Lincoln, FDR Lead Presidents’ Best of Best
By Curt Smith (bio)
Vive la differencecry Parisians, who ironically often shrink from judging good v. bad. (One reason they are French.) By contrast, Americans, as writer Mark Reiter says, like making “clearer and cleaner decisions about what is good, better, best in the world.”
Reiter is co-editor of a new book, Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four of Everything, using a top-32 bracket system popularized by basketball to judge 101 categories like inventions, CEOs, animation characters, and Kings and Queens of England.
Best dog for the ages? The book names Snoopy. (I’d choose Fala or Rin-Tin-Tin).
Best candy bar? Nielson Crispy Crunch. (Like Florida, Snickers wants a recount.)
Best black-and-white TV series? Bracketologist picks The Andy Griffith Show, easily and naturally. (Mayberry, as state of place and mind.)
Reiter and his co-editor, The New York Times sports TV columnist Richard Sandomir, asked me to choose the best all-time Presidential speeches. I began fearlessly, if haltingly. How do you evaluate the very core by which Presidents are judged?
Theodore Roosevelt invented the term Bully Pulpit: the Presidency’s nonpareil power to persuade. Ultimately, great speakers wed social impact, political consequence, and/or rhetorical artistry, forging oral history passed from one generation to another.
No one equals Franklin Roosevelt’s five of my 32 top speeches. They are: 1936 “Rendezvous With Destiny”; 1940 “Arsenal of Democracy”; 1941 “Four Freedoms” address; and 1941 “Date which will live in infamy” declaration of war upon Pearl Harbor. In second place overall: FDR’s “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” 1933 First Inaugural.
To me, Roosevelt, not the magic Ronald Reagan, was The Great Communicator – or was that Honest Abe? Like George Washington, Lincoln was “first in the hearts of his countrymen” – and his 1865 Second Inaugural first among equals: “with malice toward none, with charity for all … let us strive to … bind up the nation’s wounds.” Lincoln died 41 days later. His lyric address lives.
The Great Emancipator’s other among-top 32 speeches are his 1861 Inaugural and 1863 Gettysburg Address. In third place is John Kennedy’s 1961 Inaugural: “Ask not what your country can do for you.” Fourth: In 1986, Reagan mourned the Challenger explosion using a sonnet by World War II aviator John Gillespie Magee: “They slipped the surly bonds of earth” to “touch the face of God.”
Other JFK masterworks are 1962’s Cuban Missile Crisis address and 1963’s “Ich bin ein Berliner.” Beside Challenger, Reagan bares 1984’s D-Day 40th anniversary and 1987 Berlin petition: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Richard Nixon is the only other President with three speeches: 1969 “Silent Majority” address; 1972 speech to the Soviet people, the first to use TV to address another Nation; and poignant 1974 farewell, saying, “My mother was a saint.”
In Bracketologist, Washington and Lyndon Johnson vaunt two addresses each: former, 1789 First Inaugural and 1796 Farewell; latter, 1963 post-JFK assassination and 1965 Voting Rights Act. All show, as LBJ aide Douglass Cater said, “how Presidents, like great French [!] restaurants, have an ambiance all their own.”
Presidents with one speech apiece are: Thomas Jefferson (1801 First Inaugural), Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Gerald Ford (“Our long national nightmare is over”), Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush (nine days after 9/11. Few recall, given sonny’s collapse.)
At best, each President has tried to reach, teach, and change us, moving history his way. I hope The Enlightened Bracketologist’s 32 top speeches reflect Jefferson’s “this government, the world’s best hope.” Plainly we remain what Walter Lippmann termed “a most Presidential country”: still a great land in which to judge.
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