D-Day speeches from three Presidents

Tomorrow President Obama will give a speech on 70 anniversary of D-Day. It will be fascinating to compare this to the last three speeches by US Presidents on major anniversaries of D Day: President Reagan on the 40, Clinton on 50 and George W Bush on the 60 anniversaries respectively.

There are interesting differences in perspective in each; when Reagan spoke the Berlin Wall was still standing:

“Soviet troops that came to the center of this continent did not leave when peace came. They're still there, uninvited, unwanted, unyielding, almost 40 years after the war.”

While in 1994 President Clinton was able to remark: “freedom rings from Prague to Kiev”.

And President Bush made no reference to the prevailing political landscape in Europe in 2004 at all – presumably because the sense of the battle won (and an end of history) was simply too obvious (then). With recent events in Kiev and on the eastern borders of Ukraine, such certainty has receded – and President Obama is bound to make reference to this.

But there are other differences between the three speeches which are interesting from a speech making point of view. Presidents Clinton and Bush both try to bring poignancy to their remarks by referring to men who did not return from the smoke and fire of Normandy. President Bush remarked:

“Remember men like Technician 5th Grade John Pinder, Jr., whose job was to deliver vital radio equipment to the beach. He was gravely wounded before he hit shore… Under constant enemy fire, this young man from Pennsylvania was shot twice again, and died on the beach below us.”

President Clinton used the personal example of Pauline Elliott and her one year old daughter listening to news on the radio and longing only for “the happiness of the hours that will follow her daddy's homecoming step on the porch.”

Before going on to recount those who did not return:

“33 pairs of brothers, a father and his son, 11 men from tiny Bedford, Virginia, and Corporal Frank Elliot, killed near these bluffs by a German shell on D-Day.”

In contrast, President Reagan did not use any individual names of the fallen. Instead he drew his examples from survivors, from the unquenchable bravery the men who fought that day:

“the night before the invasion, when Colonel Wolverton asked his parachute troops to kneel with him in prayer he told them: Do not bow your heads, but look up so you can see God and ask His blessing in what we're about to do.”

President Reagan’s speech gained its power by daring to take its audience back to the action of D-Day, through the memorable individuals like Bill Millin of the 51 Highlanders who played his bagpipes while the bullets burst around him, or Lord Lovat of Scotland:

“who calmly announced when he got to the bridge, ``Sorry I'm a few minutes late,'' as if he'd been delayed by a traffic jam, when in truth he'd just come from the bloody fighting on Sword Beach.”

And most memorably of all in his line:

“These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs.”

President Reagan’s speech is much the most powerful of the three because it does not try to tear at our heartstrings. It has greater honesty. Above all it has one great quality, a quality that sets a great speech apart from others: vividness. A sense of being in the moment:

“When one Ranger fell, another would take his place. When one rope was cut, a Ranger would grab another and begin his climb again. They climbed, shot back, and held their footing. Soon, one by one, the Rangers pulled themselves over the top, and in seizing the firm land at the top of these cliffs, they began to seize back the continent of Europe.”

Who could hear those words and not feel themselves moved to tears? The power of speeches never fades.