President delivers 'greatest speech'

It is, said New York Post columnist John Podhoretz, "the greatest speech of our time." And it was delivered "by a man who many ... once mindlessly and pompously derided for his halting style of speech.

"No more. Not ever.

"Not when George W. Bush has just joined the ranks of FDR and JFK and Ronald Wilson Reagan in elevating a nation through the power of his discourse and the passion of his conviction."

Next Podhoretz quoted from the president's address:

"We have suffered great loss. And in our grief and anger, we have found our mission and our moment. ... We will not tire, we will not falter and we will not fail."

This last sentence is explicitly, even self-consciously Churchillian. It evokes some of the same phrases, the near-identical cadences used by that master of English rhetoric in 1940, as he rallied the British Empire when it stood alone against Hitler's "hideous apparatus of aggression," as he phrased it.

What isn't widely known, and to my knowledge hasn't been told even by his own hometown newspaper, is that the gifted writer crafting the president's speeches is a 36-year-old whiz kid from St. Louis named Michael Gerson. It is Gerson who crafted the memorable phrase for candidate Bush as he addressed flaws in our education system, indicting "the soft bigotry of low expectations" for minority students who, if challenged, can do the most demanding work.

Speechwriter Gerson was the subject of an astonishingly flattering profile in the New York Times this past summer. The Times credited him with much of the president's best stuff, especially including Bush's widely praised inaugural address. (Gerson is a graduate of Westminster Christian Academy in St. Louis County, which also happens to be the alma mater of Cape Girardeau native Jack Oliver, who since January has been running the Republican National Committee for the president.)

And now Gerson and this president have written their names into the history books first by crafting, then delivering this imperishable presidential address. Podhoretz again: "Mr. Bush ... made clear that he knows what the nation needed at this time of uncertainty. And that was grandeur of tone and of vision:

"'We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them against one another, drive them from place to place until there is no refuge or rest,' he said in tones redolent of the great orations of the 19th century, even as he readies a nation to fight a war in the 21st."

It was said by Margaret Thatcher of Ronald Reagan that "he marshaled words into battalions, then sent them into battle on behalf of freedom." Indeed. And now, to the same category, add this president. Decades from now, next to George W. Bush's entry in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, will appear liberal excerpts from Thursday night's speech. Not a bad day's work.

As our English-speaking cousins across the oceans confronted Hitler alone in the dark days of 1940, Churchill addressed Parliament yet again, choosing to read from a letter President Roosevelt had hand-delivered to the new prime minister. "And in it," Churchill said, "is a verse from Longfellow, which he wrote out in his own hand." Here is the verse:

Sail on, O ship of state;

Sail on, O union, strong and great.

Humanity, with all its fears, with all the hopes of future years,

Is hanging breathless on thy fate!

Peter Kinder is assistant to the chairman of Rust Communications and president pro tem of the Missouri Senate.