US & CANADA

19 January 2011 Last updated at 00:02 GMT

JFK's inaugural speech: Six secrets of his

success

By Max Atkinson
Rhetoric expert

President John F Kennedy would have been delighted to know that his inaugural
address is still remembered and admired 50 years later.

Like other great communicators - including Winston Churchill before him and Ronald Reagan
and Barack Obama since then - he was someone who took word-craft very seriously indeed.

He had delegated his aide Ted Sorensen to read all the previous presidential inaugurals, with
the additional brief of trying to crack the code that had made Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg
address such a hit.

Fifty years on, the debate about whether he or Sorensen played the greater part in
composing the speech matters less than the fact that it was a model example of how to
make the most of the main rhetorical techniques and figures of speech that have been at the
heart of all great speaking for more than 2,000 years. Most important among these are:

Contrasts: "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country"
Three-part lists: "Where the strong are just, and the weak secure and the peace preserved"
Combinations of contrasts and lists (by contrasting a third item with the first two): "Not because the
communists are doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right"
If the rhetorical structure of sentences is one set of building blocks in the language of public
speaking, another involves simple "poetic" devices such as:

Alliteration: "Let us go forth to lead the land we love"

Imagery: "The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans"
In general, the more use of these a speaker makes, the more applause they will get and the
more likely it is that they will be recognised as a brilliant orator.

But great communicators differ as to which of these techniques they use most.

Presidents Reagan and Obama, for example, stand out as masters of anecdote and story-
telling, which didn't feature at all in JFK's inaugural. Mr Obama also favours three-part lists,
of which there were 29 in his 10-minute election victory speech in Chicago.

Stark warning
Kennedy, however, used very few in his inaugural address. For him, contrasts were the
preferred weapon, coming as they did at a rate of about one every 39 seconds in this
particular speech. Some were applauded and some have survived among the best-
remembered lines.

He began with three consecutive contrasts:

"We observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom"

"Symbolizing an end as well as a beginning"
"Signifying renewal as well as change"
From the 20 or so he used, other widely quoted contrasts, all of which were applauded,
include:

"If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich"
"Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate"
"My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the
freedom of man"
The speech also bristled with imagery, starting with a stark warning about the way the world
has changed because "man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of
human poverty and all forms of human life."

People of the developing world were "struggling to break the bonds of mass misery."

JFK vowed to "assist free men and free governments in casting off the chains of poverty"
and that "this hemisphere intends to remain the master of its own house."
He sought to "begin anew the quest for peace before the dark powers of destruction
unleashed by science engulf all humanity", hoped that "a beachhead of cooperation may
push back the jungle of suspicion" and issued a "call to bear the burden of a long
twilight struggle."

First inaugural designed for the media?

Impressive though the rhetoric and imagery may have been, what really made the speech
memorable was that it was the first inaugural address by a US president to follow the first
rule of speech-preparation: analyse your audience - or, to be more precise at a time when
mass access to television was in its infancy, analyse your audiences.

In the most famous fictional speech of all time, Mark Antony had shown sensitivity to his
different audiences in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar by asking his "Friends, Romans,
countrymen" to lend him their ears. But Kennedy had many more audiences in mind than
those who happened to be in Washington that day.

His countrymen certainly weren't left out, appearing as they did in the opening and towards
the end with his most famous contrast of all: "Ask not..." But he knew, perhaps better than
any previous US president, that local Americans were no longer the only audience that
mattered. The age of a truly global mass media had dawned, which meant that what he said
would be seen, heard or reported everywhere in the world.

At the height of the Cold War, Kennedy also had a foreign policy agenda that he wanted to be
heard everywhere in the world. So the different segments of the speech were specifically
targeted at a series of different audiences:

"Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill"

"To those new nations whom we welcome to the ranks of the free"
"To those in the huts and villages of half the globe"
"To our sister republics south of the border"
"To that world assembly of sovereign states, the United Nations"
"Finally, to those nations who would make themselves our adversary"
The following day, there was nothing on the front pages of two leading US newspapers, The
New York Times and the Washington Post to suggest that the countrymen in his audience
had been particularly impressed by the speech - neither of them referred to any of the lines
above that have become so famous.

The fact that so much of the speech is still remembered around the world 50 years later is a
measure of Kennedy's success in knowing exactly what he wanted to say, how best to say it
and, perhaps most important of all, to whom he should say it.
Dr Max Atkinson is the author of Lend Me Your Ears: All You Need to Know about Public
Speaking and Presentation and Speech-making and Presentation Made Easy

More US & Canada stories

Giffords move to rehab 'flawless' [/news/world-us-canada-12253687]

Doctors treating a US congresswoman who was shot in the head last week say her transfer to a rehabilitation centre
has gone "flawlessly".
US baby-kidnap 'mother' detained [/news/world-us-canada-12263243]
Skins US version 'is dangerous' [/newsbeat/12264058]

BBC © MMXI The BBC is not responsible for the content

of external sites. Read more.