Obama's War of Words

Eloquence without action is soon forgotten.


Whatever else he may be, Barack Obama is a gifted orator whose words will be remembered by generations. Or will they?
In the first two weeks of this month, President Obama has delivered two critical war speeches. At West Point he outlined a new policy for Afghanistan, committing 30,000 additional troops to deal with the threat that militant Islam continues to pose to the American people. In Oslo scarcely a week later, he used the occasion of his Nobel Prize to deliver a bracing reminder that the reality of evil requires nations willing to confront it.
Now comes the question put to all presidential speechwriters when a wartime president gives a major address. What did you think? Did he make his case? How will these speeches be treated by history?
The answer, surely, is that the measure of a speech goes beyond words. When it comes to the English language, the speechwriters around President Obama enjoy more than their share of talent. Still, ultimately a war speech will be judged as much on the success of the war as on the eloquence of the words.

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Think of the great war speeches, starting with the Gettysburg Address. When Abraham Lincoln delivered those words at a cemetery for the Union fallen in 1863, he justified the terrible human toll on the promise "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."

Ask yourself this: Had Lincoln not committed himself so single-mindedly to that effort, had he given in and sued for peace, would schoolchildren still be memorizing his words today?
Or consider Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Historians are still debating his decisions. But there can be no debate that his exhortations resonate even today because they were backed by policies that defeated totalitarian threats across both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

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Ditto for John Kennedy. In his memoir "Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History," Kennedy adviser and speechwriter Ted Sorensen did not dismiss the power of the spoken word, but neither did he confuse it with action. "[A]fter all is said and little is done, a speech—even an elevated, eloquent speech—is still just a speech," he wrote. "Saying so doesn't make it so."
Kennedy is sometimes compared with Ronald Reagan, often thought to have been a great presidential speech-giver because of his gifts as an actor. No doubt the Gipper understood the stage. But the point about Reagan is that when he spoke, he wasn't acting. When Reagan declared that the "last pages" of communism were being written or called for the Berlin Wall to come down, he believed it—and his policies reflected those beliefs.
"Nobody remembers "Tear Down this Wall" because I did an OK job of stringing the words together," says my speechwriter friend, Peter Robinson. "We remember the speech because Reagan meant it, because it expressed the principles that he acted on, and because history proved him right. We remember Reagan at Berlin because the wall did come down—and he did his part to help bring it down."
As the chief speechwriter who helped President George W. Bush draft his remarks on the surge in Iraq, I've been amused these past few days by hearing people compare that speech favorably to President Obama's recent announcement of the surge in Afghanistan. It's amusing because that's not the tone many of these folks were taking back when President Bush delivered those remarks.
If that speech holds up well today, it's because of more than words. It's because President Bush burnished those words with actions—insisting that we could still win in Iraq, backing that up with more troops at a time when many Americans wanted them home, and, most of all, by refusing to countenance an end game that would see our men and women in uniform leaving Iraq from the ignominy of an embassy rooftop.
In wartime, people soon tire of lofty words that do not seem borne out by events. In September 2001, with the twin towers still smoldering and the Pentagon wounded, President Bush delivered a war address to a joint session of Congress (which I had no part in, so am free to praise) that ranks with the best of FDR. Whether that speech ever receives its full due depends in part on how this war ends.
The same goes for President Obama. At West Point and Oslo, he spoke to the challenge of defending our freedom against hard men with no moral limit on what they are willing to do to crush it. The irony is that whether these fine speeches are remembered by history depends on a word he didn't use in either one: victory.
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