Legend has it that Demosthenes, the greatest orator in ancient Athens, attended lectures by Plato when he was a young man. One day while doing so he saw a great crowd of people hurrying to another part of the city, and on enquiring was told that the people were eager to hear a notable orator there. He immediately followed them, saying that if oratory could command such a following, he was going to give up philosophy for rhetoric.
The story does Demosthenes little credit, but it illustrates a truth that until recently had become obscured by the television age: that oratory is a powerful thing, able to sway masses, change minds, influence events and thus alter the course of history. I say ‘until recently’ because the example of US President Barack Obama in his first election campaign reminded us that a skilled orator can work magic even on the distancing medium of television. Think of his acceptance speech in Bryant Park, Chicago, and then imagine what it was like to be in that park as those persuasive cadences flowed. The combination of a consummate speaker’s words and the strange mass psychology of crowds is electric in its effect. This fact is exploited by good and bad people both, by Hitler and other demagogues as well as by Winston Churchill and Martin Luther King.
The French statesman Charles Talleyrand once said that ‘speech is given to man to disguise his thoughts’, and his remark can be adapted to say something even more true, that ‘speeches are made by politicians to disguise their intentions’. To say this is not merely to repeat the old and not wholly accurate cliché that politicians are dishonest by profession, but to acknowledge that politics is a difficult art, akin to herding cats, and every political utterance has a multiplicity of competing audiences, demanding of the speaker that he pick his words with vast care and as little explicitness as possible. In wartime, and when one is on a moral crusade, an absolute line can be followed, and one’s oratory can soar; in the dog days of ordinary political life every syllable has to be weighed, lest the press pounce and twist and make the difficult business of government even harder.
Everyone yearns for plain, honest, solid leaders who will say what they mean and mean what they say. Everyone comes to despise the tricksy politician whose words twist their way round the minds of the populace, only to be found out later as mere speechifying, full of empty promises and false sincerity. Herein, perhaps, lies the key difference between statesmen and politicians: the former speaks, the latter makes speeches.