But Enough About You: Essays (56 page)

A memorable scene in Evan Thomas’s biography of the legendary Washington lawyer Edward Bennett Williams: Williams is meeting with his prospective client Bobby Baker, the disgraced D.C. lobbyist-operator of his day.

These two alpha males couldn’t resist the ritual pecker flexing as they sized each other up. One martini led to another. And another. And still more. Finally each had downed—ten. Pause for a moment to consider that heroic tally:
ten
. They shook hands, Williams went to his car, parked in the basement, and drove it through the garage door.

A quintessential martini moment. Never let them see the bottom of the glass.

—
Newsweek
, March 2012

A Short History of the Pep Talk

When Aeschines spoke, the people said, “How well he speaks.” But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, “Let us march!”

—UNKNOWN

Over? Did you say over? NOTHING is over until WE decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? HELL, NO!

—BLUTO BLUTARSKY, IN
ANIMAL HOUSE

History does not record who gave the first pep talk or what the occasion was, but at some point, a long, long time ago when the chips were down and things were looking bleak, someone, probably wearing fur, stood atop a boulder in some Neolithic locker room and said, “Okay, guys, we had a rough first half out there. We weren’t counting on the volcano erupting and the velociraptors. But are we going to let a bunch of woolly mammoths walk all over us and eat our lunch? Or are we going to show them what Neanderthal Man is made of?” To which the reply was, surely, “Huah! Huah!”

Give me a lever, said Archimedes, and I’ll move the world. A few well-chosen words can do the same. George W. Bush stood on the rubble at Ground Zero and told the rescue workers through a bullhorn, “I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.” Nothing stirs the blood like the prospect of spilling the enemy’s.

Ronald Reagan went on TV hours after the space shuttle
Challenger
tragically Roman-candled over Florida and said, “The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The
Challenger
crew was pulling us into the future, and we’ll continue to follow them.” His most memorable movie role was playing George Gipp—“the Gipper”—
who inspired the 1928 Notre Dame team to go back out there and beat Army.

In life as in the movies, Reagan was always upbeat, always urging others on, even when he was being wheeled into the Emergency Room with a bullet in his chest. “I hope you’re all Republicans,” he said as they took him into surgery, no doubt aware that doctors who suddenly find themselves tasked with saving the life of the president of the United States are themselves experiencing a bit of stress.

Pep talks are formally delivered in locker rooms at halftime, on the threshold of battlefields, from marble podiums after Japanese bombers have ruined an otherwise lovely Sunday morning in Hawaii. They can have a sinister aspect, as anyone will attest who has stood before the front gate at Auschwitz and seen the slogan
Arbeit Macht Frei
(“Work Makes Freedom”).

They can take the form of asserting a negative. “Failure is not an option!” Apollo 13’s Mission Control flight director Gene Kranz famously barked to his brigade of crew-cut, white-shirt engineers. In the movie
Glengarry Glen Ross
, the tyrannical sales manager incentivizes his Willy Lomans by telling them, “As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Anybody want to see second prize? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired.”

A pep talk can have a self-consciously melodramatic air. The valet of the Duc de Saint-Simon’s nephew would wake him with the words
“Levez-vous, Monsieur le Comte, vous avez de grandes choses à faire aujourd’hui.”
(“Wake up, Count, you have big things to accomplish today.”) The other day, the hotel operator gave me my wake-up call, saying, “You have a fantastic day!” Apparently the hotel management had decided that wishing the guest a “good” day was no longer adequate.

It can have a somber, fatalistic air: “Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we shall die” (Isaiah 22:13). A promissory note: “Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:10). Reassurance: “Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid” (John 14:27). Hope, in the midst of excruciation: “Today shalt thou be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43).

It doesn’t have to be a proper “talk” at all: “The corner has definitely been
turned toward victory in Vietnam” (Defense Department announcement, May 1963).

But the great ones tend to be delivered formally, script in hand. They also tend to become the signature utterances of whoever said them. History favors the uplifter over the doomsayer.

On December 8, 1941, with the USS
Arizona
still smoking and hissing in Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt spoke plainly to the nation. “We are now in this war. We are in it—all the way.” He didn’t sugarcoat: “It will not only be a long war, it will be a hard war. . . . We don’t like it—we didn’t want to get in it—but we are in it and we’re going to fight it with everything we’ve got.”

Churchill also inspired by straight talk. His prose was more polished that FDR’s. It sounded as though it had been written by firelight, quill pen on parchment.

You ask, what is our policy? I say it is to wage war by land, sea and air. War with all our might and with all the strength God has given us, and to wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy.

You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word. It is victory. Victory at all costs—victory in spite of all terrors—victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival.

Churchill made defiance a virtue, even after 226,000 British troops and 110,000 French had to be rescued off the beaches at Dunkirk. “We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be; we shall fight on beaches, landing grounds, in fields, in streets and on the hills. We shall never surrender . . .”

Two weeks later, on June 18, 1940, Churchill delivered his most famous speech of all.

The Battle of Britain is about to begin. On this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization . . . Hitler knows he will have to break us in this island or lose the war.

If we can stand up to him all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad sunlit uplands; but if we fail, the whole world, including the United States and all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister and perhaps more prolonged by the lights of a perverted science.

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty and so bear ourselves that if the British Commonwealth and Empire last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”

Churchill was a painter. “Broad sunlit uplands” is a painter’s metaphor: He was showing the British people what the landscape would look like after victory. He was also a historian. “New dark age” is a vivid, resonant, terrifying image, even if to our generation, it might sound like Gandalf trying to rally a bunch of wobbly hobbits. Churchill’s speech is marmoreal; this is prose, sixty-three years later, to raise the hairs on your arm.

Arguably the most famous speech in all Shakespeare is a pep talk. There are two, actually, both in
Henry V
. There’s not a shred of evidence the real Henry ever said a word of them, but no matter.

Henry, no longer the callow frat boy Prince Hal, is on the Continent reasserting his claim to the throne of France. (English kings were always having to do this; it went with the job.) Rallying his exhausted men before the walls of Harfleur, Henry cries, “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more . . .

I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,

Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot:

Follow your spirit, and upon this charge

Cry, ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’ ”

Three centuries later “The game’s afoot” became the cry of another famous Englishman. Elementary, my dear Watson.

On his march back to Calais, Henry finds his way blocked at Agincourt by 25,000 hopping-mad French. He is down to 6,000 archers
and a few thousand foot soldiers. On the eve of battle, his aide-de-camp, Westmoreland—a resonant military name—moans,

O that we now had here

But one ten thousand of those men in England

That do no work to-day!

This is Henry’s cue to riff magnificently on the general superiority of the English. “Wogs begin at Calais,” as the saying goes.

If we are mark’d to die,

we are enow

To do our country loss;

and if to live,

The fewer men, the greater

share of honor . . .

We few, we happy few,

we band of brothers;

For he to-day that sheds

his blood with me

Shall be my brother;

be he ne’er so vile,

This day shall gentle

his condition;

And gentlemen in

England now a-bed

Shall think themselves

accursed they were not here,

And hold their manhoods

cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us

upon Saint Crispin’s day.

The next day, Henry’s army of grunts disemboweled the shiny French noblesse with sharpened stakes and porcupined them with arrows
shot from longbows. French body count: 5,000. English body count: 100. (This body count is disputed by some historians.)

Kenneth Branagh’s rendition of the speech in his 1989 movie is so stirring you want to gallop up to the nearest French embassy and ride a horse through the front door. The Laurence Olivier version, filmed in 1944 while World War II was being waged on the same ground where Henry had fought, was a pep talk delivered in real time.
^I

Mel Gibson gives a goose-bump-inducing talk to his troops in the movie
Braveheart
, before the Battle of Stirling. The lads need some bucking up, since they’ve just had a good long look at the English army and those lethal archers. Braveheart gallops up to put the lead back in their sporrans.

“Will you fight?”

He’s met with dubious looks.

“Aye, fight and you may die. Run and you’ll live—at least a while. And dying in your beds many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that for one chance, just one chance to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom?”

Giving a speech on horseback seems to have twice the impact as just standing there whacking your shins with a riding crop. Soon Braveheart’s men are lifting their kilts, mooning the English, and on their way to becoming a nation that distills three hundred types of single malt. That’s a pep talk.

In the movie
Gladiator
, Russell Crowe plays the Roman general Maximus. (Why can’t our generals have names like that, instead of Norman and Tommy?) Maximus is up against the skankiest-looking barbarians in movie history—Germans, natch. Even Kofi Annan
and Dominique de Villepin wouldn’t bother with inspections on this bunch, who’ve just returned the Roman negotiator tied to his horse, minus his head.

Maximus addresses his men in the charged dawn mists: “Archers! Three weeks from now I will be harvesting my crops. Imagine where you will be, and it will be so.” Then he’s thundering up behind the barbarian front line, blade drawn, shouting to his captains, “Stay with me! If you find yourself alone, riding in green fields with the sun on your face, do not be troubled—for you are in Elysium, and you are
already
dead!”

The centurions chortle. They love it.
That Maximus—what a cutup!
That’s leadership, getting a chuckle out of men about to go toe-to-toe with second-century Huns armed with hammers and axes.

Germany, ancient and modern, has been the setting for memorable pep talks. The most stirring of my youth was given in Berlin by John F. Kennedy on June 26, 1963. It was remarkable at even the technical level: One key line is Latin, the punch line in German. Don’t try this at home.

“Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was
civis Romanus sum
. Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is
Ich bin ein Berliner
.” The words were spelled out phonetically in Kennedy’s speech text as “ISH BEEN OIN BEAR-LEE-NER.”
^II

Berliners needed some cheering up. They’d been through rather a lot, what with World War I, Weimar, World War II, and now the Cold War. Two years prior to Kennedy’s visit, the East Germans had built a wall through the city. Every night, they went to sleep to the sound of guards shooting escapees and Russian tanks on the other side revving their engines.

Onto that stage climbed the handsome young American president to tell them:

I want to say, on behalf of my countrymen, who live many miles away on the other side of the Atlantic, who are far distant from you, that they take the greatest pride that they have been able to share with you, even from a distance, the story of the last eighteen years. I know of no town, no city, that has been besieged for eighteen years that still lives with the vitality and the force, and the hope and the determination of the city of West Berlin.

When they got back aboard Air Force One, the adrenaline was still pumping. Kennedy said to his speechwriter Ted Sorensen, “We’ll never have another day like this one, as long as we live.” Prophetically correct, as it turned out.