An academic thinks he has discovered that actually, Winston Churchill’s wartime speeches went over like lead balloons.
“The author says he was surprised by his findings, but I for one don’t
buy it,” says speechwriter correspondent Lorne Christensen. “It’s hard
to imagine someone tackling a book like this hoping they can write
hundreds of pages confirming what most people already think about
Churchill’s speeches.”
The thing is, one doesn’t have to dig hard to find contradictory reports of speeches. Try reading Republican and Democratic papers’ accounts of what was said at, and who won, the first Lincoln-Douglas debate at Ottawa, Ill.
When it comes to speeches, even speechwriters are unreliable
narrators. I’m presenting Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech
at a meeting at the European Commission next week. In researching
the speech, I read a Washington Post article
by MLK speechwriter Clarence Jones, in which Jones says King started
out reading Jones’ text, but then immediately after he finished the famous
analogy Jones had written about the promissory note, King’s favorite
gospel singer Mahalia Jackson “called to him from nearby: Tell ‘em about
the dream, Martin, tell ‘em about the dream!”
And with that, according to Jones, “Martin clutched the speaker’s
lectern and seemed to reset. I watched him push the text of his prepared
remarks to one side. I knew this performance had just been given over
to the spirit of the moment. I leaned over and said to the person next
to me, ‘These people out there today don’t know it yet, but they’re
about ready to go to church.”
A nice story, but if you watch the tape of King’s address, no such
thing happens—at least, not at the moment Jones says it happens, or
anywhere near it. In this version, King finishes his bit about the
promissory note at about 4:30.
But he clearly sticks with his script until at least another five
minutes, and doesn’t actually begin to “tell ‘em about the dream” until
about 11:30.
I’m not calling Jones a liar or even an exaggerator. I’m just calling
him a witness to a speech. The unreliability of speech audiences to
remember what exactly happened and how they and others felt at the
time—that unreliability is tied directly to the particular usefulness of
the speech—a spontaneous, essentially ephemeral thing, much like the
emotions that it has the unique ability to provoke.
(Meanwhile, wish me a broken leg with my own unreliable audiences, several gaggles of speechwriters and other communication-minded continentals in Brussels and Copenhagen this week and next. Back at you late next week. —DM)
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