When Charles I stroked the axe and addressed the audience at his execution, he had the benefit of 17th-century English, which allowed him to say things like: 'I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown, where no disturbance can be.'Īnd Mark Antony was lucky enough ('So are they all, all honourable men') to have Shakespeare as his speechwriter. And some were dealt even more outrageous hands. Obviously, the contributors who rose to their feet at the turning points of history - Lincoln at Gettysburg, Churchill in 1940 - had an unfair advantage. Alongside the truly grand utterances in this book - the rallying cries or elegies of King, Byron, Havel, Nehru and others - this seems, er, lightweight. The trouble is that the theme of any campaigning speech is: vote for me. But he also finds room for several rambling, evasive monologues by Richard Nixon and then there's Barry Goldwater, George Bush, Jimmy Carter, Jack Kemp, Hubert Humphrey, Harry Truman, and so on. Presumably for comic reasons, Safire has included Dan Quayle's trapped-in- the-headlights performance in the televised vice-presidential debate. It is a shame, though, that the book leans so hard on politics, a field of endeavour that generates the least interesting work. It was slower to dispense with the shapeliness of biblical language, quicker to accommodate the fleet-footedness of everyday speech, and seems more varied and supple than our own aloof version. Besides, American is a rich and versatile tongue. The best speeches are written and spoken - a fusion of the rhetorical arts, or what we now call 'language skills'. It is not a question of the spoken word being more dramatic, or simpler, than the written word. But these are inevitable quirks, and do not detract from the collection's seductive appeal.
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