The presidential campaign speech is, like jazz, one of the few truly American art forms. It is not, of course, unknown in other democratic countries, but nowhere else has it achieved the same degree of virtuosity; nowhere else is it so accurate a reflection of national character: by turns solemn or witty, pompous or deeply moving, full of sense or full of wind. The excerpts below have been selected from over a century and a half of successful—and unsuccessful—presidential politicking.
A few months ago, President Lyndon Johnson was showing Prime Minister Lester Pearson of Canada the handsome chandelier which, thanks to Mrs. Kennedy, again hangs in the Treaty Room of the White House. He explained where it had been in the meantime: ”… when President Theodore Roosevelt would have to open the windows in the evening to let the breeze in to keep cool … the chandelier would tinkle and keep him awake. So he told the butler one evening to get the chandelier out of here and take it down to the Capitol. The frustrated butler said, ‘Where do we take it?’ He said, ‘Take it to the Vice President, he needs something to keep him awake.’”
Consider, to begin with, the situation that confronted President Thomas Jefferson in 1803. The United States then was a very young country, of uncertain unity and with dubious prospects for survival, and it was trying to steer a middle course between the imperial rivalries of England and France. Most of its people lived east of the Alleghenies, but the westward movement had begun and the land beyond the mountains was being settled all the way to the Mississippi; by 1800 nearly a million Americans lived in that western country, and more were going there every year. Because it was so hard and costly to transport goods across the moun: tains, these settlers could not hope to prosper unless they could use the Mississippi River as their commercial highway to the outer world.
The assassination of President Kennedy has brought out, in an agonizing : way, the realities of the American Presidency and has again demonstrated its unique function as a political organism. The first truth to be asserted about this great office is that the President of the United States is a monarch. The Constitution, in deliberately ambiguous terms, entrusts to him the whole executive power of the Union and in addition confers on him the separate ollice of Commander in Chief with complete control of the armed forces. This, of course, does not mean the President is an absolute monarch. He has to share power with Congress (as President Kennedy painfully discovered in his three years in the White House); and both he and Congress share power with the Supreme Court.
The American Presidency is a formidable, exposed, and somewhat mysterious institution. —John F. Kennedy, 1963