Kennedy is sometimes compared with Ronald Reagan, often thought to have been a great presidential speech-giver because of his gifts as an actor. No doubt the Gipper understood the stage. But the point about Reagan is that when he spoke, he wasn’t acting. When Reagan declared that the “last pages” of communism were being written or called for the Berlin Wall to come down, he believed it—and his policies reflected those beliefs.
“Nobody remembers “Tear Down this Wall” because I did an OK job of stringing the words together,” says my speechwriter friend, Peter Robinson. “We remember the speech because Reagan meant it, because it expressed the principles that he acted on, and because history proved him right. We remember Reagan at Berlin because the wall did come down—and he did his part to help bring it down.”…
The same goes for President Obama. At West Point and Oslo, he spoke to the challenge of defending our freedom against hard men with no moral limit on what they are willing to do to crush it. The irony is that whether these fine speeches are remembered by history depends on a word he didn’t use in either one: victory.
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