in shallow graves just where they had fallen. The citizens of Gettysburg, led by Judge David Wills, had purchased seventeen acres of ground on Cemetery Hill. The graves were arranged in a semicircle and a speaking platform erected to face away from the buried dead so that the gathered would not defile their memory by trampling on the graves.
The setting could scarcely have been more sombre, yet Lincoln’s references to the gravity of the day are rapid and perfunctory. He does not, as Everett had before him, recite a roll-call in remembrance of the American dead. No sooner has he read this parish notice than he changes the subject, in a shift reminiscent of the Funeral Oration of Pericles, from the individual to the nation. The speech is sprinkled with the imagery of birth, life, and death in reference to a nation ‘brought forth’, ‘conceived’, and a system of government that shall not ‘perish’. The dead of the battle have become the nation incarnate.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate – we cannot consecrate – we cannot hallow – this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.
This is as clever a transition as you will find in all public speech. The triple formulation ‘we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow’ is a routine rhetorical device. The language is resonant but the cliché is really transformed by what Lincoln does next. He picks up the word ‘consecrate’ to note that the combatants on this ground have done more in deed than he can ever do with words. Then, even better, he repeats the idea of dedication but alters its meaning. The first instance refers to the dedication of sacred ground; the second implores the people of the United States to complete the revolution. A smooth transition is one of a speech’s technical problems and Lincoln here packs it into a single word. Surreptitiously, with a disguised repetition, he slides from the dedication of a memory to the dedication to a cause. With subtle brilliance that no listener will notice, Lincoln has moved from the past to the future, the direction of every good speech.
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Lincoln shows that the only rule in writing is that there is no rule that cannot be broken if the speaker retains control of the words. This single sentence is set up and paid off with four succeeding clauses, all referring back to the beginning. In the hands of a poor writer it would be too long, but the broken rhythm enhances the effect when the flourish comes. Speeches should accelerate, intellectually and audibly, as they come to their end. The repetition of ‘dedication’ enlists the dead in Lincoln’s cause as he states, much as we shall see Pericles doing, that they died for the purpose he is applauding. Whether they did or not is really a moot point.
The only extempore addition to the script was the phrase ‘under God’. It was an uncharacteristically spontaneous revision for Lincoln, but he kept the change in all three copies of the address he prepared later. The phrase under God became controversial again in 2013 when, in a recording he made of the Gettysburg Address, Barack Obama omitted the improvised phrase. This loosed a volley of criticism that Obama was censoring and secularising Lincoln’s words. In fact he did nothing of the sort. There are five extant versions of the Gettysburg Address, only three of which contain the phrase ‘under God’. Obama was reading from Nicolay’s draft, the first draft, which does not include it, because it was prepared before delivery.
At the end, Lincoln elevates the pitch even further. The question is now not just the ending of slavery but the very survival of democratic representation. Government of, for and by the people: the whole subject in one memorable phrase. It probably wasn’t Lincoln’s coinage, though. The prologue to John Wycliffe’s first English edition of the Bible in 1384 includes the phrase: ‘This Bible is for the government of the people, for the people and by the people’, which seems too close not to be the source.
Lincoln’s language may seem biblically dramatic to us now, yet it is considered to be a turning point in the nature of public speech. Before Gettysburg, orators tended to speak like Edward Everett, who said, among many purple passages, ‘standing beneath this serene sky, overlooking these broad fields now reposing from the labours of the waning year, the mighty Alleghenies dimly towering before us, the graves of our brethren beneath our feet, it is with hesitation that I raise my poor voice to break the eloquent silence of God and Nature’. There were 13,000 words in that vein. Here is the ancient battle between the Attic and the Asiatic styles, brought forward twenty centuries onto a battlefield in Pennsylvania. Oratory changed that day and Lincoln, in a speech far plainer than Everett’s grand-style classicism, changed it.
Not that the speech was wonderfully received. Lincoln was heard in silence. Not many listeners realised they were in the presence of a speech that would be one of the first in every anthology. It took time for the verdict to settle that Lincoln had delivered a lapidary masterpiece. Its brevity, which had caused consternation on the day in Gettysburg, has since come to be seen as poetic concision rather than short-changing the audience. Lincoln gave meaning to the terrible sacrifice of battle. He defined again the purpose of the United States of America. He gave voice to democracy and equality, the foundations of the nation which he had laid once again.
JOHN F. KENNEDY
Ask Not What Your Country Can Do for You
Washington DC
20 January 1961
John F. Kennedy (1917–63) feeds the American desire for myth. In life he defined American modernity, an image that death petrified and preserved. His assassination in 1963 produced the first tumult of conspiracy theories which, half a century later, threaten to overwhelm the quest for truth. More Americans believe that Kennedy’s death was the result of a conspiracy than disbelieve it.
In 1960, at the age of forty-three, Kennedy had become the first child of the twentieth century to become president, the second-youngest man to take that office after the 42-year-old Theodore Roosevelt. Kennedy remains the only Roman Catholic to have been president and the only president to have won a Pulitzer Prize, for Profiles in Courage.
Kennedy was one of nine children born into a Massachusetts family of Irish lineage that had gone into state politics. In 1938, he came to London with his father, who had been appointed as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ambassador to the Court of St James’s. He was in London on 1 September 1939, the fateful day that Germany invaded Poland, and attended the debates in the House of Commons in which war was announced. His Harvard thesis, about the British role in the Munich agreement, became a best-seller under the title Why England Slept.
The war changed Kennedy’s life. His first attempt to enter military service was scuppered when he was disqualified for service due to chronic lower-back pain. It was only after months of exercise to strengthen the muscles that he joined the US Naval Reserve in September 1941. War service gave him a stature that cannot be earned any other way. In August 1943, Kennedy’s navy patrol boat was cut in half by a Japanese destroyer near New Georgia in the Solomon Islands. The crew abandoned the boat and swam to a small island three miles away. Kennedy injured his back in the collision but still towed one of his men, who was badly burned, through the water with a life-jacket strap clenched between his teeth. Kennedy was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal and the Purple Heart Medal. On 1 March 1945 he was honourably discharged from the Navy Reserve with the full rank of lieutenant.
The
