Kennedy (12 page)

St. Patrick’s Day 1954 also marked a change in my role in the office. My duties as Legislative Assistant had gradually expanded over the whole scope of his legislative activities, committees and mail. The New England economy was still the focal point of my efforts, however. While I worked on any outside speeches or articles concerning his New England program, I had little to do with the few other speeches he gave. But when he approved my suggested draft of his speech for a 1954 St. Patrick’s Day Dinner (a phenomenon unknown in my background), my role as speech collaborator on any and all subjects was fixed for nearly ten years.

It became my most taxing role. Although I had previously done
some writing and public speaking—as a high school and college debater and as editor of the
Nebraska Law Review
—my pen (for I drafted anything of importance in longhand) was not always sufficiently fast or facile to keep pace with the Senator’s varied and increasing demands. But the long, tedious hours of writing were rewarded both by the additional bond they forged between us and by his approval and use of my efforts. The morning after a particularly successful speech he would frequently call and thank me for my part.

He would never blindly accept or blandly deliver a text he had not seen and edited. We always discussed the topic, the approach and the conclusions in advance. He always had quotations or historical allusions to include. Sometimes he would review an outline. And he always, upon receiving my draft, altered, deleted or added phrases, paragraphs or pages. Some drafts he rejected entirely.

As the years went on, and I came to know what he thought on each subject as well as how he wished to say it, our style and standard became increasingly one. When the volume of both his speaking and my duties increased in the years before 1960, we tried repeatedly but unsuccessfully to find other wordsmiths who could write for him in the style to which he was accustomed. The style of those whom we tried may have been very good. It may have been superior. But it was not his.

The very fact that I was involved in his other activities and decisions, and constantly present to hear his public and private utterances, made it increasingly easy for me to fulfill the speech-writing role—and increasingly difficult to shed or even share it. “I know you wish you could get out of writing so many speeches,” he said to me one weary night in an Indianapolis hotel room in 1959. “I wish I could get out of giving so many, but that’s the situation we’re both in for the present.”

In that situation we turned out hundreds of speeches, some good, some bad, some mediocre. The poorer speeches, in my view, occurred for the most part in the early days when we were learning and in later days when we were rushed. Invariably the more time he had to edit and rewrite, the better the speech would be.

The Kennedy style of speech-writing—our style, I am not reluctant to say, for he never pretended that he had time to prepare first drafts for all his speeches—evolved gradually over the years. Prepared texts were carefully designed for an orderly presentation of their substance but with no deliberate affectation of any certain style. We were not conscious of following the elaborate techniques later ascribed to these speeches by literary analysts. Neither of us had any special training in composition, linguistics or semantics. Our chief criterion was always audience comprehension and comfort, and this meant: (1) short speeches, short clauses and short words, wherever possible; (2) a
series of points or propositions in numbered or logical sequence, wherever appropriate; and (3) the construction of sentences, phrases and paragraphs in such a manner as to simplify, clarify and emphasize.

The test of a text was hot how it appeared to the eye but how it sounded to the ear. His best paragraphs, when read aloud, often had a cadence not unlike blank verse—indeed at times key words would rhyme. He was fond of alliterative sentences, not solely for reasons of rhetoric but to reinforce the audience’s recollection of his reasoning. Sentences began, however incorrect some may have regarded it, with “And” or “But” whenever that simplified and shortened the text. His frequent use of dashes as a means of separating clauses was of doubtful grammatical standing—but it simplified the delivery and even the publication of a speech in a manner no comma, parenthesis or semicolon could match.

Words were regarded as tools of precision, to be chosen and applied with a craftsman’s care to whatever the situation required. He liked to be exact. But if the situation required a certain vagueness, he would deliberately choose a word of varying interpretations rather than bury his imprecision in ponderous prose.

For he disliked verbosity and pomposity in his own remarks as much as he disliked them in others. He wanted both his message and his language to be plain and unpretentious, but never patronizing. He wanted his major policy statements to be positive, specific and definite, avoiding the use of “suggest,” “perhaps” and “possible alternatives for consideration.” At the same time, his emphasis on a course of reason—rejecting the extremes of either side—helped produce the parallel construction and use of contrasts with which he later became identified. He had a weakness for one unnecessary phrase: “The harsh facts of the matter are…”—but, with few other exceptions, his sentences were lean and crisp.

No speech was more than twenty to thirty minutes in duration. They were all too short and too crowded with facts to permit any excess of generalities and sentimentalities. His texts wasted no words and his delivery wasted no time. Frequently he moved from one solid fact or argument to another, without the usual repetition and elaboration, far too quickly for his audiences to digest or even applaud his conclusions. Nor would he always pause for applause when it came.

He spoke at first with no gestures, though he gradually developed a short jab to emphasize his points. Often his tone was monotonous. Often his emphasis was on the wrong word. But often when his audiences were large and enthusiastic—particularly indoors, if the hall was not too vast—an almost electric charge would transmit vitality back and forth between speaker and listeners.

He used little or no slang, dialect, legalistic terms, contractions, clichés, elaborate metaphors or ornate figures of speech. He refused to be folksy or to include any phrase or image he considered corny, tasteless or trite.
⁴
He rarely used words he considered hackneyed: “humble,” “dynamic,” “glorious.” He used none of the customary word fillers (e.g., “And I say to you that is a legitimate question and here is my answer”). And he did not hesitate to depart from strict rules of English usage when he thought adherence to them (e.g., “Our agenda
are
long”) would grate on the listener’s ear.

The intellectual level of his speeches showed erudition but not arrogance. Though he knew a little French (“very little,” he commented in 1957 after a somewhat halting telephone conversation with the King of Morocco on the North African situation), he was most reluctant to include any foreign words in his addresses.

He was not reluctant, however, particularly in those pre-1960 days, to pack his speeches with statistics and quotations—frequently too many for audiences unaccustomed to his rapid-fire delivery. While I learned to keep a
Bartlett’s
and similar works handy, the Senator was the chief source of his own best quotations. Some were in the black notebooks he had kept since college—some were in favorite reference books on his desk, such as Agar’s
The Price of Union
—most were in his head.

He would not always be certain of the exact wording or even the author of a quotation he wanted, but he could suggest enough for his staff or the Library of Congress to find it. Preparing his brief, effective statement against the isolationist Bricker Amendment to the Constitution, for example, he told me, “Someone—was it Falkland?—gave the classic definition of conservatism which went something like‘When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.’ Let’s include the exact quotation and author.”
⁵

He also liked on occasion—especially with college audiences which he enjoyed—to include humorous illustrations and quotations in the body of his speeches. An excerpt from a particularly abusive debate
between earlier Senators and statesmen always delighted him, possibly because it contrasted so vividly with his own style of understatement.

Humor in the
body
of a prepared speech, however, was rare compared to its use at the
beginning
of almost every speech he made off the Senate floor. While here, too, he preferred historical or political anecdotes, both the quality and the sources of this introductory material varied widely. He believed topical, tasteful, pertinent, pointed humor at the beginning of his remarks to be a major means of establishing audience rapport; and he would work with me as diligently for the right opening witticism, or take as much pride the next day in some spontaneous barb he had flung, as he would on the more substantive paragraphs in his text.

Successful stories told by a toastmaster or by another speaker would be jotted down for future reference. Collections of Finley Peter Dunne and Will Rogers, current newspaper columns and quotations, the works of writers who liberally sprinkled their thoughts on history and government with amusing expressions or examples (such as Denis Brogan and T. V. Smith) were all carefully mined. Standard jokebooks were never used, nor would he ever say, “That reminds me of the story of…” as a bridge to some irrelevant and lengthy anecdote, but many an old saw was adapted to modern politics and to a particular audience.

No laugh-getter once used or even considered was ever discarded. A large “humor folder” in my files grew continuously. Omitting all anecdotes from the texts that were distributed to the press usually avoided their being publicized, and thus made possible their use in another speech in another part of the country. Audiences watching him scribbling away during dinner often thought he was rewriting his speech, as at times he was. More often he was jotting down the opening lines most appropriate to that audience, working in many cases from a typewritten “humor list” of one-line reminders.

Except for joking about the political liabilities of his own religion, he avoided all ethnic references as well as all off-color remarks in public (although not in private). The only joke which backfired was told early in his Senate career. “The cab driver did such a good job rushing me to this luncheon,” he told a Washington audience, “that I was going to give him a big tip and and tell him to vote Democratic. Then I remembered the advice of Senator Green, so I gave him no tip and told him to vote Republican.” The Associated Press solemnly reported the story as though it had actually happened, and a storm of letters from cab drivers and their wives caused the Senator to think twice about his choice of humor in the future.

He liked to poke fun at politics and politicians, his party, his colleagues
and himself. He liked humor that was both topical and original, irreverent but gentle. In his eight years in the Senate no speech assignment worried him longer or more deeply than his role as Democratic jester for the Washington Gridiron Club Dinner in 1958. His successful ten-minute talk on that occasion was drawn from several hours of material gathered from many sources and tried on many “experts.” Thereafter he tended more and more, except perhaps on the 1960 campaign circuit, to use that kind of political, more subtle and self-belittling humor, for it was naturally consistent with his own personality and private wit.

His best humor, of course, was spontaneous, and his increasing confidence on the platform brought increasing numbers of spur-of-the-moment gibes. Candor and humor, when combined, can be dangerous weapons politically, and at times he had to restrain his natural instincts in this direction.

In addition to the humor file, we kept a collection of appropriate speech endings—usually quotations from famous figures or incidents from history which, coupled with a brief peroration of his own, could conclude almost any speech on any subject with a dramatic flourish. On many of the hectic precampaign trips of 1957-1959, he would leave one community for the next with a paraphrase from a favorite Robert Frost poem:

He soon knew all these closings by heart; and while the standard closings, like the humorous openings, were almost always omitted from his released texts in order to facilitate their continued use elsewhere, his own reading copy (prepared in extra-large type) would have merely a word or a phrase to indicate the appropriate close: e.g., “Candles,” “General Marshall,” “Rising or Setting Sun.”

Obviously the Senator was capable of selecting and remembering his own peroration without the help of these few words. But he looked upon his text and each part of it as insurance. Should the pressures of the moment or the fatigue of the trip benumb his brain as he stood on his feet, he wanted a complete text in his hands which he could follow or at least take off from. He would often deviate from his text or delete passages previously approved and sometimes discard it entirely. But—particularly in earlier days, when he knew his extemporaneous remarks were likely to be less organized, precise and grammatical than a more
carefully prepared text—he wanted the reassurance a manuscript gave him.

A tremendous amount of staff research preceded every Kennedy talk. He was known in the Library of Congress as the heaviest borrower of their reference works. He did not make as many major Senate speeches as some of his more vocal colleagues, nor did he measure his—or their—effectiveness by the publicity a speech was given.

One of the most carefully researched, widely publicized and officially ignored speeches Senator Kennedy ever delivered was his address in 1957 outlining the interest of America and the West in a negotiated solution for eventual self-determination in Algeria. The speech proved to be substantially and in some ways distressingly prophetic in subsequent years, but it was bitterly criticized at the time in Washington as well as Paris. His name and speech, he later discovered, were hailed throughout North Africa—and an American correspondent who visited the Algerian camp related to the Senator his surprise at being interviewed by weary, grimy rebels on Kennedy’s chances for the Presidency. There was, however, no Algerian vote in this country, and reporters looked hard for political motives.