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SPEECH?
The Big Question: half a century ago, Martin Luther King had
a dream and JFK said he was a Berliner. Both were famous
speeches—but what is the best speech ever made? We asked
six writers to make their choice. Sam Leith sets the scene
Fifty years ago Martin Luther King stood on the steps of the Lincoln
Memorial and declared: "I have a dream." His words were heard, it is for
once no exaggeration to say, around the world. Whole passages now live
in folk memory; and, with its formal links to the black folk pulpit and the
language of the Book of Amos, the speech itself drew on folk memory.
So, though some two and a half millennia separate the earliest two
speeches championed here—Pericles’s funeral oration and the Gettysburg
Address—Lincoln’s words exactly rehearse the themes and structure of
Pericles’s. Barack Obama, one of the most technically gifted orators of the
modern day, consciously appropriates the language both of Lincoln and of
Dr King (who himself referred to Lincoln). Nelson Mandela’s 1964 trial
speech invokes Magna Carta and the US Bill of Rights. And so on.
You can then take the shared language—and with it your audience—
wherever you want it to go. The turns of language that technicians call
figures (as in "figures of speech") capture myriad ways of making
language dance: the tricolons—groups of three terms—that make
sentences ring; the rhetorical questions (or erotema) with which you
challenge the audience and shape an imaginary dialogue; or the anaphora
with which, by repeating a word or phrase over and over again, you build
an irresistible gathering rhythm.
Is great oratory dead, as some claim? It is not. But it is true that it doesn’t
look like it did. It adapts itself ceaselessly to the means of its transmission.
Language changes, convention changes, media change. The Greek notion
of kairos—or timeliness—is apt here.
Cicero, addressing the Senate around 50BC, would speak unamplified and
at some length. His audience was present, and such written records as
survive were usually created afterwards (and probably polished) by Cicero
himself. In the age of newspapers, when speeches would be disseminated
by third parties, a different tack was required, though it might not always
work: "I have a dream" didn’t make the next day’s Washington Post.
Churchill, remembered as a great orator, was a radio star; his wartime
speeches went over less well in Parliament, but the audience that counted
was the one listening at home. The intimacy of the television camera
offers yet another set of opportunities. In his famous 1952 Checkers
speech, Richard Nixon was able to address the American people, as it
were, eye to eye.
It’s a mistake he won’t repeat. Oratory now lives in the age of electric
dreams—but the dream goes on.
Sam Leith is a columnist on the Evening Standard and the author of "You
Talkin' to Me? Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama"