The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

It was four days after the OKC tragedy when Clinton unleashed the best nine minutes of his presidency. The word-for-word content of the address he gave at the memorial prayer service is pretty good, but that’s not the important part; on the page, the speech he delivered was not that different from the speech that was expected. The 914 words were a collaboration composed by multiple writers, much of which was drafted and fine-tuned on the helicopter ride from DC to Oklahoma City. A phrase like “One thing we owe those who have sacrificed is the duty to purge ourselves of the dark forces which gave rise to this evil” does not scan as unscripted material. But the brilliance was in the way the words were said. Here was a guy reading carefully crafted sentences off a piece of paper, yet pausing and changing tempo and behaving as though the speech were being invented as he went along. And he was not doing this to trick anyone—it’s not like he was trying to create the false impression of someone speaking extemporaneously. He was not. He was in no way hiding the fact that the speech was directly in front of him or that this was a public performance. The audience knew exactly what was happening.