SPEAK THE SPEECH

Jan 26, 2009 Features / Columnists, Tony Deyal column

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Hamlet: Speak the speech I pray you as I pronounced it to you,/ trippingly on the tongue;/… Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your/ tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this/ special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature.” William Shakespeare
While some American soldiers might have been confined to barracks on Tuesday, January 20, 2009 to ensure they were available in the event of any trouble, I spent almost 10 hours confined to Barack’s– inauguration, that is.
While his Inaugural Address was riveting, what was even more interesting were the reactions by some of the critics. Ross Douthat, Associate Editor of The Atlantic, wrote, “The speech, I thought, was a sometimes-dissonant, sometimes-successful attempt to marry expansiveness and sobriety. It wasn’t a speech brilliant enough to write its own page in the history books, a la Kennedy’s first inaugural, and so it will be assessed by future generations through the eyes of hindsight, once this presidency has a record against which his opening statement can be judged.”
Jules Crittendens, a Boston Herald editor and columnist, was vitriolic: “This one may actually have been worse than that other wretched speech (on Race Relations).  Even local lefties…have been saying this one didn’t go anywhere or deliver any punches…I’m not going to waste a lot of time on it. Another disappointment from a guy who is being hailed as the second coming of Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, Truman and FDR. Still waiting to get a sense of what the guy actually believes in, and what, aside from his personage, the mystical change is about.”
William Safire, author of “On Language” (the book and the New York Times column) and a former speechwriter for Richard Nixon, was not impressed.  Under the caption “No Memorable Theme”, he wrote “Our 44th president’s Inaugural Address was solid, respectable, uplifting, suitably short, superbly delivered, but — in light of the towering expectations whipped up that his speech might belong in the company of those by Lincoln, F.D.R. and Kennedy — fell short of the anticipated immortality.”
He was scathing about Obama’s use of George Washington’s Valley Forge speech, “It struck me as presumptuous for any speaker to begin to compare that moment of our nascent nation’s greatest danger to ‘this winter of our hardship.’ But maybe, as a former speechwriter, I’m hung up on the example of Lincoln these days.”
Obama’s reverence for Abraham Lincoln was also on the mind of Katharine Q. Seelye writing in “The Caucus” blog of the New York Times, “The speech carried echoes of several previous presidents although, strikingly, not much from Lincoln, to whom Mr. Obama has demonstrated the full measure of his devotion…Mr. Obama’s echoes of Lincoln were relatively brief — first, with his reference to the ‘full measure’ of happiness, a reminder of Mr. Lincoln’s ‘full measure of devotion’ from the Gettysburg Address.
“His reference to ‘our better history’ recalled Lincoln’s ‘better angels of our nature’.”
The comparison with Lincoln, particularly his Gettysburg Address, is deeply ironic.  Lincoln was never a media favourite.  The New York Post quoting Brownson’s Review of 1964 said of him, “Mr. Lincoln evidently knows nothing of  the philosophy of history or the higher elements of human nature…His soul seems to be made of leather and incapable of any grand or noble emotion.  Compared with the mass of men he is a line of flat prose in a beautiful and spirited lyric. He lowers, he never elevates you…You ask not, can this man carry the nation through its terrible struggles? But can the nation carry this man through them and not perish in the attempt…Even wisdom from him seems but folly.”
Harper’s Weekly was even more insulting, “Filthy story-teller, Despot, Liar, Thief, Braggart, Buffoon, Usurper, Monster, Ignoramus Abe, Old Scoundrel, Perjurer, Robber, Swindler, Tyrant, Field Butcher, Land-Pirate.”
The reaction to the Gettysburg Address was mixed and consistent with the political leanings of the newspapers. The Chicago Times said it was “…an offensive exhibition of boorishness and vulgarity” and “…We did not conceive it possible that even Mr. Lincoln would produce a paper so slipshod, so loose-joined, so puerile, not alone in literary construction, but in its ideas, its sentiments, its grasp.  He has outdone himself.  He has literally come out of the little end of his own horn.  But the side of it, mediocrity is superb.”
The Harrisburg Patriot and Union was as uncomplimentary: “We pass over the silly remarks of the President; for the credit of the Nation we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them and that they shall no more be repeated or thought of.”
While history will be the judge of how Obama’s Inaugural Address will be viewed by later generations, Clark S. Judge, who was a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, was more effusive in his praise than some of the other critics:  “President Barack Obama delivered a deeply American inaugural address. He called for putting aside old rivalries and hostilities, as did Abraham Lincoln in both of his inaugurals…As have all new presidents, he affirmed the American experience and our national ideals, doing it with particular force and grace.
“Finally, in subtle notes, he entwined the African-American experience in his portrait of the nation’s legacy and its destiny. It was a marvelous address.”
But the last word on the subject, for the time being, belongs to Senator Charles Sumner (1811- 1874), a Republican politician, who was the leader of the anti-slavery movement in Massachusetts.  On June 1, 1865, in his eulogy on the slain President, Sumner said of the Gettysburg Address, “That speech, uttered at the field of Gettysburg… and now sanctified by the martyrdom of its author, is a monumental act. In the modesty of his nature he said ‘the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here; but it can never forget what they did here.’ He was mistaken. The world at once noted what he said, and will never cease to remember it. The battle itself was less important than the speech. Ideas are always more [important] than battles.”
*Tony Deyal was last seen reminding everyone of what Ronald Reagan said when he heard that the Sandinistas had fired on a press helicopter, “There’s some good in everyone.”

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