Jimmy Carter is nominated for re-election - 15 August 1980

Looking back over many odd and rousing scenes in the White House, I think of one now which has a fascinating relevance to the Democratic convention.

It was around Christmas time, 1941. The Japanese had dealt their devastating blow at Pearl Harbor, and crippled the American Pacific fleet. The United States was now in the war, and Mr Churchill flew secretly to Washington.

He and Roosevelt now ranged over the new half of the world that had been added to Europe and Africa and the Mediterranean as a battleground. And when they had done this, Roosevelt thought it a good idea that they should each, in his own way, give a radio account to their own peoples of the majestic task that lay ahead.

They agreed that Mr Churchill should be allowed time to get home, assemble his thoughts and his prose and on the same evening, each of them would make his fireside speech, one following the other. Both speeches would be heard in both countries.

They agreed on a date, Roosevelt was generous: he could afford to be, Churchill had ahead of him a weary flight, with refuelling stops, on a bomber which in those days, took most of a day. He would then have to collect his speech writers.

Let’s say, said Roosevelt, two nights from now. Agreed. They shook hands. Churchill growled out some memorable quotation, probably from Churchill, and he zipped himself into his siren suit and was off. Roosevelt lost no time rounding up several advisors and three speech writers, of whom one was the lanky and lugubrious playwright, Robert Sherwood.

All the time that Churchill was over the Atlantic, at one stage perkily taking the controls to the terror of the crew, Roosevelt was looking over drafts of a speech that plainly must be the best he can do. After all, he was up against the champ.

It came out, later, that Churchill too was not idle. He was probably the only orator who could fly a bomber and compose a speech at the same time. Anyway, two days went by, and on the night of the evening of the joint broadcast, Roosevelt was sitting in the White House with Sherwood and the others, blotting an idiom here, improving an adjective there; he was almost ready with the final, the stupendous draft. He would go on the air later that evening and all the radio networks had cleared the time.

Then the telephone rang. To the horror of the Roosevelt team, the president of one of the networks said that they had been asked from London to clear the airwaves for Mr Churchill in an hour’s time. There was no way to stop it. An hour later, Roosevelt sat there, assembling the almost-perfect draft of his wonderful speech when a voice came on, announcing the prime minister.

Churchill began, he went on, he ended, after an incomparable, a God-like survey of the globe, its fighting fronts, the problems that had to be met, the victory that must come. When it was over, Roosevelt, knowing in his bones that America was humming with admiration, blew out a long, slow, stream of smoke. He looked wearily at his speech writers. "What happened?" he said. "Mr President," said Sherwood, more melancholy than ever, "he rolls his own."

I thought of this the other night when we saw on the floor of the Democratic convention young Kennedyites jumping like grasshoppers, old men pounding their palms, a black woman with the tears rolling down her cheeks crying "Fantastic, wonderful, he’s the best".

Senator Edward Kennedy had delivered what everybody agrees is the campaign speech of the year. Sceptical reporters, old ones, who long ago had their fill of bloodshot orators alternated between calling it galvanising, brilliant, the best since his brother's famous inaugural speech.

In the quiet dawn, after that heady night, a bulky question comes to mind – does he roll his own? Not likely. Senator Kennedy has always been at his best presiding over a Senate committee hearing, when he has at his wrist a sheaf of memos and questions, composed by his senatorial staff and whereas some senators get along with a dozen or so fully-paid helpers, Senator Kennedy can afford to have over 100 on everything from foreign policy to the financing of New York City's underground system.

But when he is on his own he has always been tentative, inarticulate, his response punctuated with many ers and ahs .. and on the stump, with no text, he has been even less impressive. He has adopted a style that has puzzled the generation which claims him as his own, the rolling, ominous tune, of an old-time evangelist, of God's angry man.

But his language has been clumsy. It never worked until the other night and we are bound to ask why. The answer, I think, lies in the very noble, very vague prose of the speech and its characteristic cadences, characteristic of whom? Listen... "I am a part of all that I have met. For me, a few hours ago this campaign came to an end. For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die..."

Does this remind you of something? It reminds me of his brother when he stood before the Capitol on that brilliant icy day of January 1961, and ended, "...let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty."

The nation was galvanised by that too. But not galvanised in the long run into keeping those promises. Americans, it soon appeared, were not in fact, prepared to pay any price – say, a million dead. Meet any hardship? We didn’t even forego our automobiles. To jump to the defence of 43 friends, whose survival was guaranteed in 43 treaty commitments? One hard-pressed friend was enough, Vietnam.

America was sorely pressed and it did meet some hardships and took on ghastly burdens, but when it didn’t work the nation rebelled, and concluded that Vietnam was either a thundering mistake or a moral disaster. Vietnam, I am afraid, was the price we paid for John Kennedy’s noble inaugural.

Well both that famous speech and the brother's speech the other night carry echoes of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The note that sustains their rhetoric is that of a hero vowing never to submit or yield. The John Kennedy speech for which we paid so galling a price, was written by Ted Sorensen, a name forgotten by most of us but not by the Kennedy family.

It should be no surprise to learn then that he also wrote, I am pretty sure he did, Edward Kennedy's rousing speech. Both speeches sound like an heroic call to battle, while your back is against the wall. I believe, rather, that they are a brave but sentimental response to the strangling complexities of the world around us. They express a yearning for resounding simplicities, to heal the sick, to tend the poor, to deem the dispossessed. On a second reading, away from the fire and plunging cadences of the delivery, they sound, to me at any rate, resoundingly hollow.

Now the other question that troubled old timers was the puzzle of guessing how this evangelical tone which Kennedy had used so badly should have worked so well on Wednesday night. I think because, for once, the substance matched the delivery.

After hearing from plain Mr Carter for so long, how hideously complicated and how grim and grey and tangled our problems are, the Democrats, distraught and divided, were ready to throw in the congressional reports and the statistics and dive into a bath of pure rhetoric.

When life for a politician comes to seem like a revolt in the civil service, why not indulge one hour of good old-fashioned rhetoric and come out for Mother and Santa Claus. Long ago, in a similar depressing time, a young man who made his home on the Platte River in Nebraska, came forward to a Democratic convention, his name was William Jennings Bryan.

He was not, by a long chalk, the automatic nominee. He had a bee in his bonnet about silver, about the need, as he saw it, for a second currency. The gold standard, he truly believed, was a devilish monopoly of Wall Street. And he spoke for the farmers of the prairie who hated Wall Street. If money is short, abolish the single gold standard, and allow the free coinage of silver.

He appeared before the convention. He had a voice like ringing brass, it soared and boomed and reverberated. He ended a thrilling speech, with these sentences, "You shall not press down upon the brow of labour this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." He, too, had a 40-minute ovation, Bryan's speech took the nomination in fact, and the nation's heart, but it did not take the votes.

Four years later, the boy orator of the Platte was nominated again and again he lost. Four more years went by and the Democrats turned to a less inflamed politician, and lost. So, 12 years after his first candidacy, the Democrats nominated him again. Again, he lost. He died an embittered old man, swatting a fly and having a fatal stroke. By then, young actors and elocutionists, were going round the country, reciting the cross of gold speech. Years from now, when Ted Kennedy is dead and gone, actors may well give solo performances of his Madison Square Garden’s speech.

Actors, like writers, love word men, and assume they would make the best presidents. The word man they will be commemorating, will not, however, be Ted Sorensen, but his mouthpiece, Ted Kennedy. In the fine flush of Kennedy’s speech, and the following lead balloon of Carter's, it’s not difficult to predict that what Ted Kennedy was doing was making his first campaign speech for 1984.

But, in our present euphoria it’s not easy to say whether Kennedy is truly dedicated to reviving the discredited, all-powerful, all-providing central government, of Roosevelt’s liberals, or whether simply, hounded by that voice from beyond the grave – the founding father Joe Kennedy – he simply has a compulsive drive to be president.

All I would say for now is that on his feet, and before a hundred audiences, the boy orator from the Charles River will be forced to roll his own. He doesn’t do it as well as the maligned, the less than heroic Jimmy Carter, but Jimmy Carter knows, by now, that the presidency is not a crusade, it’s the duller, harder job of running the country.

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