Ten years after Sandy Hook, the mass murders and presidential eulogies continue
National Post, 15 December 2022
Unique among world leaders, the American president is the eulogist-in-chief
The tenth anniversary of the Sandy Hook school massacre — what former president Barack Obama still calls the “darkest day of my presidency” — reminds us that, unique among world leaders, the American president is the eulogist-in-chief. It falls to him to eulogize the dead, comfort the kinsfolk, reassure the nation, consecrate the history and preach the civic sermon.
The tradition has roots. The two greatest speeches ever delivered by an American president — Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and his Second Inaugural — were both eulogies of a sort, the former properly so, on the occasion of dedicating a cemetery.
More than 30 years ago, Peggy Noonan, speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, published What I Saw at the Revolution, a memoir of working in the White House. She lifted the curtains on the drafting of two of Reagan’s best speeches, eulogizing the “boys of Pointe du Hoc” on the 40th anniversary of D-Day and his Oval Office address after the space shuttle Challenger exploded upon liftoff.
That lovely book has spawned aspiring imitations, the latest of which is Grace, the White House memoir of Cody Keenan, Obama’s chief speechwriter. Keenan is an able writer, but no Noonan, and Obama’s rhetoric was different from Reagan’s. Obama had the more artful phrasing; Reagan was straightforward. Obama would never have said, “Tear down this wall!” Obama’s speeches were more pleasing to the ear, but had an evanescent quality. I was at his first inaugural in Washington and, despite the grandeur of the historic occasion, his words evaporated into the winter air. Reagan’s lodged in the heart and in history.
It is remarkable that Keenan, after eight years in the Obama wordsmith shop, chose to frame his book around Obama the eulogist. He opens with the drafting of the speech for the massacre of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook elementary school, and closes with the June 2015 killing of nine people at a bible study in a Charleston church.
It is an astonishing phenomenon, that one of the principal rhetorical duties of the president is to speak at the memorials for those Americans murdered in mass shootings by their fellow Americans. Obama noted in relation to Sandy Hook that he had already spoken at four such memorials — a rate of one a year for his presidency at that point.
The president has to be selective. As of last month, there had been more than 600 mass shootings — defined as more than four people shot, excluding the shooter — in the United States in 2022. In 2021 there were 690, the most in any year to date.
“At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries,” Keenan records Obama telling him during the drafting of the Sandy Hook speech. “It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency. And it is in our power to do something about it. I say that recognizing the politics in this town forecloses a lot of those avenues right now. But it would be wrong for us not to acknowledge it. And at some point, it’s going to be important for the American people to come to grips with it, and for us to be able to shift how we think about the issue of gun violence collectively.”
Keenan recalls one of Obama’s few gaffes, his diagnosis that “bitter Americans … cling to guns or religion.” When it came to eulogize the strange fruit of those flowering guns, Obama went heavy on the religion.
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