The famous words are scribbled across a paragraph in an
early draft of the speech — short, powerful sentences that read like poetry and
were added at the last minute.
“These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc.
"These are the men who took the cliffs . . .
“These are the heroes . . . ”
It was spring 1984. President Ronald Reagan stood on a
craggy piece of land jutting into the English Channel, where 40 years before,
American soldiers had scaled the heights on D-Day, June 6, 1944, during the
allied landings at Normandy, reported the Washington Post.
Sitting before him were 62 of the “boys,” now-middle aged
men who had climbed the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc, using ropes, grappling hooks
and ladders to reach a suspected German gun emplacement 100 feet up.
They were boys no more, and even on the that stormy morning
in 1944, they were more a group of rugged characters than youths.
One, William “L-Rod” Petty, 63, had lost his teeth playing
football and suffered two broken legs in training before he joined the Army
Ranger outfit that fought there. It took him three tries to reach the top. He
is thought to have killed 30 German soldiers that day.
Leonard G. “Bud” Lomell, 64, had been a railroad brakeman
before the war. Shot in the side, he barely made it up the cliff but later
destroyed two big German guns with thermite grenades. He would be awarded the
Distinguished Service Cross.
Frank South, 59, was a Ranger medic, and had treated many
wounded men on the beach before reaching the heights with the others. He would
earn two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star.
Antonio “Tom” Ruggiero, 58, had been a professional tap
dancer before the war. He was plunged into the water when a shell hit his
landing craft on D-Day and later became a sniper in the Rangers.
President Trump is scheduled to visit Normandy on Thursday
for the 75th anniversary of the invasion. But he’s set to speak at an American
cemetery, not Pointe du Hoc, according to the White House. Today, there is
believed to be only one Ranger who fought at Pointe du Hoc still alive.
Even in 1984, D-Day was a hazy memory for many people. The
United States was still healing from the deep psychic wounds of the Vietnam
War, and Washington faced a menacing adversary in the Soviet Union.
Plus, Reagan was in the midst of a reelection campaign, and,
during a trip to Europe that spring, his appearance in Normandy was a crucial
opportunity.
The task of writing Reagan’s address was given to a
precocious 33-year-old speechwriter named Peggy Noonan, one of seven children
of an Irish Catholic family from Brooklyn. Her father was a furniture salesman.
The family later lived above a candy store in New Jersey. She had once worked
as a waitress.
She also had a degree in literature, had minored in
journalism, and kept a copy of the Bible and Ezra Pound’s “Cantos” by her when she worked.
What she produced was brilliant.
“For sheer oratorical elegance,” historian Douglas Brinkley
wrote, it would become “one of the most inspirational presidential speeches
ever delivered.”
In June 1984, Noonan had been at the White House about three
months and had never met the president. But she adored Reagan, got a keen sense
of the drama of D-Day and was terrific with words.
“A speech is a soliloquy,” she would write later. “One man
on a bare stage with a big spotlight . . . part theater and part political
declaration.”
It was also “poetry: cadence, rhythm, imagery, sweep!” she
wrote.
But it was also an official presidential address, and Noonan
had to pack a lot into it.
“A good speech is really a sausage skin,” she wrote. “The
stronger it is the more you shove in.”
She had to hit some Cold War notes for the president,
criticizing the Soviet Union for its continued and unwanted occupation of large
chunks of Europe.[
She had to remind shaky European allies of what they had
accomplished in World War II.
And she had to make Reagan look and sound good.
Scenes from D-Day: One of the most complex military assaults
in history
In her 1990 book, “What I Saw at the Revolution,” she wrote that she paced
around the Washington Monument, read books about D-Day and pondered.
“I drifted . . . waiting for the speech to come,” she wrote.
“Sometimes they do.”
She would borrow several rich scenes from Cornelius Ryan’s
classic D-Day history, “The Longest Day.” She would use a line from the British
poet, Stephen Spender: You “left the vivid air signed with your honor,” she
would have Reagan say.
Then, she had a revelation.
She knew that Pointe du Hoc veterans would be in the crowd
to hear the speech. But she had not known until she learned from a colleague
that they would all be sitting together right in front of the president when he
spoke.
“I was indignant,” she told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
in 2004. “How could you not tell me?”
Reagan must address them directly.
At the bottom of page 2 of her May 21 typed draft, the
sentence, “We have here today some of the survivors of the battle of Point du
Hoc, some of the Rangers who took these cliffs,” is crossed out.
Handwritten over it, in neat printed script, are the words,
“These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc . . . ”
It was the greatest line in one of Reagan’s greatest
speeches, and perhaps the most memorable about D-Day since Gen. Dwight D.
Eisenhower told his men that day: “You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade. . . . The eyes
of the world are upon you . . . ”
Noonan wrote that she grabbed the “boys” line from Roger
Kahn’s 1972 baseball book about the Brooklyn Dodgers, “The Boys of Summer.”
“O happy steal,” Noonan wrote.
(But Kahn had his own “steal,” taking his book title from a
Dylan Thomas poem that begins, “I see the boys of summer in their ruin,”
according to the historian Brinkley.)
Not all of Noonan’s words made it into the speech. There
were deletions and insertions. But much of the good stuff did.
'Heroes who helped end a war': Reagan honors the 'Boys of
Pointe du Hoc'
Reagan delivered it on a gray afternoon, against the
backdrop of the gray sea, “on a lonely windswept point on the northern shore of
France,” he said.
He stood before a French-built stone monument to the Rangers
constructed atop an old German bunker.
The Rangers, in dark blazers, gray slacks and business
suits, stood and saluted when he stepped to the lectern, then sat down on
wooden folding chairs. Reagan returned their salute.
Noonan watched on TV in her office back in Washington.
“Forty years ago at this moment, the air was dense with
smoke and the cries of men, and . . . was filled with the crack of rifle fire
and the roar of cannon,” Reagan said.
“Free nations had fallen,” he had begun. “Jews cried out in
the camps. Millions cried out for liberation. Europe was enslaved and the world
prayed for its rescue.”
“Here . . . the rescue began,” he said.
“Behind me is a memorial that symbolizes the Ranger daggers
that were thrust into the top of these cliffs,” he said, glancing over his
shoulder. “And before me,” he said with a pause for drama, “are the men who put
them there.”
“These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc,” he said, stopping as applause
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment