One of the dividends from reading or hearing Donald Trump’s words is a sense of authenticity. A leader might lie, confect or embellish, yet remain true to themselves – unvarnished, unfiltered, even unhinged. As a French count claimed centuries ago, “le style, c’est l’homme même”. “Style, that is the man himself”, as Count Buffon would have said in English.
Which other political leader has earned that sort of back-handed compliment? After appraising all the repertoire of communications options available to leaders – speeches, interviews, diaries, memoirs, fiction and fable – they might still come up short in originality, imagination or coherence. We voters deserve better, but what should we ask for?
Everyone knows a good speech when they hear one. Setting to one side the matchless 272 words in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which warrants a category all its own, great recent speeches might be arranged like cue cards. A preacher has a dream (Martin Luther King, Jr), astronauts will travel to the Moon before the decade is out (John F. Kennedy), a space shuttle crashes (Ronald Reagan), an unknown soldier comes home (Paul Keating), a martyred brother is remembered as a good and decent man (Teddy Kennedy), a prisoner professes himself ready to die for his convictions (Nelson Mandela). The disproportionate share allotted to Americans is fitting; universities as distinguished as Harvard continue to teach Rhetoric, and American leaders recognise its power. In days past, a Queen reminds her warriors that she has “the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England too” (Elizabeth I, 1588). An escapee from slavery insists that her audience recognise “ain’t I a woman” (Sojourner Truth, 1851).
Everyone knows a good speech when they hear one.
One reason those eight speeches remain memorable is that top-quality rhetoric is so rare. Boilerplate, with its hackneyed phrases and tired tropes, is more the norm. Boilerplate cannot convey vision, nor link together disparate policies into a coherent plan. Leaders do not have to roll their own; Peggy Noonan, Don Watson and Ted Sorensen were masters at melding their brains and hearts with those of a speaker. Leaders do, nonetheless, have to own the words, make them their own, speak them as though they matter.
I once wrote some speeches for a national leader, only to be dismayed when he usually delivered them verbatim. Perhaps neither subject nor audience counted for much or there was a weird symbiosis between us, a rather more unpalatable thought. At the other extreme, the leader of a much larger nation once spent half an hour with me discussing the technical detail beloved by a speech snob: cadences, humour, rhythm, enlisting the audience, building to a climax.
Encouraging leaders to keep diaries is another option, but one easily dismissed. Keeping a diary denotes an inordinate self-regard. A diary is not a confessional; few diarists lose arguments, commend opponents or admit failure. On a lighter note, diaries may be gleefully scabrous and scurrilous. Alan Clark’s demonstrate that sex and grog, scandals and spite, can convert even a Minister’s jottings into tabloid fodder. Others actually illuminate a corridor of power, whether Jock Colville’s notes on Churchill late at night or Jean-Paul Huchon’s commentary on the thankless job of prime minister in France.
Perhaps technology is an enemy of vain introspection. Our attention span is truncated and cluttered. After-hours can be consumed in the light of a screen. Samuel Pepys would not have bothered with nightly scribbles in an age of email and mobiles.
Memoirs offer a more serious opportunity to set the record straight, have the last word, rake in money, and scorn all those malign forces which denied greatness to the subject.
Convention, at least in Washington and Paris, obliges putative leaders to publish books explaining why our nations should be entrusted to their care. Almost without exception, those are shabby products, riddled with clichés, sodden with self-esteem, reeking with false promise. There is one honourable exception; John McCain led such a dramatic and heroic life that outlining his time as a fighter pilot and prisoner of war makes compelling reading.
Otherwise, a voter might as well seek inspiration in the pages of Trump: The Art of the Deal. In France, wits would suggest that prospective leaders are obliged at least to have read the books published under their names.
Memoirs offer a more serious opportunity to set the record straight, have the last word, rake in money, and scorn all those malign forces which denied greatness to the subject. They are, however, published a bit late. Virtually no readers pick up a memoir willing to alter their opinion of its author. Count Buffon reckoned that a writer’s style would reveal “clarity of mind, soul and taste”. That was optimistic, although we might live in hope that a common sense, matter of fact memoir by Angela Merkel proves that “style, that is the woman herself”.
We should lament the fact that premature death denied us the chance to read the seven-volume history of the Jewish people planned by Menachem Begin. The Israeli prime minister intended to cover the period from Hitler’s accession to power in 1930 until the present day, then 1982. The scale and scope of that project were remarkable; even the prolific Churchill, with 43 books to his name, kept his focus more narrowly personal.
As for fiction, books published by leaders are best passed over in silence. In evidence, we could cite Saddam Hussein’s fantasies, the boring thrillers co-authored by the Clintons, Benjamin Disraeli’s stilted novels, Churchill’s lamentable Savrola, and Pandit Nehru’s re-invention of Indian history. I once classified Henry Kissinger’s memoirs as the finest political novel of our time, but that did not do justice to Ward Just or the best of John le Carré. If you want to find truth and truths in fiction, read Jane Austen.
