Undelivered: The Never-Heard Speeches That Would Have Rewritten History
Genres: History
Book Preface
My obsession with undelivered speeches began late in the evening on November 7, 2000, Election Night.
Working for Vice President Al Gore in the White House was my first job out of college, and it was heady stuff for a twenty-two-year-old. When Gore’s campaign for president moved from Washington, D.C., to Nashville, Tennessee, I moved along with it. Even for my idealistic young self, the Gore 2000 campaign was an affair strangely disconnected from its candidate and unloved even in its home state. (On my drive to the campaign headquarters each morning, I could count on somebody to spot my GORE 2000 bumper sticker and give me the finger.)*
Like all campaigns, there was plenty of camaraderie and carousing, but when each day’s tracking polls would come in, either showing Gore up or down by a couple of points, a fatigued, beleaguered staffer would inevitably mutter under his or her breath, “And that’s just at headquarters.” Even the most relentless enthusiasm can succumb to the numbing grind of a relentless campaign. We will bring prosperity and progress! Or was it progress and prosperity? Was it change that works? Or change that works for working families? Nobody could quite remember.
But as Election Night approached, you could begin to feel an actual change; the pallor from sleeplessness and fast food was replaced with the flush of hope. There was hope for the nation, certainly—America would be moving into a new century and a new millennium as the sole superpower on earth, led by someone who understood the challenges of climate change and the potential of technology.
But there were also more granular, grounded, and, let’s just admit it, self-involved hopes for those of us who had toiled on the campaign. I might get to work in the White House! I might get to work at the State Department! I might be a presidential speechwriter!
And so on Election Night, as the last get-out-the-vote phone calls were dialed, we headed to the outdoor plaza in downtown Nashville.
Vice President Gore prepared to head there as well. In keeping with political superstition, he had both a victory and a concession speech prepared. Because of what the campaign had seen in its polling, he also had a third version of the speech prepared: in case he had won the electoral vote but lost the popular vote.*
As polls closed, it appeared Gore would be giving the victory speech: just before 8:00 p.m., the Associated Press, followed by CNN and the other networks, declared that Al Gore had won Florida’s twenty-five electoral votes. Within the hour, they also called Michigan, Illinois, and Pennsylvania for Gore. We were euphoric. Al Gore was going to be the next president.
And yet the people crunching the numbers inside both campaigns were seeing something less definitive than what was being reported. I had received a call earlier in the afternoon from a college acquaintance who told me that his grandmother and some of her friends in Palm Beach, Florida, were having trouble figuring out the ballot. At the time, I reported the call to the campaign “boiler room”—where the Gore campaign’s high command was handling Election Day operations, but didn’t think much of it. On Election Days, all sorts of rumors run rampant, and it becomes hard to separate the signal from the noise. Partly that’s because people who were previously working eighteen-hour days now must sit and wait for results like everyone else, so they trade every bit of information they come across. What are you hearing about turnout? What is exit polling saying? And sometimes they traffic in rumor and paranoia.
But it turned out that call about Florida was prophetic, because Palm Beach’s ballot was designed in such a visually challenging way that an estimated 2,800 Gore voters actually voted for third-party candidate Pat Buchanan, one of many problems with Florida’s voting system that would soon be revealed.
Back in Nashville, we didn’t know any of that yet. What we knew was that Gore had lost Ohio and his own home state of Tennessee. It was all going to come down to Florida, and Bush was claiming that he was actually going to win Florida. Something seemed to be changing, and just before 10:00 p.m., it did: in an unprecedented and embarrassing move, the networks took Florida out of Gore’s column and declared it “too close to call.” Over the next couple of hours, Bush’s lead in Florida grew, and shortly after 2:00 a.m., the networks declared Bush the winner in Florida and the winner of the presidency. Gore called Bush to concede. But as Gore was en route from his hotel to address the crowd in Nashville, Bush’s lead in Florida began to drop again, as numbers from several of the late-reporting counties came in.
At this point, I was with a number of campaign staffers in a bar near the plaza, taking shelter from the persistent drizzle. All our pagers (not everyone had cell phones at the time) began going off. We were being asked to return to campaign headquarters. In a tense phone call, Gore had called Bush to retract his concession. Back at headquarters, staffers who had law degrees or a connection to Florida were being told to pack overnight bags and head to the airport, where the campaign plane would take them to Florida to begin working on the automatic recount the closeness of the election had triggered. At the same time, other groups were dispatched to the other states where the race was too close to call: Wisconsin, Iowa, New Mexico, and Oregon. I ended up in Madison, Wisconsin, in desperate need of a new winter coat, helping prepare for a recount that never happened.
That night, Vice President Gore gave no speech at all. Just after 4:00 a.m., Gore’s campaign chairman, William Daley, stepped to the lectern and said,
I’ve been in politics for a long time. But there’s never been a night like this one … As everyone in America knows, this race has come down to the State of Florida. And without being certain of the results in Florida, we simply cannot be certain of the results of this national election.… Until the recount is concluded and the results in Florida become official, our campaign continues.
Far from being a statement for posterity, posterity was put on pause. I’ve been through stacks of files trying to find my printed copy of the speeches Al Gore was prepared to give that evening, or the floppy disk they were stored on, to no avail. Whatever it was that Al Gore had planned on saying to the cold, wet assembled crowd may be lost to history.*
Since that night, I’ve nursed an obsession with finding and bringing to light the undelivered.
Growing up, we all learned about Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream. But what if the March on Washington had taken on a different tone and tenor? What if John Lewis, the fieriest speaker of the day, had preceded King by declaring that he could not support Kennedy’s civil rights bill, “for it is too little and too late”? What if King had kept his dream to himself and taken the stage on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to declare that there would be “normalcy never again”? Both of them went to bed the night before the 1963 March on Washington with prepared speeches that did just that.
Today, we don’t have to consider what would have happened if the D-day invasion failed, with bad weather leaving tens of thousands of Allied troops to be massacred on the beaches of Normandy. But Dwight Eisenhower did, and he prepared an apology for it.
And what if, on the other side of the world, Emperor Hirohito had been the one to apologize? Instead of becoming Japan’s longest-reigning emperor and the man who oversaw Japan’s full transition from an aggressor nation to a modern democracy, would he have exited the stage as part of a cabal of warmongers who led the nation to ruin?
In the following pages, I’ll share speeches of historic import that were never given because events intervened, or a leader had a change of heart, or history took a sudden turn. Several of these speeches have never before appeared in public. Others were known to small groups of history buffs, but they weren’t easily accessible. For each, I’ve tried to add new context and new understanding, both about the moment in which they were written and about the process that went into writing them.
Even when, with hindsight, we know the precariousness of a historical situation, what we didn’t know is often chilling. For example, this book will share the speech in which John F. Kennedy announces an aerial bombardment and ground invasion of Cuba. In the draft, there is a harrowing blank, noted only as “Follows a description of first reports of action.” And only later did we realize that the “first action” could have been already-operational Soviet tactical nuclear weapons vaporizing our base at Guantánamo Bay and an entire American invasion force.
Sometimes speeches go undelivered because of the choices leaders make, and sometimes they go undelivered because of whom the people choose to be their leaders. Such was the case on November 8, 2016, when America elected Donald Trump to be president. Hillary Clinton had expected to win. Her victory speech had been written, and wrestled over, and edited. But it was never delivered. Her speech lays out a very different future from the one America is still living through. It, along with the story behind its creation, is published here for the first time.
Each of these speeches provides a window into the fraught moments in which it was penned. In the aggregate, they provide an alternative history of key twentieth- and twenty-first-century events. But these are not simply historical novelties, moments encased in amber. They show that history is in constant conversation with itself. Indeed, you’ll find in these undelivered speeches an almost eerie relevance to our world today.
Progressive Illinois governor John Altgeld’s undelivered 1897 farewell address was a clarion warning about partisan passions overwhelming the need to govern, and it resonates powerfully. Emma Goldman’s undelivered speech at her trial for inciting a riot has something to say about how words of outrage, righteous or otherwise, can lead to action in the streets. Helen Keller’s undelivered speech on giving the women the right to vote reminds us of how intimidation can keep the disenfranchised voiceless. Richard Nixon’s undelivered speech in which he refuses to resign the presidency presaged President Trump’s actions in 2020 by showing the arguments that could be made by a leader who refuses to accept accountability.
In these historic undelivered speeches, we find the beginnings of an answer. These words not only tell us something about their moments in time—they tell us something about ours.
For more than twenty years, I’ve been a speechwriter to those who hold positions of influence in the White House, in Congress, in sports and culture, and in the corporate world. My job has been to help leaders articulate their visions for the future and to put to paper the words and ideas to respond to events that nobody foresaw.
Sometimes the act of writing a speech is the act of envisioning the many paths history can take and arguing forcefully for—or against—one of them. Sometimes it’s the act of responding to the moments beyond our control where history takes a sudden turn. In those moments, schedules and plans get thrown out the window; there’s a rush to gather information and figure out how to respond. The speaker and the speechwriter know that people will be listening, needing to be informed, inspired, comforted, and led. And as the world enters a new reality, the words written for the old reality get left behind.
Anyone who writes speeches for a living has files littered with drafts and statements that were never delivered for a variety of reasons. There’s even a joke among our small family of scribes in which a speechwriter dies and is offered a choice between heaven and hell. Being a good researcher (as all speechwriters must be), he asks to see both, starting with hell. Saint Peter shows him a crowded room in which row upon row of stressed-out looking speechwriters are hammering away on computers, facing a looming deadline. “That’s my worst nightmare,” says the speechwriter. “Please show me heaven.”
And Saint Peter shows him an identical room in which row upon row of speechwriters type away, trying to meet a deadline.
“But this is the same as hell,” protests the speechwriter.
“Not at all,” answers Saint Peter. “Up here, we use their stuff.”
As the late William Safire noted in the introduction to his classic compendium Lend Me Your Ears, words on a page are no more a speech than a screenplay is a movie: “What makes a draft speech a real speech is the speaking of it.”
Most words that go unspoken are not particularly illuminating, because the dirty secret is that most of what is said by political, business, and cultural leaders is mundane, fulfilling a less-exalted goal of saying little if anything at all.
There are times when it isn’t a snowstorm or a scheduling change that causes a speech to go undelivered, however, but occasions when History—with a capital H—intervenes, when leaders are forced to choose, and the words they didn’t use tell us as much as the ones they did.
What happens to those undelivered words? Are they simply relegated to a parallel rhetorical universe in which the victor is the vanquished?*
Or can they tell us something about the fateful moments in which they were crafted—the thoughts of leaders in times of choosing and consequence, victory and defeat, joy and pain, triumph and catastrophe? Can they clarify our understanding of what might have been had events allowed for or necessitated their delivery?
The only way to know is to salvage some of those speeches from the dustbin of history, to re-create the tense moments in which the words were set to paper, to understand the context or conflict in which very different outcomes were possible and, indeed, envisioned, and then to deliver the undelivered
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