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
