchill Archives Center, recently said this about the Great Man: "...unlike many contemporary politicians, he wrote his speeches himself. 'Although there were people who supplied him with ideas, there were no speechwriters in the modern sense,' Mr. Packwood said. '(His) speech... was one man’s creation.'" (NY Times 6/17)
That bores to the heart of what makes a truly great speech. It is a sincere and personal opinion that is offered to the world without fear.
May '10
Re: What Makes a Great Speech Great?
With deference to Claire, I would choose Churchill's speech right before her choice.
Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.
Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'
"Lights of a perverted science"... poetry!
Re: What Makes a Great Speech Great?
Gettysburg, for sure. I had all my elementary students memorize it. The line: "The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here" gets at a point our own Bill McGurn (Bush speechwriter) makes under one of Peter's speech posts -- the words must be backed by action in order to carry real power.
Gettysburg: http://americancivilwar.com/north/lincoln.html
Re: What Makes a Great Speech Great?
Just as I'm sure we won't settle the debate about which of Churchill's speeches was the greatest, nor shall we settle the debate about the greatest of Lincoln's speeches. But I would commend to the judges' attention the First Inaugural as an almost supernatural admixture of intellectual power and literary accomplishment.
Re: What Makes a Great Speech Great?
We should consider McGurn's recommendation. Not so much for Top 10 status, but for the process of "compiling clips" for our specific topic. From a speech GWB made to the Knesset, written by Chris Michel:
May '10
Re: What Makes a Great Speech Great?
Flannery O'Connor is another worthy guide.
"Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue, but good is another matter. Few have stared at that long enough to accept that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction. The modes of evil usually receive worthy expression. The modes of good have to be satisfied with a cliche or a smoothing down that will soften their real look."
May '10
Re: What Makes a Great Speech Great?
Paules, Claire, Peter, anyone: I propose that the "tear-down-this-wall!" zinger line that would define a tide-turning speech to the Muslim world would be "Heal thyself!" Clearly defines the problem and the solution, and, oh Nellie, would it be memorable if delivered by an American president. (I bet President Christie would be game.)
Re: What Makes a Great Speech Great?
Scott, it's not a line that will have the resonance it does to those familiar with Western literature. That said, the words became famous because they're great, not vice-versa. So, yes, I like it.
Jul '10
Re: What Makes a Great Speech Great?
Reagan, "Challenger." Easily the greatest I have experienced in my lifetime (though I'd put the speech at the Brandenburg Gate immediately next), it accomplished exactly what the administration and most of the American public did not even realize was needed in that moment; it achieved a completely unified government in the face of tragedy on a night when Reagan was originally scheduled to deliver a blistering State of the Union, and as one of the children who watched the shuttle explode...it gave me a sense of comfort and reinforced Reagan's position as father figure to the nation. I defy anyone to watch or read it without completely falling apart. It also contained a dig to the Soviet Union that somehow made us proud of our tragedy, because at least it happened in public and we admitted it.
If we're including fiction, some lines from "The Lion In Winter" achieve more than any full speech ever has, of course there's the the Saint Crispen's Day speech from "Henry V," and...one of my personal favorites, from "Lord of the Rings," which can be viewed in its entirety here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcPOv8lmEi8