A pep talk can have a self-consciously melodramatic air. The valet of the Duc de Saint-Simon’s nephew would wake him with the words “Levez-vous, Monsieur le Comte, vous avez de grandes choses à faire aujourd’hui.” (“Wake up, Count, you have big things to accomplish today.”) The other day, the hotel operator gave me my wake-up call, saying, “You have a fantastic day!” Apparently the hotel management had decided that wishing the guest a “good” day was no longer adequate.
It can have a somber, fatalistic air: “Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we shall die” (Isaiah 22:13). A promissory note: “Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:10). Reassurance: “Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid” (John 14:27). Hope, in the midst of excruciation: “Today shalt thou be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43).
It doesn’t have to be a proper “talk” at all: “The corner has definitely been turned toward victory in Vietnam” (Defense Department announcement, May 1963).
But the great ones tend to be delivered formally, script in hand. They also tend to become the signature utterances of whoever said them. History favors the uplifter over the doomsayer.
On December 8, 1941, with the USS Arizona still smoking and hissing in Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt spoke plainly to the nation. “We are now in this war. We are in it—all the way.” He didn’t sugarcoat: “It will not only be a long war, it will be a hard war. . . . We don’t like it—we didn’t want to get in it—but we are in it and we’re going to fight it with everything we’ve got.”
Churchill also inspired by straight talk. His prose was more polished that FDR’s. It sounded as though it had been written by firelight, quill pen on parchment.
You ask, what is our policy? I say it is to wage war by land, sea and air. War with all our might and with all the strength God has given us, and to wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy.
You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word. It is victory. Victory at all costs—victory in spite of all terrors—victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival.
Churchill made defiance a virtue, even after 226,000 British troops and 110,000 French had to be rescued off the beaches at Dunkirk. “We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be; we shall fight on beaches, landing grounds, in fields, in streets and on the hills. We shall never surrender . . .”
Two weeks later, on June 18, 1940, Churchill delivered his most famous speech of all.
The Battle of Britain is about to begin. On this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization . . . Hitler knows he will have to break us in this island or lose the war.
If we can stand up to him all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad sunlit uplands; but if we fail, the whole world, including the United States and all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister and perhaps more prolonged by the lights of a perverted science.
Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty and so bear ourselves that if the British Commonwealth and Empire last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”
Churchill was a painter. “Broad sunlit uplands” is a painter’s metaphor: He was showing the British people what the landscape would look like after victory. He was also a historian. “New dark age” is a vivid, resonant, terrifying image, even if to our generation, it might sound like Gandalf trying to rally a bunch of wobbly hobbits. Churchill’s speech is marmoreal; this is prose, sixty-three years later, to raise the hairs on your arm.
Arguably the most famous speech in all Shakespeare is a pep talk. There are two, actually, both in Henry V. There’s not a shred of evidence the real Henry ever said a word of them, but no matter.
Henry, no longer the callow frat boy Prince Hal, is on the Continent reasserting his claim to the throne of France. (English kings were always having to do this; it went with the job.) Rallying his exhausted men before the walls of Harfleur, Henry cries, “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more . . .
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry, ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’ ”
Three centuries later “The game’s afoot” became the cry of another famous Englishman. Elementary, my dear Watson.
On his march back to Calais, Henry finds his way blocked at Agincourt by 25,000 hopping-mad French. He is down to 6,000 archers and a few thousand foot soldiers. On the eve of battle, his aide-de-camp, Westmoreland—a resonant military name—moans,
O that we now had here
But one ten thousand of those men in England
That do no work to-day!
This is Henry’s cue to riff magnificently on the general superiority of the English. “Wogs begin at Calais,” as the saying goes.
If we are mark’d to die,
we are enow
To do our country loss;
and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater
share of honor . . .
We few, we happy few,
we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds
his blood with me
Shall be my brother;
be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle
his condition;
And gentlemen in
England now a-bed
Shall think themselves
accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods
cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us
upon Saint Crispin’s day.
The next day, Henry’s army of grunts disemboweled the shiny French noblesse with sharpened stakes and porcupined them with arrows shot from longbows. French body count: 5,000. English body count: 100. (This body count is disputed by some historians.)
Kenneth Branagh’s rendition of the speech in his 1989 movie is so stirring you want to gallop up to the nearest French embassy and ride a horse through the front door. The Laurence Olivier version, filmed in 1944 while World War II was being waged on the same ground where Henry had fought, was a pep talk delivered in real time.I
Mel Gibson gives a goose-bump-inducing talk to his troops in the movie Braveheart, before the Battle of Stirling. The lads need some bucking up, since they’ve just had a good long look at the English army and those lethal archers. Braveheart gallops up to put the lead back in their sporrans.
“Will you fight?”
He’s met with dubious looks.
“Aye, fight and you may die. Run and you’ll live—at least a while. And dying in your beds many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that for one chance, just one chance to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom?”
Giving a speech on horseback seems to have twice the impact as just standing there whacking your shins with a riding crop. Soon Braveheart’s men are lifting their kilts, mooning the English, and on their way to becoming a nation that distills three hundred types of single malt. That’s a pep talk.
In the movie Gladiator, Russell Crowe plays the Roman general Maximus. (Why can’t our generals have names like that, instead of Norman and Tommy?) Maximus is up against the skankiest-looking barbarians in movie history—Germans, natch. Even Kofi Annan and Dominique de Villepin wouldn’t bother with inspections on this bunch, who’ve just returned the Roman negotiator tied to his horse, minus his head.
Maximus addresses his men in the charged dawn mists: “Archers! Three weeks from now I will be harvesting my crops. Imagine where you will be, and it will be so.” Then he’s thundering up behind the barbarian front line, blade drawn, shouting to his
captains, “Stay with me! If you find yourself alone, riding in green fields with the sun on your face, do not be troubled—for you are in Elysium, and you are already dead!”
The centurions chortle. They love it. That Maximus—what a cutup! That’s leadership, getting a chuckle out of men about to go toe-to-toe with second-century Huns armed with hammers and axes.
Germany, ancient and modern, has been the setting for memorable pep talks. The most stirring of my youth was given in Berlin by John F. Kennedy on June 26, 1963. It was remarkable at even the technical level: One key line is Latin, the punch line in German. Don’t try this at home.
“Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was civis Romanus sum. Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is Ich bin ein Berliner.” The words were spelled out phonetically in Kennedy’s speech text as “ISH BEEN OIN BEAR-LEE-NER.”II
Berliners needed some cheering up. They’d been through rather a lot, what with World War I, Weimar, World War II, and now the Cold War. Two years prior to Kennedy’s visit, the East Germans had built a wall through the city. Every night, they went to sleep to the sound of guards shooting escapees and Russian tanks on the other side revving their engines.
Onto that stage climbed the handsome young American president to tell them:
I want to say, on behalf of my countrymen, who live many miles away on the other side of the Atlantic, who are far distant from you, that they take the greatest pride that they have been able to share with you, even from a distance, the story of the last eighteen years. I know of no town, no city, that has been besieged for eighteen years that still lives with the vitality and the force, and the hope and the determination of the city of West Berlin.
When they got back aboard Air Force One, the adrenaline was still pumping. Kennedy said to his speechwriter Ted Sorensen, “We’ll never have another day like this one, as long as we live.” Prophetically correct, as it turned out.
The speech marked the high point of transatlantic relations. These days, German politicians tend to run against the United States—and win. But in 1987, Ronald Reagan gave West Berliners a pep talk that turned out to sound the first death knell for Soviet communism.
“Mr. Gorbachev,” he said, looking uncharacteristically grave, “tear . . . down . . . this . . . wall!”
Leni Riefenstahl died this September at age 101. Her 1934 film Triumph of the Will documented the twentieth century’s most ominous pep talk—Hitler’s, at Nuremberg. Hitler was by all accounts one of the most powerful speakers of the twentieth century. Even before he got to “in conclusion,” the audience was reaching for the keys to the Panzers and the Baedeker guide to Poland. And yet—can you quote a single thing he said, other than “Is Paris burning?” Hitler is a paradox: the great orator who left no memorable quotes.
It’s similarly difficult, poring over the pep talks of other twentieth-century monsters, Stalin, Mao, Mussolini, Castro, Saddam Hussein—and not much fun, really—to find notable lines. Perhaps it’s that pep talks given by dictators are organically flawed: They lack sincerity. Dictators don’t have to bring their crowds to their feet. The audience will do that automatically.
Say it’s you sitting there in Row 3 at the Eighteenth Party Congress, into the fourth hour of Stalin’s speech about how you, comrade, can increase tractor and hydroelectric output under the new Five Year Plan. Are you inspired? See the guy sitting at the end of the row, in the KGB-issue black leather raincoat, checking to see how loudly you’re applauding? You bet you’re inspired. Boy, the Boss is really cooking tonight!
Dictators not only give Potemkin pep talks, but also Trojan Horses. In 1957, Chairman Mao Tse-tung gave an uplifting speech in which he urged—demanded—that the Chinese express themselves freely, no matter if it was contrary to the party line. “Let a hundred flowers bloom,” he said, “and a hundred schools of thought contend.” Harvard professors cheered! What followed was the Cultural Revolution, in which all the free-thinkers found themselves being dragged through the streets wearing dunce caps, on their way to being reeducated, or worse.
Saddam Hussein’s inspirational style is somewhat harder to characterize. Last March 20, on the eve of Shock and Awe, he appeared on television to stiffen the doubtless quavering spines—and sphincters—of his followers. He called the Iraqi people “Dear friends.” Under his rule, an estimated quarter of a million people were detained or murdered. As a rule, the more of his own people a dictator has murdered, the more affectionately he addresses them in public.
“We love peace,” he said. He urged Iraqis to “Go use the sword. Draw your sword, and I’m not afraid. Draw your sword. The enemy is making a fuss.” (This may have sounded more inspiring in the original Arabic.) Like FDR and Churchill, he told it straight, telling the “brave” Iraqi people what they were up against: “the criminal junior Bush” and “the criminal Zionists . . . who have agendas.” Well, who doesn’t have an agenda these days? He signed off, “Long live jihad!” This gets my vote for the year’s Worst Cheerleading Routine.
But it was Saddam’s information minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, who showed himself a true master of the pep talk. “Baghdad Bob,” as he was nicknamed, had Americans cheering for him. He was the ur-cheerleader, the Super Pangloss, Anthony Robbins on LSD.
“Today we slaughtered them at the airport!” he announced on TV, even as U.S. troops were taking smoke breaks in the control tower.
“The infidels are committing suicide by the hundreds on the gates of Baghdad!” he said, with so many U.S. tanks rolling through that MPs had to direct traffic.
“As our leader Saddam Hussein said, ‘God is grilling their stomachs in hell!’ ” If I’d been a “brave” Iraqi soldier, cowering in the basement of a hospital or orphanage and I’d heard that on the TV, I like to think I’d have rushed right out and shot some woman in the back.
On a cheerier note, if the killing of whales can be called that, are the pep talks given by the three mates in Moby-Dick to their respective crews as they pull—pull!—at their oars. Here’s Stubb, the second mate, urging on his crew:
Pull, pull, my fine hearts-alive; pull, my children; pull, my little ones . . . Why don’t you break your backbones, my boys? What is it you stare at? Those chaps in yonder boat? Tut! They are only five more hands come to help us—never mind from where—the more the merrier. Pull, then, do pull; never mind the brimstone—devils are good fellows enough. So, so; there you are now; that’s the stroke for a thousand pounds; that’s the stroke to sweep the stakes! Hurrah for the gold cup of sperm oil, my heroes! . . . Pull, babes—pull, suckings—pull, all . . .
Wouldn’t you break your back for a coxswain like that? Chief mate Starbuck, whose name has now become synonymous with “grande nonfat mocha latte with an extra shot,” urged on his crew more economically. All he said was, “Pull, pull, my good boys.” Whereas Flask, the Pequod’s third mate and its most eager whale hunter, could barely contain himself:
Sing out and say something, my hearties. Roar and pull, my thunderbolts! Beach me, beach me on their black backs, boys; only do that for me, and I’ll sign over to you my Martha’s Vineyard plantation, boys; including wife and children, boys. Lay me on—lay me on! O Lord, Lord! but I shall go stark, staring mad: See! See that white water!
As for the whaleboat management secrets of Captain Ahab, Melville was coy: “But what it was that inscrutable Ahab said to that tiger-yellow crew of his—these were words best omitted here; for you live under the blessed light of the evangelical land.” But Ahab knew how to incentivize. Want to improve your third quarter? Try nailing a gold doubloon above the water cooler. Business schools could use these four disparate styles of pep-talking as case studies on how to motivate employees, though it’s possible that human resources might have a problem with “Pull, sucklings!”
Then there’s what might be called the Anti-Pep Talk, which seeks to inspire by scaring the bejeezus out of the audience. One of the most memorable of this genre was surely delivered by the late Herb Broo
ks, the U.S. Olympic hockey coach whose team performed the “Miracle on Ice” by beating the Soviets in 1980. On that occasion, the famously abrasive Brooks went into the locker room and told his men, “You’re meant to be here. This moment is yours. You’re meant to be here at this time.”
Very calm, almost Zen-like. And boy did it work. Before the next game, with Finland, he told them, “If you lose this game, you’ll take it to your f—g grave.” He turned to leave, pausing at the door to add, “Your f—g grave.”
Vince Lombardi, legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers, inspired by evincing contempt for anything less than total victory. “There is a second-place bowl game,” he said, “but it is a game for losers played by losers. It is and always has been an American zeal to be first in anything we do, and to win, and to win, and to win.”
This American will to win is most grandiloquently showcased in the opening scene of the movie Patton—a pep talk to the troops on the eve of the invasion of Europe. George C. Scott strides out on stage, exquisitely accoutered in chrome helmet, ivory-handled .45s, riding crop, and breeches.
“The Americans love a winner,” he says, “and cannot tolerate a loser. Americans despise cowards. Americans play to win—all the time. I wouldn’t give a hoot for a man who lost and laughed. That’s why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war, for the very thought of losing is hateful to an American.”
The above is from the actual speech Patton gave in the spring of 1944. Historians call it “The Speech.” It was carefully rehearsed and staged, and he gave it four or more times on the eve of invasion. In contrast to the quiet invigorations of Ike and Omar Bradley, Patton’s is pure trumpet, the Mother of All Pep Talks. The movie version—written in part by a young Francis Ford Coppola—is actually less profane than the real article: “An army is a team. It lives, sleeps, eats, fights as a team. This individual heroic stuff is a lot of crap. The bilious bastards who wrote that kind of stuff for the Saturday Evening Post don’t know any more about real battle than they do about f—g.”
But Enough About You: Essays Page 43