Are words pitchforks? That is, do they goad people into doing things — both good and bad things — they wouldn’t otherwise do? Surely not, some say; surely the process by which human beings make choices and decisions is slightly more complicated than that.
Yet just when we’re ready to dismiss political language as so much superficial blather, along comes a stirring, goose-bump-inducing speech that changes everything. Certain phrases connect instantly with the national psyche: “Ask not what your country can do for you”; “I have a dream.” John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial are more than majestic utterances about topics close to the nation’s soul. They don’t just deal with historical events; they constitute historical events in their own right.
The debate about words and what they can do is enriched by “Ask Not: The Inauguration of John F. Kennedy and the Speech That Changed America” by Thurston Clarke. First published in 2004, and reissued this month with a new afterword to mark the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s inaugural address, the book is an eloquent, well-researched anatomy of how a great speech gets written — and how certain words rise above the babble to become the ones we chisel on stone and remember forever.
Clarke is especially good at illustrating the collaborative nature of modern political speechwriting. Did Kennedy “write” his inaugural address? To paraphrase another former president, that depends on what the definition of “write” is. Kennedy aide Theodore Sorenson outlined the address, and came up with basic themes, but Kennedy’s habit was to take advice from many people and then craft his own speeches. Tracking down the many drafts of the inaugural address, and tracing the evolution of key ideas and phrases as they passed between the minds of Sorenson and Kennedy, Clarke combines a rhetorical critique with a rigorous analysis of who did what. And when and why.
Thus the book could have been titled “CSI: Camelot.”
The author also gives delicious background details about the physical settings in which the speech was written — a sort of People magazine version of a momentous creative act, and a nice break from discussions about tropes and synecdoche.
Few such details are available about Lincoln’s composition of the Gettysburg Address. That meant that Garry Wills, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the speech, “Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America” (1992), the book to which “Ask Not” will automatically be compared, had to stick to history. In Lincoln’s short speech, Wills claims, the president “changed the way people thought about the Constitution.”
Forecasting which speeches will live, and which fade into obscurity, is a tricky business. Some commentators have already announced that President Obama’s Jan. 13 address at the memorial service for victims of the Tucson massacre is a keeper. But the same claims were made for candidate Obama’s speech on race — an address that is now virtually forgotten. A speech for the ages doesn’t come along every day; as Clarke notes in the new afterword to his book, it requires “the convergence of a dramatic event, a pivotal historical moment, a skillful orator, eloquent words, and an audience hungering to hear them.”
Oddly, and with uncharacteristic silliness, Clarke claims that Obama’s inaugural address failed to meet his supporters’ expectations because of — wait for it — Hillary Clinton, his chief rival for the Democratic nomination. Obama was so stung by her attacks on his eloquence, Clarke theorizes, that he pulled his punches on Inauguration Day and deliberately kept portions of his speech tepid.
That ludicrous notion — insulting most of all to Obama, in its suggestion that a man of his intellect and accomplishment would be so easily knocked off course by the routine back-and-forth of campaigning — is one of the book’s few flaws.
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“Words are mighty things, but their power waxes and wanes with the times, and they can move different audiences, and generations, in different ways,” Clarke writes. His words in this book may stick around for a long time, as the definitive account of the complex gestation of a great speech.
‘Ask Not’
By Thurston Clarke
Penguin, 304 pages, $16