Speeches for Leaders: Leave Audiences Wanting More by Crawford Charles

Author:Crawford, Charles [Crawford, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Diplomatic Courier | Medauras Global
Published: 2014-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

5. whaT’s The Message?

Presidents clinton and chirac in sarajevo

T

he message part of giving any speech is simple. If you don’t know the message(s) you want to convey in a speech, don’t stand up and start talking. You’re wasting your own time and (worse) wasting the audience’s time.

If you do prepare a speech beforehand but at the end of all this work you’re not quite sure what the basic message is, the audience may well take away from the speech something very different to what the leader meant to say. International diplomatic speechwriting is especially tricky in this sense. A leader is usually trying to send different messages (both open and subliminal) to different audiences for different purposes simultaneously. The headlines in the media at home might well not be what the leader wants to see in a specific country mentioned in the speech.

A good speechwriting team clears away all the fluff surrounding a message by starting at the end of the process: the ideal positive media headline that the speech aims to win. That headline will be written in language you’d use talking to an intelligent aunt or uncle who is not familiar with policy detail, but can quickly grasp what an issue is all about. But beyond the headline message is the subliminal message that the speech tries to project: courage, resolve, hope and change, fairness, compromise, no compromise, leader, strength. Once the ideal headline has been identified, the work can start on building the speech to hit that target.

The message also has to work for the speaking occasion itself. Two examples from Bosnia.

Bosnia and Herzegovina was one of the six republics comprising the (Tito Communist) Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Its re-emergence in the 1990s as an independent state for the first time since the Middle Ages prompted a ghastly conflict with its neighboring republics, Serbia and Croatia. For several devastating years Bosnia came to symbolize the worst consequences of the end of European communism: horrible inter-communal fighting and atrocities.

The war ended with the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995. The task began of building a new country from the ruins. In the first years after the Dayton deal was signed, Sarajevo hosted top foreign political visitors keen to see how national reconciliation and rebuilding were going, not least because taxpayers from their respective countries were pouring funds into this work.

In late 1997 President Clinton came to Bosnia. The Bosnian issue had been a huge foreign policy problem for his first presidency. Deep divisions over how to tackle the Bosnia crisis (in particular disagreements over riskily committing troops on the ground) had left relations between Washington and the United States’ closest European allies reaching depths of acrimony not seen since the Second World War. President Clinton nonetheless had enjoyed a diplomatic triumph at Dayton. Now he wanted to visit Bosnia itself and strike an unambiguously generous note of reconciliation and reconstruction. He also had to send a message to Congress in Washington that the heavy U.S. military presence now on the ground in Bosnia was being successful and safe, and needed to be extended.

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