Words that Changed The World, with Jeremy Irons and Carey Mulligan

it is an absolute delight ladies and gentlemen to see you all here tonight I'm glad you're here you're in for a real treat you've heard we're marking the 15th birthday of intelligence squared and we're celebrating the spoken word we look at the history of speeches and speech making and the importance of words I'll let that one sink in today as if I even needed to now more than ever before I think we see the ramifications that a few lines can have as they spread around the world for good or for bad tonight it is a real privilege to bring you some of the very finest read by the very finest so I'm going to take you through our extraordinary cast list we have two highly distinguished speech writers experts in the art form both sides of the Atlantic Phil Collins will be very familiar to many of you chief speechwriter to Tony Blair now a columnist in The Times where he pioneered that analysis of major political speeches and his new book is called when they go low a reference to that line you'll remember from Michelle Obama joined the campaign speeches that shape the world and why we need them that's going to be a fundamental question we asked tonight Cody Keenan a warm welcome to you just flown over especially Cody was President Obama's speech writer during his eight years in the White House he helped craft amongst others the State of the Union address the Selmer 50th anniversary speech which we'll be hearing a little of tonight and the farewell address in Chicago he's currently working with Barack Obama on his memoirs Phil and Cody then will be discussing some of the great speeches made by remarkable men and women they have chosen the ones that they found the most inspiring but to bring it all to life we have four of Britain's best-loved actors Jeremy Irons shot to fame early in the 1980s when he starred in the TV adaptation of had revisited he's barely left our screen or our stage since that moment he won Best Actor Oscar for his performance in reversal of fortune Carey Mulligan won the BAFTA Best Actress Award for her breakout role in an education she starred alongside Meryl Streep more recently in suffragette and took the lead role in far from the madding crowd Simon Russell Beale one of the most acclaimed stage actors of his generation hailed for his Lea his Macbeth his Hamlet's I can go on you'll currently see him in amando you new cheese satire the death of Stalin and he's the winner of two BAFTAs Jaden uka star of the Donmar Warehouse as Shakespeare trilogy Julius Caesar Henry the fourth The Tempest an award-winning actor who's also appeared in Mike Leigh's film a running jump and in the channel 4 comedy chewing gum a warm welcome to all of you and thank you for making this so special but we're going to start right here with you to Phil and Cody and to understand what it is that pulls you into speechwriting do you do wake up dreaming of being a speech writer as a kid no yeah I didn't even get into politics to be a speech writer I got into politics because it's at its most pure its of battle ideas and I felt passionately about a bunch of ideas and my first boss was Ted Kennedy senator john f kennedy's brother worked for him for few years just as a policy aide i actually started as an unpaid intern in the mailroom and the Obama campaign came calling in 2007 they heard I could write and and I lied and told them I could and this is my first speech writing job so what does that mean then when you say you can write what had they seen of yours at that stage was that phrases was it the way you carried a message what what what do you put into it that I'd written a few speeches for senator Kennedy not many because even have a dedicated speechwriter but I always try to make them talk about something bigger than the actual moment the actual issue and I think that caught on film well for me I came right through the writing I'd always wanted to be a writer and so the first thing was was was Dickens and all well and that they were the people I wanted to write like and then I'd realize that speech writing is the point where writing and theater and politics all meet and trying to find elevated words for political argument became the thing that I could do slightly better than all my colleagues in politics could do they could do many other things rather than I could but I spent a lifetime wasting my circle my life just reading books that weren't on the curriculum and suddenly that I discover that turns out to be the best possible apprenticeship to be a speech writer don't do anything you meant to be doing simply read all the wrong books and you discover years later that music turns up in your writing and we have brought in actors tonight to deliver those speeches do you think your job is to make politicians into actors I mean when you talk about that performance it is an art isn't it it is an art and we use you I've seen it done very badly and it's very instructive when you've seen done very badly I used to write for a certain Deputy Prime Minister who I shall only identify by calling him John and this John and on a famous occasion he was always rambling in his speeches and I gave him a tip I said what you need to do John is tell the audience how many points you've got to make before you start he said I'll thank you that's very good advice and he stood up before a very large audience just around the corner he said good morning everybody I have 49 points we've got little John Prescott there do you have a I can't believe you blow my cover just I'm just bringing to the conversation in case um Cody was there somebody that you found monstrous - rightful no I've been extremely fortunate that's actually true I you know when you'd write for Ted Kennedy though he would view it as more of a barely even a map just something that was there and he'd do whatever he wanted to anyway it was like force of nature I mean many people will remember for example the Ed Miliband speech which he learned off by heart and missed out that middle bit Denis you know the bit on immigration do you ever have those moments are you are you sort of tracing the you know the lines as you go and you find that somebody's decide to perform it do it off by heart and before you know it it's oh yeah yeah absolute line you stand there the back with the script and you're going through it hoping that they hit all the right moments and don't don't delete things but obviously when you're talking about people the caliber of Ted Kennedy and Tony Blair they're perfectly capable of doing that and they as part of the skill is to be able to go off script and not make a mess and they did it all the time and Blair was constantly going off script and it was he always landed it perfectly but it's always a heart-rending moment because he think Oh where's he going with this you know you think please don't make the news no don't say it don't say anything interesting you find yourself a and we think of a bomber in that same way as being so lyrical and so flowing did he stick to script or did he'd he did and that's that's less a compliment to me than it is to him in that he was very active in his speech writing he was very passionate about he was precise with his edits and the words that he chose so that by the time we went up to give a speech it's exactly what he wanted to say some more often than I need to stick to it because he'd already worked it through we're going to take our cells int the first speech now this is the Gettysburg Address Abraham Lincoln something that I had always thought was a sort of first attempt I thought it was this wonderful free-flowing thing but you've explained Phil that there are sort of different iterations of this before he actually landed on the Gettysburg version oh there are there's always been a myth that it was just written on the back of an envelope on the way to get this book from Washington and like most political speeches the Gettysburg Address was written with quite a tight deadline so you don't that you can't have long but there are five versions which are extant and there's a number there in the Library of Congress as there's one version there was a controversy recently when Barack Obama recorded the Gettysburg Address and he didn't say the words under God which are the only things that Lincoln extemporized in the speech we're about to hear and the religious rites were absolutely up in arms that Barack Obama had deleted the the phrase under God he hadn't of course all he done was to read out one of the original scripts with it that Lincoln had prepared and he and he put it in under the whilst he was there the rest of it was delivered exactly as was written and it is I think one of perhaps the greatest of all speeches because what it does is it captures in a single phrase which you'll hear at the end of the of the speech the maxim of popular sovereignty down the ages you hear Cicero in Lincoln because you get this unbroken link from the American Republic all the way back to the Roman Republic for Cicero rhetoric was not just speaking it was also politics the two things were the same and that idea of popular sovereignty is given absolutely imperishable form by Lincoln there's one last thing before context before we which is that Lincoln was not meant to deliver the Gettysburg Address that honor went to a man called Edward Everett who was around orator of the day and Everett spoke for two and a half hours an incredible flourish absolutely dreadful we don't remember a word of it it it's all there publishable if you want to read it but it's terrible it's really incredibly ornate and Lincoln's plain style reinvents rhetoric on the day and the time people thought this was far too prosaic but it's become the great standard of American rhetoric this is Abraham Lincoln they could spread a dress four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal now we are engaged in a great Civil War testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure we are met on a great battlefield of that war we have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live it is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this but in a larger sense we cannot dedicate we cannot consecrate we cannot hallow this ground the brave men living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract the world will little note nor long remember what we say here but it can never forget what they did here it is for us living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced it is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom and the government of the people by the people for the people shall not perish from this earth [Applause] and it is that wonderful line isn't it the world will little note nor long remember what we say here and of course that speech as Phil said probably one of the most memorable in the world against which we now set virtually every other presidential speech no politician is given as good as speech since no politician has delivered a speech that's 272 words since and what's extraordinary about it beyond its beyond its brevity and simplicity is it does what any great speech does which is it speaks to something bigger than the moment they were there to consecrate a battlefield as a cemetery but instead he talked about not just winning a war that was still raging and still very much in doubt but our very founding ideals the very possibility about whether or not a country founded on those ideals could endure and of course Lincoln would not have had a speechwriter well he had a clock in those days I didn't use the term speechwriter there's a good man called John Nicolay who was his clerk who helped him with the speech but he did write it himself so they worked on it together but you see in the speech to the echoes of previous rhetoric so there's Pericles as in this speech that rhetoric really begins with Pericles in 431 BC in his commemoration of the war dead of the Peloponnesian War and what Pericles does is exactly what Lincoln does there as he passes from the eulogy to the war dead quite quickly and transports it into a paean of praise to the democracy to the city to the to the Republic and and that that transition marks all of rhetoric and it's the start of rhetoric and democracy who at which at wind because it's only in a democracy that the words really matter because it's only in a democracy where you're trying to persuade where the acts of persuasion is also the acts of politics as Cicero says and that's what Lincoln's doing there and so brief as you said curry so brief it must have taken ages to write you don't get that kind of brevity without losing a lot along the way no shorter speeches is much harder to write anybody can write a long speech short speech takes takes a longer time it just went one point about the very first words - four score years and seven now that sounds just like the date in a cadence but it's much more than that if you work back from 1863 four score years and seven it takes you back to the Declaration of Independence not to the writing of the Constitution that's absolutely critical because what Lincoln is saying in this speech is that the Civil War is a betrayal of the independence the revolution has been betrayed and what he's talking about with ever without ever mentioning the word is slavery he has himself proposed the Emancipation Proclamation and this speech is about slavery and he's saying these dead will have died in vain and if this Republic is allowed to continue with the blood of slaves and that's what he's saying but because his audience will not receive that well he's saying it in coded language so it's very cleverly done it's poetic but it's incredibly brutal at the same time once you understand and Cody's right this has become the absolute speech that no one has ever surpassed but every American president goes to Gettysburg and does their own Gettysburg Address there's only one president who didn't make it there and that was Kennedy because in 1963 he was due to do the Centennial speech and he had to ask eisenhower lived on a farm and gets spoke to stand him for him because Kennedy had to go down to Dallas where he did some important party political work and never came back and then every president does the same speech at Gettysburg which is a sort of cover version of Lincoln and then in the last election campaign candidate Trump went to Gettysburg and instead of 272 words of compressed beauty he delivered 45 minutes of egregious trade about the corruption of the American Republic it was and is the worst and most disgraceful speech I've ever seen because to do that anywhere would would be pretty bad but to go to the place which is essentially a secular right and deliver that speech was really quite an astonishing abnegation of everything that an American Republic stands for rites of passage places that have come to represent that I'm going to let you take us on Cody to Brock Obama's Selma speech on the anniversary you won't say this but I can you had a very major part in what he said that I helped him yeah this I always say but it's true Barack Obama was our chief speechwriter everything flowed from him and we were just there to help but for Selma this was another speech about the meaning of America just like Gettysburg it was you know in March 7th 1965 I guess or 60s a group of mostly black Americans set out to march to protest for their right to vote and before they even crossed the bridge out of town their nonviolent protest was met with violent retribution and the image of bloodied women bloodied men children fire hoses attack dogs they actually reached the entire world and they shook the conscience of the nation and the president and it was sanctioned wasn't it that was there was silence sanctioned by the mayor sanctioned by the governor ran on the bridge which I think is to this day still named after a Ku Klux Klan drag another cool expand and the idea that just 50 years later a black president would come back to that site was crazy enough as John Lewis actually said when he introduced brocco bomb that day you'd I would have called you crazy but and we could have just done a nice ceremonial speech commemorate it and God now there but Brock and I wanted to do something a little bit bigger with it he wanted to talk about the meaning of America because even 241 years in were still engaged in a big battle over what we are whether we're a static nationalistic fearful country divided by defined by one particular race or creed or whether we're ever pressing dynamic ever-changing and we view that as our constant hallmark so he elevated Selma the place into the pantheon of great American places but he also elevated those people into some of our most iconic Americans what could be more American than what happened in this place what could more profoundly vindicate the idea of America than plain and humble people unsung the downtrodden the dreamers not of high station not born to wealth or privilege not of one religious tradition but many coming together to shape their country's course what greater expression of faith in the American experiment than this what greater form of patriotism is there then the belief that America is not yet finished that we are strong enough to be self-critical that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals for we were born of change we broke the old aristocracies declaring ourselves entitled not by blood line but endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights we secure our rights and responsibilities to a system of self-government of and By and For the People that's why we argue and fight with so much passion and conviction because we know our efforts matter we know America is what we make of it we're the immigrants who stowed away on ships to reach these shores the huddled masses yearning to breathe free Holocaust survivors Soviet defectors The Lost Boys of Sudan with the hopeful strivers who crossed the Rio Grande because we want our kids to know a better life that's how we came to be and that's what the young people here today and listening all across the country must take away from this day you are America unconstrained by habits and convention unencumbered while by what is because you're ready to seize what ought to be because Selma shows us that America is not the project of any one person because the single most powerful word in our democracy is the word we we the people we shall overcome yes we can that word is owned by no one it belongs to everyone oh what a glorious task we are given to continually try to improve this great nation of ours [Applause] all those echoes of speeches that we know the Gettysburg of course the Statue of Liberty but then this phrase which he has come to be so associated with yes we can Cody you can hear when J was reading you know I could I could hear his voice again there is a sort of liturgical resonance isn't there to how he speaks what he says and I wonder whether the words come from that or whether he sort of directs that what tell us about yes we can both I mean and what's interesting about this speech is that he actually struck yes we can that morning that was them that was the day yeah and I had to fight with him on the plane to try to put it back in and he thought it was too self referential as a direct reference to the campaign and I had to remind him you know the very Lex lot next lines were those words belong to everybody and yes we can was was its we knew that people there would cheer about this and this was a speech specifically to the future to young Americans were engaged in this battle and I said you have to give them that rallying cry so how self-effacing I mean how unusual really for a man of power to not want to put too much of himself in his yeah it's a pretty solid contrast to what we see today [Laughter] [Applause] I'm always struck with the American rhetoric about how self-consciously it's a tradition so you've got that you know you've got Lincoln in there you heard but you've also got we the people we shall overcome yes we can it's a tradition that they quote a cross-party and we we it's much harder to do that in Britain and we've struck me before when I saw that Kerry had chosen that speech two things about it one is that Obama's writing and in your writing is really quite plain and the poetic elevation comes from compression it's like the creation of diamonds and in the Gettysburg Address 204 of those 272 words were a single syllable and the Bombers writings very much like that there's no flourish as such it comes from the arrangement the setting and it's beautifully done the other thing I thought is that if I were to do the speech which I'm most known for it was the 2006 conference speech when Cherie Blair had said something rude about Gordon Brown and we had to make light of it in a joke and I found this old Les Dawson joke which was my wife's run off with a guy next door and you know what I'm really gonna miss him and it just struck me that you're well known for an absolutely beautiful speech about injustice not known for a less dorsum gag I think that tells you something about the nature the two countries do you think that I mean from what you're saying if it's all down to one syllable words these speeches have to be said out loud they don't work as well on the page some do some don't I mean demosthenes wrote that all great speeches should should read well too but I'm not sure that's true I think there are some speeches which we don't need to come to life they need to be delivered well and you know I I have myself read some of these speeches and made a terrible mess of them they don't they don't come alive unless you've got the the rhythm I think I mean Obama has got a magnificent speaking voice hasn't he wouldn't whenever we wrote we always wrote for the year and my reader to read the speech aloud before you've been giving him a draft and then try to you know it's like the first time you when you're trying learn a foreign language in a dream in that foreign language the first time I could hear his own voice was when I realized I finally had were you there with him when he did the Pinkney speech when he sang Amazing Grace because I've always wondered what how'd the speech writing meeting went before that speech when he says what I'm gonna do is about 50 minutes in I'm gonna sing did he tell you no I can tell you we this this was a eulogy after the shooting in Charleston and we'd already done over a dozen of these and we were trying to find that figure out what to say this time you know that that's different and it was actually the families of the victims forgave the killer in open court and he said that's it I want to talk about grace the concept of unearned Grace and I did my best but the night before he crossed out the final two pages rewrote them longhand I think Pete Sue's got a photo of it somewhere and he we'd worked with the concept of grace he actually wrote in the lyrics the night before and then when we were he had to be back more revisions that morning and we were on the helicopter getting off at Andrews to get onto Air Force One he turned and said you know if it feels right I might sing it and I just said oh okay but people do ask if we wrote in you know sing here and you can never do that you have to feel it but if you've ever seen the speech you can tell instantly that you know he's in a black church of course he's gonna sing there's there's an organist playing there's a guy with a guitar one of the preachers binders in shades it's happening he always view then he would sing it yeah I'd say 99.9% yeah Jordan I'm going to take us on I don't really want to leave Obama on that thoughts it's so extraordinary but I'm going to bring in Winston Churchill hmm you've picked the finest hour speech Phil which is the funniest now yeah yeah I could have chosen any of the speeches from 1940 there they are all remarkable what gives them their real gravity is the fact that the the peril is real that the Luftwaffe have been in the sky this speech we're about to hear is after the Battle of Britain and it's genuinely um when the country is on the threshold of complete de Lappe disaster and collapse and that gives rhetoric great power because you can say things of wait at that moment and Churchill is the perfect example of this because he was renowned throughout his career for lavishing verbosity on issues that simply didn't warrant it so you go back to 1899 and Churchill is a by-election candidate in although he's 24 years of age and he turns up at church hall and there's about six people that and he stands up on the podium he says never before in the history of Oldham of so many people had so much to eat assaulted and then nine years later is junior minister and he's in Africa and he goes to the opening of an irrigation scheme and he's literally standing next to a hole in the ground and he says never before in the history of Africa have so much water being held up by so little masonry and it's it's all true I wasn't making it up every I'm just making speeches out for indolence yeah he did it all his life he lavished his skill on things that simply weren't up to it and then but then all of a sudden all of a sudden this absolutely extraordinary final chapter to is this random career and he's Prime Minister in the war and then he hits the the heights with never before in the field of human conflict has so much been owned by so many to so few that's the speech which follows this one this is their finest hour where he's defining the war effort he's giving a fairly candid assessment of where Britain is in the war and then at the end he lifts everybody with this hope what general vegam called the Battle of France is over I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization upon it depends our own British life and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire the whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war if we can stand up to him all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad sunlit uplands but if we fail then the whole world including the United States including all that we have known and cared for will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister and perhaps more protracted by the lights of perverted science let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties and so bare ourselves that if the British Empire and it's Commonwealth lasts for a thousand years men will still say this was their finest hour [Applause] Carolee I want it your thoughts on that to us it sounds such a quintessentially British speech it is of course a British speech in in wartime does it feel that that could not be made by an American leader do you think it's a different type of language a different type of rhetoric or would you not go that far yes and I think the moments different to I mean I think the extinction of your way of life tends to be clarifying and we we've never really had that moment you know we've protected by two oceans and it's also the time I dad's just watching Simon do that I pictured people sitting around the radio listening and it was also a time where everyone would listen to a speech like that whether on television or the radio today you just don't get that you don't get those moments they're so rare where tens of millions of Americans would tune in and a lot of them now just tuned in as a chorus of critics on Twitter it's it's just very very different age I one of the reasons that we Churchill is so revered as a speaker and Lloyd George isn't is that Churchill had the radio and Lloyd George didn't Lord George was an absolutely excoriating speakers brilliance and his war speeches were absolutely fabulous in the First World War but we don't have recordings of them so he hasn't entered the collective memory in the way Churchill has there's also course the facts of the war that the Second World War is a more obviously an easily a symbol just war than the great war but really is because we don't have any recordings of Lloyd George because Churchill did do that the radio he delivered it first in the House of Commons and then that evening he went to the BBC to record it and he was on the occasion of this one he was in a terrible mood and he turned up at the BBC and was moaning there was no whiskey and so in order to annoy them he refused to take his cigar out of his mouth so the recording we've got he sounds drunk he's not drunk he's just got a cigar in his mouth so we could have made you do it with a cigar in your mouth for authenticity we decided not to this girl was um was quite apparel for Churchill's and I mean he often just sort of caught fire as he wrote didn't he he literally did there was one occasion when he was so lost in the composition of a speech that his valet had to say sir you appear to be on fire and he said well just put it out man and is there is there a sense that Churchill knew or any of these leaders knew the the sort of success that they had achieved by the time they first delivered it or does that only come sort of retrospectively I think in Churchill's case and usually you can of course judge your audience in the auditorium or in the House of Commons as it was in his case you know immediately whether you're working there you don't know whether you're wider audience has received your words well at all and that becomes more and more apparent as we have you know mass media and of course the primary audience for speeches we roads were invisible to us we didn't know in what circumstances they would receive our words we didn't know how many people would we didn't know how it would be cut up the one of the things I mean you try and get onto news night and you think well you're going to be cut up into a very small segment so that's why you spend quite a lot of time trying to work out your top-line your soundbite if you think if I'm only gonna get six seconds on the news then I want it to the right six seconds you know if Shakespeare was gonna get six seconds you think well I really hope they do that to be or not to be bit because you know that's my best line and I want that up there and that will be on his press release which is of course why why sometimes now with politicians they will stick to a line however long the interview because they're so scared that's pre-recorded that the line doesn't get that's right they're they're fearful of people at you having your own opinion um Cody I wonder if if when you were writing or as he wrote for a Barack Obama you could have a sense of correlation between a successful speech and a jump in public opinion or in an ease with which a policy was accepted was there anything that tangible to work on no and I think that's I mean I wish that was the case but I think that's also a consequence of the times I mean we were so polarized there's just very little that any one speech is gonna do even to move a policy you think how many times we had to write speeches on climate change even wasting time trying to convince people that it's real you know it's it's it doesn't I think that the internals time that probably would have worked you say of all politicians of the modern era Obama is the one who really owes his ascent to his rhetorical brilliance yes all the way back from his first convention appearance when he really bursts on the scene and and then the the campaign in his fight against Hillary Clinton it's his capacity for language which really demonstrates I think why speeches still count he is the the absolute typical politician who is as good as they get and I regard him I can say this whereas in the new count I think he's by a distance the best in in my lifetime when I was on the US campaign trail over the last 18 months talking to a lot of people about Hillary Clinton and rhetoric and they said you know she's got the toughest job in the world because you know she's she's through no fault around sandwiched between Barack Obama's rhetorical brilliance and of course the comparisons people made with Bill Clinton and it was sort of almost unachievable that rhetoric was not particularly her forte many things were but that wasn't was that sort of do you think that was ever part of the of the the failure of that campaign yeah I think she embraced that notion I mean she made light of it certainly but that's the her skill set lie and lie lay and policy work and and bringing people together and doing the nitty-gritty and that's what she was really great at Bill Clinton's a good example of something very important about rhetoric because there's there's a very fine speaker and a fine mind but judged in retrospect not a great deal to say and the reason for that is not not is not to denigrate him it's because the times didn't produce that kind of moment he didn't have an event which goes down in the authorities and the history books in the way that Ronald Reagan did a series of cold war speeches which are magnificent and still anthologized he sees and peace and prosperity don't lend themselves to historical stage his inauguration speech is so forgettable isn't it sort of the least the least interesting one of any recent I think for the reason yet he gives that you know happiness rights white this month Allen said it's very difficult to write in an aging and vivid way about things which are nice I think there wasn't there was an opening there that would have been interesting after the end of the Cold War to redefine what the future is gonna look like I actually one of the most devastating lines that George W Bush ever entered I thought a great line in his convention speech in 2000 when he was talking about Bill Clinton was in the end to what end yeah and remember watching that a TV going down that is cult yeah I'm going to bring in the first female speech I mean there are a plethora of reasons why there are so few women speeches in history but we have one and before Cary performs for us I should just say comb elegance got to dash off at about 7:20 so I'm very conscious of of trying to get as much with care before you go to film but maybe fo you could just take us briefly into this and then we'll look yeah well this is Elizabeth the first this is a speech about gender because Elizabeth the first is speaking to the troops that gathered at Tilbury the Spanish Armada is is about to launch its attack and Elizabeth is answering the accusation that as a woman she cannot be a viable commander of the Armed Forces don't think she will heels just gonna to that I am come amongst you as you see at this time not for my recreation and Dysport but being resolved in the midst and heat of the battle to live and die amongst you all to lay down for my God and for my kingdom and my people my honor and my blood even in the dust I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman but I have the heart and stomach of a king and of a king of England too and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain or any Prince of Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm to which rather than any dishonour shall grow by me I myself will take up arms I myself will be your general judge and reward of every one of your virtues in the field I know already for your forward nurse you have deserved rewards and crowns and we do assure you in the word of a prince they shall be duly paid you in the meantime I left Handel general should be in my stead then whom never Prince commanded a more noble or worthy subject not doubting but by your obedience to my general by your Concord in the camp and your valour in the field we shall shortly have a famous victory over those enemies of my god of my kingdom and of my people [Applause] and this is the queen as commander in chief isn't it a woman who has to reassure subjects that she's actually a man you know that she can't behave like a man that's right and she's refers to her father in the speech because she knows that if the battle goes awry it will be attributed to her gender in a way it wouldn't have been if the if it was a king rather than a queen so she she does what you should always do and she confronts that head-on and she takes on that fight and she was greeted with the great ovation and you say she didn't wear heels well it's friend Jesse I can't tell you definitely she did wear heels but there is a huge scholarly dispute about what she was wearing at the time because the conception we have of Elizabeth now is this formidable warrior is really ode to that speech and all the all the depictions of her in various soft suits of armor and I don't want to labor the point but there was a very strong moment during the last campaign where Hillary Clinton had to decide didn't she was she going to say you know because a lot of criticism was how can we have a woman you know I said criticism a lot of her critics would say how can we have a woman as commander-in-chief this was something that the other side used against her and she had to decide whether to you know sort of feminized herself didn't she or whether to sort of take the Elizabeth the first approach and say I'm stealing yeah I know I look weak and feeble but I have the heart and stomach of a king yeah I mean there's a certain unfairness to the the bars she had to jump over the hoop she had to jump through I mean nobody made Donald Trump prove whether or not he was capable to be commander-in-chief you know and I was so she and she didn't really have to work that hard it's at saying it either she traveled to I think 180 countries when she was Secretary of State she you know lived in the White House for eight years of the commander in chief she was knew all the generals I mean she was eminently qualified but to make her still have to go through these hoops saying I know I'm but a weak and feeble woman his ridiculous was Elizabeth completely transformed the way she was seen with his speech I mean again it shows how important it was we don't know for certain this speech was ever delivered actually all we have is the testimony of a clergyman 35 years later who wrote it up so we can't be certain that it was delivered exactly as it was but she did she was known to be a real fan of good writing an Elizabeth was a good writer herself we know that so it accords with what we do know about her literary capacities but we're not certain that those words were delivered quite like that but we can compare it to the words of Everly in Pankhurst the laws that men have made which she embraces the fact that women need laws for women it's not about being male it's about laws coming to meet with absolutely I mean Emmeline Pankhurst in the speech we're about to hear is she arrives actually from prison because she's been imprisoned by the authorities she was on seven occasions and there's a gathering in the Portman rooms in London and they don't expect Emmeline Pankhurst to turn up and she does she comes on stage and she's greeted with this huge ovation and she does a really brilliantly forensic speech about why it's important for women to be firstly given the vote but secondly why because there are laws that men have made which are only for the interests of men and this is a speech in which she makes that case men politicians are in the habit of talking to women as if there were no laws that affect women the fact is they say the home is the place for women their interests are the rearing and training of children these are the things that interest women politics have nothing to do with these things and therefore politics do not concern women yet the laws decide how women are to live in marriage how their children are to be trained and educated and what their future of their children is to be all of that is decided by Act of Parliament let us take a few of these laws and see what there is to say about them from the woman's point of view first of all let us take the marriage rules they are made by men for women let us consider whether they are equal whether they are just whether they are wise what security of maintenance has the married woman many a married woman having given up her economic independence in order to marry how is she compensated for that loss what security does she get in that marriage for which she gave up economic independence take the case of a woman who has been earning a good income she is told that she ought to give up her employment when she becomes the wife and a mother what does she get in return all that a married man is obliged to do by law for his wife is to provide her shelter of some kind food of some kind and clothing of some kind it is left to his good pleasure to decide what the shelter shall be what the food shall be what the clothing shall be it has left to him to decide what money shall be spent on the home and how it shall be spent the wife has no voice legally in deciding any of these things she has no legal claim upon any definite portion of his income if he is a good man a conscientious man he does the right thing if he is not if he chooses almost to starve his wife she has no remedy what he thinks sufficient is what she has to be content with the more one thinks about the importance of the vote for women the more one realizes how vital it is we're finding out new reasons for the vote we need new needs for the vote every day in carrying on our agitation I hope there may be a few men and women here who will go away determined to at least give this question more consideration than they have in the past they will see that we women who are doing so much to get the vote want it because we realize how much good we can do with it when we've got it we do not want it in order to boast of how much we have got we do not want it because we want to imitate men or be like men we want it because without it we cannot do the work that is necessary and right and proper that every man and woman should be ready and willing to undertake in the interest of the community of which they form apart Carrie thank you so much arias Carrie is leaving us for Graham Norton but I'm under stirred that you can you can catch her tomorrow just hearing that and the sort of simplicity with which Carrie read that I was sort of I was struck it's almost like she's trying to explain something incredibly simple to a child you know there's no soaring rhetoric there's no romance or like you said there is no grandiose right there is no sort of soaring flight is there there's just let me put this in words of literally one syllable that's right her husband Richard Pangos was it was a lawyer and that is essentially a lawyer's speech it's very instrumental the argument she makes - because she doesn't dwell for long on the sheer injustice that women should be denied the vote you could make that case it's simply an irrelevant category womanhood to deny anybody the vote and she does glance at that argument but then she moves on quite quickly to say the reasons why the consequences of us not having the votes are themselves iniquitous and she makes it in a very painstaking way and it's very interesting and part of the reason she does that I think is that of course Pankhurst and the suffragettes in contrast to the suffragists Millicent Fawcett Socrates were renowned for their violent methods so at least in part this is a speech a sauna has just arrived from prison whose the authorities are watching her very closely and she makes a deliberately downbeat consciously rational argument so the context is quite important in that plainness of style so you've said something critical there which is a rational quality would be something that presumably men would admire and also men at the time of course would regard women is not capable of that so not hysterical I'm not shouting I'm not going to burst into tears quite and and interestingly this this line that she says we do not want it because we want to imitate men or be like men she's anticipating isn't she there yes she said that a lot in all her speeches that sort of thing she's also addressing women because at the time I mean bear in mind this is a century ago not all of the women were on her side by any means so she's also saying to women of a traditional cast of mind don't worry I'm not excluding you she's doing something we all have to do with speeches which is try and bind an audience which does not agree so she's trying not to lose women of a traditional kind as well as win over men so it's a very delicate task she's engaged on and that explains the very careful way she trips through the argument and the simplicity is what makes it powerful I mean some of the best speeches throughout history are given by agitators and rabble rousers but that's just what we call them and really all they're doing is holding up a mirror to society and what we see is uncomfortable and the simplicity of her just describing exactly how society works was uncomfortable like some of the some of the greatest speeches and in civil rights women's rights labor rights embrace that and in the line you put out she's it's not even a plea for special treatment it's just a plea for the equal treatment that we like to promise but don't always deliver on because you're telling people things they don't know I mean whether it's civil rights most people would not have known you know the situation that those fighting for justice were in or sometimes they even do know and don't do anything about it and that's what makes it even more uncomfortable we're going to go to Shakespeare now Henry the fifth the speech on Crispin's day krispies and Crispin Crispian yes so sometimes it has an a sometimes it doesn't filled you have a few years to take we're really actually looking at to battle speeches now aren't we one Shakespeare and one much more modern yeah the other ones Tim Collins on the eve of the Iraq battle I mean Shakespeare there's no speech writers joke which I've used many times which is when it was written anything you say your words will be read long after Milton and Shakespeare are forgotten but no until then and I'm often asked who's the best speech writer in the history of rhetoric and it's very hard to look past Shakespeare you know I am no orator as Brutus it's and then this whole whole sections of the other plays are actually about rhetoric not just deploying it Coriolanus being the obvious example and Julius Caesar just cited and Shakespeare's magnificent capacity for rhetorical language is seen to wonderful effect in this passage we're gonna hear in a moment from Henry the fifth and then we're going to have straight after that a modern version of eve of war speaking Colonel Tim Collins speaking to his troops before they go into battle in the defining conflicts of the 21st century the Barton battle in Iraq the politics of which are much strolled over but it's much more rare to just dwell from her and think about those people go into that battlefield and what is going through their minds that's what Tim Collins is trying to do but first let's have Henry the fifth with Shakespeare he which hath no stomach to this fight let him depart his passport shall be made and crowns for convoy put into his purse we would not die in that man's company that fears his fellowship to die with us this day is called the feast of Crispian he that outlives this day and comes safe home will stand a tiptoe when this day is named and rouse him at the name of Crispian Hever shall live this day and see old age will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours and say tomorrow his son Christian then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars and say these wounds I had on Crispin's day old man forgets yet all shall be forgot but he'll remember with advantages what feats he did that day then shall our names familiar in his mouth as household words Harry the King Bedford and Exeter Warwick and Talbot Salisbury and Gloucester be in their flowing cups freshly remember'd this story shall the good man teach his son and Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by from this day to the ending of the world but we in it shall be remembered we few we happy few we band of brothers for he today 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 Abed 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 [Applause] we go to liberate not to conquer we will not fly our flags in their country we are entering Iraq to free our people and the only flag which will be flown in that ancient land is their own show respect for them wipe them out if that is what they choose but if you are ferocious in battle remember to be magnanimous in victory Iraq is steeped in history it is a site of the Garden of Eden of the great flood and the birthplace of Abraham tread lightly there you will see things that no man could pay to see and you will have a to go a long way to find a more decent generous and upright people than the Iraqis you will be embarrassed by their hospitality even though they have nothing don't treat them as refugees for their in their own country their children will be poor but in years to come they will know that the light of liberation in their lives was brought by you if there are casualties of war then remember that when they woke up and got dressed in the morning they did not plan to die this day allow them dignity and death bury them properly and mark their graves there are some who are alive at this moment who will not be alive shortly those who do not wish to go on that journey we will not send as for the others I expect you to rock their world if you harm the regiment or its history by over-enthusiasm in killing or in cowardice no it is your family we'll suffer you will be shunned unless your conduct is of the highest for your deeds will follow you down through history we will bring shame on neither our uniform or our nation if we survive the first strike we will survive the attack as for ourselves let's bring everyone home and leave Iraq a better place for us having been there our business now is north I'd forgotten the astonishing power of that I don't think I had heard it spoken out loud I remember vividly when it was made it was on the front page of our newspapers and going back to what you were saying about Churchill in the radio that for me was a reminder that this was a message not just to the Troops but very much to an audience a domestic audience wasn't it of of doubters of there had been protest the Iraq war and there were a lot of people who really worried about our position that yeah and how the outcome can mock the rhetoric in due course because the other thing was really powerful about it is the the fact that we didn't tread lightly and that none of those things came to pass and it's and it's now sounds like a series of pious hopes which we know will be disappointed and that happens in rhetoric all the time and his speeches don't make things happen most of the time the most conspicuous example was right back at the beginning with Cicero who his Sousa philippics against Mark Antony he ended up his head cut off and his hand cut off and nailed to the rostrum for two exhibitors to passersby and if you end up with after a series of speeches with your head in your hands cut off you have to conclude it could have gone better that's Cody's such a sort of sobering thought I mean not not that one obviously which is but this idea that we've called this this session this this performance night words that change the world what if they don't yeah that was gonna make the same point that you know that the Churchill speech doesn't really endure if Britain fell if we lost the Battle of Britain and that's how history is written you know that there are a lot of great speeches out there that didn't endure because it didn't work out the right way so so your perspective then will be this is not a speech that that lasts because or do you or do you you know I mean Tony Blair as you know well thinks we will come full circle I don't want to enter a sort of an Iraq war debate but do you think that we will come full circle and recognize that it was the right battle to wage do you think in you know this could be a speech that if you like comes back into fashion I think Cody's exactly right anything's a very important point that the the speeches which really last over a long period of those which tell the story of progress and a victory and all the great speeches if you look at them collectively they are speeches that are made at a moment of great importance where the some sort of injustice was named and something else happened that was better on the other side and those are the ones that that last and to bring this back to Shakespeare of course what the Henry the fifth was the first bit of fiction which i think is an important thing to remember what Shakespeare writing still for a politics outside the theater though yes he was very very much so and he's also Shakespeare is very interesting how politicians have subsequently used Shakespeare because one of the things which has gone missing from rhetoric in reading the 20th century sits since the Second World War has been the ability to quote know Shakespeare Churchill studied that speech when he was doing his 1940 speeches because the odds that Henry is describing there are five to one before the battle aversion core he's complaining about the absence of troops and all the odds are stacked against him this is exactly the position that Churchill finds himself in so he studies that speech and he echoes it and throughout all of Churchill speeches you've got echoes of Shakespeare he knew long large tracts of Shakespeare by heart now could you do that now very few people do most contemporary political rhetoric is fairly flat and free of quotation there was an survival free of the Bible I mean Martin Luther King we're gonna hear in a moment it's full of the Bible we heard an echo of Yeats in the Tim Collins the the tread lightly tread upon my dreams but it's rare I used to try and get drop little bits of Larkin to Tony Blair speeches you know they they make a mess of you your mum and dad that kind of thing but he always spotted them he had an unerring ability to to notice poetry and then take it out was that because he felt it was what sort of too liberal elite all or no is that the flow he felt it didn't carry the thing that changes rhetoric I think in the 20th century is actually a rather good reason I think it's that the 20th century is have such progress that it's harder to make great speeches so when you're when you're arguing to the propertied elite in the policy in Athens everybody will be evenly educated when you're arguing to a 60 million people democracy or in your case far far more than that you're having to be more demotic you're having to have a plainer vocabulary because your audience is wider is less evenly educated and it inevitably alters the way you speak okay I'm gonna ask you to take us onto your favorite speech of the night in some ways isn't it there JFK at what's become known as the moon speech why did you pick this one I love this speech it's it's not even john f kennedy's best speech i put his inaugural address i'd put his speech at American University above it but it's it's my favorite you know since we crawled out of caves we've looked up at the moon and then this young man came out on a late summer day in 1962 and said it's time to go and you know for five years just for context there'd already been a beeping up in space from the Russians because Sputnik was up there and they'd sent a man up there so there was a little fear he had a purpose to this to frighten America enough into pursuing a space program so that the moon wouldn't be red someday and he was pushing Congress to you've got a bunch of different audiences in all these speeches and yet he did it in the most hopeful optimistic way and just the audacity that we're gonna build a space program from nothing and put a man on the moon in seven years is the type of thing we don't get anymore in our speeches and it's a blast there is no strife no prejudice no national conflict in outer space as yet its hazards are hostile to us all its conquest deserves the best of all mankind and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again but why some say the moon why choose this as our goal and they may well ask why climb the highest mountain why 35 years ago fly the Atlantic we choose to go to the moon we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they're easy but because they are hard because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept one we are willing unwilling to postpone and one which we intend to win many years ago the Great British explorer George Mallory who was to die on Mount Everest was asked why did he want to climb it he said because it's there well space is there and we're gonna climb it and the moon and the planets are there and New Hope's for knowledge and peace are there and therefore as we set sail we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked [Applause] and we did and he wasn't there to see it as the ultimate tragedy isn't it yeah there's not a shred of cynicism to the speech I mean we've we've allowed ourselves become so cynical because that way we don't get disappointed if you expect that politicians and society are always going to let you down then you'll never be let down when that happens if you can allow yourself to be idealistic the joy in being proven right is so much greater and of course there's some propaganda involved in the speech he knew the Russians were listening that was part of it but to convince us that we could do something that preposterous and you know people died on the way there but we ultimately made it it's something that's missing from our politics on the grand stage how easy is it Phil for UK politicians to sound optimistic no I don't mean now I just mean it's it's very much part of the American character isn't it and it's not part of that sort of slightly sardonic yes British approach I always felt that if any of our politicians had said yes we can there be a sort of are you sure no we probably can't you know I've written quite a lot for American chief executives and I've always felt there's a sort of spinal tap moment where I have to turn it up to 11 because they're just it but it is a sense of optimism and possibility and of course that comes with being America rather than Britain you know it is you can risk the grand style when you're writing for president the United States I mean I am I've been inundated by British politicians asking me to turn them into Barack Obama and I just what I always say to them I always say to them let me count the ways in which you're not Barack Obama because the principle one is nothing to do with them it's to do with the the context and the fact that you know a black man as president of the United States is a remarkable story it's a remarkable thing to have and then someone with his capacity for language to and that's just not true if what you're doing is the just after lunch spot at the local government Chronicle you know you've got to be appropriate to your setting you've got to be in Cicero's word decorous and Kennedy talking about going to the moon how grand can you get that's the most optimistic thing in the world we're gonna shoot to the moon it's remarkable come on in a moment to the optimism of Martin Luther King who perhaps even more remarkable Cody I have a dream Oh sort of doesn't need an introduction it was a speech that changed the world really yeah for sure I mean there there are two speeches that American and school kids are required to memorize and perform and it's Gettysburg in this what's remarkable about the passage you're about to hear is dr. King didn't even know the day before exactly what he was going to say he spent the afternoon arguing with his advisors about what the thrust of the speech and then he finally told him to go away and he was gonna go confer with the almighty the the passage you're about to hear the most famous passage wasn't in the speech at all he'd been you know Todd talking about it over the course of the year he'd been extemporaneously doing it and until a gospel singer named Mahalia Jackson he performed des shouted tell him about the dream during his speech he wasn't going to say this part let us not wallow in the valley of despair I say to you today my friends and so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow I still have a dream it is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its Creed we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal I have a dream that one day on the Red Hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi a state sweltering with the heat of injustice sweltering with the heat of oppression will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character I have a dream today I have a dream that one day down in Alabama with its vicious racists with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers I have a dream today I have a dream that one day every Valley shall be exalted every Hill and mountain shall be made low the rough places will be made plain and the crooked places will be made straight and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together this is our hope and this is the faith that I go back to the south with and Cody tell us how that was received i you know i don't know actually i don't i don't remember watching the crimea you've got 200,000 people there but i remember watching the crowd as to how i was received i mean you can look at it today in a couple different ways right the white house was which only a few blocks away was viewing it warily there were weary allies the movement itself was splintered and uncertain even some of the speakers that day had different views of it some some had a harsher take some thought this was too optimistic and naive and these are still the same arguments were fighting through today i mean it's not like we've become a post-racial society in the united states a lot of these words you can still use so when he delivered that was it seen that he was demanding the impossible I mean was what he said did it did it sound you know like the Emmeline Pankhurst speech like a very natural thing to ask for or did it sound ridiculous it's more like the impossible and he directly addressed that in the speech talking about the fierce urgency of now that it's not the time to weigh that it's time to press forward now he spends the first half of the speech the the bit which he did right which is called a canceled check which is just prior to that section being very careful to say to essentially detect the audience please don't riot because Kennedy was very fearful of the of the march on Washington he felt he might put back the cause of civil rights if there was a terrible event there and King is very careful to to be very calm and then as Kody says Mahalia Jackson screams out to him and he turns and in his memoir of the time Kings speechwriter Clarence Jones remarks that that he turns to his colleagues as are Shetty's doing the dream which is just about the biggest misjudgment in the history of speech isn't it because he goes that is it's just extraordinarily but I mean how good is that is fabulous they're always late so they had heard the dream had he performed the dream to a smaller crowd endlessly he done it the one he that Mahalia Jackson scene was in Detroit a few months earlier and it was quite common in those days to do a thing on the on the circuit quite often so Kennedy's ask not what your country can do for you he'd said versions of that many times and what King did was as a preacher he was very accustomed to having little bits of phrases and riffs and he put them together it would be different every time and yet comprised of phrases which were common to him he had a real stock of biblical phrases but it's still amazing that he's doing it up there on the stage with no script no author cue off the top of his head no matter how well you know your material to do that with such control and to land it in the way he did there is really quite astonishing I'm just gonna feel the temperature here in terms of the number of questions that we've got if there's lots we shall bring them in early just give me a sense of who there are some hands coming up yes there are lots of hands all right I think at this point then we will go to questions you so that's a very straight hand there's one up at the top why don't we start with you madam Cody hi um question for you please it's very easy to forget that President Obama didn't grow up in a home where they might have even known who Mahalia Jackson was so I'm wondering did he come to have this extraordinary oratory style in the sort of vein of black Baptists all of Martin Luther King did he come to have that naturally cuz presumably he wouldn't have had exposure to that until what he was the men in his 20s when he moved to Chicago yeah that's true I mean he's you know he was raised by a single mom white woman from Kansas his white grandparents spent his childhood why ain't Indonesia and I don't think he became well-versed in the black tradition until he joined tradie Church in Chicago obviously a church that gave him some troubles later on but once he did he really did I mean he can tell you everything there is to know about the civil rights movement and its actors and we would get drafts back with full inserts from them so I think you've got one thank you a great event question for Kody again and in terms of speech givers or orator is currently in the u.s. political system anybody coming through who impresses you Ted Kennedy's grandnephew JH my answer man well that was easy yeah I'm sensing a trend I've been in Europe now for six days and I've gotten that question six times so I get the sense people are looking for some new leadership out of my country let's move on to a few more I'm gonna take them in batches of three you could elaborate as we go along yes ma'am you've got one you touched on cynicism for a speech to be truly great as a person giving it need to genuinely believe in what they're saying or have you seen great speeches be faked interesting fellow put that one on your side but not yet yes sir I think all of the speeches that have been mentioned so far have been positive and I wondered whether you'd be able to touch on when speeches have changed the world for the worse yeah and whether communication and the oratory can actually convince people to do things that in their hearts or even in their minds they probably wouldn't want to really interesting thank you for that let's have one down here yes you spoke of language and you spoke of moods and emotions how much does the body play in in speech so so full delivery how does that matter we want anecdotes on that one for right let's just look at those three for now Phil just look at the cynicism first I think you have to communicate a sense that you really believe it an audience will understand well they'll they'll pick it out if they if they feel that there's something inauthentic or something contrived about the event a speech is by its nature a contrived event because it's very rare for you to stand and speak uninterrupted for 20 minutes but you have to project a sense of character and beliefs there are many people who think that rhetoric colleges go wrong when politicians cease to write their own speeches you Mary beard is always making this point to me on radio programs I always point out so that that gives me far more power than I really warrant the the speechwriter is just an aide to the projection of a character but if the principal appears not to believe what they're saying then that will be that will be injurious in the speech it will never work so I think the short answer is yes you do have to believe it and just the second question that is unfortunately sometimes very much the detriment because an example the the obvious example which is unavoidable in the history of rhetoric and it's dark shadow is Hitler there are others Robespierre was a brilliant speaker who gave a fantastic but appalling justification of terror which he redefined as justice there are many instances in the history of rhetoric where terrible words have been brilliantly argued yeah I think that both answers are right I mean people have very we lived in a time with people have very sophisticated detectors with we can tell when somebody's lying to us when somebody's not authentic the most recent example I can think about the top of my head it was president Trump State of the Union address no I'm not trying to make light of it the every almost everything he said up until the end sounded like him you know you can vehemently disagree with the content but at the end there was an ending that sounded like it could have been written for any president who's ever lived something about holding hands working together and the entire graph said you knew he believed in none of it he did that to an extent in the acceptance speech you know two o'clock in the morning where everyone for that moment thought this was a very different man to the one they'd seen on the campaign what was your sense about that nonsense I mean you really saw the the pivot coming right is he pivoting to be a real president and the answer is most definitely no that pivot has never happened to me yeah there's an interesting thing because Trump was not capable of doing that convinced me was he and yet that is an absolute staple of the inaugural speech all the way back to 1800 and one jefferson delivers the inaugural after the most divisive election campaign in american history in which jefferson accuses john adams being pro english john adams accusative and fathering a a child with his slaves it's horrible and then Jefferson comes to do the speech and he binds the country and he does a version of no blue states or red states and all American presidents do that but there's something in the way they conduct themselves in office which means that's fine and I grew thee when Trump comes to do that it suddenly think no that's really not fine and he's very interesting in that respect cuz he's probably the first president United States not to respect the office and as the audience you feel that yeah if you do want more contemporary examples of speeches that could actually propel people in a negative direction you look at his I mean there are no more racist and it's Lama folks in America than there were two or ten years ago but the Klan is now marching without hoods and that's because they have permission from the present United States it batters speeches matter gosh uh that's quite a thought isn't it I can see now why you're a speechwriter let's talk about body I mean I guess you know following on from that Alec Baldwin would say yes the body is quite instrumental in conveying the character does it ever this body matter yes it does it does I mean go back to my egregious example of Hitler where the the whole body was used in the and in the rallying cry that he did he utters much more homely and much less dreadful example you just think recently in Britain Teresa Mays conference speech where she where her body let her down she was unable to get through the words but she couldn't get through without coughing and she exacerbates it but that by looking down to his amazed just about the only senior politician it doesn't use autocue she doesn't like it so the consequence when she's on the podium she's like this and that puts all the pressure on your throat so when she started to struggle she was unable to clear her throat most politicians will stand like that because the otic use running in front of you there and it gives you a much better connection with your audience so part of her problem was that but her body was was crucial in that in that she couldn't get through the speech let's take a few more questions that's a very straight hand sir yes full marks there why knock with the backs how easy is it to write a speech which you actually don't believe in it and have you written one of that sort mr. Collins great okay come back to you on that one while he's thinking he was my second mic yes why do you think in terms of political speeches how you say something so much more important than the information you're transmitting this just explain that again the speech the speech itself is more important than the information you're transmitting how would you say it how does how you say the speech how do you say how you say it yeah and yes today we're now encompassed by social media and online type discussion and where the President of the United States no longer has to think about speech writing and making a speech it just can make a tweet in a few words where do you think the future of speech in moratorium or typed well I wondered if we would get onto that yeah should we go backwards yeah if you like yeah do you want to pick up on that one then so we have a tweeting president now why would you bother with a speech when you can do it in 140 or 280 I actually think that I have a love/hate relationship with Twitter I mostly hate it because when I'm watching a speech that have held the president craft I have to watch live reaction to it and they're often reacting people would people would grade the State of the Union address or any other speech before was even halfway through or complain you know he hasn't talked about X issue yet and I'm just yelling at my computer screen that's like three paragraphs away but I had to answer your question I think it's actually more important than ever because the speech is just Barack Obama has always viewed speech writing as a way to organize his ideas and his thoughts on the page and put them forward and to lead a reasoned rational debate to lead people to an issue to an idea to a to a cause you can't do that in 280 characters and certainly not when you know your greatest impetus is yourself it's supposed to be a speech is about to be to people about all of us and tweets just don't get that through I very much agree with that it is very important part of speech writing is that what you're doing is organizing your thoughts and it's the process you put around it where you gather and you think where are we now and what can we say oh how do we move forward so the process you go through is as important as the as a delivered event I think it's quite common that our speeches delivered ends up being more important than the content the best example is David Cameron who became president of this country for precisely that reason President President sorry delighted that whatever whatever he was I'm trying to forget it in 2005 he went to the Conservative Party conference and him and David Davis had to do speeches in front of they assembled there's almost as an audition for him in the next leader and Davis gave her a wooden speech and Cameron did if you remember a virtually content free speech but he did it it seemed extemporary he did it from memory and he walked around the stage and it was the first time you've seen that well actually anyone who'd seen Gladstone Disraeli had seen it but it was new in modern terms and the manner of his speaking said to the audience I'm a new kind of leader I can win for you and that was a really potent message and so I think it was an exact exactly example and yeah we're going to end on that last thought the gentleman stood up at the beginning what happens if somebody asks you to write a speech you just don't believe in do you say no or do you manage to muster a way through it no I'd say no I mean you can but it wouldn't be any fun and it probably wouldn't be very inspired you don't if you're a political appointee Lowe as we were you don't end up writing those sorts of speeches so civil servants do it all the time it never really occurred to me that I had to do that I've had one speech where it was a small part of it a significant part of it was something a policy ID cards that I didn't believe in it was probably the best passage of sustained arguments I ever wrote because I was so calm of the contrary arguments that like a barrister that I know you once were I was able to avoid the obvious pitfalls of the argument and I wrote very cleverly and well on something I didn't believe in but clearly as a speech rights you have to have a certain humility you're not the Prime Minister you're not the president you are there to serve them and to give them what they want and if the gap between what you're being asked to do and what you think is so large then you shouldn't be there in the first place we came to end with a very special speech Phil you're going to take us into this I think it will have an enormous resonance today even though it was written at a very specific time it was written at the turn of millennium in 1999 the Clintons invited a series of speakers to the White House to deliver the Millennium lectures and this is a speech called the perils of indifference by a man who won the Nobel Prize called Elie Wiesel cam who once said the best thing that's ever been said about democracy he said that democracy is valued mostly not for what it allows but for what it prevents and this is a speech about what happens when that regulation goes missing this is a speech by Elie Wiesel who is was a young man as he says the beginning of speech from the Carpathian Mountains who wakes up one morning and as he says the beginning not far from Goethe's beloved Verma in a place of eternal infamy called Buchenwald when he first arrived there he was separated from his mother and his sister by dr. Josef Mengele with a wave of the bandleaders battle as v Zell puts it and with his father he walked one way and his mother and sister what the other he never saw them again his father didn't quite make it through he died from dysentery a few days before the Russians first burst through and then the American soldiers liberated the camp and in the speech in the Xtravaganza here he's describing what he thinks of as the indifference that the world showed what is indifference strange and a natural state in which the lines blur between light and darkness dusk and dawn crime and punishment cruelty and compassion good and evil what are its courses and inescapable consequences is it a philosophy is the philosophy of indifference conceivable cannot possibly view indifference as a virtue is it necessary at times to practice it simply to keep one sanity live normally enjoy a fine meal in a glass of wine as the world around us experiences harrowing upheavals in a way to be indifferent to suffering is what makes the human being inhuman indifference after all is more dangerous than anger and hatred anger can at times be creative one writes a great poem a great symphony one does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry of the injustice the one witnesses but indifference is never creative even hatred at times may elicit a response you fight it you denounce it you disarm it indifference elicits no response indifference is not a response indifference is not a beginning it is an end and therefore indifference is always the friend of the enemy for it benefits the aggressor never his victim whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgot the political prisoner in his cell the hungry children the homeless refugees not to respond to their plight not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory and in denying their humanity we betray our own indifference then is not only a sin it is a punishment and this is one of the most important lessons of this outgoing centuries wide-ranging experiments in good and evil just to say there is more to come Phil is just going to give his thoughts at this pause what he then goes on to do is to describe the feelings of indifference when the Americans failed to intervene and when everybody failed to intervene and he asks the assembled people in the White House why it was the world stood aside he then does go on though to say that there were people who came and in the end the American soldiers came and he thanks them for the rage that they showed when they came and like many brilliant speeches this is a symphony it ends at the point where it began and it ends on a note of hope and throughout the speech vis L is saying that's the importance of naming people giving people names and he was prisoner a3 777 to them but his name was Elie Wiesel does it mean we have learned from the past does it mean that society has changed has the human being become less indifferent and more humans have we really learned from our experiences are we less insensitive to the plight of victims of ethnic cleansing and other forms of injustice 'as in places near and is today's justified intervention in Kosovo led by you mr. president a lasting warning that never again will the deportation the terrorization of children and their parents be allowed anywhere in the world will it discourage other dictators in other lands to do the same and what about the children how we see them on television we read about them in the papers and we do so with a broken heart their fate is always the most tragic inevitably when adults wage war children perish we see their faces their eyes do we hear their pleas do we feel their pain their agony every minute one of them dies of disease violence famine some of them so many of them could be saved and so once again I think of the young Jewish boy from the Carpathian Mountains he has accompanied the old man I have become throughout these years of quest and struggle and together we walk towards the new millennium carried by profound fear and extraordinary hope [Applause] on that note ladies and gentlemen we are going to end with our extreme thanks to Simon Russell Beale to Jaden Luca to Jeremy Irons and Carey Mulligan in her absence and to both to Cody Keenan to Phil whose book is on sale in the fray and he will sign it for you what a tremendous evening thank you all very much indeed [Applause]

Channel: Intelligence Squared

Views: 191,132

Rating: 4.7641869 out of 5

Keywords: words, oratory, speech, speeches, great oratory, public speaking, cody keenan, philip collins, emily maitlis, jeremy irons, carey mulligan, jad anouka, simon russell beale, JFK, Obama, Barack Obama, Selma, speechwriting, Tony Blair, Shakespeare, Winston Churchill, Elizabeth I

Id: xegAFhfIbHU

Length: 97min 41sec (5861 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 19 2018

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From video description:

For 15 years, Intelligence Squared has vigorously championed the spoken word. The finest speakers from across the globe have come to our stage — to argue, to move, to persuade and change minds. Their speeches epitomise the vital role that public speaking plays in our lives. To celebrate the power of oratory, we held a major event which will showcase how great speeches have swayed the course of history and demonstrate how, more than ever, we need them to help define our values and who we are.

Barack Obama’s director of speechwriting, Cody Keenan, shared his experience of helping craft the presidential speeches that moved the hearts and minds of millions around the world. Alongside him was be Philip Collins, Tony Blair’s former speechwriter and Times columnist, whose new book argues for the importance of speeches in protecting and promoting democracy. With Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis in the chair, Keenan and Collins unpacked the tricks and techniques that have been used by the most brilliant orators down the centuries and which are still working their magic today. Bringing this all to life were star actors Carey Mulligan, Jeremy Irons and Simon Russell Beale, who will perform extracts from remarkable speeches – some familiar, others that will surprise – from different continents and eras.

What is it about a great speech that can give voice to people’s intense but unarticulated feelings? What is that special alchemy of words and personal charisma that makes us as susceptible to dangerous demagogues as to the morally uplifting oratory of a Mandela, a Martin Luther King or a JFK?

Edit:

Speeches:

Abraham Lincoln The Gettysburg address

President Barack Obama The Selma Speech

Winston Churchill This was their finest hour

Queen Elizabeth I of England Speech to the Troops at Tilbury

Emmeline Pankhurst The Laws That Men Have Made

William Shakespeare Henry V - The Speech on St. Crispin's Day

Col. Tim Collins Iraq War Eve-of-Battle Speech

John F. Kennedy The Moon Speech

Martin Luther King I Have a Dream

Elie Wiesel The Perils of Indifference

N.B. The speeches are abbreviated and in some cases mere extracts.