Donald Trump take note: brevity is often best - The Times

Donald Trump often tells us he is one of the greatest US presidents in history, smashing records that would intimidate lesser mortals, and in one respect he is right. At one hour and 47 minutes, his state of the union speech on Tuesday night, a characteristically rambling paean to his own achievements, was the longest in modern American history.

By contrast Ronald Reagan, nicknamed the “Great Communicator”, addressed both houses of Congress for an average of just 40 minutes. But then Reagan only ended one war, the Cold War, whereas Mr Trump claims to have ended eight. His audience should have been grateful to him that he was so restrained.

Instinctively, I suspect, most of us associate very long speeches with dictators, whose lack of accountability means they can bore their audiences without fear of the consequences. I doubt many readers would have enjoyed listening to, say, Stalin listing the Soviet Union’s tractor production statistics for hours on end.

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But recent history has also produced plenty of windbags, such as Libya’s ill-fated Colonel Gaddafi, who was allotted 15 minutes to address the United Nations in 2009 but spent a spirit-sapping 100 minutes ranting about the evils of western foreign policy.

He did not, alas, endear himself to his listeners. At one point he ceremoniously ripped up the UN rule book in front of assembly members, who he likened to soapbox orators at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park. “You make your speech and then you disappear!” he thundered, showing few signs of wanting to vacate the stage himself.

But at least Gaddafi was more concise than Fidel Castro, who in 1960 addressed the general assembly on a similar subject for four hours and 29 minutes. Yet he never came close to matching India’s ambassador to the UN, Krishna Menon, who in 1957 spent almost eight hours defending his country’s claim to Kashmir. As one witness recalled: “People went out and had lunch and came back, and then went and had dinner and came back and he was still going at it.”

As anybody who has ever attended a wedding will agree, dictators and ambassadors have no monopoly on interminably boring speeches. Time travellers keen to visit the House of Commons would be well advised to avoid February 7, 1828, when the Whig politician Henry Brougham delivered a six-hour oration on the urgency of legal reform.

As one contemporary remarked, Brougham was a man of great “moral sentiment”, but he had “execrable judgment” and “his speeches were never good”. Not surprisingly, his listeners were reportedly “thin and exhausted” by the time he sat down.

The most unstoppable of all parliamentary juggernauts, though, was William Gladstone, of whom Queen Victoria complained that he addressed her as though she were “a public meeting”.

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In his budget speech of 1853, which abolished a wide range of taxes and duties, Gladstone spoke for four hours and 45 minutes. “Sir, I scarcely dare to look at the clock, reminding me, as it must, how long, how shamelessly I have trespassed on the time of the committee,” he said at one point — and then ploughed relentlessly on.

For many Victorians, however, listening to a long speech was a fun day out. More than a quarter of a century later, when Gladstone toured his Midlothian constituency denouncing alleged Ottoman atrocities in the Balkans, enormous crowds gathered to hear his tirades. And although the 70-year-old Gladstone often spoke for five hours at a time, the listeners loved it. They were “deeply moved”, wrote one observer, who was impressed by the “prolonged cheering”.

Given that Gladstone frequently spoke outdoors, how many people could actually hear him is an unanswerable question. Probably many were cheering a vague idea of what he was saying, rather than the reality. But as any public speaker knows, what matters is that they cheer at all.

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By and large, though, less is more. Pericles’s eulogy to the Athenian dead during the Peloponnesian War, often regarded as the greatest of all classical speeches, lasts just 20 minutes or so in audiobook versions. (Whether the Greek historian Thucydides recorded it accurately is a different matter. Perhaps he cut out all the boring bits.)

Another great wartime speaker, Winston Churchill, had a reputation for being florid and prolix yet his most celebrated addresses were shorter than you might expect. His first radio address as prime minister on May 19, 1940, rousing the nation to fight “for all Britain is, and all that Britain means”, lasted ten minutes. And perhaps his most celebrated speeches — the call to “fight on the beaches” on June 4 and the “finest hour” speech on June 18 — clock in at little more than half an hour.

But I should end with another American, the man behind the most effective short speech in the history of the English language. When, on November 19, 1863, some 15,000 people gathered at Gettysburg to mourn the Union soldiers who had fallen fighting the Confederacy four months earlier, the main speaker was the former secretary of state Edward Everett, widely regarded as the greatest orator of his generation.

Everett duly spoke for two hours in formal, rolling Victorian style, just as everybody expected. Then the president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, rose to say a few words — literally.

His Gettysburg address, a stirring tribute to the proposition “that all men are created equal” and the ideal of “government of the people, by the people, for the people”, lasted for just 271 words and took less than two minutes to deliver. But posterity remembers his speech as one of the greatest in history, and nobody remembers what came earlier.

“I should be glad,” Everett wrote to Lincoln afterwards, “if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.” Given that he had been comprehensively upstaged, that was a decent thing to say. And even if the present US president were to speak until the end of time, I can’t imagine him coming out with anything quite so gracious.