No Heavy Lifting
LEAD: 'SAY IT AIN'T SO, JOE,' moaned the dismayed supporters of Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic Presidential hopeful, in tones echoic of the fans of baseball's Shoeless Joe Jackson when it was discovered that their idol had faithlessly sold out to the gamblers in the 1919 World Series.
'SAY IT AIN'T SO, JOE,' moaned the dismayed supporters of Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic Presidential hopeful, in tones echoic of the fans of baseball's Shoeless Joe Jackson when it was discovered that their idol had faithlessly sold out to the gamblers in the 1919 World Series.
The cause of the Biden followers' dismay was what members of the Judson Welliver Society, the organization of former White House speechwriters, call 'heavy lifting': borrowing at length and without attribution the rhythms, thought patterns and sometimes the words of another orator.
'Why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university?' asked the candidate in a rousing finale to a debate at the Iowa State Fair. 'Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? . . . Is it because they didn't work hard, my ancestors who worked in the coal mines of Northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play football for 4 hours?' These rhe-torical questions were an-swered with a ringing 'It's because they didn't have a platform upon which to stand.'
That was a killer-diller of a peroration, warming egalitarian hearts, until Maureen Dowd, a reporter for The New York Times, printed excerpts from a speech by Neil Kinnock, leader of Britain's Labor Party, made several months before:
'Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? . . . Was it because all our predecessors were thick? Was it because they were weak? Those people who could work eight hours underground and then come up and play football? Weak? . . . It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand.'
As an old hand at the speechwriting dodge, and a longtime specialist in its Thrilling Peroration Division, my first reaction was to wince at the formalistic upon which construction. Although it enabled the speaker to conclude with the strong word stand, the ostentatiously careful grammar conflicts with the common-man point; a more forceful conclusion would be 'no platform to stand on,' with spoken emphasis on stand.
Focused on this particular tree, however, I missed the forest of moral outrage that sprang up to deride the heavy lifter. 'I'm going back to Gary Hart,' said one embittered Democrat. 'At least he didn't steal that girl from some far-lefty in England.'
Maybe my familiarity with rhetorical borrowing has left me insensitive to the shock of recognition. I remember listening to John F. Kennedy's inaugural, with its stirring line 'In your hands, my fellow citizens, more than mine, will rest the final success or failure of our course.' I had to admire the way writer Ted Sorensen evoked the rhythm of the line in the Lincoln first inaugural: 'In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war.' (Kennedy subtly corrected Lincoln's redundancy of fellow-countrymen; that was especially astute.) What's wrong with such evocation? Winston Churchill, writing his ringing 1940 speech about defending his island by fighting on the beaches, in the streets, etc., recalled Georges Clemenceau's defiance in 1918: 'I shall fight in front of Paris, within Paris, behind Paris.' (Clemenceau, in turn, was paraphrasing Marshal Ferdinand Foch on Amiens.) That sort of boosting - a less pejorative term than lifting and certainly far from plagiarizing, rooted in the Latin for 'kidnapping' - is done all the time. Time for confession.
I always admired Franklin D. Roosevelt's use of the repeated I see construction, begun in his 1937 'I see one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished. . . .' Working with writers Samuel I. Rosenman and Robert E. Sherwood in 1940, F.D.R. collaborated on a speech that used I see to frame an inspiring vision: 'I see an America where factory workers are not discarded after they reach their prime. . . . I see an America whose rivers and valleys and lakes . . . are protected as the rightful heritage of all the people. . . . I see an America devoted to our freedom. . . .'
Working as a speechwriter for Richard Nixon in 1968, I thought: Why not lift it? Adlai Stevenson had already adapted the pattern to a series of paragraphs that began with I look forward to, which President Kennedy had lifted in 1963: 'I look forward to a great future for America, a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint. . . . I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty. . . . And I look forward to a world which will be safe not only for democracy and diversity but also for personal distinction.' Always a slam-bang format for a peroration.
So Richard Nixon told the Republican convention: 'I see a day when Americans are once again proud of their flag. . . . I see a day when the President of the United States is respected and his office is honored because it is worthy of respect and worthy of honor. . . . I see a day when our nation is at peace and the world is at peace and everyone on earth - those who hope, those who aspire, those who crave liberty - will look to America as the shining example of hopes realized and dreams achieved.'
After that speech, I felt a little pang of guilt - some spark of conscience had not been totally extinguished in the peroration dodge - and I called Judge Rosenman to fess up to using the I see construction he and Bobby Sherwood had written for Roosevelt.
'Check Robert Ingersoll about 10 years after the Civil War,' replied the man F.D.R. called 'Sammy the Rose.' With the help of the Library of Congress, I tracked down the speeches of the orator who coined the sobriquet 'The Plumed Knight' in the rousing nominating speech for candidate James Blaine. There was the source of F.D.R.'s I see's in an Ingersoll speech in 1876:
'I see our country filled with happy homes. . . . I see a world where thrones have crumbled. . . . I see a world where labor reaps its full reward. . . . I see a world without the beggar's outstretched palm . . . and, as I look, life lengthens, joy deepens, love canopies the earth; and over all, in the great dome, shines the eternal star of human hope.'
That is the sort of ending to a speech that Demosthenes would have considered a grabber. I never credited Sam Rosenman, and Rosenman never credited the guy who wrote it for Ingersoll; why should the Biden speechwriter give a public pat on the back to the hack who pounds away for Kinnock?
The answer is that times have changed; you can't get away with borrowing anything these days - not even an oratorical technique, much less a phrase or paragraph - unless you are willing to give the attribution. So my advice to candidates like Joe Biden is this: Do justly, love perorations and walk humbly with thy speechwriter. (I forget where I got that, but it has a nice ring to it.)  ON LANGUAGE