the silent subject of the Gettysburg Address. Obama touches on that question in the meritocratic section of this passage, and it is granted the greater force because he is saying it. A black man becoming the president of the United States of America is one of the greatest stories ever told in all the annals of politics.
Martin Luther King’s vision has not yet been achieved in full, but it would take a hard heart to suggest that Obama’s presidency is not one act in the drama of his dream. This is the context when Obama speaks and it lends historic weight to his every word. None of this would apply if your task is to present the strategic objectives to the sales team or if you are on in the just-after-lunch slot discussing council tax at the annual conference of the Local Government Chronicle. Important a topic as that is (and it is), it has a register of its own which is not the same as that of a victorious president in the world’s most powerful democracy. The lesson here is: respect your occasion. If you pretend you are speaking on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and have the ear of the world cocked for your words, you do not elevate your subject; you diminish it. Obama can do this because of who he is and the context he speaks in. If the ending reads on the page as slightly boilerplate Obama, it works in the hearing. Hope is not always an audacious emotion to evoke. It can sound vacuous if it is not attached to the power to realise it in the world. Without pragmatic politics, hope is a wish-list. Which makes the defining point. The finest political hopes are those of an elected president of a free country.
THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESSES
On the centenary celebration of the Gettysburg Address on 19 November 1963, the sitting president of the United States was indisposed. He was required to fly down to Texas to appear in Dallas with Vice-President Lyndon Johnson. Instead of speaking at Gettysburg, as he had been requested to do, President John F. Kennedy sent a message that read: ‘On this solemn occasion let us all rededicate ourselves to the perpetuation of those ideals of which Lincoln spoke so luminously. As Americans, we can do no less.’
Kennedy’s place at Gettysburg was taken by a famous resident. Dwight D. Eisenhower had been stationed in Gettysburg during the First World War as the commander of the US Army Tank Corps Training Center. After the Second World War he had bought a 189-acre farm on the site where, in 1952, he held a picnic to open his campaign for the presidency. During his time in the White House, Eisenhower would often spend the weekend in Gettysburg, shooting skeet and inspecting his herd of Angus show cattle. It was here, in the farm that became known as the ‘Temporary White House’, that he recuperated from his heart attack in 1955 and here that he received the world’s dignitaries.
In 1961, General and Mrs Eisenhower retired to Gettysburg, where the ex-president began work on his memoirs. He was called upon to perform this one last major service, though, to stand in for his successor President Kennedy. President Eisenhower used his centenary address to summon the noble destiny and unity which had inspired Lincoln. Though Lincoln’s words retain their power to move, said Eisenhower, ‘the unfinished work of which he spoke in 1863 is still unfinished; because of human frailty it always will be’. The task was to pass on, as best we could, the legacy bequeathed by Lincoln: ‘a nation free, with liberty, dignity and justice for all’.
Despite the solemnity of the occasion and the gravity of his words, President Eisenhower’s speech has been lost to posterity because three days later the man who should have made the speech at Gettysburg, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated. The bullets in Dallas completed a gruesome symmetry around the most famous speech in the political canon. Both the man who was never meant to make the Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln, and the man who was but didn’t, John F. Kennedy, were assassinated, almost a century apart.
Ever since Abraham Lincoln consecrated the spot in 1863, American presidents have repaired to the battlefield at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to pay homage to the American Republic that Lincoln’s 272 words were designed to save. In 1878, Rutherford B. Hayes hoped that contemplation of the National Cemetery would allow Americans to appreciate those who ‘gave their lives for the Union, liberty, and for a stable, constitutional government’. Beating even Lincoln for brevity, Hayes spoke just 253 words, forty-four of which were in quoting Lincoln’s last sentence. In 1904, in a lesson about applying the disciplines of war to win the liberty of peace, Theodore Roosevelt commended the soldiers who had made their countrymen forever their debtors. On the fiftieth anniversary of Lincoln’s address in 1913, Woodrow Wilson celebrated reconciliation and offered a paean to a nation ‘undivided in interest’. On Memorial Day, 30 May 1928, Calvin Coolidge observed the usual pieties, dwelling on America’s interest in maintaining global peace and depicting the American economy, just prior to the Wall Street crash of 1929, as prosperously content.
Two years later, in a Gettysburg Address about the common good, Herbert Hoover issued a warning against demagoguery and said that ‘the weaving of freedom is and always will be a struggle of law against lawlessness, of individual liberty against domination, of unity against sectionalism, of truth and honesty against demagoguery and misleading, of peace against fear and conflict.’ In 1938, Franklin D. Roosevelt came to Gettysburg to sound a warning, which has extraordinary contemporary resonance, to those who seek to ‘build political advantage by the distortion of facts; those who, by declining to follow the rules of the game, seek to gain an unfair advantage over those who are willing to live up to the rules of the game’. Roosevelt articulated better than most presidents the idea they all took from Lincoln of an America that forswears prejudice and seeks unity in the common welfare.
Perhaps the finest of the second-order Gettysburg Addresses was given six months before Eisenhower took Kennedy’s place on the rostrum. Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson used Memorial Day to make a significant speech about civil rights. Johnson spoke as the grandson of a Confederate soldier and responded to Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail by offering the black people of America a promissory note. ‘Our nation found its soul in honour on these fields of Gettysburg a hundred years ago,’ he said. To ask for patience now would be to court dishonour and impair that soul. ‘In this hour’, the vice-president went on, ‘it is not our respective races which are at stake – it is our nation … The Negro says, “Now.” Others say, “Never.” The voice of responsible Americans – the voice of those who died here and the great man who spoke here – their voices say, “Together.” There is no other way.’
Johnson does to a high standard what all American presidents do at Gettysburg, which is to sing a hymn to the Republic. All speakers, taking their cue from Lincoln’s line about America being an experiment, reflect on the fragility of democracy, and they all say that, as long as the citizens remain committed to vigorous work, then a government of the people, by the people, and for the people could yet propel the nation towards greatness. That was, at least, the tradition. Then, on 22 October 2016, Donald Trump, at the time a candidate to be president of the United States, delivered his own Gettysburg Address and did none of this.
Instead, Trump gave a speech whose chief subject was not the American Republic but himself. It was both daring and egregious. After opening in the traditional fashion, by invoking and associating himself with Lincoln’s battle against division (‘hallowed ground … amazing place’), Mr Trump then proceeded to take the Address somewhere both unprecedented and unpresidential. Trump’s scattergun hit Washington and Wall Street for rigging the game against ‘everyday Americans’. He called his political opponent, Hillary Clinton, a criminal, claimed massive voter fraud without a shred of evidence, denounced unspecified corruption and fulminated against his enemies, home and abroad, real and perceived. He complained bitterly about named media outlets who he claimed were biased against him and which he alleged deliberately fabricated stories to discredit him. He labelled as liars the women who had made claims of sexual assault against him. It was a broadside against all the estates of the realm.
The worst of the speech is that Trump chose the site of the greatest-ever speech about the virtues of the Republic, to ask citizens not to trust the machinery of their own government. ‘The rigging of the system’, he said, ‘is designed for one reason, to keep the corrupt establishment
