Five great speeches of my lifetime

The Newseum posted a link to Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech on Facebook with the notation that comments were disabled because "many of them were hateful and racist." How pathetic in this day, 25 years after the MLK Holiday passed Congress and 43 years after King was martyred in Memphis! His 1963 speech may well be the best speech ever given in America, but if you listen to the first part, when King was reading from the prepared text, it's nothing extraordinary. He delivers a well-argued speech with some vivid imagery, but about 12 minutes into the 17-minute speech, King hits his stride. He is no longer reading from a text; he is preaching. He is no longer standing on the podium; he is in the pulpit. With the cadence of the church, he delivers some of the most memorable lines in American history, and he does it with a cadence and an oratorical style that sends chills down your spine.

King's speech and the comments I received following a post about Barack Obama's memorial speech in Arizona got me to thinking about great speeches. Here are the speeches from my lifetime that I would rank as my top five:

1. King's "I Have a Dream" speech. It's a good thing he didn't stick to his text!

2. John F. Kennedy's "Ich bin ein berliner" speech delivered at the Berlin Wall at the height of the Cold War. The speech is less than five minutes long, but it packs a rhetorical wallop with his repetition of " some say ... let them come to Berlin." It is not as long or as famous as his inaugural address, but its brevity is its strength.

3. Kennedy's inaugural address. Rarely has any president laid out a vision for the nation as Kennedy did in 1961. The "ask not what your country can do for you" line gets quoted frequently, but the speech is full of memorable phrases. Subsequent inaugurations have featured some very good speeches, but I can't think of any with the breadth and eloquence of Kennedy's.

4. Barack Obama's speech at the memorial service for those killed by a deranged gunman Jan. 8. I wrote of my admiration for this speech in a previous post. This is a great speech with just the right tone for the moment.

5. Ronald Reagan's "these are the boys of Point du Hoc" speech commemorating the 40th anniversary of D-Day. Reagan was an exceptional orator, but rarely did he have a topic or words of this poignancy. The speech reminds me of Henry V's St. Crispian's Day speech.

Those are my top five, but one speech, a bit before my time, might trump all of them. On Nov. 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln delivered a 200-word speech at the dedication of a military cemetery at Gettysburg, Pa. He was not the featured orator, but his simple speech was filled with words that carried more weight than a library of long orations. We know it as the Gettysburg Address, and we know its key phrases: "conceived in liberty ... hallow this ground ... last full measure of devotion ... government of the people, by the people, for the people ... ." It might be the finest speech in American history. But that's just my opinion.