The Power of a Whisper
President Biden has given his first address to a Joint Session of Congress. It was delivered to a smaller-than-usual, socially distanced assembly.
For me, what distinguished the President’s speech most wasn’t its content — although I found that encouraging — but its volume. As veteran journalist Jeff Greenfield wrote (Politico), “His speech was delivered almost as conversation, rather than a series of declamations. He kept his voice, for long stretches, at times a near-whisper of empathy or concern — a tone that would have been completely unworkable in a full room.”
It wasn’t exactly a fireside chat ala Roosevelt, but it fully lacked the sound and smack of a Twitter feed full of bile delivered in ALL CAPS and exclamation points. He didn’t need to shout “Look at me!” He did not confuse pouting and ranting and hyperbole, the basic ingredients of a reality TV show, with the call to lead. As Greenfield noted, “when he turned to the George Floyd case, he spoke the most powerful of images — ‘We have all seen the knee of injustice on the neck of Black America’ — almost in a whisper.”
What President Biden demonstrated is that an adult in the White House can still be, in a word, presidential.
There is a term for those who speak quietly. It’s “soft-spoken.” It’s universally positive; I can’t think of a negative use. It doesn’t imply that the speaker is hoarse. It implies, I think, that the speaker doesn’t confuse making noise with having value, as if the louder she hollers the more important she is. Shouting, screaming, emoting loudly enough to be heard down the street, this is the stuff of reality TV. I can’t think of a single “reality TV star” (an interesting concept in itself) who would be known as “soft-spoken.”
We know there is a time and place for shouting. On the battlefield, the commander must he heard over the din and roar of weapons. If your 4-year-old wanders between two parked cars into speeding traffic, scream his name. Get him to stop. Shouting can be the right mode of communication, but the President’s address was properly delivered in subdued tones.
I had already given forty or 50 speeches as an AIDS activist before I met the brilliant playwright Larry Kramer. In none of my speeches had I raised my voice. In none of Larry’s then-decade-long leadership of ACT UP had he lowered his. He carried a megaphone and used it to get attention during a time when (mostly) young American men were dying every hour and the President of the United States had not so much as uttered the word “AIDS.” Larry screamed.
In early 1993 I’d agreed to speak at an event where, as it turned out, Larry was also scheduled to appear. I hadn’t known he would be there, and I was terrified. I just knew he would humiliate me in front of the audience, straight Republican woman that I was. He’d let everyone know I had no place in his AIDS movement. I was literally quaking as I was led backstage and there he was, holding court with someone until he turned and looked directly at me.
I don’t remember whether he came to me or I went to him, but when we met he did not take my proffered hand. He spread out his arms and embraced me. “Mary, Mary, Mary” he said softly, gently, affectionately, as if we were old friends finally together again. “I love what you’re doing,” he said. “Don’t stop. Don’t ever stop.”
In the twenty-five years between the afternoon we met and last Spring, when Larry died of pneumonia at age 84, we became fast friends. “I need to shout,” he would say, “so you can whisper.” He told me, repeatedly, that the 1992 night I spoke at the Republican National Convention was “one of the best nights of my life.” He even loved the title of my speech, “A Whisper of AIDS.”
The word “whisper” appears in the Convention speech first to signal fear. In 1992, when someone died of AIDS, as often as not their obituary mentioned pneumonia as cause of death. Dying of AIDS carried a mantle of shame or, as I described, “a shroud of silence.” So in my speech I said, “You are HIV-positive but dare not say it. You have lost loved ones, but you dared not whisper the word ‘AIDS.’ You weep silently; you grieve alone.”
The last time I said “whisper” in that speech was at the end. It was in a call to “learn with me the lessons of history and of grace, so my children will not be afraid to say the word AIDS when I am gone. Then their children, and yours, may not need to whisper it at all.”
Larry’s colleagues were outside the convention hall screaming into a bullhorn. I was inside, on stage, whispering. Perhaps America needed both.
We speak, I think, as we are. A cowardly narcissist will give loud sermons hoping people will believe he is brave and strong; his shouting belies the truth that he lacks courage and strength. A furious activist whose legion of followers are dying will lean into the megaphone and scream until someone hears, and listens, and acts. A mother of two small children who’s not yet come to terms with dying young doesn’t shout. She whispers.
And a president who hopes there will be “enough of us” to make a difference comes to us as a soft-spoken leader, one who believes in the promise of America and the decency he has restored to his office. He has learned in the agony of loss — a wife, a daughter, a son — that the most important words do not need volume. Comfort comes in quiet certainty, and whispers.
So does leadership.
