EXCERPT: 'My Fellow Americans' by Michael Waldman

Author Michael Waldman takes a look at America's leaders, past and present.

ByABC News via logo
December 10, 2010, 5:06 PM

Dec. 14, 2010 — -- Almost as important as what U.S. presidents did during their time as leaders of the nation is what they said.

From George Washington to Barack Obama, Michael Waldman, Bill Clinton's former speechwriting director, has selected some of the most famous presidential speeches.

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America's racial divide is the one of the most vexing themes that weaves throughout American history. Yet rarely do presidents, indeed any politicians, touch the subject firmly. So it is all the more notable that the most remarkable rise to the presidency, of the nation's first black chief executive, was saved by a speech on race—a speech stark in its frankness and eloquent in its summoning of all the most powerful themes of American history and its rhetorical legacy.

Barack Obama leapt onto the national stage with a rapturously received keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention. He was a state legislator, "a skinny kid with a funny name" who would soon win a U.S. Senate seat from Illinois. He was born to "a mother from Kansas and a father from Kenya" and raised in Hawaii and Indonesia. He worked as a community organizer in Chicago, and then became the first black editor in chief of the Harvard Law Review (among the top honors in legal education) and a respected teacher of Constitutional law at the University of Chicago. His multicultural, peripatetic path was something very new for American politics. (Or anywhere else, for that matter.)

Two years later, the political landscape began to change. In his second term, George W. Bush had become durably unpopular. The weapons of mass destruction he had declared as the reason for the invasion of Iraq turned out to not exist. His proposal to invest Social Security funds in the stock market flared out. His administration was harshly criticized for inaction when Hurricane Katrina submerged much of New Orleans, making hundreds of thousands permanently homeless. In 2006, the Democrats won both houses of Congress for the first time since 1992. It seemed likely that a Democrat would win in 2008. The frontrunner was the party's most famous working politician—Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, the former first lady.

Then the freshman senator from Illinois plunged into the presidential race.

The campaign transfixed the nation, as a woman and an African American battled for the lead. Obama's powerful speeches ignited a strong organization. "They said this day would never come," he declared in a thrilling speech on caucus night in Des Moines, after winning in the overwhelmingly white state. Clinton recovered, shedding her imperial frontrunner's cloak, and won the New Hampshire primary days later. Obama's concession speech was so eloquent ("Yes, we can!") that it was turned into a popular music video by the hip hop artist Will.I.Am. Obama won a dozen victories in a row, followed by a month in which Clinton and he traded wins.

At this moment, cable television stations began saturation airplay of videos featuring incendiary remarks by Obama's minister, Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. The pastor was a strong, fierce influence on young Obama. At Wright's church, Obama had a religious epiphany, as he describes in his memoir. The senator borrowed the title of a Wright sermon for his second book: The Audacity of Hope. Wright officiated at his wedding. When Obama announced his candidacy, Wright was due to give the benediction, but the campaign removed him from the program at the last minute.

Now, angry excerpts from Wright's sermons flashed across cable television news programs. The 9/11 attacks, he roared, echoing Malcolm X, were the "chickens coming home to roost." "The government gives [black Americans] the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes the three strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America,'" Wright declared. "No, no, no. Not God Bless America. God Damn America!" The New York Post bannered the story, "Obama's Minister of Hate."

Wright's thundering jeremiads pushed to the surface issues of race, religion, and the ultimate mystery of Obama—who is this guy? Often, campaign aides overreact to the cable maelstrom; it is hard to know whether this was such a moment. But it seemed clear to the campaign then that this could prove fatal to Obama's presidential bid.

Obama called his aides together and said "I want to give a speech on race. From a political standpoint, this is a moment of great peril and requires more than the typical political response. But I have got a lot to say about this and I think it requires a thoughtful speech. It's a speech that only I can write. Either people accept it or they won't, and I may not be president."

The speech would be given four days later, days filled with campaigning. Who would write it? "Don't worry," Obama reassured. "I know what I want to say." He dictated for an hour to his young speechwriter, Jon Favreau. Then he went to work on Favreau's draft. After long days campaigning, Obama retreated to his hotel room, working on his laptop computer, a solitary writer wrestling with his text. "Writing is anything but a small part of Obama's life," observed journalist Robert Draper. "It's basic to who he is." At two in the morning one night he emailed the final text to Favreau and other top aides. Strategist David Axelrod read it and replied: "This is why you should be president."

The next morning Obama spoke before eight flags, a small tense audience, and many more watching on TV. He could have simply denounced Wright's words, and pivoted to his broader campaign themes—which had only implicitly touched on race. Instead, he explained Wright and his anger to a wider audience. He condemned the things Wright had said: "Reverend Wright's comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity." But he explained,

He contains within him the contradictions—the good and the bad—of the community that he has served diligently for so many years. I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother—a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

He explained black anger—especially that of an older, scarred generation—to white Americans. And he explained white anger, resentment over reverse discrimination, to blacks. As good speakers do, he pointed forward with a message of reconciliation. Intriguingly, he did not principally do so through an explicit appeal to government programs that would unite working class voters of all races, so much as through his own story. The legacy of racial hatred, he seemed to argue, was especially generational—and his own success pointed to a less divisive future.

The media reaction to the speech was powerful and positive across party lines. "I thought Barack Obama's speech was strong, thoughtful and important," Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan wrote in the Wall Street Journal. "Rather beautifully, it was a speech to think to, not clap to." In Newsweek, Jonathan Alter evoked Thomas Jefferson's line that race is "a firebell in the night." "The bravest thing Obama did in his historic speech at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia was to ring the bell louder," Alter wrote. "He chose to focus on an uncomfortable topic that most Americans would rather leave unspoken." New Yorker columnist Hendrik Hertzberg, himself a former speechwriter, noted, "It was not defensive. It did not overcompensate. In its combination of objectivity and empathy, it persuaded Americans of all colors that he understood them." The speech was posted in its entirely on YouTube; within a day, it was viewed 1.6 million times.

For all the praise, the speech was not unprecedented. Lyndon Johnson told a Southern crowd that he was sick of white politicians who shouted "nigger" at election time. Bill Clinton gave the same speech to inner-city voters in Detroit and "White Flight" voters in Macomb County, Michigan, on the same day, to challenge both groups to move past racial division. (His remedy was policy, such as national health reform, rather than his own personal story.)

But few political leaders have spoken so precisely and eloquently, with such honesty, about race—and especially not at such a moment of political peril. Obama took what could have been yet another campaign crash and used it to elevate the nation's approach to a difficult issue. His calm amid a political storm became a hallmark and a harbinger. This, in itself, was seen as a harbinger of what his presidency could be.

Wright did not fade away. After more public angry statements from Wright, Obama was forced to renounce him altogether. But the issue did not really hurt Obama's prospects further. John McCain, his Republican opponent, never raised Wright as a topic. On election night, seventy thousand filled Chicago's Grant Park, the site of the riots that tore apart the Democratic Convention forty years earlier. Obama won 52 percent of the vote, the largest share for a Democrat in a half century. In his speech that night, his reference to the astounding racial breakthrough was subtle but unmistakable, as historian Josh Gottheimer notes an allusion to the great civil rights song by Sam Cooke: "It's been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America."