bout de papier, Vol. 13, No. 2 (1996) — Summer 1996 // Été 1996, p. 2
“The lady’s not for turning” Sir Ronald Millar
“An endless enduring dream and a thousand points of light…” Peggy Noonan
“It’s morning again in America” Hal Riney
If you thought that the attributions listed above are surely wrong and should read, respectively, Margaret Thatcher, George Bush and Ronald Reagan — well, check out “Brewer’s Quotations”.. The lines were in fact coined by two full-time speech writers and an advertising executive.
Now step back a few years. What about “This was their finest hour” or “Ask not what your country can do for you…”? The former carries echoes of Shakespeare’s Henry V, the latter of Khalil Gibran, but historians who like to pore over handwritten drafts of famous speeches agree that it is fair to give Churchill and Kennedy full credit for the lines — both used speechwriters, but by no means all the time and only for rough first drafts.
So what’s all this got to do with foreign policy, let alone bout de papier? Well, quite a lot, really.
As most civil servants well know, the fact is that very few world leaders, politicians — or even senior bureaucrats — write their own speeches these days. Strangely, many in the media seem unaware of this, and continue to give such luminaries personal credit for their keynote speeches to the UN or to party political rallies. The same reporters also seem to think that Summit communiqués are actually negotiated at Summit meetings — perhaps at Yalta and Potsdam they were, but those days seem to be long gone.
Not only do we write the politicians’ speeches and negotiate peace in their name, but we now script every possible encounter they may have with their counterparts, whether it be five minutes seated side-by-side on a couch outside a UN conference room or a few words and a handshake in an airport lounge during a refuelling stop. Of course, much to our frustration, our masters do not always follow, or even read our “Points to register,” but should our leaders perchance speak their mind and/or say the wrong thing, the next set of “Points to register” or keynote speech will subtly bring them back onto track — sooner or later, we usually, by dint of persistence, get our way.
I wonder whether this is really how a government department should work. It is true that our Ministers have many demands thrust on them and find little time to write their own speeches. But Churchill managed in what was, to say the least, a demanding situation, and — anyway — wouldn’t our Ministers have a lot more time on their hands if they didn’t have to wade through an inch-thick briefing book in preparation for every one hour meeting?
Ah, you may say, but today’s issues are so complex that it takes full-time specialists to keep up with them. Without a bureaucracy of thousands, Warren Christopher could never have come up with the Dayton accords, it is true. On the other hand, Dayton was such a complex and fundamentally bureaucratic solution (to a mediaeval situation), that one has to wonder how long it will stick.
There’s a question, too, as to how democratic our Departmental processes are in this era when accountability, transparency and “hearing what the people want” are the buzz phrases. Instead of lining up every so often, to brief our Ministers on Haiti or the latest developments on Helms Burton, shouldn’t we be the ones to listen, to take instructions from the elected representative of the Canadian people, interjecting only with institutional memory and points of information?
Will the Departmental review that is currently under way change all this and start throwing up new JFKs? Stay tuned…
For those who thought that those heroes of the Golden Age didn’t know how to write anyway, and that the desk officers would have done a far better job, we are this issue beginning a new feature: “From the Archives” This month’s item is an exchange of letters between Lester Pearson and Dean Acheson — concerning the ever-topical Taiwan; both were penned by the signatories. Readers are invited to contact a member of the board of bout de papier if they have suggestions for particularly interesting items for which we might ransack the archives — either particularly well-written pieces, or items with a special resonance today.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 13, No. 2 (1996) — Summer 1996 // Été 1996, p. 2. Read the rest of this issue →
