Campaign Tissues

Imagine what today’s media consultants would do with FDR.

During his long political career, Franklin Delano Roosevelt made hundreds of speeches, but not once did he mention the rather conspicuous fact that he was sitting in a wheelchair. Had he lived today, in the age of Oprah, when stories of personal trauma and redemption are all the rage, FDR might well have been pressed to place his disability at the center of his oratory.

Tell your audience how you’ve suffered, a savvy spin meister would probably say. Make them feel your struggle to walk again and make it a metaphor for national renewal. Focus on your life story and they’ll believe you when you say, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

If that sounds startling, consider this: Al Gore’s speeches at the last two Democratic conventions have featured vignettes about his son being hit by a car and his sister dying of lung cancer. On the Republican side, Elizabeth Dole tried to cast a warm glow around her husband’s dour public persona by roaming the convention hall with a wireless microphone, much like that omnipresent talk show host from Chicago.

“Bob was totally paralyzed, and people thought he would never walk again,” Elizabeth Dole told the national television audience that night in 1996, describing her husband’s World War II battle wounds. “He willed himself to walk.”

Pick up the text of the most memorable political speeches of the last decade, and chances are you’ll find one or more heartwarming testimonials, mini-tales of heroism and woe. It is what defines political speechmaking these days, much as Greek-inspired orations did during the days of Abraham Lincoln.

“Before the 20th century, candidates didn’t even campaign for themselves. The office was supposed to seek the man,” says John Murphy, professor of speech and communications at the University of Georgia.

The quadrennial political conventions, which start later this month, are traditionally the Super Bowl of American oratory, a rare moment when large numbers of Americans collectively tune in to campaign speechifying. A great convention speech can give a campaign a boost like it did in 1976, when the normally uninspired Gerald Ford delivered the best speech of his career and nearly erased Jimmy Carter’s huge lead.

With ideology largely on the back burner as George W. Bush and Gore fight for the political center, and with both parties worried about sagging television ratings, this year’s conventions will probably accelerate the trend toward a kinder, gentler--mushier--sort of political rhetoric.

“People don’t want to talk about the issues because they’ll lose some of the public,” says Craig Smith, a former speech writer for Presidents Ford and George Bush. “Whereas if they can talk about what a great guy they are, and they can do it without appearing to be egotistical, they can pick up votes with no loss.”

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So, whom do we have to thank for the public outpouring of emotion on the stump, for the triumph of the personal over the political? In large sense, the almost never warm-and-fuzzy Richard Nixon, who once upon a time saved his political career with a story about a dog. And, of course, the man who many experts agree has most influenced contemporary American oratory: Ronald Reagan.

Nixon, in his 1952 “Checkers” speech, was the first to harness the power of a coast-to-coast television hookup to make a personal plea for political salvation. A generation later, Reagan, the silky ex-actor, staged his speeches as epic dramas shrunk to fit inside a cathode ray tube. He spoke against dramatic backdrops--New York Harbor and the Statue of Liberty, for example.

Since then, speech writers and political handlers have come to rely more than ever on the narrative devices of the docudrama and other video forms to shape the words the candidates speak. In 1992, it was a 12-minute film about Bill Clinton’s humble upbringing in small-town Arkansas--complete with a tear-jerking interview of his mother--that set up the climax of Clinton’s nomination acceptance speech and the line that defined his winning candidacy: “I still believe in a place called Hope.”

Great American rhetoric, we’re taught, is not about great television but about the poetic turn of phrase, the elaborate word imagery in, say, William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech at the 1896 Democratic convention. Metaphor is still a pillar of the modern-day speech. Some candidates hire novelists to write their speeches. But in general, recent years have seen a revolt against flowery expression. While Gore at times tries to mimic the cadences of Baptist preachers, Bush sticks to a thoroughly homespun style.

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“There’s this idea propagated by the media that we’re all really cool now and that high-style speeches won’t work,” says speech writer Smith.

Jack Valenti, 78, is a bridge between the two eras of oratory. As a child, he stood in crowded open-air political gatherings in Houston, listening to fiery speakers such as U.S. Sen. Tom Connally. “He would exhort the crowd, speaking without a microphone to thousands of people,” says Valenti, now president of the Motion Picture Assn. of America.

Years later, Valenti would write speeches for President Lyndon Johnson. By then, television had made the pulpit-style oratory of Valenti’s youth look ridiculous. “You start screaming and your neck swells and your veins stick out, you get a horrific look on your face,” Valenti says. “People say, ‘My God, he’s going to have a heart attack.’ ”

Attention spans and tastes have changed too. In the first half of the 19th century, Daniel Webster, considered the greatest orator in the history of the U.S. Senate, gave speeches that lasted a day or longer. Today, not even the most ardent C-SPAN junkie would tune in that long.

Before movies and television transformed how Americans spend their leisure time, political speeches were a form of popular entertainment. Just before Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address, famed orator Edward Everett gave a two-hour account of the battle that had been fought there four months earlier, a sort of spoken docudrama complete with the names of individual soldiers and their units.

A century later, Ronald Reagan brought storytelling back to the political speech in a condensed sound bite size, peppering his talks with anecdotes about real people. In his 1976 campaign for president, he told again and again the story of a Chicago “welfare queen” who “has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards” and whose “tax-free cash income is over $150,000.” (It turned out later Reagan had exaggerated a bit: Her income was only $8,000.)

Politicians had brought anecdotes into their speeches before, but Reagan did it more often and to better effect than any other before or since, says Murphy of the University of Georgia. For his first State of the Union speech in 1982, Reagan introduced two “ordinary Americans” into the House chamber and America’s living rooms.

“We don’t have to turn to our history books for heroes,” Reagan intoned. “They’re all around us.” On cue, the television picture switched from Reagan to a 28-year-old man who was sitting in the House balcony, Lenny Skutnik. Reagan recounted how Skutnik rescued an air crash victim from the freezing Potomac River.

Subsequent presidents have made the hero in the balcony a fixture of the State of the Union speech. In 1999, Bill Clinton introduced a baseball player.”You know, sports records are made, and sooner or later, they are broken. But making other people’s lives better--and showing our children the true meaning of brotherhood--that lasts forever. So for far more than baseball, Sammy Sosa, you are a hero in two countries tonight.”

Al Gore has not lost time bringing the practice to the campaign trail this year, when his staff placed policy props in the crowd--real people with real stories who Gore then mused about.

Most campaigns now have armies of researchers sifting through newspapers and other sources for anecdotes that will later roll off the candidate’s tongue. They are just part of what have become rhetoric factories churning out speeches, rebuttals and white papers.

A team of about half a dozen speech writers is considered de rigueur for most presidents. Important speeches can be hammered out by committee, with media advisors looking over the shoulders of the writers.

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The public got a rare glimpse into the process in “The War Room,” a documentary about the 1992 Clinton campaign. On election night, with Clinton rolling to a win, advisor George Stephanopoulos looks over the work of two writers preparing Clinton’s victory speech. “In that section, you’ve got to add a sentence about the young people,” Stephanopoulos says. “It should come after the 83-year-old woman. See if you can find a story in the catalog.”

Like any group project, the modern speech can be less than the sum of its parts. Bob Dole’s speech accepting the Republican nomination in 1996 was widely considered a disaster, in part because of Dole’s stylistic differences with the man hired to write it, novelist Mark Helprin. But convention speeches are only rarely great oratory, anyway.

“So much of it is artificial and canned,” says Howard Zinn, author of “The People’s History of the United States.” “The speeches are market-driven, in both content and style. They’re more boring than the Academy Awards.”

Hollywood, naturally, is a growing presence at the political conventions, with movie stars brought in by party operatives to liven up the proceedings and boost Nielsen ratings. At the 1996 Democratic Convention in Chicago, a speech by Edward James Olmos drew such a ho-hum response that he had to pause several times to castigate his audience for not listening. But Christopher Reeve electrified the audience with a bravura performance from his wheelchair.

“President Roosevelt showed us that a man who could barely lift himself out of a wheelchair could still lift a nation out of despair,” Reeve said. “And I believe--and so does this administration--in the most important principle FDR taught us: America does not let its needy citizens fend for themselves.”

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Mirroring the trends on prime-time television, the wounded, disabled and dying have become a central rhetorical image used in speeches at party conventions. A parade of people with AIDS and men in wheelchairs took the rostrum at both the Democratic and Republican conventions in 1996. Sometimes, the candidates themselves have flown into high melodrama, few higher than Gore, who at the 1996 Democratic convention told the story of his sister’s death. For a moment, Gore’s speech sounded like a gut-wrenching episode of “E.R.”

“All of us had tried to find whatever new treatment or new approach might help, but all I could do was to say back to her with all the gentleness in my heart, ‘I love you.’ And then I knelt by her bed and held her hand. And in a very short time, her breathing became labored and then she breathed her last breath.

“Tomorrow morning, another 13-year-old girl will start smoking. I love her, too. Three thousand young people in America will start smoking tomorrow. One thousand of them will die a death not unlike my sister’s, and that is why, until I draw my last breath, I will pour my heart and soul into the cause of protecting our children from the dangers of smoking.”

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To some observers, it was an emotionally manipulative moment (and even a bit hypocritical, given Gore’s previous willingness to accept tobacco industry support). But it left much of the admittedly partisan audience in tears and added some warmth to Gore’s image.

Any qualms politicians might have had about revealing embarrassing details of their personal lives disappeared long ago, or more precisely: Sept. 23, 1952. On that night Nixon, picked two months earlier to be Dwight Eisenhower’s running mate, delivered his nationally televised address in response to charges that he had received improper donations from wealthy supporters.

With his wife sitting at his side, Nixon gave a detailed account of his personal finances--down to the $3,500 loan he had taken out from his parents. He said he was going to keep the only gift he’d accepted, a cocker spaniel named “Checkers,” because his daughter Tricia had become so attached to it.

“That’s what we have. And that’s what we owe. It isn’t very much,” Nixon said. “But Pat and I have the satisfaction that every dime that we have got is honestly ours. I should say this, that Pat doesn’t have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat, and I always tell her she would look good in anything.” The next morning, Eisenhower’s campaign was flooded with telegrams exhorting him to keep Nixon on the ticket.

“You read Checkers today and it seems positively restrained,” says Murphy of the University of Georgia. “At the time, it was thought to be highly unusual. That’s why it had such an impact.”

No one thinks of Checkers as a “great” speech. But Nixon did give some good ones, helped by an all-star team of speech writers including Ray Price, who co-authored what many consider Nixon’s best, his 1968 acceptance of the GOP presidential nomination in Miami.

As the speech reached its climax, Nixon recounted the suffering of an unnamed, poor American child. “He sleeps the sleep of a child, and he dreams the dream of a child. And yet when he awakens, he awakens to a living nightmare of poverty, neglect and despair.”

A few sentences later, Nixon added a twist. “I see another child tonight. He hears a train go by. At night he dreams of faraway places where he’d like to go. It seems like an impossible dream. But he is helped on his journey through life. A father who had to work before he finished the sixth grade sacrificed everything he had so that his sons could go to college.”

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Nixon listed others who had helped the unnamed boy, “a gentle Quaker mother . . . a remarkable football coach.” Then Nixon reached the payoff line: “And tonight [that boy] stands before you, nominated for president of the United States of America.”

The “train in the night” speech helped soften the ferocious image Nixon had cultivated over the years. But did it express genuine emotion? Or was it an act of outright manipulation by a crafty politician?

Years later, after Watergate, a writer friend asked Nixon if he’d had a good life--a tape of the conversation was released this month. The writer was trying to get Nixon, the man who opened the door to confessional speechmaking, to reveal a bit about his feelings. Nixon replied curtly: “I don’t get into that kind of crap.”