Undelivered: The Never-Heard Speeches That Would Have Rewritten History

Jeff Nussbaum has been a prominent political speechwriter with a lot of experience writing and rewriting speeches. Many of those speeches never saw the light of day. This inspired him to gather together and examine some of the historical speeches that stayed in a file somewhere. And the result is definitely interesting. He divides the book into 6 sections–for speeches that not allowed because they were “too hot", speeches dropped because of a change of mind, speeches prepared for a crisis that was averted, speeches in times of war and threats to peace, speeches when an election is lost (the concession or the victory speech not given), and speeches where circumstances changed, sometimes even at the last second. He includes speeches over more than a century and from a broad range of people. There is the speech that John Lewis was forced to change at the march on Washington and the one that Martin Luther King, Jr. abandoned, entitled "Normalcy, Never Again," even after he started giving it and skillfully slid into a speech he had given many times before but not to such a broad audience, which we all know as his "I Have A Dream." There is Eisenhower’s apology prepared in case the D-Day invasion had failed where he took full responsibility and one for Nixon when he contemplated fighting resignation. He noted that the speech that Native American leader Wamsutta Frank James had written when invited to speak at the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrim landing at Plymouth Rock but not allowed to give ended up having a greater impact than it likely would have had if he had given it. There is Hillary Clinton’s victory speech, which he includes in whole in the appendix and which comes across as very gracious. Instead, she became the first presidential candidate to say “I’m sorry” in a concession speech. The subtitle implies that at least some of these speeches would have rewritten history, but his argument for that was not very strong. In many cases it was the change in events that rewrote the speeches, but there were at least two that might have fit that bill. Pope Pius XI wrote a speech in 1939 condemning the rising fascism in Europe but died the day before he was to give it. The next pope took a conciliatory, if not supportive position. The other is a speech written in 1948 and discovered in his papers after Emperor Hirohito’s death in which he apologized for Japan’s role in starting World War II where he says, “Our heart is seared with grief. We are deeply ashamed…for our lack of virtue.” He had not been permitted to give it. Then there are some chilling speeches. Condoleezza Rice planned to give a speech advocating a greater focus on missile defense as opposed to conventional defense against smaller scale attacks on September 11, 2001. She didn’t give it because of a low-tech terrorist attack. And there was the speech that Kennedy planned to give in defense of a direct attack to destroy the Cuban missle silos, a speech fortunately not given. Decades later after the fall of the Soviet Union we found that, in contradiction to our intelligence at the time, the Soviet military alread had a store of tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba and military leaders had orders to use them without prior authorization from Moscow if attacked. Nussbaum also uses the speeches to describe how speeches are developed and written as well as what forms and literary devices are used. But, I was expecting to see entire speeches with some commentary. Instead, the commentary was interspersed within scattered lines of the speeches though some of the speeches are included in full as originally written in the appendix. And some of the commentary was a bit scattered and verbose. There’s a lot of detail that doesn’t add to the book and left me to forget what the point he was trying to make really was until he came back to it pages later. But, it was still very interesting and informative and certainly worth the time and effort.