The media’s claims of Donald Trump’s “pivoting” toward being more “presidential” in his congressional address got me thinking. What does “being presidential” sound like?
And this is what I came up with: John F. Kennedy’s Rice University Moon Speech. Everyone knows this sound bite from that:
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 are easy, but because they are hard…
These one-and-a-half sentences are burned into our collective memory, right down the peculiar cadence with which Kennedy pronounced “de-CADE”. It’s part of our shared unconscious model of what being “presidential” sounds like.
There’s only one problem with this: taken out of the context, it’s bullshit.
As I argued in a previous diary, bullshit isn’t just a trivial lie; in fact it often has very non-trivial consequences. What distinguishes bullshit from an ordinary lie is that you don’t really have to believe it; you just need to go along with it. Bullshit produces something that superficially resembles belief, but it’s more like assent without conviction; you’ll assent to bullshit as long as you like the way it feels.
Stripped of its context this soundbite suggests a ridiculous policy: if something is difficult, you should do it. Well, knocking yourself out by punching your own face is difficult. That doesn’t make it a good idea.
You can’t communicate like a leader just by aping the rhetoric of leaders. You have to study leadership as a whole thing.
A leader doesn’t just make people feel a certain way. He shows them new ways of thinking for themselves, by putting things in context. And here’s where the whole Rice speech is worth studying:
Kennedy, in a few short paragraphs, summarizes the past fifty thousand years of human progress. He paints a world experiencing exponentially accelerating change; a world that is transforming in ways that are exciting but also dangerous and unpredictable and hard to react to. And in that frightening context, when he calls upon Americans to go to the moon “because it is hard”, he’s telling them they have the power to choose a better destiny. Here’s the key part that makes “because it’s hard” meaningful:
William Bradford, speaking in 1630 of the founding of the Plymouth Bay Colony, said that all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage.
The dictionary defines courage as “the quality of mind or spirit that enables a person to face difficulty, danger, pain, etc.” “Answerable” is an old-fashioned way of saying “corresponding.”
This gets right to the heart of leadership. Bradford is saying that we must find the appropriate kind of courage to face our specific circumstances. And courage, by definition, means taking on things that are hard. If its answerable courage, those will be the right things:
The growth of our science and education will be enriched by new knowledge of our universe and environment, by new techniques of learning and mapping and observation, by new tools and computers for industry, medicine, the home as well as the school.
Younger people probably wonder what the big deal with Kennedy was, especially in light of the less attractive things we’ve learned about his character over the years. But they must take so many of the novel things he is talking about here for granted. In 1962 they were literally fantasy. That was the same year Silent Spring was published; the public wasn’t thinking about environmental monitoring yet, much less space-based environmental monitoring. But Kennedy was.
Kennedy of course didn’t envision the precise details of all the things he promised, but he got the broad outlines right. He understood that the only way to fight the dark possibilities of human nature is to give people something that stirs and satisfies their ambition, something that could steer them away from rash things:
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 many never come again.
There has never been an act of warfare in space. Space has myriad military applications, but operational weapons have never been stationed there. No nation has ever claimed sovereignty over any extraterrestrial thing or place or has any plans for doing so. Yet we take this highly unnatural state of affairs for granted. Things could have gone in a very different direction with different leadership.
Watching the Rice speech is almost like watching a video of the actual Henry V giving Shakespeare’s “We Happy Few” monologue. The only comparable historical artifacts I can think of are the recordings of FDR’s “Day of Infamy” address and Churchill’s “We Shall Fight Them on the Beaches” speech to parliament. Surprisingly, neither of these speeches tries to incite hatred. Instead both lay out the appalling situations with cold and calculated candor.
Most world leaders regularly pump out barrels of eloquence. It’s easy; you can hire people with a diabolical knack for the stuff. But talk about a thankless job! People don’t even notice when some benighted hack coughs up an abomination like “chorus became an earthquake.”It doesn’t matter, as long as the man in the suit delivers the line with smug sanctimony.
Words, whether graceful or ungainly, are disposable when they’re divorced from the truth.
In the speeches that get remembered, eloquence and imagination serve a fierce and uncompromising honesty. And that’s no accident. You can only call upon answerable courage in response to true circumstances.