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The Birth of Rhetoric

The beautiful ideas of rhetoric and democracy were born in the same moment, in the winter of 431 BC in Athens, when the statesman Pericles stood to deliver his Funeral Oration. It might seem grimly appropriate, as democracy struggles through yet another of its crises, that its birth should have been marked by a funeral oration. There are plenty of predictions that another doleful eulogy will be required soon. Democracy is going through a troubled time and rhetoric is in the dock beside it. The chapters that follow have been written in the conviction that no funeral oration is needed for either.

In his speech, Pericles commemorated the sons of Athens lost in the Peloponnesian War, but he also applauded the glory of the city and made a sparkling case for government with the consent of the people. The currency of persuasion in a democracy, he argued, is not force or authority. It is speech. The moment that fiat is replaced by consent is the moment that oratory begins to count. Rhetoric and democracy are twinned; their histories run together. In this book I shall tell these parallel stories and mount a vigorous defence of the practice of politics in a time when cynicism has become the norm.

The politics of ancient Athens and Rome are distant and unfamiliar to us today except for a single unchanged element. The spectacle of a single person walking to a podium to persuade an audience remains now exactly as it was then. Very few disciplines survive twenty centuries. Nothing of the science of the period is of much more than curiosity value. The drama is still performed, but most of its stylistic conventions are anachronisms. Disciplines tend to date, positions are superseded, ideas fall into disuse, new frontiers are discovered. None of that is true of rhetoric. Reputations in the ancient republics were won and burnished by theatrical performance, and in politics today, they still are. Whether they know it or not, public speakers of all the succeeding ages owe a debt to Aristotle’s The Art of Rhetoric and Cicero’s De oratore.

Cicero gives us a portrait of the ideal orator. There was no separation, for him, between rhetoric and politics, so the orator needed to be steeped in political wisdom, to display a command of language and psychological insight into the audience, to be witty, shrewd and funny. In an age in which speeches were delivered by heart, the orator needed perfect recall. They also needed a resonant voice, although not all of them have had it. Demosthenes practised with pebbles in his mouth with the aim of improving his timbre. Abraham Lincoln was barely audible at Gettysburg, Winston Churchill sought medical help over his lisp, and John F. Kennedy’s voice was often said to be too reedy for his grand words.

The central point of De oratore, what Cicero calls the Topic, should be engraved over the desk of every speechwriter: make sure you know your central point. This is advice that has worked for all speakers, in every nation and every time, and will always work. The central point of this book is that liberal democracies are the best imaginable places to live and that this claim needs to be compressed poetically into a clear message of hope. As I write, democracy is once again coming under threat from populists, and rhetoric is, like nostalgia, one of those things that are always said not to be as good as they used to be. The threat to democracy is linked to the attack on rhetoric. If we want to attend to the good health of our democracy, and we really must, then we need to attend to the integrity of the way we speak about politics.

The Sophisticated Speechwriter

For many years it was my job to write the words that carry public arguments. As the chief speechwriter to Prime Minister Tony Blair I tried to draft words that did justice to the hopes and passions of politics while at the same time respecting the limitations involved. It was a fascinating and privileged vantage point on the politics of Britain and its chief allies. If Blair’s speeches feature prominently in the chapters that follow it is because of that personal insight rather than necessarily a claim that the words bear comparison with the finest rhetoric in history.

During my time as Blair’s speechwriter I regularly fielded the accusation that rhetoric had declined and that the duplicity of crafted words was contributing to the low repute of politics. These are dangerous illusions that need to be countered. Rhetoric is not crafted deception and it is not worse than it was. There is a serious prospect that, in our time, we are losing faith in politics. The words of politicians float by, practised and polished, but profligate. The respect, veneration and hope first expressed by Pericles, has gone missing. It is the grand purpose of this book to help to call it back.

The accusation that rhetoric is simply duplicity has a long pedigree, and speechwriters have always come in for opprobrium as purveyors of fine falsehoods. In the sixth and fifth centuries BC, Greece was making the transition from aristocracy to democracy. Social class was no longer enough to support a political career, as every free male citizen enjoyed the right to speak in the assembly. This created a novel demand for tuition in the art of rhetoric. A band of itinerant writers and teachers of oratory met that demand, for high fees. They were known as the Sophists and they came in straight away for vilification. Taking money for instruction was thought to be ignoble and the Sophists were immigrants who imported new and unwelcome ideas, such as the notion that truth was not transcendent but emerged from the clash of arguments.

In 423 BC, in The Clouds, Aristophanes was the first to note that rhetorical genius can be turned to ill effect or can conceal dubious motives: It’s just rhetoric, we say. Aristophanes satirises Socrates’ rhetorical fluency and his ability, in the boast of the Sophist Protagoras, to ‘make the weaker case appear the stronger’. In The Clouds Aristophanes has Socrates teach a boy how to argue that a son should beat his parents. They take revenge by burning down Socrates’ ‘Thinking Shop’. Plato, who lived in Athens in the generation following the arrival of the Sophists, shared Aristophanes’ distrust and wrote the classic statement of suspicion about rhetoric. In his dialogue Gorgias, he condemned rhetoric as a ‘knack of flattering with words’ which led not to truth but to mere persuasion. Plato regarded rhetoric as a low art form of no great import, like cookery, in particular pastry cookery. The writer might be an enchanter, thought Plato, but his work touched the surface alone and never penetrated to the deeper truths.

Plato’s villain, the superficial malignant, was the Sophist speechwriter rather than the speaker himself. Tacitus echoed the complaint at the beginning of the second century AD. When the emperor Nero gave a speech praising his predecessor Claudius, Tacitus criticised Nero for reading words written by his tutor, Seneca. It is often said that political leaders would be more authentic if they wrote their own material. Many of them, in fact, have. Cicero was a practitioner as well as a student and a theorist of oratory. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln all composed their own words. Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote his famous Inaugural Address of March 1933. Winston Churchill never stopped reading and writing his own speeches. Even now, the most senior politicians write more of their own words than is commonly supposed. Barack Obama was heavily involved in his major speeches. I can attest that Tony Blair often took his fountain pen and scribbled his own words in a spider hand.

But why should a politician not seek help for a task as central to democracy as making a case? George Washington got help for his Farewell Address from Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, though neither took the title of speechwriter. Judson Welliver, the man credited with coining the phrase ‘the Founding Fathers’, was known as a ‘literary clerk’ when he wrote for Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge between 1921 and 1925. Herbert Hoover always denied that French Strother wrote his words. Franklin D. Roosevelt had a group of advisers that he called his Brains Trust, to help with his speeches.

The first man to be given the title of speechwriter in the White House was Emmet J. Hughes, who wrote for President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The turning point, when the speechwriter becomes a shadowy figure of national importance, is often said to be President Kennedy’s relationship with his amanuensis Ted Sorensen, though it was actually Richard Nixon who was the first president to establish a Writing and Research Department in the White House. The supposed promotion to a department of their own concealed a change that would have puzzled and irritated Cicero. Before they were separated into a distinct craft, writers took part in policy deliberation. In Nixon’s new dispensation they became wordsmiths. The industrial term describes the demotion from profession to trade, from statecraft to prettifying decisions made somewhere else.

The speechwriting office, once established, never closed, and every president employed a host of writers, sometimes as many as six. There is a cultural difference here between the common practice of America and that of Britain. British speechwriters tend to be cats who prowl alone, like Joe Haines who wrote for Harold Wilson and Ronald Millar who wrote some of Margaret Thatcher’s best speeches. Though the British speechwriter writes solo, he or she has to contend with the attention of a multitude. Part of the job is to be editor-in-chief, fielding the reams of unsolicited passages sent in by academics and pet projects pushed by ministers. It is a curiosity of the job that people seem to believe that if they send in a few lines with no context then the speech can be assembled from all these bits, like flat-pack furniture comprised of the parts from different chairs. In Britain it can be a lonely task, whereas counterparts in the White House are collectively crafting clap lines in pairs or, for big speeches such as the State of the Union, in numbers even greater.

However they do it, their words really count. Robert Schlesinger, the author of White House Ghosts, a history of presidential speechwriters (one of them was his father Arthur, who wrote for Kennedy), has suggested that there may be cause and not just correlation in the fact that the one-term presidents – Ford, Carter, George H. W. Bush – were poor speakers while the charmers – Reagan, Clinton, Obama – talked themselves into second terms. No politician ever fares better with phrases ragged and unformed. Their words would, to use an old speechwriting joke, be read long after Milton and Shakespeare are forgotten – but not until then. For all the fine speakers who make it for the consideration of posterity there are countless would-be orators whose dreary platitudes would have benefited from the attention of a writer with an ear for rhythm.

The Temple of Concord

The enemy of good writing is not the good speechwriter. It is bad politics. When a politician is timid they will avoid all controversial topics. They will then have nothing to say. The cause of the distance that opens up between the people and politics is empty talk. Then, into the vacuum, there is always the danger that something unpleasant can insert itself. That is where we will find ourselves heading again, if we fail to attend to the quality of political speech. The suggestion of manipulation by fiendish speechwriters is the first denigration. The second accusation is that rhetoric is now boring. The travails of democracy are attributed to the poor quality of contemporary speech. The truth is closer to the opposite. If speeches are duller today than they once were, that is largely on account of the manifold successes of the liberal democracies.

This charge is also perennial. Every change brings an accusation of decline; every age is written off as a dying fall. Abraham Lincoln revolutionised rhetoric on the field at Gettysburg and attracted criticism for the plainness of his novel style. Robert Peel, whose maiden speech in Parliament in 1810 was judged to be one of the finest ever given, was mocked when he replaced the ornate Thucydides-inspired curlicues of Chatham, Burke and Fox with a flatter, demotic vocabulary. Roosevelt and Churchill adapted their rhetorical style to the new technology of the wireless, which demanded a quieter, more intimate tone than a podium calls for. They too incurred the claim that rhetoric was in decline. This is more than a lament about language. As rhetoric and democracy run together, any allegation about the decline of rhetoric is always a coded way of claiming the concomitant decline of politics itself. We need to be clear that both claims are nonsense. Rhetoric is thriving and so is democracy. They have simply changed together.

The extension of the franchise meant that oratory had to become more demotic. The electorate of the late eighteenth century in England would have been classically educated, and all to the same extent. The Great Reform Act 1832 added the merchant class to the electorate, and further extensions to the franchise in 1867, 1884, 1918 and 1928 brought the whole adult nation into the conversation. The pivotal change was not that politicians became more stupid or less literary but that the audience grew. Classical and biblical references and quotations from Shakespeare and Dickens were once commonplace because a speaker could be sure that the audience would share them. With a larger audience, the common denominator is lower and political language becomes less courtly, more colloquial. The decline of the grand oratorical style is thus the same process as the extension of the franchise. To lament the consequence without recognising the cause is a form of historical snobbery.

Less florid rhetoric is not necessarily worse rhetoric. There is a tendency, even today, for poor writers to come on like a pastiche of Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society because they think of that style as somehow properly rhetorical. But purple prose does not sound black and white when it is spoken. When he was criticised by William Faulkner for his limited vocabulary, Ernest Hemingway gave a reply that was not intended as advice for speechwriters but works as such anyway: ‘Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words and those are the ones I use.’

Soon after the audience started to grow, the world started to shrink. Radio, television and the internet have vastly extended the reach of a political speech. Before mass media connected leaders to their public, rhetoric was an elite game. The political class talked about the people but largely to each other. The real setting of the great speech is no longer the Temple of Concord, Freedom Hall or the steps of the Capitol, even though the words may be spoken there. The speech exists in the lines cut into soundbites on social media, edited to seven seconds on the evening news or published in next day’s newspaper. Even that had ceased until I revived the format in The Times, which now carries analyses of all the major political speeches. The format devised there appears in this book, for the select band of speeches that have endured among the mass that have been given.

The test of time proves too much for most rhetoric, plenty of which falls victim to the sheer pace of modern politics. There are two types of modern politician, the quick and the dead. No one can afford to be silent for long, and the outcome is that politicians today speak far too often. Gladstone and Disraeli would deliver polished speeches three times a year. Their speeches would be deeply researched and considered rather than knocked out in the heat of a passing crisis. Most political speeches today are unnecessary: press releases stretched far beyond their natural span. They also have to stretch further than they did. Government has grown broader in scope, and more complex. Speeches get made about such unpromising subjects as environmental directives and the gradient of welfare benefit tapers.

The great causes, at least in the rich, fortunate democracies, have gone. If there are fewer uplifting speeches today than there once were, then the chief cause is a heartening one. Momentous speeches are always given in answer to a signal injustice or crisis – think of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela. The success of the developed democracies means injustice is less acute than it once was. The great questions – the entitlement to vote, material and gender equality, freedom of association and speech, war and peace – are not entirely resolved, but the first decades of the twenty-first century show progress that would have been unimaginable two centuries before.

The line towards freedom is crooked, as we shall see. Nevertheless, the issues are smaller, the injustices largely less raw. The conflict between capitalism and communism pitted two sets of utopian aspirations against each other, with liberals and socialists everywhere painting the war of ideas in vivid colours. The victory of capitalism over socialist planning changed politics even in countries that had never been run by the communists. It meant that the left-of-centre parties largely accepted the writ of the market. The argument continued about where the lines of regulation should be drawn, but the dispute was now in the details, not the principles. At much the same time, the political Left won a cultural victory over the respect that was due to people of all creeds and colours. Each side, by and large, accepted the lesson it had been taught by the other, and the upshot was the creation of a new, benign, largely liberal consensus.

This means that public speech that truly sings is harder to pull off. Rhetoric, like all drama, needs a dispute. Agreement writes white, as Montherlant said about happiness. Politics, though, has to go on and this explains the rather exaggerated, overwrought nature of rhetoric today. No politician ever gets into office by volubly agreeing with his opponents. The political dispute therefore carries on regardless, as if there were no consensus. Public speech is easily reduced to an exercise in caricature, confected and boring, with the volume set too high. Amid this vast ado about nothing, it is little wonder that a decline in the standard of rhetoric is declared. But it is an illusion, and if public speech is boring the proper response is to be thankful. There are plenty of examples of shining speech in this book given during times when politics was far from boring and some of it was terrifying.

There is, though, still a reasonable complaint here. Language in the public square today does not always rise to the occasion. Too little of what is said in politics is memorable. It needs to be. Politics is the best idea about government that anybody ever had, or ever will have. Words need to inspire because disenchantment with politics fosters the illusion that there is an alternative. It is certainly still possible to write well rather than badly. The Obamas, Barack and Michelle, have shown that it is still possible to go high when everyone else is going low. It is still possible, as Mark Twain put it, to apply ‘a minimum of sound to a maximum of sense’. The aim of good public speaking is to borrow the rhythms of everyday speech but at the same time to heighten its effects. The objective is to write high-octane ordinary speech, as if an eloquent person were speaking naturally at their best, fluent and uninterrupted, with all the connecting threads edited away.

The greatest speeches are essays in simple language, easily comprehensible to a democratic audience, but works of beauty and profundity all the same. As a collection, the finest public speeches tell the story of the unfolding of human accomplishment through politics. This book is not a story of human progress in the manner of the old Whig theory, in which history moves serenely from darkness towards the light. There have been too many desperate times. But to the extent that there has been progress in the material conditions of life, as unquestionably there has, that progress is owed to political argument that began with the Funeral Oration of Pericles and continues to this day.

That is the spirit, and the thesis, of this book, which defines five political virtues and applauds the greatest words that have been spoken in their defence. The first political virtue is that through politics the voice of the people is heard. The second is that politics commits us to persuasion rather than force. The third virtue is that through politics the demand for recognition can be heard. Fourth, the equal consideration of all citizens in free societies is the means by which the material condition of the population is improved. Then, fifth, perhaps the most profound point of all: it is only when politics prevails that the worst of human instincts can be tamed. All of these virtues require poetic political speech.

The Quarrel with Ourselves

William Butler Yeats once said that poetry was made out of a quarrel with ourselves whereas rhetoric derived from the quarrel with others. It can, alas, be more than a quarrel. We now face new threats to the liberal democratic order, from both without and within. In the wealthy democracies today an insidious lack of confidence has set in. Conspiracy theories have flourished and people are tempted towards fringe candidates. This lack of confidence in democracy is misplaced and dangerous. Cynicism with politics is everywhere and it is everywhere nihilistic.

The history of fine speech is proof against cynicism of this kind. Public speech can be elevated and it can still be uplifting. It needs to be because it is in the spoken word that the defence of politics has to be conducted. The final speech in this book tells the most heartbreaking story of the modern age. ‘Not far from Goethe’s beloved Weimar, in a place of eternal infamy called Buchenwald’, says Elie Wiesel, the worst of instincts was let loose. Politics is the human achievement that prevents a repetition of terrors such as this. The title of Elie Wiesel’s great speech is a reminder to us all of the perils of indifference. We can compose a funeral oration for politics if we choose. Or we can fight back.

This book exhibits the examples that we can choose to follow. By explaining what the great speakers meant and how they said it, I hope to elucidate the principles through which good politics can be conducted. All we have at our disposal are beautiful words, but what a weapon to hold. Stirring words in a skilled arrangement are all the power we need. The question for us now, when confidence in politics and democratic process is low, is not whether good things are still being said. Good things are still being said. The question is whether we are still listening.