Editor’s Choice: The Best Political Speeches of the Past 55 Years

A few recent political speeches worthy of the history books.

To consider the multitude of possible political speeches, including a number of excellent speeches on the Senate floor, would be too tall an order for a brief list such as this. This list will instead feature speeches given by politicians playing, as former president Barack Obama might phrase it, “at the highest level of politics.” Heads of state and those who compete for that role, regrettably or otherwise, often receive the lion’s share of attention in democracy, and, for better or worse, that tradition will continue for this list.

With honorable mention to Douglas MacArthur (“The world has turned over many times since I took the oath on the plain at West Point…”), Ted Kennedy’s eulogy for his brother Robert (“My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it…”) and George W. Bush’s eulogy for John McCain (“We sometimes talked of that intense period like football players, remembering a big game. In the process, rivalry melted away…”), here are those who said it best. While the credit is perhaps to the speechwriters, any speechwriter worth his salt says that his or her words belong to the politician who speaks them. With that said, here are a few favorites.

8. Robert Kennedy’s Democratic Convention Speech

Speaking in Atlantic City ten months after the death of his brother, President John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy was, in the words of one commentator, “…the representation of what they had lost.” After a standing ovation that lasted nearly twenty minutes, Kennedy took the stage to reflect on his brother’s legacy. Those who were there reported that when he finished speaking, Kennedy was so overcome with emotion that he left the building, sat on the fire escape, and cried:

“When I think of President Kennedy, I think of what Shakespeare said in Romeo and Juliet: ‘When he shall die take him and cut him out into stars and he shall make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun.'”