With President Obama’s health care speech to Congress and his education speech to school children getting so much attention this week, I began wondering about the history of political speechwriting.
A Google search on “history of speechwriting” reveals that it dates to at least 1415 when, it seems, England’s King Henry V employed a speechwriter to craft his call to arms on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt. The essence of that speech was captured by Shakespeare, “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…”
More than 350 years later, here in the states, it’s believed that both Alexander Hamilton and James Madison had a hand in writing Washington’s Farewell Address.
And Abraham Lincoln, that most accomplished of writers, “got suggestions from many people on what he should say as he took office with the Union breaking apart,” according to the History of Speechwriting timeline on Google.
However, the official White House Speechwriting Office is only 88 years old, dating to 1921. The first presidential speechwriter? Judson Welliver, “literary clerk” to President Warren G. Harding.
Today, the Judson Welliver Society is a bipartisan social club made up of former U.S. presidential speechwriters who usually meet after major presidential addresses, such as the State of the Union.
Members have included Ted Sorenson and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., speechwriters to JFK; William Safire, Pat Buchanan and James Keogh, Nixon speechwriters; Robert Hartman, speechwriter to Gerald Ford; and David Gergen, Tony Snow and George Stephanopoulos.
Reading or listening to the speeches of Lincoln, FDR, Churchill, the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King, Jr., Barbara Jordan, Jesse Jackson and Mario Cuomo reminds us of the power – the visceral power – of elegant, inspiring and memorable phrases and ideas delivered by our political leaders.
I think what speechwriters should take from the great political speeches is that words still matter. They really matter. In an era of PowerPoint presentations, it’s nice to remind ourselves of that.
We can provide those words. They need us. They really need us.
