On the Papers. Writing Lessons to Be Learned from John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address

• Author: George D. Gopen
• Pages: 17-21

On the Papers

Published in Litigation, Volume 48, Number 1, Fall 2021. © 2021 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not be

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GEORGE D. GOPEN

The author is Professor Emeritus of the Practice of Rhetoric at Duke University.

I urge you to go online and listen to

Kennedy’s delivery of this speech—less than

14 minutes in length—before reading this

article. You might wish to read and listen

to it afterward, as well.

As readers, we always want to be forging

forward. I am asking something different

of you here. Once I have noted something

about a passage, you will comprehend what

I am saying better if you then go back and

read Kennedy’s text again, with my points

in mind.

The presidential election of 1960 was

hotly contested in the middle of a cold

war: Out of the 68,330,000 votes cast,

John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon

wound up separated by only 112,000.

Kennedy was the second-youngest per-

son to become president; and he had made

little noise as a congressman or senator.

The world was waiting anxiously for his

inaugural address, which might reveal

his character, might let us know wheth-

er we should be able to trust this man to

represent us in the Cold War with the

Soviet Union. He cowrote and delivered

one of the most memorable inaugurals in

American history, including perhaps the

single most memorable sentence ever ut-

tered in that context. This issue’s On the

Papers will try to explain what trial law-

yers can learn from a close investigation

of how the language of that speech—and

especially its prose rhythms and its use of

recognizable rhetorical figures of speech—

was able to produce such memorability.

Why should it be worthy of study by

trial lawyers?

Rhyth ms in Prose

Rhythms exist in your prose, whether you

recognize them or not. You cannot avoid

them. As long as they are there, why not

take steps to ensure that they work for

you, and not against your readers? Can you

imagine being a famous maker of movies

and having the studio haphazardly set just

any old music score to your latest mas-

terpiece? The music would constantly be

at odds with the movie’s substance. Your

prose rhythms are your musical score.

Kennedy (with the aid of his talented

speech writer, Ted Sorensen) made good

use of a series of techniques for producing

and regulating that music.

When rhetoric is really well employed,

listeners and readers are usually not con-

scious of its presence, but yet are affect-

ed by its powers. By becoming conscious

of all these devices, we can come to un-

derstand them well enough for us to use

them. Our listeners and readers will, in

turn, be affected by our powers, probably

without noticing.

We will look here at a number of these

devices: (1) rhythmic prose balancing, (2)

sound repetitions, (3) a rhetorical figure of

speech known as anaphora, and (4) anoth-

er figure of speech known as chiasmus. We

will be cherry-picking examples of each of

these from Kennedy’s inaugural; and then

we shall also explore the structure of the

speech as a whole.

If you have been reading my

L articles on Lincoln for the

past year, you know about my invention

of “colometrics,” by which I separate a

THE POWER OF

BALANCE: WRITING

LESSONS TO BE

LEARNED FROM JOHN F.

KEN NEDY’S INAUGURAL

ADDRESS

Illustration by T im Bower