WHAT WAS THE GREATEST

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

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, July/August 2013

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.

Great speeches don’t come out of nowhere. Threads of debt and

inheritance tie the earliest recorded oratory to the speeches of the
present day. Every speech relies for its power on the common language of
the tribe, and that language is itself shaped by the great speeches of the
past.

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.

So what makes a good speech? It must be forceful in argument,

memorable in style, resonant in its references. It must also, before
anything else, connect its speaker to its audience. This is what Aristotle,
the first Western authority on rhetoric, called ethos—the basic movement
in any effective speech that transforms the "me" of the speaker and the
"you" of the audience into "we": "Friends, Romans, countrymen..."

Ethos is established by, quite literally, speaking the audience’s language:

shared jokes, common reference points, recognisable situations. As the
rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke has said: "You persuade a man only in so
far as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order,
image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his."

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.

In the internet age—this ecosystem of interruptions—you’d soon lose your

audience if you served up two hours of formal oratory in the high style.
Soundbites, though much bemoaned, are not a recent innovation: Cicero
was fond of them. But they have come front and centre as first rolling
news and now social media have swept in to favour the juicy quote over
the rounded argument.

The technological arms race is not over. A wonderfully embarrassing

YouTube clip shows Ed Miliband answering a series of questions with near-
identical versions of the same prepared sentence. He sounds like a robot;
but then, he never expected us to see more than a single ten-second clip
on the news. His mistake was to gear his strategy to the age of rolling
news, not to an age in which the rushes can be posted to YouTube and
spread virally on Twitter.

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"