Before today’s mass audiences, a president’s ‘vital speech’ has power: to persuade, convert and to compel. The truism holds even in a world flooded with media communication and comment. If the President discerns events in their beginnings, foresees what is coming and forewarns others, the speech becomes an influential transaction.
The vital speech, delivered convincingly and persuasively, represents the height of presidential leadership. Neither overlooked nor forgotten, however, are regrettable occasions upon which the President failed to lead. That is, he failed to speak and to speak authoritatively. Specific examples follow.
In the spring of 1994, from Africa and the landlocked Republic of Rwanda, the Clinton Administration received overwhelming evidence: The extremist Hutu government was slaughtering tens of thousands of Tutsis, the country’s own people. Rwanda’s staggering evil would eventually claim the lives of between 800,000 and a million people. The genocide violated international laws of crimes against humanity, which are laws the U.S. helped enact at the 1949 Genocide Convention in New York.
