Boston Speaker Series - John Kerry

Boston Speaker Series

Allison Kornet, US English Teacher and Faculty Advisor to The Vanguard

Geoffrey Goose, Elise Donovan, Alfie Rudnik, Josh Kim attended John Kerry's Boston Speaker Series Speech on October 10th, 2019.

Of interest to future Speechwriting and Public Speaking students (Elise and Alfie):

• He had this personal tick of putting his pointer finger to his nose. And early in the talk, he grabbed the mike and moved out from the lectern, closing the gap between him and the audience and saying, “I want to just talk.” It felt pretty contrived —a typical politician move— but it was also, as intended, engaging.
• He opened and closed with anecdotes; the first involved president Taft artfully deflecting a fat joke (a humor move to establish rapport) and the final involved Kerry giving CPR to a hamster that had fallen into the sea on the Cape (it came back to life). Needless to say, the kids enjoyed the closing anecdote more.
• Kerry established ethos throughout by referring to his personal experiences as a Vietnam vet and eventual protestor and as someone who has flown over the Artic Circle and seen the melt caused by climate collapse. He referred to personal experiences as secretary of state, interacting with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and negotiating in various situations, e.g. for the Iran nuclear deal and for Israel to be recognized as a Jewish state.
• Substantively, he drew attention to his themes with sharp sound bites: “This is not a normal time” — “Our democracy is dysfunctional, and everybody knows it” — “How, today, can we be so passive about things that are really dangerous?” —  ‘People argue that things are rigged because they are’ — “Rhetoric is easy. saber rattling is easy. But it can have really bad consequences and can take you where you don’t want to go” — “In order to go to war, it pays to have some friends, and right now we don’t have them.”
• He also framed some problems with local examples that made our student listeners pay attention, for example naming the Woburn dump alongside the Love Canal and other toxic waste sites that produce cancer; asserting that the Acela train is supposed to be able to go 150mph, but it can only do so for an 18-mile stretch because infrastructure is so lousy, etc.
• At end, his speech became a call to action…
• “Politicians respond to you. Show them en masse that this is urgent. Children don’t hate. It’s taught. Tribalism is taught. Think of where we are, how many people were killed in the last century. We’re just journeyers. We get a chance to contribute.”
• …with informational pieces
• In our time, extreme poverty has gone from 50% to 10%
• The first generation of kids in Africa is about to be born aids-free
• …and an inspirational finale
• We stopped Ebola. We’re curing diseases we never thought we could. We communicate better. We live longer. Far fewer people are dying on this planet than ever before in history.”
• And antithesis for closure:
• “What we’re not doing is coalescing our will to make new progress.”