Bill Clinton and the Oklahoma Memorial Service Speech

Clinton’s Speech
The Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in which more than 150 people lost their lives served as the occasion for William Jefferson Clinton’s speech at the Oklahoma Bombing Memorial Prayer Service Address. Although it is a prayer service address, Clinton never once mentions the word prayer in his speech. Instead he attempts to cheaply inspire the audience by using the tragedy of the bombing as an occasion to talk about a community coming together, how great America is, and how important it is for the legacy of the lost to be lived out in the lives of the living. Full of platitudes by light on actual sentiment, the speech fails to rise above its mawkish pretensions and deliver a satisfying response to the tragedy that had occurred in Oklahoma City just four days prior.
The speech is organized poorly. It begins by acknowledging the audience, the people of Oklahoma City, but quickly wanders off course as though the President were there to talk about how great the state of Oklahoma was and how many fond memories Bill and Hillary had of the place. Clinton even states that he is “honored to be here today to represent the American people” as though by giving the speech at the prayer service he were somehow being recognized for an accomplishment (Clinton 1). The speech gets back on topic in the next section, where Clinton discusses mourning with the victims’ families in the city, but he attempts to collectivize the victims by identifying those who were killed not as individual families but as one large American family—as though himself personally had lost loved ones in the blast. It is as though he is trying to sound like John F. Kennedy in 1963 in Berlin: “Ich bin ein Berliner” (Kennedy). As Michael McGee notes, the purpose of collectivization as a rhetorical device is to identify the “we the people” moment (235)—and for Clinton he does that in his address when he states that “this terrible sin took the lives of our American family” (Clinton 1). Clinton’s style is wordy, with endless qualifiers used to give the speech length. The delivery is dull and uninspired, saccharine at best. Christopher Hood notes that such a type of speech is useful in managing public sentiment and stifling any dissent that might be brewing among the public—and Clinton certainly manages to do that: by saying nothing of substance, he utterly evacuates the tragedy of any significance whatsoever, compelling the masses at large to go back to sleep—they have missed nothing.
Though Clinton succeeds in condescendingly painting a picture of how Americans can get over the tragic loss suffered four days prior in Oklahoma by planting a tree to remember the children, the sentimental nature of this success does not do much to indicate any real leadership on his part. In times of suffering, sentimentality is more like vinegar poured on a wound than it is like a healing balm. Clinton’s speech is too glossed with sentimentality to be effective in doing anything other than wringing out hollow words for what must be a hollow audience.
The speech was not a fitting response to the tragedy that occurred in Oklahoma City, though it was certainly intended to be: its pandering and condescending approach to the tragedy gave the impression that Clinton believed his audience consisted of kindergartners who barely understood the significance of what happened. What the speech reveals is that it was Clinton who barely perceived the significance and scope of the bombing. Concluding by offering up the hollow sentiment of planting a tree to remember the children who lost their lives in the bombing is about as shallow as one can get in a time like this when real people are really grieving: it is not surprising that the idea of planting a tree to remember the dead children is an idea that Clinton gets from a child—that is the wavelength that he tries to stay at, a child’s wavelength, and the speech shows it through and through. Every attempt to provide an empty qualifier to fluff the speech and make it sound heartfelt rings false. He remembers the dead as “neighbors and friends” reminding the audience that they “saw them at church or the PTA meetings, at the civic clubs, at the ball park,” as though it were necessary to give the tragedy a down-home, folksy feeling (Clinton 2). It is as though he cannot help but think that he is still campaigning, trying to show that he knows how ordinary people live, that everyone gets together at the PTA and the ball park, that everyone knows their neighbors, that everyone spends their evenings down at the civic club—when in reality ordinary people just are not like this at all.
To make the speech better, Clinton should have dropped the qualifiers, the empty rhetoric and the attempt to bring the nation together at a time of tragedy and instead simply recognized the horror of the bombing for what it was—a tragedy. It was not an opportunity to talk about the “wonderful state” of Oklahoma or of the “great land” of the United States (Clinton 1). These kinds of references only make it seem as though Clinton were unaware that the speech he was giving was directed towards audience members who had just lost families in the Oklahoma City bombing. Instead of commemorating the great land of America, as though this were what had passed away, he should have been commemorating the dead—naming names and identifying the real people who had lost their lives, giving them a moment, a thought, a prayer, and a petition to God for mercy. That would have been appropriate and contextually relevant, but Clinton appears to think he is on the campaign trail, giving a grieving audience honeyed words that they can take with them to the voting booths on Election Day.

Works Cited
Clinton, William J. “Oklahoma Bombing Memorial Prayer Service Address.”
AmericanRhetoric.com
Hood, Christopher. The art of the state: Culture, rhetoric, and public management.
Oxford University Press, 2000.
Kennedy, John F. “Berlin Speech.” American History.
http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/presidents/john-fitzgerald-kennedy/ich-bin-ein-berliner-speech-1963.php
McGee, Michael C. “In search of ‘the people’: A rhetorical alternative.” Quarterly
Journal of Speech 61.3 (1975): 235-249.