TED:
Bill Clinton loves history, he loves American history. He's very well read in it. And he liked having unusual sources quoted in speeches. He didn't always read everything I put in there. That's true for any speechwriter. But he liked being surprised and challenged. And that's what you're trying to do for the audience, also. You can't always quote the same three people. So over the long haul I think it did help me.
RAMONA:
And, Michael, what about your relationship with the man you wrote the speeches for?
MICHAEL:
I think it's absolutely critical that you like the person, for a start. Because what you're trying to do, and what I was always trying to do with Bracks, was to find the rhythm of the man, you know? And he has a reputation as not being a great public speaker, which never bothered me. Because I think we're shooting for honesty, not for showbiz. And I think when you hit honesty that's what transmits. And at the time we were up against one of the greatest showbiz practitioners in Australian politics in Jeff Kennett. So I also began with Bracks when his common… The common way he was described in the media was 'Steve who?' I remember the great line that was in some newspaper was, 'Here is another nice-looking man in a suit who'll be sacrificed to the lost cause that is the Victorian ALP'. I like a challenge. And so it was the whole idea of taking what seemed to be absolutely impossible and then taking it forward. So we did go on a bit of a journey together.
RAMONA:
What about the idea that Michael's just said, 'they were going for honesty, not showbiz'? Now, surely, that can't be the way everybody does every speech. Especially when you're in power, surely not 'honesty, not showbiz'. What about… Ted, what do you think?
TED:
I think it's always a little bit of both, but I felt like Bill Clinton knew enough about showbiz to handle that for himself so my job… Especially in the foreign policy realm, there were two offices. There was domestic speechwriting and foreign policy. Our speeches were more serious and more focussed on factual matters. A speech by the President of the United States becomes foreign policy by definition. So we couldn't take too many liberties with humour or great drama, but, nevertheless, Bill Clinton is Bill Clinton. And he would always enliven the speech with asides or little metaphors or folksy ways of describing complicated situations. It was his great strength as a politician.
RAMONA:
What about you, Don? Honesty? Showbiz? What?
DON:
I think probably the question is phrased slightly the wrong way. I think what matters in a speech… Speeches work when they're concrete. It's not so much a matter of honesty. It's when any great speech — speeches which are often regarded as rhetorical masterpieces, Gettysburg or the Second Inaugural of Lincoln or Roosevelt's inaugural speech or Martin Luther King, they change an audience when they attach something that they recognise and feel, even if they've long lost contact with it. And when they are verb-filled and talk about things which people actually experience or know or sense, then they take off. When they're full of managerial speak or any other form of abstraction or cliche then people turn off. I mean, one of the things speechwriters do, it seems to me, if they're any good, is actually keep the language of politics alive and meaningful.
RAMONA:
Let's talk a little bit about language since you've introduced it here, Don. Do we agree that verbs are important, that lots of verbs are good, Michael?
MICHAEL:
Absolutely. Abstraction is the death of anything.
RAMONA:
But hang on. What about complex ideas? Does that mean you can never have a speech about something important in a theoretical vein or a set of complex ideas?
MICHAEL:
I think you can, but I think it has to be very grounded in what Don was saying, in the actual experience of people's lives. And that, I suppose, is where you're part of the speechwriter's armoury, it's the anecdotal. So that things are brought down to actual experience. The avoidance of great endless lines of statistics, which end up sounding like a kind of white noise. After you've got about two statistics in a sentence it's finished.
TED:
Absolutely. I think active verbs are important. The passive voice does not work usually. And simplicity is better than complexity. That was hard for me to learn, at first, coming from my academic background, but it helped me greatly as a writer to write for a politician, because you don't need five paragraphs to express a thought. You can express it in one or two sentences. But I also agree that there is a strategic moment in a speech where you can insert a complicated idea maybe one time only. You can work up to it. And that's the best part of the speech. But you have to be very careful not to overcomplicate the speech. In Lincoln's Gettysburg address there are very short words and sentences, but every now and then he'll introduce a word like 'consecrate' and it sounds beautiful in that simple context.
RAMONA:
You're on The Book Show with me, Ramona Koval, on ABC Radio National. We're talking about what constitutes a great speech with great speechwriters. Michael Gurr in the studio with me in Melbourne, Don Watson in New York and Ted Widmer who wrote speeches for President Bill Clinton in Providence, Rhode Island. That 'I have a dream' speech, though, which was the one that made my hair stand on end at the back of my neck last week when I heard it again, that seems to work with gentle repetitions. And there was a certain hymnal element to the sound, the rhythm.
MICHAEL:
It actually quotes the gospel songs. And the speech works as a kind of tide. It keeps coming in and out. One of the extraordinary things about that speech is that you keep thinking that it's over and it's not, there's another one that just keeps breaking across you. So what that does emotionally is it just builds you and builds you and builds you until you're actually enveloped by it, you're kind of swimming in it. And it is simply impossible to disagree. Just back on that point you mentioned, the Gettysburg thing before, Ted, and the use of the word 'consecrate', there's another really beautiful thing that Lincoln does in there, he uses three words which are virtually meaning the same thing, but he says, 'We cannot dedicate, we cannot hallow, we cannot consecrate this ground'. But what I think he realises is that each of those words would hit different people in different ways. You may not respond to 'hallow' and 'dedicate', but you might to 'consecrate'.
DON:
I think it actually hinges on the word 'struggle'. That's the word which is so cleverly conceived, I think. When he says, 'the men who struggled here', when he could have chosen a whole lot of grander words. That's the illustration of how choosing the right word really matters. And it's the plainest word you could think of, but it actually paints immediately a picture of what war is. And the battle's still fresh when he speaks. It's funny, some of the great speeches in American history have all been written just before the man died. Lincoln died soon after Gettysburg. Well, no. The Second Inaugural, he died soon after that or was killed soon after. Robert Kennedy made his best speech just before he was killed and so did Martin Luther King. Well, his second best speech, the one he made before he was shot where he actually predicts his own death.
TED:
I spend all my time reading old Lincoln speeches and I don't think I'm normal, but it sounds like you have the same obsessions I do.
RAMONA:
You haven't met Don and Michael. They're not normal, either.
TED:
And the King, too. I feel exactly the same about the King. I've been reading his later speeches. He started to turn against the Vietnam War at the end of his life and gave fascinating speeches as he was wrestling with that. I've enjoyed those lately, too.
DON:
You do have such a… The religious tradition in America is so different to Australia and I think, in different ways, both Lincoln and King Arthur influenced our fate via that traditional sermonising.
TED:
I think Clinton very much, without him having to say it, people could just intuit that he knew his Bible very well, which he… He's a rare liberal who knows the Bible extremely well.
MICHAEL:
It gives the whole architecture to it, I think.
TED:
Right.
DON:
Yes, you have that advantage, too, Ted. I've often thought it would be so much easier if we could evoke God in Australian speeches, but at least until about two years ago that was a complete no-no. No Labor politician would dare mention God, whereas it's almost mandatory now in America.
TED:
It is. You basically have to. You have to end the final line with 'God bless America'.
DON:
Yes, yes. I think it's a bit of a pity. I think it's a bigger test if you can't mention God.
RAMONA:
Someone it's rather horrifying if you're listening to an Australian speech and occasionally you'll hear the 'God' word and you'll think 'What on earth is that about? Who are they talking to here?'
MICHAEL:
You just feel excluded.
DON:
They've imported it recently, I think. And I know where we've imported it from.
TED:
What Lincoln is saying I think is more religious. He's saying it's insulting to God to say that we know exactly what he's planned for us. It's a little more respectful to say we don't quite know but we're doing the best we can. I think that's a great attitude for us to take on the left over here, but people just like certainty in US politics, so it's always 'God bless America'.
DON:
The thing about Lincoln, it's a sort of cliche of speechwriting, but there was a head and a heart involved in every sentence. There was such a marvellous soulfulness about his writing, but it had this intellectual quality that not many people have had since.
MICHAEL:
And a kind of modesty, too.
RAMONA:
Michael, as a playwright, did you approach the writing of a political speech as a storytelling exercise, as a performance?
MICHAEL:
The thing to remember about speechwriting is that there are many hands in the job, so many sometimes it can feel like you're on one vast committee. And you can feel as it goes through different hands of different advisors back to the person who's going to deliver it then back to you, then back to the advisors. You can sometimes feel the energy begin to drain out of it. What I think having written plays helped me with was I'm very used to writing in other people's voice and, I hope, able to capture rhythm. And I'm quite happy with being invisible.
TED:
There are many different kinds of speeches that a single politician has to make, so some are more theatrical than others. And some of ours had to be very dry, a statement of regret or approval of an action by another country. Or an extremely long persuasive speech to get Congress to do something and then you might have a statement of emotion over the passing of Sonny Bono all in the same day. So we're always kept on our toes.