Throwaway lines

Why presidential speeches don’t matter

Joe Biden gave a State of the Union address on Thursday March 7. Audiences tuned in to see if he looked and sounded as old and decrepit as his critics had been saying he is. He didn’t—which said as much about the critics as about Biden. Pundits commented in the hour immediately after the speech, but by the next day the news caravan had moved on.

This is the way it goes with nearly all presidential speeches. Of the very many that have been delivered since George Washington spoke at his first inauguration in 1789, only a handful stick in historical memory. Thomas Jefferson is remembered for one line in his 1801 inaugural address: “We are all Republicans; we are all Federalists.” It’s cited for its fence-mending sentiment after a harsh campaign. But no one at the time believed it, and it had no effect on party passions.

Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and his second inaugural are quoted at greater length, the first because it is very short and the second because it amounted to Lincoln’s last will and testament. Woodrow Wilson was probably the best orator in the White House. Many of his speeches read like sermons, not least because he grew up practicing oratory in the church of his minister father. But all that survive are sound bites rendered ironic by subsequent events. “Safe for democracy” was hurled back at the ghost of Wilson as fascism overtook Europe in the years after World War I.

Franklin Roosevelt gets kudos for his heartening “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” John Kennedy’s speechwriter Ted Sorensen produced memorable lines for his boss’s inaugural: “The torch has been passed to a new generation. . . . Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” But as with Lincoln’s second inaugural, Kennedy’s words were amplified by untimely death.

Ronald Reagan is remembered for two lines in two speeches. “Government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem” gave news outlets a hook for coverage of his first inauguration. “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” was scripted and choreographed for television coverage from Berlin six years later.

Students of presidential rhetoric will add their own favorites, but even allowing for these, the remarkable thing about all the speechifying by presidents is how little has been remembered.

Part of the reason is that for the last century, what a president said often mattered less than how he said it. FDR’s defiance of fear rang out over radio to the far corners of America. His tone inspired hope among millions who didn’t remember the content of his message. Kennedy’s bare head and coatless torso on a cold day appeared robustly impressive on television. The Brandenburg Gate looming behind Reagan made him look like Joshua before the walls of Jericho.

The larger reason for the unmemorability of presidential speeches is that despite appearances, and despite expectations that develop during campaigns, presidential success has little to do with making speeches. The coin of the political realm is power, and a successful president manages to deploy power to align the interests of crucial others behind his agenda. For all Wilson's moving speeches on behalf of the League of Nations and the Treaty of Versailles, he failed to overcome the objections of those who still thought of American security in hemispheric terms. Mikhail Gorbachev ignored Reagan's Berlin Wall demands. The wall outlasted the Gipper, succumbing only to the combined weight of East German popular pressure and the collapse of the Soviet model of political economy. 

By contrast, Lyndon Johnson, one of the worst orators among presidents, bent Congress to his will on civil rights and other aspects of the Great Society by his mastery of the legislative process and his command of the levers of manipulation available to presidents: personal endorsements, government contracts, appointments to office, and other favors for friends, and the withholding of same from foes.

Richard Nixon achieved detente not by publicly sharing a vision of peaceful coexistence but by privately playing Moscow against Beijing. He won a peace agreement for Vietnam not by summoning the better angels of human nature but by bombing the daylights out of North Vietnam and betraying South Vietnam.

Speaking of better angels, Lincoln would have been the first to acknowledge that the Union was preserved and emancipation achieved not by the words of presidents or other politicians but by the arms and sacrifice of soldiers. His own words at the Gettysburg cemetery put it clearly: “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”

Presidents will continue to give speeches. Pundits will continue to rate them. History will continue to forget them.

Acta non verba.