0:04 [SPEAKER_03]: There are just times when you need a great speech. 0:08 [SPEAKER_03]: These times are rare, but they exist. 0:10 [SPEAKER_03]: In most cases, the last thing you need is more words. 0:14 [SPEAKER_03]: You usually need someone to get up and do something. 0:17 [SPEAKER_03]: Build something, pay for something. 0:19 [SPEAKER_03]: But sometimes words are all you have. 0:21 [SPEAKER_03]: Sometimes nobody knows what to do, what to build, or who to pay. 0:25 [SPEAKER_03]: You kind of look at the other people in the room and shrug, and before you do anything else, you need to pause and wrap your head around the moment. 0:33 [SPEAKER_03]: You need to get on the same page to take a breath of what it means to move forward. 0:38 [SPEAKER_03]: We've all been in places where this was true. 0:41 [SPEAKER_03]: Maybe it was a ulogy at a funeral, maybe it was a toast, or I have time speech during a football game, but when you need a great speech, you really need a great speech. 0:52 [SPEAKER_03]: You need someone to get up and ring the bell, like JFK did, when the Soviet Union beat the United States to space in the 1960s with his we choose to go to the moon speech. 1:17 [SPEAKER_00]: We choose to go to the moon and this decay and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best. 1:31 [SPEAKER_03]: Well, like President Reagan did, following the challenge of explosion, in which seven American astronauts died on national television, in a broadcast shown live in public schools throughout the country. 1:42 [SPEAKER_01]: And I want to say something to the school children of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's takeoff. 1:49 [SPEAKER_01]: I know it's hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. 1:54 [SPEAKER_01]: It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. 1:57 [SPEAKER_01]: It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. 2:02 [SPEAKER_01]: The future doesn't belong to the faint hearted. 2:06 [SPEAKER_01]: It belongs to the brave. 2:08 [SPEAKER_01]: The challenge of your crew was pulling us into the future. 2:10 [SPEAKER_01]: and we'll continue to follow them. 2:13 [SPEAKER_01]: We will never forget them. 2:15 [SPEAKER_01]: Nor the last time we saw them this morning. 2:18 [SPEAKER_01]: As they prepared for their journey and wave goodbye. 2:22 [SPEAKER_01]: And slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God. 2:32 [SPEAKER_03]: This episode is about a timeline this, when American needed a speech and the president of the United States stood with his hat in his hand, looked at the eager crowd and laid an absolute egg. 2:45 [SPEAKER_03]: He struck out, dropped the ball, or, in the vernacular of professional speakers, cropped the bed, and arguably, the stakes have never been higher. 2:54 [SPEAKER_03]: One of the bloodiest battles in American history had just finished, and tens of thousands of graves were scattered across 10 square miles, a formerly pristine countryside. 3:04 [SPEAKER_03]: These graves, often rushed and shallow, were beginning to open up under heavy rain, in birds and dogs were feeding on the bodies, flies everywhere. 3:13 [SPEAKER_03]: And the lingering excretement and discarded gear of hundreds of thousands of soldiers did little to improve the ambience. 3:20 [SPEAKER_03]: As far as the war itself was going, the country was literally coming apart and in this battlefield, it certainly looked and felt like it. 3:28 [SPEAKER_03]: So with the eyes of a desperate nation squarely on him, the president took the podium and delivered the worst speech in American history. 3:36 [SPEAKER_03]: The reviews were scorching, the very hottest of hot takes, according to the Chicago Times. 3:42 [SPEAKER_02]: The chief of every American must tangle with shame, as he reads the silly, flat, dish-watery utterances of a man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the president of the United States. 3:57 [SPEAKER_02]: The local paper said simply, we passed over the silly remarks of the president. 4:03 [SPEAKER_02]: For the credit of the nation, we're willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them and that they shall no more be repeated or thought of. 4:13 [SPEAKER_03]: Even the president's hometown newspaper, the Illinois State Register, demolished him for his incompetence. 4:20 [SPEAKER_02]: Nothing could have been more inappropriate than to have invited this Prince of Jokers, no wonder then that here where thousands had congregated to witness the solemn and impressive consecration, he should appear before a crowd with no other object than to create laughter. 4:41 [SPEAKER_03]: The speech, of course, is the Gettysburger dress, and as you know today, it is considered one of the greatest speeches in the history of our nation. 4:49 [SPEAKER_03]: There is a lesson in this, for our own era of scorching hot takes and hypercritical commentary. 4:54 [SPEAKER_03]: Outrage is easy, too easy, extremes are easy. 4:59 [SPEAKER_03]: Overreacting to things, and judging them harshly, has become an American way of life. 5:04 [SPEAKER_03]: Reviews like this remind us to be aware of the sneering arrogance, a professional critics, and to be aware of the fickle, temporary attitudes of any given moment. 5:14 [SPEAKER_03]: They remind us to gravitate instead to people of character and substance who take a long view of history and are unwilling to trade those things for popular applause. 5:23 [SPEAKER_03]: They remind me to take a look for people who are measured and circumspect. 5:27 [SPEAKER_03]: who don't rush to judgment and who are not slaves to the moment or any party or party line. 5:33 [SPEAKER_03]: Another lesson for us today, sometimes less is more. 5:36 [SPEAKER_03]: Sometimes it's okay to be moderate in our speech, to be thoughtful and sober and balanced. 5:42 [SPEAKER_03]: It doesn't make you boring, it doesn't make you scared, life is complex, and continually exceeds the limits of human speech. 5:52 [SPEAKER_03]: Saying a lot is no substitute for saying something of value. 5:56 [SPEAKER_03]: Lincoln shared the podium that day with a man known at the time as the best orator in the United States, a politician and Harvard professor named Edward Everett. 6:06 [SPEAKER_03]: In fact, Everett was the main speaker. 6:08 [SPEAKER_03]: Lincoln was the afterthought. 6:10 [SPEAKER_03]: Everett spoke for two hours, meeting all of the expectations of the fickle public. 6:15 [SPEAKER_03]: His speech was very well received. 6:17 [SPEAKER_03]: Even the prayer offered by the local preacher was four times longer than Lincoln's little address, an irony not lost on even that very impatient 19th century audience. 6:27 [SPEAKER_03]: The MC who followed that preacher annoyed at the minister's excess, said mockingly, the preacher gives a prayer that thinks it was a speech. 6:36 [SPEAKER_03]: But no one you know can quote any part of either of these speeches. 6:40 [SPEAKER_03]: It's possible that this is the first you've heard of them. 6:43 [SPEAKER_03]: A final lesson. 6:44 [SPEAKER_03]: Just because people didn't like something doesn't mean it was bad. 6:48 [SPEAKER_03]: We all know that most of the best TV shows in the last 25 years have been canceled. 6:52 [SPEAKER_03]: Sometimes, popular opinion is discerning, and sometimes, it isn't. 6:57 [SPEAKER_03]: Learn from critics, and never let them define you. 7:00 [SPEAKER_03]: Certainly, never let them break you. 7:03 [SPEAKER_03]: While the audience in the critics wanted that day at Gettysburg was high-flying verbal gymnastics, some oratorial pyrotechnics. 7:10 [SPEAKER_03]: They wanted that kind of stirring, overconfident, highly emotive display we love to see from our talking heads on TV. 7:19 [SPEAKER_03]: What they got was a calm, measured, sober address that lasted about as long as it takes to brush your teeth. 7:26 [SPEAKER_03]: What they got was this. 7:30 [SPEAKER_02]: Four score in seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. 7:45 [SPEAKER_02]: Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. 7:56 [SPEAKER_02]: We are met on a great battlefield of that war. 8:00 [SPEAKER_02]: We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who hear gave their lives that that nation might live. 8:11 [SPEAKER_02]: It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. 8:16 [SPEAKER_02]: But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate. 8:20 [SPEAKER_02]: We cannot consecrate. 8:22 [SPEAKER_02]: We cannot allow this ground. 8:26 [SPEAKER_02]: The brave men living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. 8:36 [SPEAKER_02]: The world will little note no longer remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. 8:45 [SPEAKER_02]: It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work, which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. 8:56 [SPEAKER_02]: It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us. 9:02 [SPEAKER_02]: That from these honored dead, we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. 9:11 [SPEAKER_02]: That we hear highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain. 9:18 [SPEAKER_02]: That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. 9:23 [SPEAKER_02]: And that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.
Show full transcript (86 segments)
