Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (33 page)

About a month later, I got a letter from my mother. She was in her room one evening, and the head of the Peace Corps in India had driven up to the little town of Vikhroli. He came in and asked my mother if she needed anything. She said, no, she was getting along quite well, but she would like to go over to Bombay. He said, “Well, can I take you in shopping, Mrs. Carter?” She said, “Yes, I’d like that.” So, they went in, and he bought her a very fine supper and brought her back to Vikhroli. When he got out, he handed her a fifth of very good bourbon. And he turned around to get in the car to leave, and he finally turned back to her and said, “By the way, Miss Lillian, who in the hell are you, anyway?” And that’s a true story. It was not until later that my mother knew who she was. She was a friend of Hubert Humphrey.

And, of course, the next time he crossed my path was in 1968 when he
was our nominee for president. And all of us in this room went through that year of tragedy together when he was not elected to be the leader of our country. And I think he felt then an urging to be loyal to his president and, unfortunately, many people were not that loyal to him. And his loss was our nation’s even greater loss in 1968.

The next time I saw him was when I was governor. He came to our home in 1972. All the candidates just happened to stop by to see me that year, and my daughter, Amy, was about four years old. And most of the ones who would come into the mansion—she stayed away from them, having an early aversion to politicians. But when Senator Humphrey came in, she loved him instantly.

And I’ll never forget sitting in the front presidential suite of the Georgia governor’s mansion, a very beautiful room, trying to talk to Senator Humphrey. Amy came in eating a soft brownie, and she climbed up on his lap without any timidity at all. In a very natural way, he put his arm around her as though she was his own grandchild. And I’ll always remember Senator Humphrey sitting there talking to me about politics and about the campaign, smiling often, with brownie all over his face. And each time he frowned, brownie crumbs fell to the floor. And Amy loved him then and has loved him ever since. But I think she recognized in him the qualities that have aroused the love of so many people.

And then, of course, last year all I could hear everywhere I went when I said, “Would you help me become president?” almost invariably they would say, “Well, my first preference is Hubert Humphrey. If he doesn’t run, I’ll support you.” And there again, I learned on a nationwide basis the relationship between Senator Humphrey and the people of this country.

But I think the most deep impression I have of my good friend Hubert Humphrey is since I’ve been president. I’ve seen him in the Oval Office early in the morning. I’ve seen him in meetings with other congressional leaders. I’ve called him on the phone when I was in trouble. I’ve gotten his quiet and private and sound advice. And I’ve come to recognize that all the attributes that I love about America are resident in him. And I’m proud to be the president of a nation that loves a man like Hubert Humphrey and is loved so deeply by him.

Pat Moynihan, academic turned White House domestic adviser and later senator from New York, made his mark as a supporter of the dignity of ethnicity and the creator of family assistance programs. He also had an offbeat sense of humor, which led him to the sponsorship of the thirty-two-letter “floccinaucinihilipilificationism” (meaning “the action of estimating as worthless”) as “the longest word in the English language.”

At the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, in the nation’s capital on July 19, 1978, he was asked for dedicatory remarks on the receipt of the massive sculpture
Isis
by the artist Mark di Suvero. The hard-to-ignore work is apparently the impression of the severed brow of a Grimsby trawler, appropriately given to the nation by the Institute of Scrap Iron and Steel. The senator’s dedication was both succinct and mouth filling.

***

AS CHAIRMAN OF
the board of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden it falls to me to accept this splendid gift from the Institute of Scrap Iron and Steel, and I recall that on the occasion that Margaret Fuller declared, “I accept the universe,” Carlyle remarked that she had better.

Isis
achieves an aesthetic transubstantiation of that which is at once elusive yet ineluctable in the modern sensibility.

Transcending socialist realism with an unequaled abstractionist range, Mr. di Suvero brings to the theme of recycling both the hard-edge reality of the modern world and the transcendent fecundity of the universe itself; a lasting assertion both of the fleetingness of the living, and the permanence of life; a consummation before which we stand in consistorial witness.

It will be with us a long time.

Orson Welles is remembered as the star and director of
Citizen Kane
, considered by many the greatest movie ever made, and as the radio producer and actor who, on Halloween eve, panicked a huge audience with his all-too-realistic broadcast of an invasion of Earth by Martians. European audiences hailed his portrayal of the racketeer Harry Lime in
The Third Man
, but his later years were spent fighting for financing and acting in lesser roles. In a moment of bitterness, he said that his business was “about 2 percent moviemaking and 98 percent hustling.”

Darryl F. Zanuck is remembered as the legendary movie producer who began in the silent era with
Rin Tin Tin
, headed production of the first talkie,
The Jazz Singer
, launched Twentieth Century-Fox in the thirties, winning Oscars for
Gentlemen’s Agreement, All About Eve
, and, after a six-year series of flops, an Oscar nomination for
The Longest Day
. He was an eccentric and often tyrannical boss; the title of his biography is
Don’t Say Yes Until I Finish Talking
. After saving his studio from the disastrous budgetary overruns of
Cleopatra
, he fired his son for financial mismanagement and was himself forced from power a decade before his death.

Welles, a writer as well as a star, delivered this eulogy of Zanuck on December 27, 1979, at the Westwood United Methodist Church in Los Angeles, in the voice that first scared and thrilled radio audiences as “The Shadow” in the 1930s. It begins with a gripping anecdote about Winston Churchill’s funeral, for which Churchill wrote the script: in England, noted the film director in his industry’s lingo, “they give you the final cut.”

The eulogy is notable for what it leaves out. Welles does not recount the movies Zanuck produced or the stars he worked with, as did the
obituaries. He dispenses with the deceased’s harsh reputation in a few lines: “Darryl didn’t sign on to be the recreation director of a summer camp. Of course he was tough…. But unlike many of the others, he was never cruel.” He closes on the quality of friendship and personal loyalty in adversity, which both men had and suffered. Unlike many of Zanuck’s self-protective corporate peers, testified his friend Welles in a conclusion of seven short, declarative sentences, “He would have hid me under the bed.”

***

AT WINSTON CHURCHILL
’s funeral, there was a moment when the coffin was to be carried out of Westminster Abbey and onto a barge for a trip up the Thames River. A special group of pallbearers from the various military services in Great Britain was selected for this. One, a sailor, broke his ankle carrying the coffin down the stone steps of the Abbey. For a moment it seemed that the coffin would drop to the ground, but it was safely carried onto the barge.

Afterward, officials said to the sailor, “How did you manage to go on?”

And the sailor said, “I would have carried him all over London.”

That’s the way I feel about my friend Darryl Zanuck.

Churchill wrote the script for his own funeral. Lord Mountbatten recently did the same thing in England—in England, if you’re going to have a state funeral, they let you do that. They give you what amounts to a final cut. We don’t have state funerals in our movie community, but if we did, Darryl would certainly have been given one—and he would have produced it. And what a show that would have been. Virginia and Dick have reminded me that Darryl himself would not wish this occasion to be too lugubrious. That’s true. I’m pretty sure that if he was the producer in charge of this occasion, Darryl would have wished for us all to leave this gathering with lightened spirits. The trouble is that I’m the wrong man for that job—I can’t find anything cheerful to say about the loss of my friend.

To understand the special nature of his contribution, we must understand the full meaning of the word “producer” in Darryl’s day. In the Golden Age of Hollywood, it meant something quite different than it does now. There were producers assigned to each movie, and then there was the man in charge of all the movies. In Darryl’s day that was a lot of movies—forty, fifty, sixty, seventy feature pictures a year. He was one of the legendary tycoons presiding over production.

The whole point about Darryl was that he did not just preside. He did so very much more than preside. Of all the big-boss producers, Darryl
was unquestionably the man with the greatest gifts—true personal, professional, and artistic gifts for the filmmaking process itself. He began as a writer and in a sense he never stopped functioning as a writer. Others may have matched him as a star maker, but with all of Darryl’s flair for the magic personalities, his first commitment was always to the story. For Darryl that was what it was to make a film: to tell a story.

God bless him for that. With half a hundred and more stories to tell every dozen months, this great storyteller was, of necessity, an editor and a great editor. There never was an editor in our business to touch him.

Every great career is a roller coaster and Darryl had his disasters. He knew eclipse. He knew comebacks and triumphs. It was a giant roller coaster. And then there were studio politics, and that’s the roughest game there is. But has anybody—anybody—ever claimed that Darryl Zanuck advanced himself by dirty tricks? Or by leaving behind him the usual trail of bloody corpses? Of course, there were some aching egos and some bruised temperaments. If you’re in charge of a regiment of artists, some of your commands are going to hurt. Some of your decisions are bound to seem arbitrary, but Darryl didn’t sign on to be the recreation director of a summer camp. Of course he was tough. That was his job. But unlike many of the others, he was never cruel. Never vindictive. He wasn’t—and what a rare thing it is to say in the competitive game of ours, he was a man totally devoid of malice. But he was great with irony. Great sense of humor, even about himself; of which of the others can we say that?

I always knew that if I did something really outrageous, that if I committed some abominable crime, and if all the police in the world were after me, there was one man and only one man I could come to, and that was Darryl. He would not have made a speech about the good of the industry or the good of his studio. He would not have been mealymouthed or put me aside. He would have hid me under the bed. Very simply, he was a friend. I don’t mean just my friend. I mean that friendship was something he was very good at.

And that is why it is so very hard to say good-bye to him.

Former pro football quarterback, New York congressman, and first Bush Administration housing secretary, Jack Kemp is an ardent supply-side economist, a believer in “empowerment” for the poor through home ownership, and a hard-line activist in foreign affairs.

His speaking style is akin to Hubert Humphrey’s—passionate, uplifting, anecdotal, and often verbose. (Senator Humphrey used to say, “I’m like the little boy who learned how to spell ‘banana’ and never knew when to stop.”) Kemp is an unabashed ideologue: this quality has the oratorical disadvantage of the hard sell, but the advantage of clarity and intensity; he leaves no audience ambivalent.

Chosen to be Bob Dole’s running mate on the Republican ticket in 1996, Kemp eschewed the usual attack role of the vice-presidential nominee and dismayed some partisans by “staying Kemp”—with the ebullient, upbeat style and sunny message of inclusion that was his trademark.

Though best known for his extemporaneous, rambling, too-detailed style, Kemp has occasionally submitted to oratorical discipline. In the prepared speech accepting the Winston Churchill Award of the Claremont Institute, in Los Angeles, on November 30, 1990, Kemp’s purpose was to turn the occasion toward a case for armed intervention in the Persian Gulf. Opponents of the Bush buildup to war to push Iraq out of Kuwait were using the Vietnam quagmire analogy; Kemp used the tribute to Churchill to press home the Munich analogy, of the need to stop forcibly rather than appease an aggressor.

One technique to note here is the dramatic setup of a quotation. Instead of a dull “As Churchill said,” Kemp says, “Listen to his words as war threatened….”

***

I LOVE THE
Churchill story they tell about the reporter who was once kind enough to let a rising young politician named Winston Churchill preview an upcoming article about his recent speech. At the end of a long quotation from Churchill’s remarks, the newsman had written the word “cheers” to describe the audience’s reaction. Churchill scratched it out. The reporter was amazed by what he thought was an unusual display of modesty, until Churchill wrote instead, “loud and prolonged applause.”