When They Go Low, We Go High

by Philip Collins

  A reputation as an eloquent opponent of slavery helped Lincoln secure the Republican Party’s nomination for president in 1860. It is also the source of his indelible reputation as one of the great presidents of the American republic. Lincoln’s moral stature on slavery infused his leadership throughout the Civil War and helped to preserve the Union during a spell of potentially terminal peril. As if all that were not enough, there is something else to reinforce the abiding myth of Abraham Lincoln in American life. He is the frontiersman who made it to the White House. He is the incarnate American dream. The man who showed that virtue derives from public service rather than noble birth.

  Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

  The first thing you notice about the Gettysburg Address is its length; just 272 words compressed into ten sentences. It challenges every other writer to cut. The famous final words encapsulate the whole in just ten words. Of the 272 words, 204 are of a single syllable, mostly of Anglo-Saxon or Norman derivation, like ordinary speech. High political rhetoric until Lincoln had tended to look to Rome or Greece, for both structure and vocabulary. The phrase ‘conceived in liberty’ is an echo of Cicero’s argument that the only constitution in which a citizen can flourish is a republic. But stylistically, Lincoln here exemplifies the link between successful oratory and plain speech. Great rhetorical prose is not complex. It is ordinary speech elevated to the heights.

  The entire text can be read out in under two minutes, and the concision is all the more marked by the fact that the audience had waited so long for it. The procession that had escorted Lincoln to the field had been greatly delayed. Everett, the day’s main orator, then took his time getting to the platform. Before he spoke there was a lengthy prayer and some music, and then he spoke for all of two hours. By the time Lincoln rose to the lectern, the audience had been on its feet for close to four hours.

  It was worth the wait. The opening words are a date spoken in a musical cadence, but also more than that. ‘Fourscore and seven years’ takes the listener back from 1863 to 1776, the moment of the Declaration of Independence, rather than to 1791, the signing of the Constitution. Lincoln is making a critical point: he is saying that the ideals of the revolution have been violated in the Civil War. If the war is to honour the dead it must be fought for a purpose higher merely than preserving the Union. It must hark back to the founding idea that ‘all men are created equal’. Without once mentioning the word, Lincoln is talking about slavery. In January of 1863 Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Slavery is nowhere in his text but it is everywhere.

  Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

  The repetition of the word ‘nation’, which recurs five times, shows what, and how much, Lincoln believes to be at stake. The words ‘nation’ and ‘birth’ share a common root and often come back together at moments of heightened rhetoric. As early as the second sentence, Lincoln upsets the equilibrium he has established in the first. The nation, defined in the respect for the equal moral worth of all, is placed in peril in a single crisp sentence.

  To say so much so quickly requires complete control, which raises the question of how a text so learned could be composed by a man of such jejune education. Writers are often asked where their ideas come from. The best answer may be Larkin’s: ‘pure genius’. Fitzgerald perhaps came closer to the truth when he wrote, in a letter to his daughter which described exactly what he never did himself, that a good style forms through good reading. Lincoln is known to have read Aesop’s Fables. Robert Burns was his favourite poet and he knew both the Bible and Shakespeare. There is, though, some magical property in verbal composition that can make a novelty out of a reading list, and Lincoln had that mesmerising quality.

  We know that the words are Lincoln’s own because we have the testimony of his private secretary, John G. Nicolay, who saw the text, written in ink, in Lincoln’s hand. Nicolay also points to an important truth when he says that Lincoln wrote half the speech the day before he left Washington and the other half when he arrived in Gettysburg. Political speech has a short half-life. It goes stale fast and should therefore be composed as close to the deadline as possible. Bad writers are apt to think they will get better by taking longer, but taking pains can simply add to the agony.

  This is quite different from the myth, which first appeared in a 1906 book by Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews called The Perfect Tribute, that Lincoln was so slapdash that he composed the speech, literally, on the back of an envelope. The Gettysburg Address attracts myths. Harriet Beecher Stowe also claimed that Lincoln had written the speech in a few moments, and Andrew Carnegie insisted that Lincoln had used his pen. Don’t believe a word of it. It is clear from the finished version, let alone from the surviving manuscripts, that, though the craft cut close to the deadline, Lincoln himself worked on it until he had the desired effect.

  We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

  Lincoln is taking a risk with this speech. He is speaking at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, four months after the Confederacy forces were defeated there by the Union armies in the only battle in the war to be fought on Northern soil. More than 40,000 men had been wounded and 5,000 had perished. Most had been hastily buried 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 th
at 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 was American modernity incarnate, 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 war changed Kennedy’s life in another way too. The mantle of future president had always been laid on his oldest brother, but the death of Joe Kennedy in 1944, killed on a mission over the English Channel at the age of twenty-nine, meant that his father’s hopes for high office were transferred to Jack. Kennedy’s first job after the war, arranged by his father, who knew the proprietor William Randolph Hearst, was as a special correspondent for Hearst newspapers. In that position he was in Berlin, the scene of his own later triumph with a speech (see chapter 2), to cover the Potsdam Conference.

  Kennedy returned to America and set out on his political course. He represented Massachusetts in the House of Representatives from 1947 to 1953 and in the Senate from 1953 until 1960, in which year he became the Democrat nominee for president. In the general election of 1960, Kennedy won a tight victory over his Republican rival, Richard Nixon. The young president came to power bearing vast domestic hopes. He had plans for ending privation and poverty, for action in the cause of equal civil rights, federal funding for education, medical care for the elderly and a programme of economic stimulus, most of which would fall to his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson. The 1964 Civil Rights Act passed in part because Johnson invoked the memory of his slain predecessor.

  Kennedy’s short time in office was dominated, as the tenure of most presidents is, by foreign affairs. His first error was to overreact to a Cold War speech by the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in early 1961 which poisoned the atmosphere of the Vienna Summit that year. Kennedy announced in Vienna that any treaty between Moscow and East Berlin which affected American access rights in West Berlin would be regarded as an act of war. The Russians proceeded nevertheless, and the prelude to war, with the threat of nuclear confrontation, began.

  The next site of the struggle with communism was Cuba. Following Fidel Castro’s victory against the US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista in January 1959, Kennedy approved a plan he had inherited from President Eisenhower and ordered the invasion of the island using CIA-trained Cuban exiles. The landing at the Bay of Pigs on the night of 16/17 April 1961 ended in humiliation when the invaders were killed or captured. What took the world to the brink, though, were the events of the following October 1962, when the CIA took pictures of ballistic missile sites being built by the Soviet Union in Cuba. Against the advice of some hawks on the National Security Council, Kennedy settled on a naval quarantine. The world trembled on the cusp of nuclear wa
r, but after a perilous period the Russians backed down and removed the weapons.

  The next domino to fall was Vietnam. Kennedy vastly increased American involvement in Vietnam, but found no lasting solution and handed on an unresolved problem to his successor. It is still disputed, and will never be settled, whether America’s entanglement in Vietnam would have happened had Kennedy lived longer.

  Everyone remembers where they were on the day that C. S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley died. It was 22 November 1963, the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, shot by Lee Harvey Oswald from the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository. After just two years and ten months in office, he became the youngest president to die. Perhaps because of that early death, Kennedy remains an icon of American politics.

  The light has flooded in on his private life since his death. News has spread about his alleged infidelities, such as spending a week at Bing Crosby’s house with Marilyn Monroe, and his illnesses, which were at times critical. Perhaps Kennedy’s brief presidency would not have been possible in this more prurient age. There are plenty of commentators on American politics – Gore Vidal and Arthur J. Schlesinger, for example – who date the decline in trust in the political establishment to the death of John F. Kennedy.

  None of the revelations appear to have besmirched his reputation. The Kennedy White House exists in a sepia reality in which hope is forever young. The culture and the politics never seemed so well aligned. Kennedy’s approval rating remains the highest of any American president. It is now impossible to read the speech that follows without a retrospective sense of foreboding. This was Kennedy’s only inaugural address, and it cannot be read now, as is also the case with Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address, free from the shadow of what is about to befall him. On his grave at Arlington Cemetery in Washington DC there is a plaque on which many of the lines from this speech are engraved.