The Greatest Speeches of All Time, and What Biden Said

If you want to reach the kids, you’ve got to go where the kids are. Where are they right now? With their devices, of course. And what are they doing on those devices? Listening to podcasts, of course. This, presumably, was the reason behind the release of a corker: NATO Through Time, in which a grandfatherly former NATO official and three young and extremely well-informed co-hosts plunge into the past.

What’s next, Yalta: The Musical? It would probably be a more successful venture, because Yalta was once; NATO is forever. From age to age, a new generation of supporters must be rallied, and that is becoming the 13th labor of Hercules. If the thudding disappointment of Unfrosted taught us anything, it’s that young people hate Boomer nostalgia. And NATO is the rotary phone of geopolitical alliances.

I grew up a long time ago, when the world was every bit as complicated and dangerous as it is today. But, if only as a reassuring fiction, the American president was often referred to as “the leader of the free world.” America was the most powerful country in history, and it was sworn to protect—and was protected by, should the terrible day come—an alliance of other free nations.

NATO was principally a firebreak against the Soviet Union and remains one against Russia. But Barack Obama felt that a foreign policy in which Russia was our chief enemy was a little old-fashioned. Too From Russia With Love. Too Rocky IV and Rambo III. In a presidential debate in 2012, he mocked Mitt Romney for saying that Russia was the biggest threat to America: “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.” Then the Cold War rose from the dead and Russia invaded Crimea, and two years ago began its bloodthirsty attack on Ukraine.

Two people who don’t like NATO are Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump (who once told his foreign-policy adviser, “I don’t give a shit about NATO”). This ought to ring a distant alarm bell. Managing the very special relationship between these two powerful men seems to be Trump’s version of NATO: cheaper, more direct, perhaps one day turning into an alliance of its own.

Around the world, autocracy is rising; spend any time at all reading about the evidence, and your hair catches on fire. Russia, China, North Korea—they have all been strengthening their ties to one another; all of them have a dim view of America and of democracy.

Toward self-preservation, allow me to offer my own extremely brief assessment of NATO through time, in the form of three speeches by American presidents.

No one really knows what John F. Kennedy actually said in his famous 1961 inaugural address, because he was so goddamn sexy and so goddamn confident that the beautiful words and soaring phrases float through your receptive brain but can find no purchase. But by looping the video for a week, this is what I’ve got:

Kennedy believed that the Second World War—which had ended just 15 years earlier—was a turning point in American history. The war had revealed the extent of America’s commitment to freedom and its special role as the defender of nations where tyrants ruled. The speech recognized that the dropping of atomic bombs in Japan had forever changed the equation of human progress: “The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.” America had nuclear weapons, but so did its greatest enemy.

Embedded within the beautiful speech was the rationale for a lot of very questionable foreign policy. But the speech was also a flex and a warning: “To those old allies whose cultural and spiritual origins we share, we pledge the loyalty of faithful friends. United, there is little we cannot do in a host of cooperative ventures. Divided, there is little we can do—for we dare not meet a powerful challenge at odds and split asunder.”

In his beautiful words, he was talking about the rotary phone—NATO. And the desperate need to keep the peace: “To those nations who would make themselves our adversary, we offer not a pledge but a request: that both sides begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction. We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.”

Ronald Reagan presided over the Soviet Union’s demise. He also popularized that oxymoronic piece of realpolitik “Trust but verify.”

In 1984, he gave a speech marking the 40th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy. Peggy Noonan wrote it, and it took its place among the greatest American political speeches of all time. No one could sell a speech like Reagan, and this one opened like a novel, or better yet, a screenplay:

ESTABLISHING SHOT: “We stand on a lonely, windswept point on the northern shore of France.”

DISSOLVE: “The air is soft, but 40 years ago at this moment, the air was dense with smoke and the cries of men, and the air was filled with the crack of rifle fire and the roar of cannon.”

The genius of the speech was that, while it described dramatic action that took place in the context of extremely complicated political history, it left that history as assumed fact and centered on the individual and collective actions of very young American men, some of them boys, who had more or less been dumped out of landing craft into waist-high waves, and were immediately under German machine-gun fire.

Some survivors of that pitiless day sat in the front rows of the audience, and Reagan addressed them directly: “You all knew that some things are worth dying for. One’s country is worth dying for, and democracy is worth dying for, because it’s the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man.”

I doubt if any of the terrified young men bleeding and dying on that beach thought of themselves as morally bound to defend democracy. But Reagan followed an established tradition of recognizing the highest aspirations of American troops in combat and of finding within the individual acts of one soldier the aims and honor of a just war.

In one of the speech’s most arresting passages, Reagan tied the horrors of combat back to the suffering of parents and families. “The Americans who fought here that morning knew word of the invasion was spreading through the darkness back home. They thought—or felt in their hearts, though they couldn’t know in fact—that in Georgia they were filling the churches at 4 a.m., in Kansas they were kneeling on their porches and praying, and in Philadelphia they were ringing the Liberty Bell.”

I don’t think any other politician of the past 50 years could have sold that line about the Liberty Bell, but when Reagan said it, you were pierced by it.

Young Americans then had comparatively little experience with the Second World War as an exercise of American greatness. They’d been ground down by Vietnam, and by all the music and movies about it, and by the homeless vets who sat in wheelchairs panhandling and drinking. Vietnam had brought shame to America—but the Second World War was different. This speech gave them a chance to reconsider America in a new light, as the hero of a global catastrophe. This was before Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation and Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, and Spielberg and Tom Hanks’s Band of Brothers. In fact, those lionizing, mythmaking inventions probably would not have existed without Reagan’s speech.

The tone was Shakespearian, Prince Hal into Henry V: “These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.”

But the real heart of the speech was here, in the emphasis on the ways that the Allied powers had worked together to achieve this joint victory: “All of these men were part of a roll call of honor with names that spoke of a pride as bright as the colors they bore: the Royal Winnipeg Rifles, Poland’s 24th Lancers, the Royal Scots Fusiliers, the Screaming Eagles, the Yeomen of England’s armored divisions, the forces of Free France, the Coast Guard’s ‘Matchbox Fleet,’ and you, the American Rangers.”

And then he said this, possibly the point of the whole thing—his endorsement of the idea that the “strength of America’s allies is vital to the United States”: “We were with you then; we are with you now. Your hopes are our hopes, and your destiny is our destiny.”

When I read that Joe Biden was giving his own speech in Normandy this month, I think I actually said, “O almighty God, forbid it.” I knew it would feature our ever-diminishing president delivering a warmed-over version of Reagan’s great speech.

It was that. But, in its unspectacular way, it was also a speech that drew the sharpest possible contrast between Biden and Donald Trump, and what Trump imagines is his ability to cajole and bully our enemies, to find common cause with them and to stage dramas in which he emerges as a global ambassador of peace through strength. During his administration, Trump threatened North Korea with nuclear attack (sweet Jesus!). But he softened after Kim Jong Un “wrote me beautiful letters.” The kind of foreign policy that involves, say, sending aid to Ukraine to beat back Russian soldiers seems far less interesting to him.

Biden said this: “When we talk about American democracy, we often talk about the ideals of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. What we don’t talk about is how hard it is.” He said the “most natural instinct is to walk away, to be selfish, to force our will upon others, to seize power.”

“American democracy asks the hardest of things: to believe that we’re part of something bigger than ourselves.”

You would think that freedom is the force that flows naturally, but it’s not. Freedom generally has to be fought for and always must be vigilantly—and sometimes militarily—guarded.

There’s no point listing Joe Biden’s manifold shortcomings here. They’re in front of our eyes, and they’re not all “cheap fakes.” But Biden believes in NATO and in supporting our allies. Maybe that seems quaint, and rotary-phone-as-hell, but these are very good things.

Trump is flashier: a convicted felon, an insult comic, the last man on Earth to run on a platform of “Trust me,” and yet it’s working on a huge number of Americans.

If you vote for Biden, you’ll have to ask yourself a question: Is he still fit for office, or is he too frail, too ancient-seeming to make another term anything but a mockery of the country?

And if you vote for Trump, you’ll have to ask yourself this one: Do you feel lucky?