5 Speeches That Changed the World | A Calm Bedtime Story

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Good evening and welcome back to
Sleep Wise.

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Tonight we drift into one of the
quietest mysteries of human

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life, the strange way that
certain words spoken aloud at

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certain moments refuse to
disappear.

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Most of what we say passes
without record.

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The conversations of a single
afternoon, the murmured

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greetings between neighbors, the
apologies and reassurances and

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small jokes that fill an
ordinary day.

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These vanish almost as soon as
they are spoken.

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They are not lost in any sad
sense.

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They simply do their work, and
then they let go.

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That is the natural fate of
language, to be useful for a

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moment and then to fade gently
into the air that carried it.

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And yet every so often a voice
finds a moment, and the words it

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speaks settle into the world and
stay.

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They are repeated by strangers
who never knew the speaker.

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They are written into books,
carved into stone, taught to

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children long after the room
they were spoken in has been

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emptied and forgotten.
The chairs are gone, the lamps

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are gone, the listeners are
gone, and still the words

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remain.
Tonight we will visit five such

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moments.
Not battlefields, exactly.

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The one will be a battlefield.
Not laboratories, though science

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will join us before the night is
done.

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We will visit rooms, podiums and
open air places where someone

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stood up or simply sat down and
chose to speak and the world

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leaned in to listen.
It is tempting to think these

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speeches survived because they
were grand or thunderous.

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Most of them were not.
Some lasted only two minutes.

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One was a single sentence
delivered by a man too exhausted

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to stand.
Another was offered quietly by a

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stranger in a cardigan in a
small committee room to a

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senator who had not expected to
be moved that afternoon.

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What they share is something
subtler than power.

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They arrived at the right
silence.

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They knew when to begin, and
more rarely, they knew when to

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stop.
They did not try to fill every

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corner of the room with words.
They trusted the space around

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them, and the space remembered
them.

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Tonight is not a study of
rhetoric.

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There will be no rules of
oratory, no diagrams of

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persuasion.
We are here only to listen

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gently to the reasons certain
voices still reach us across

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years and continents and
centuries, to consider what it

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costs to speak honestly and what
is sometimes gained by saying

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less than expected.
So let your shoulders soften.

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Let the day's voices, the
meetings and messages and small

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frictions settle behind you like
dust returning to the floor of a

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quiet room.
The speeches we will visit

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tonight have already been
delivered.

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Their work is long done.
We are only guests now,

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listening from a great distance
in the soft glow of our own

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evening.
If these journeys help you rest,

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you can follow Sleep Wise and
share it with someone who might

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enjoy falling asleep while
learning something new.

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Now, with the night around us
and the world growing still, let

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us begin.
Before we step into our first

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moment, it is worth pausing on
something that often goes

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unmentioned.
For most of human history, a

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speech could only travel as far
as a single voice could carry

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it.
There were no recordings, no

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microphones, no cables
stretching the sound of one

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mouth across a continent.
If you missed the moment, you

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missed it.
The words drifted into the sky

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and were gone.
This is a strange thought to

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hold, because it means that
almost every great speech and

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human memory survives only
because someone, somewhere wrote

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it down.
Sometimes a scribe recorded it

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as it was being delivered.
More often it was reconstructed

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afterward from the imperfect
memories of those who had been

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present, sometimes decades
later, sometimes by someone who

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had not even been there at all.
That fragility is part of the

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story.
The words we are about to visit

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to night have been carried to us
through a long chain of human

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attention.
Some are reliable in nearly

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every syllable.
Some are slightly different from

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what was actually said in the
air.

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The Roman historians who
recorded ancient speeches often

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filled in plausible language
where memory failed.

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The biographers who preserved
early American oratory sometimes

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shaped a sentence until it shone
a little brighter than the

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original moment.
This is not a flaw to be

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corrected.
It is the nature of the human

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voice passing through human
hands on its way to becoming

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history.
What we remember of a speech is

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rarely an exact transcript.
It is something gentler and

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stranger.
It is what stayed for the

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speeches we will visit to night.
This matters in different ways.

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Two were captured on film and
survive in their exact spoken

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form, with all their pauses and
hesitations.

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One was written down faithfully
by witnesses on the day it was

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delivered.
Another survives partly through

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translators in the careful
memory of those who heard it.

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And one of the most famous, our
first, exists in several

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slightly different versions
because the speaker himself

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revised it in the days that
followed.

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So tonight, let us listen the
way one listens to a story

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passed down in a family, with
patience, with affection and a

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willingness to forgive the small
distances between what was said

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and what was kept.
Our first stop is a small town

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in Pennsylvania on a cool
afternoon in November of 1863.

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The air smells of fallen leaves
and turned earth.

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A new cemetery has just been
finished, the grass still thin,

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the markers freshly placed, the
rows stretching farther than the

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eye can comfortably follow.
A great crowd has gathered on

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the hillside above.
The headline speaker is one of

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the most celebrated orators in
America, and almost as an

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afterthought, a tall, tired
president has been invited to

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offer a few appropriate remarks.
He has accepted, and the country

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has no idea what is about to
happen.

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To understand what happened that
afternoon, we have to step back

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four months into the summer of
1863, when the small town of

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Gettysburg, PA, became the site
of the bloodiest battle ever

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fought on American soil.
For three days in early July, 2

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great armies met in the fields
and orchards just outside the

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town.
By the time the fighting ended,

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more than 50,000 men had been
killed, wounded or were missing.

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The number is difficult to
absorb.

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It was as though every man in a
small city had been struck down

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in the space of 72 hours.
Many bodies lay where they had

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fallen, scattered across miles
of farmland, in barns, beside

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stone walls, near streams that
ran red for days afterward.

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Gettysburg, itself a town of
fewer than 3000 residents, was

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overwhelmed.
Houses became hospitals.

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Churches became hospitals.
Schools became hospitals.

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The smell of the dead settled
into the streets and would not

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leave.
Neighbors who had recently been

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farming and walking to market
found themselves attending to

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wounded strangers from places
they had only read about burial

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in the days after the battle was
hurried and imperfect.

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Some men were laid to rest where
they fell, with little more than

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a shallow covering of earth.
By August, it was clear that

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something more dignified had to
be done.

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A young attorney named David
Wills was placed in charge of

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organizing it.
He bought the land, arranged for

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the careful reburial of the
dead, and planned a public

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dedication ceremony for
November.

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For such a solemn occasion, the
most important task was choosing

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the speaker.
Wills wanted the finest orator

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in America.
That choice in 1863 was not a

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difficult one.
It was Edward Everett.

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Everett is a name that has faded
almost entirely from memory now,

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but in his time he was the
country's most celebrated public

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voice.
A former senator, governor and

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president of Harvard, he had
spoken at the unveiling of

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monuments and the funerals of
national heroes.

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His speeches lasted hours and
were considered masterpieces of

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classical eloquence.
To invite Everett was to honor

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the dead with the very best
America could offer.

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Almost as an afterthought,
several weeks later, Wills also

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sent a letter to the president
of the United States inviting

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him to attend and to offer, in
his careful phrasing, a few

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appropriate remarks.
Lincoln was not the headliner.

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He was the courteous postscript.
He accepted.

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In the days before the ceremony,
Lincoln worked on what he would

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say.
He had no team of speech

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writers.
The few words he was preparing

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were his own, drawn from years
of brooding over the meaning of

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the war and the country fighting
it.

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The night before the dedication,
he arrived in Gettysburg by

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train.
The town was full.

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Lincoln stayed at the home of
David Wills in a small upstairs

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room and made his final
adjustments by lamplight.

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Outside, the November air was
cold.

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The graves were waiting.
The morning of November 19th

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dawned cool and overcast, though
the sun broke through at

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intervals.
As the crowd gathered, perhaps

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15,000 people came to the
hillside above the new cemetery.

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Many had travelled by train and
wagon.

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Some were the families of men
buried in the fresh ground

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below.
Some were officials and military

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officers in dress uniform.
Most were ordinary citizens who

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had come to witness an occasion
they sensed was important,

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though none yet knew how
important it would become.

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A military procession opened the
ceremony.

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There were prayers and hymns.
A band played a slow, mournful

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piece.
Then Edward Everett rose to

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deliver the main address.
He spoke from memory, without

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notes, for over 2 hours.
His oration was a sweeping

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survey of the battle and the
war.

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He compared Gettysburg to the
great battles of antiquity,

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woven classical references, and
honored the men buried below.

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It was the kind of speech people
had paid to hear in lecture

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halls.
The crowd listened, sometimes

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restlessly, as the long
sentences rolled forward.

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The afternoon wore on.
The wind shifted.

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People shuffled their feet
against the cold.

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When Everett finally finished,
there was applause, music and a

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brief pause.
Then Lincoln stood up.

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He was tall and thin, dressed in
a dark suit that seemed slightly

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too short for his long arms and
legs.

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He held a single page of notes.
He adjusted his spectacles.

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He began to speak in the high,
reedy voice that surprised many

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people the first time they heard
it.

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They expected something deeper
from a man who looked the way he

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did.
What followed lasted roughly 2

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minutes.
It was about 270 words.

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He did not mention Gettysburg by
name.

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He did not mention the Union or
the Confederacy.

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He did not list the generals,
name the regiments or recount

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the battle.
He went somewhere else entirely.

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He went back to the founding of
the country 87 years earlier and

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asked what the country had been
founded on.

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He named the proposition that
all men are created equal, and

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asked, without quite asking it
directly, whether a nation built

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on such a proposition could
survive a war this terrible.

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He suggested that the dead in
the ground below had given the

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living an unfinished work, that
they had not died for a battle

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or a war, but for an idea about
what a country could be.

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And then he sat down.
Some in the audience were not

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sure he had finished.
The applause came late and was

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scattered.
A photographer setting up his

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camera missed the entire
address, still adjusting his

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lens when Lincoln returned to
his seat, there is no clear

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photograph of the moment.
Everett, the great orator, had

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filled the air for two hours.
Lincoln had taken less time to

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speak than it takes to read his
words aloud.

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Now he himself reportedly leaned
over to a friend afterward and

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remarked that the speech had not
gone well.

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He was, in this moment, almost
completely wrong.

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In the days that followed, the
response was uncertain.

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Some newspapers praised
Lincoln's brief remarks.

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Others dismissed them.
A paper in Chicago called the

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speech silly, flat and
dishwatery.

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Even some of Lincoln's allies
thought he had missed an

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opportunity, that he had given
too little where so much had

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been expected.
But there were others, more

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attentive listeners, who
understood almost at once that

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something unusual had happened.
Edward Everett, of all people,

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may have been the first.
The next morning he sat down and

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wrote a letter to the President.
He told Lincoln that he wished

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he could flatter himself that he
had come as close to the central

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idea of the occasion in two
hours as Lincoln had come in 2

234
00:18:40,840 --> 00:18:43,840
minutes.
It is one of the gracious

235
00:18:43,840 --> 00:18:50,080
moments in American history, the
great orator quietly bowing to

236
00:18:50,080 --> 00:18:54,240
the strange power of the spare
president he had nearly

237
00:18:54,240 --> 00:18:57,920
upstaged.
Over the months and years that

238
00:18:57,920 --> 00:19:01,680
followed, the address grew
quietly larger.

239
00:19:02,320 --> 00:19:06,600
Newspapers reprinted it.
School children memorized it.

240
00:19:07,400 --> 00:19:11,560
By the time of Lincoln's
assassination, 18 months later,

241
00:19:12,120 --> 00:19:17,080
the speech had begun to take on
the weight it still carries.

242
00:19:17,840 --> 00:19:22,240
By the next century, it was
carved in stone at the Lincoln

243
00:19:22,240 --> 00:19:27,360
Memorial in Washington, where
visitors still pause to read it

244
00:19:27,480 --> 00:19:31,800
in silence.
What had Lincoln understood that

245
00:19:31,840 --> 00:19:36,200
Everett, with all his eloquence,
had not?

246
00:19:36,680 --> 00:19:41,000
Perhaps simply this.
He had understood that the

247
00:19:41,000 --> 00:19:44,480
cemetery itself was already
speaking.

248
00:19:45,160 --> 00:19:49,960
The graves, the families, the
cost, stretched across the

249
00:19:49,960 --> 00:19:54,720
hillside in long, careful rows,
the silence over the freshly

250
00:19:54,720 --> 00:19:58,320
turned earth.
All had their own voice.

251
00:19:59,000 --> 00:20:02,480
A long speech would have
competed with that voice.

252
00:20:02,840 --> 00:20:05,720
A short speech could let it
through.

253
00:20:06,040 --> 00:20:09,640
Lincoln did not try to fill
every space.

254
00:20:10,200 --> 00:20:13,920
He trusted the dead to do part
of the speaking.

255
00:20:15,040 --> 00:20:20,520
He gave the day a few quiet
sentences, lifted what those

256
00:20:20,520 --> 00:20:23,760
sentences pointed toward, and
stepped back.

257
00:20:24,880 --> 00:20:30,640
The ceremony then completed
itself in the listener and in

258
00:20:30,640 --> 00:20:34,440
the time that followed.
There is a lesson in this for

259
00:20:34,440 --> 00:20:37,720
anyone who has ever wished to
say something important.

260
00:20:38,800 --> 00:20:43,960
The most powerful thing a voice
can sometimes do is stop.

261
00:20:44,880 --> 00:20:50,360
To say less than the moment
seems to demand, to leave room

262
00:20:50,360 --> 00:20:54,360
for the listener to feel, to
think, to remember.

263
00:20:54,720 --> 00:20:57,640
This idea will return more than
once tonight.

264
00:20:58,200 --> 00:21:02,560
We will meet a man on a cold
mountain who said a single

265
00:21:02,560 --> 00:21:06,960
sentence and ended an entire
chapter of his people's history.

266
00:21:08,000 --> 00:21:12,800
We will meet another in a
courtroom who spoke for hours

267
00:21:13,120 --> 00:21:17,160
and then fell silent for 27
years.

268
00:21:18,040 --> 00:21:22,560
We will meet a quiet man in a
cardigan whose 6 minutes of

269
00:21:22,560 --> 00:21:29,040
plain speaking changed the mind
of a senator who had decided not

270
00:21:29,040 --> 00:21:32,760
to be moved.
But before we leave Gettysburg,

271
00:21:33,080 --> 00:21:38,600
let one image remain.
The November afternoon, the

272
00:21:38,600 --> 00:21:44,960
graves still fresh, a tall man
on a wooden platform speaking in

273
00:21:44,960 --> 00:21:49,520
his high, quiet voice for 2
short minutes and then sitting

274
00:21:49,520 --> 00:21:52,800
down into the long silence that
followed.

275
00:21:53,360 --> 00:21:59,000
The silence the world has been
listening to ever since Lincoln

276
00:21:59,000 --> 00:22:03,680
had spoken over the dead and
asked what their sacrifice could

277
00:22:03,680 --> 00:22:09,120
mean. 14 years later, on the
other side of a wide and

278
00:22:09,120 --> 00:22:14,480
changing country, another leader
would speak not over the dead,

279
00:22:14,720 --> 00:22:18,520
but over the living.
Over exhausted, freezing

280
00:22:18,520 --> 00:22:23,520
families who had walked nearly
1200 miles through some of the

281
00:22:23,520 --> 00:22:30,280
most difficult terrain in North
America, he would speak in only

282
00:22:30,280 --> 00:22:34,600
a few brief sentences.
And like Lincoln, he would

283
00:22:34,600 --> 00:22:40,040
understand that to say less
sometimes is to say more than

284
00:22:40,080 --> 00:22:45,120
any longer speech could.
The speech we're about to visit

285
00:22:45,480 --> 00:22:51,400
was not delivered in a cemetery.
It was delivered in a snow

286
00:22:51,400 --> 00:22:57,440
covered Meadow in northern
Montana, beneath the low Gray

287
00:22:57,440 --> 00:23:04,320
sky, with the breath of horses
and tired soldiers visible in

288
00:23:04,320 --> 00:23:08,040
the cold air.
It was not given by a head of

289
00:23:08,040 --> 00:23:13,760
state in a tall hat.
It was given by a chief whose

290
00:23:13,760 --> 00:23:19,000
people had been pushed to the
edge of their endurance, almost

291
00:23:19,000 --> 00:23:24,880
to the edge of an international
border, and whose very presence

292
00:23:24,880 --> 00:23:30,480
in that Meadow was the result of
months of running.

293
00:23:30,880 --> 00:23:36,480
The year was 1877.
The man's name in English was

294
00:23:36,480 --> 00:23:40,160
Chief Joseph.
In his own language, he was

295
00:23:40,160 --> 00:23:46,320
called Hinma Tu ya Latkekt,
which is often translated as

296
00:23:46,720 --> 00:23:49,360
Thunder rolling down the
mountain.

297
00:23:49,840 --> 00:23:54,440
To understand the weight of his
words, we have to walk back into

298
00:23:54,440 --> 00:23:59,840
the world he came from, a world
of clear rivers and deep

299
00:23:59,840 --> 00:24:05,120
forests, of salmon runs that
filled the streams in summer and

300
00:24:05,120 --> 00:24:08,640
horses that grazed in the high
meadows.

301
00:24:09,400 --> 00:24:15,000
A world that only a generation
earlier had seemed to most of

302
00:24:15,000 --> 00:24:19,840
its people steady, ancient and
unchanging.

303
00:24:20,240 --> 00:24:24,440
So let Gettysburg drift gently
into memory.

304
00:24:25,040 --> 00:24:29,960
The November afternoon, the rows
of graves, the tall man on the

305
00:24:29,960 --> 00:24:33,480
platform speaking in his high,
quiet voice.

306
00:24:34,120 --> 00:24:37,280
We are going West and we are
going back.

307
00:24:38,000 --> 00:24:43,000
Back to the Pacific Northwest of
the early 19th century, into a

308
00:24:43,000 --> 00:24:47,880
long Green Valley between 2
mountain ranges, into the wide

309
00:24:47,880 --> 00:24:52,320
rolling country beyond it, into
a way of life that had been

310
00:24:52,320 --> 00:24:57,280
carefully fitted to its land for
many hundreds of years.

311
00:24:57,600 --> 00:25:00,680
This is the world of the Nez
Perce.

312
00:25:01,240 --> 00:25:07,160
It begins, as so many quiet
stories do, in a place its

313
00:25:07,160 --> 00:25:11,040
people loved.
There is a tenderness to such

314
00:25:11,040 --> 00:25:15,200
stories, and a sadness too,
because we already know how they

315
00:25:15,200 --> 00:25:18,160
end.
We know that the valleys will

316
00:25:18,160 --> 00:25:22,240
not stay safe.
We know that the long horse

317
00:25:22,240 --> 00:25:26,800
herds will be scattered, the
lodges burned, the rivers

318
00:25:26,800 --> 00:25:31,200
crossed in flight.
We know that the chief who will

319
00:25:31,200 --> 00:25:35,160
eventually speak to us in the
snow has not yet learned how to

320
00:25:35,160 --> 00:25:39,720
be that chief.
He is still at the start of our

321
00:25:39,720 --> 00:25:45,520
story, simply a young man
growing up in a quiet place that

322
00:25:45,520 --> 00:25:50,600
taught him how to listen and how
to choose his words with care.

323
00:25:50,840 --> 00:25:55,080
For now, let the Meadow in
Montana wait.

324
00:25:56,000 --> 00:26:00,520
Let the soldiers and the snow
and the long line of exhausted

325
00:26:00,520 --> 00:26:03,560
horses stand still in the
future.

326
00:26:04,560 --> 00:26:10,200
We have a Green Valley to visit
first and a way of life to walk

327
00:26:10,200 --> 00:26:13,920
gently through before the
running begins.

328
00:26:16,000 --> 00:26:20,600
The Nez Perce, who called
themselves Nemipu, meaning

329
00:26:20,600 --> 00:26:25,400
simply the people, lived in the
high plateau country where

330
00:26:25,400 --> 00:26:28,680
Idaho, Oregon and Washington
meet.

331
00:26:29,560 --> 00:26:33,120
Their traditional homeland
stretched across roughly

332
00:26:33,120 --> 00:26:38,800
17,000,000 acres of mountain
valleys, river canyons and

333
00:26:38,800 --> 00:26:44,000
rolling grasslands.
It was a varied and abundant

334
00:26:44,000 --> 00:26:49,600
country. 5 great rivers ran
through it, including the Snake,

335
00:26:49,960 --> 00:26:55,080
the Salmon, and the Clearwater.
Salmon arrived each year in

336
00:26:55,080 --> 00:26:59,640
numbers difficult for a modern
person to imagine filling the

337
00:26:59,640 --> 00:27:02,120
streams with their bright
bodies.

338
00:27:03,200 --> 00:27:05,680
Commas bulbs grew in the
meadows.

339
00:27:06,240 --> 00:27:09,640
Elk moved through the forests in
their seasons.

340
00:27:10,000 --> 00:27:14,240
The Nez Perce way of life was
shaped by these rhythms.

341
00:27:15,000 --> 00:27:19,480
Families followed the salmon to
their spawning grounds in spring

342
00:27:19,480 --> 00:27:22,760
and summer.
They harvested Kama's roots in

343
00:27:22,760 --> 00:27:28,400
the high meadows in Midsummer.
In autumn they haunted in the

344
00:27:28,400 --> 00:27:32,920
mountains.
In winter they drew together in

345
00:27:32,920 --> 00:27:39,200
sheltered valleys, in long
lodges warmed by careful fires,

346
00:27:40,040 --> 00:27:43,960
telling the stories that had
been told there for as long as

347
00:27:44,040 --> 00:27:47,840
anyone could remember.
In the early 18th century,

348
00:27:48,200 --> 00:27:52,520
horses came into their world
from the South, and the Nae's

349
00:27:52,520 --> 00:27:57,280
purse became some of the finest
horse breeders on the continent.

350
00:27:58,160 --> 00:28:02,320
They developed the spotted
breed, now known as the

351
00:28:02,440 --> 00:28:06,560
Appaloosa.
With horses, their range

352
00:28:06,560 --> 00:28:09,520
widened.
They crossed the Bitterroot

353
00:28:09,520 --> 00:28:14,520
Mountains to hunt Buffalo on the
plains, but always they returned

354
00:28:14,520 --> 00:28:18,000
to their valleys.
When Lewis and Clark stumbled

355
00:28:18,000 --> 00:28:23,840
out of the mountains in eighteen
O 5, exhausted and starving, it

356
00:28:23,840 --> 00:28:30,240
was the Nez Perce who fed them.
The expedition would not have

357
00:28:30,240 --> 00:28:36,040
survived without that kindness.
Almost every American account of

358
00:28:36,040 --> 00:28:40,920
the early Pacific Northwest
passes through Nez per SE

359
00:28:40,920 --> 00:28:44,280
hospitality.
For decades after, the

360
00:28:44,280 --> 00:28:47,800
relationship between the Nez
Perce and the United States

361
00:28:47,800 --> 00:28:52,040
remained, if not equal, at least
peaceful.

362
00:28:52,960 --> 00:28:59,720
A treaty in 1855 recognized Nez
Perce land, including the

363
00:28:59,720 --> 00:29:04,240
Wallowa Valley in northeastern
Oregon, where Joseph's band

364
00:29:04,240 --> 00:29:07,360
lived.
The Wallowa was a place of

365
00:29:07,360 --> 00:29:12,080
extraordinary beauty.
Lakes lay among high mountains.

366
00:29:12,720 --> 00:29:15,840
Wide grasslands rolled down to
the river.

367
00:29:16,480 --> 00:29:21,680
To Joseph's family, it was home
beyond questioning.

368
00:29:22,040 --> 00:29:27,520
Then, as so often in American
history, gold was found.

369
00:29:27,880 --> 00:29:32,720
In 1860, prospectors discovered
gold on Nez Perce land.

370
00:29:33,280 --> 00:29:37,960
Settlers poured in.
The promises of the 1855 treaty

371
00:29:38,320 --> 00:29:42,480
became inconvenient.
A new treaty was negotiated in

372
00:29:42,480 --> 00:29:48,360
1863, which ceded almost 90% of
the original Nez Perce homeland,

373
00:29:48,840 --> 00:29:54,640
including the Wallowa Valley.
Joseph's father refused to sign

374
00:29:54,640 --> 00:29:56,840
it.
He never accepted that the

375
00:29:56,840 --> 00:30:00,120
document had any standing over
his people.

376
00:30:00,480 --> 00:30:05,200
The federal government called it
a treaty anyway and acted as

377
00:30:05,200 --> 00:30:11,400
though it bound everyone for the
next 14 years. 2 Understandings

378
00:30:11,400 --> 00:30:17,480
of the law moved in parallel.
Like two rivers that did not

379
00:30:17,480 --> 00:30:20,880
meet.
The government held that the

380
00:30:20,880 --> 00:30:26,000
Wallowa Nez purse were
trespassers on their own land.

381
00:30:27,080 --> 00:30:31,920
The Wallowa Nez purse held that
they had never agreed to leave

382
00:30:31,920 --> 00:30:36,240
it.
Then, in 1877, the patients of

383
00:30:36,240 --> 00:30:39,840
the United States Army finally
ran out.

384
00:30:41,880 --> 00:30:44,920
Joseph was not by nature a war
leader.

385
00:30:45,200 --> 00:30:47,920
He had spent years trying to
negotiate.

386
00:30:48,320 --> 00:30:52,160
He understood, perhaps more
clearly than the men sent to

387
00:30:52,160 --> 00:30:56,560
negotiate with him, what would
happen if his people were pushed

388
00:30:56,560 --> 00:31:00,400
into open conflict with the
United States Army.

389
00:31:01,240 --> 00:31:06,040
He counselled patience.
He spoke softly in counsel and

390
00:31:06,040 --> 00:31:12,080
listened more than he spoke.
In the spring of 1877, an Army

391
00:31:12,080 --> 00:31:16,600
general named Oliver Howard
arrived in the region with

392
00:31:16,600 --> 00:31:21,440
orders to remove the Wallowa
Band to a reservation in Idaho.

393
00:31:22,120 --> 00:31:27,320
Howard gave them 30 days.
Joseph asked for more time.

394
00:31:27,920 --> 00:31:31,280
The cattle were scattered across
the high country.

395
00:31:31,840 --> 00:31:34,600
The rivers were swollen with
snow melt.

396
00:31:35,480 --> 00:31:39,280
Crossing them with women,
children and herds would mean

397
00:31:39,280 --> 00:31:44,200
losses no people could absorb.
Howard refused.

398
00:31:44,600 --> 00:31:47,200
The Nez purse began their
reluctant move.

399
00:31:47,680 --> 00:31:51,640
And then, almost at the last
moment, a few young men,

400
00:31:52,040 --> 00:31:56,760
grieving losses and angered by
the long humiliation, struck

401
00:31:56,760 --> 00:31:59,560
back at white settlers along the
Salmon River.

402
00:32:00,640 --> 00:32:05,760
The leaders had not approved it,
but once it began, there could

403
00:32:05,760 --> 00:32:09,640
be no return.
Joseph and the other chiefs

404
00:32:10,000 --> 00:32:16,040
gathered their bands and fled.
What followed was extraordinary.

405
00:32:16,600 --> 00:32:24,400
Roughly 750 Nez Perce, including
women, children and the elderly,

406
00:32:24,880 --> 00:32:29,880
set out across the mountains,
hoping to reach safety somewhere

407
00:32:30,080 --> 00:32:35,520
the Army could not follow.
Only about 250 of them were

408
00:32:35,520 --> 00:32:38,880
warriors.
The rest were simply families

409
00:32:39,440 --> 00:32:43,160
trying to live for more than
three months.

410
00:32:43,480 --> 00:32:47,200
They ran.
They crossed the Bitterroot

411
00:32:47,200 --> 00:32:51,080
Mountains.
They moved through the Big Hole

412
00:32:51,080 --> 00:32:55,720
Valley in Montana, where they
were attacked at dawn by

413
00:32:55,720 --> 00:33:00,960
soldiers and lost dozens of
women and children before the

414
00:33:00,960 --> 00:33:03,440
warriors could organize a
defence.

415
00:33:04,240 --> 00:33:08,560
They crossed the Yellowstone
region just as it was becoming

416
00:33:08,560 --> 00:33:13,960
the world's first National Park,
frightening tourists who had

417
00:33:13,960 --> 00:33:17,000
never imagined being inside a
war.

418
00:33:17,840 --> 00:33:22,880
They climbed through high passes
and narrow trails, with soldiers

419
00:33:22,880 --> 00:33:25,640
pursuing from several directions
at once.

420
00:33:26,040 --> 00:33:31,720
They covered roughly 1200 miles.
They fought a series of battles

421
00:33:31,720 --> 00:33:35,800
and skirmishes, often
outnumbered, often without

422
00:33:35,800 --> 00:33:40,440
supplies, often with the wounded
slowing their pace.

423
00:33:41,480 --> 00:33:46,520
And again and again, they
outmaneuvered the soldiers sent

424
00:33:46,520 --> 00:33:50,840
to catch them.
Newspapers across the country

425
00:33:50,840 --> 00:33:53,920
followed the chase.
Some readers cheered for the

426
00:33:53,920 --> 00:33:57,120
army.
Others found themselves quietly

427
00:33:57,120 --> 00:34:02,280
admiring the small, exhausted
force trying so hard to reach

428
00:34:02,280 --> 00:34:05,480
freedom.
Joseph was not the chief

429
00:34:05,480 --> 00:34:09,600
military strategist.
That credit belongs largely to

430
00:34:09,639 --> 00:34:14,400
other Nez Perce leaders,
including his brother Olacort

431
00:34:14,760 --> 00:34:19,600
and the war chief's Looking
Glass and two HUL HUL Zoet.

432
00:34:20,400 --> 00:34:22,600
But Joseph carried a different
weight.

433
00:34:23,239 --> 00:34:27,800
He held the families together.
He kept the noncombatants

434
00:34:27,800 --> 00:34:30,760
moving.
He spoke to them in the cold

435
00:34:30,760 --> 00:34:36,600
mornings and tended the wounded.
By late September, they were

436
00:34:36,600 --> 00:34:41,639
within 40 miles of Canada.
The border was almost insight.

437
00:34:42,600 --> 00:34:46,880
They stopped to rest in a Meadow
at the foot of the Bear Paw

438
00:34:46,880 --> 00:34:52,159
Mountains, believing they had
nearly outrun the war.

439
00:34:52,440 --> 00:34:56,360
They had not.
On the morning of September

440
00:34:56,360 --> 00:35:01,440
30th, while the families were
still in camp, a fresh column of

441
00:35:01,440 --> 00:35:07,040
soldiers under Colonel Nelson
Myles attacked from the South.

442
00:35:08,120 --> 00:35:12,320
The battle that followed was
bitter and exhausting.

443
00:35:13,320 --> 00:35:18,360
The Nez purse fought from rifle
pits dug into the cold ground.

444
00:35:19,200 --> 00:35:23,720
Snow began to fall.
Some of the people in the chaos

445
00:35:23,880 --> 00:35:28,040
slipped away through the lines
and made it across the border

446
00:35:28,040 --> 00:35:32,400
into Canada.
Others, including most of the

447
00:35:32,400 --> 00:35:36,160
warriors who had led the long
flight, were killed.

448
00:35:36,520 --> 00:35:40,240
For five days, the siege
continued.

449
00:35:40,520 --> 00:35:43,880
The wind grew colder.
Food ran out.

450
00:35:44,120 --> 00:35:46,760
The wounded suffered without
medicine.

451
00:35:47,160 --> 00:35:52,160
Joseph's brother Olacott was
dead, so were Looking Glass and

452
00:35:52,360 --> 00:35:56,960
Tu HUL HUL Zote.
The chiefs who had organized the

453
00:35:56,960 --> 00:36:02,040
flight, who had outwitted the
army across 1000 miles of

454
00:36:02,040 --> 00:36:05,120
mountains, were now silent in
the snow.

455
00:36:05,400 --> 00:36:12,800
On October 5th, 1877, Joseph
rode out under a Gray sky to

456
00:36:12,800 --> 00:36:15,720
meet General Howard and Colonel
Miles.

457
00:36:16,400 --> 00:36:19,040
He carried his rifle across his
saddle.

458
00:36:19,440 --> 00:36:22,400
The wind moved across the open
Meadow.

459
00:36:23,200 --> 00:36:25,960
The soldiers and his own people
watched.

460
00:36:26,520 --> 00:36:31,360
He dismounted, handed over the
rifle, and began to speak.

461
00:36:31,760 --> 00:36:36,280
The words he spoke that day were
translated and written down by a

462
00:36:36,280 --> 00:36:41,600
young Army officer named Charles
Erskine Scott Wood.

463
00:36:42,240 --> 00:36:46,920
The version that has come down
to us is brief, simple and

464
00:36:46,920 --> 00:36:51,880
almost unbearably tired.
He spoke of the chiefs who were

465
00:36:51,880 --> 00:36:54,680
dead.
He spoke of the children

466
00:36:54,680 --> 00:36:59,160
freezing in the hills, of those
who had run to the mountains and

467
00:36:59,160 --> 00:37:05,160
had no blankets, no food.
He said his heart was sick and

468
00:37:05,160 --> 00:37:10,840
sad, and he ended with the line
that has carried his voice into

469
00:37:10,840 --> 00:37:14,120
history.
From where the sun now stands,

470
00:37:14,120 --> 00:37:18,080
he said, I will fight no more
forever.

471
00:37:18,360 --> 00:37:20,680
It is worth pausing on that
sentence.

472
00:37:20,920 --> 00:37:24,440
It is not, on its surface,
dramatic.

473
00:37:25,000 --> 00:37:29,200
It contains no metaphor, no
flourish.

474
00:37:29,840 --> 00:37:35,800
But it does something rare.
It marks an ending with absolute

475
00:37:35,800 --> 00:37:40,080
precision.
He did not say I am defeated.

476
00:37:40,360 --> 00:37:45,960
He did not say I surrender, He
said something quieter and

477
00:37:45,960 --> 00:37:49,080
stranger from where the sun now
stands.

478
00:37:49,440 --> 00:37:55,280
From this exact moment, on this
exact day, in this exact light,

479
00:37:55,760 --> 00:37:59,960
I will fight no more.
And then the word that gives the

480
00:37:59,960 --> 00:38:05,800
sentence its weight forever.
It is the speech of a man who

481
00:38:05,800 --> 00:38:10,840
knows that a chapter is ending
and who refuses to allow the

482
00:38:10,920 --> 00:38:16,400
ending to be vague.
He chooses the moment himself.

483
00:38:16,720 --> 00:38:22,560
He places it in time.
He gives it a precise hinge upon

484
00:38:22,560 --> 00:38:27,920
which the rest of his life and
his people's life will turn.

485
00:38:28,240 --> 00:38:33,240
In doing so, he turns a defeat
into something else.

486
00:38:33,680 --> 00:38:39,360
Not a triumph, not a comfort,
but an act of dignity.

487
00:38:40,000 --> 00:38:44,560
The power to name the ending
even when one has lost the power

488
00:38:45,040 --> 00:38:48,280
to prevent it.
The translation may have

489
00:38:48,280 --> 00:38:50,960
polished his actual word
slightly.

490
00:38:51,240 --> 00:38:55,760
The exact phrasing may not be
what he said in his own

491
00:38:55,760 --> 00:39:00,800
language, but the shape of the
moment, the weight of the chosen

492
00:39:00,800 --> 00:39:06,720
finality that is real.
It cannot be edited out.

493
00:39:07,040 --> 00:39:12,440
He ended with those words and
stepped back into silence.

494
00:39:14,160 --> 00:39:18,080
The promises made on that Meadow
were not kept.

495
00:39:18,480 --> 00:39:23,160
Joseph and his people had been
told that they would be sent

496
00:39:23,160 --> 00:39:27,440
back to the Idaho reservation
where some of their relatives

497
00:39:27,440 --> 00:39:30,960
lived and where they could begin
to rebuild.

498
00:39:31,760 --> 00:39:37,800
Instead they were marched E 1st
to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas

499
00:39:38,280 --> 00:39:44,120
and then S to Indian Territory,
what is now Oklahoma.

500
00:39:45,200 --> 00:39:51,440
The land was hot, swampy and
unfamiliar diseases.

501
00:39:51,520 --> 00:39:55,160
The Nez Perce had no resistance
to swept through them.

502
00:39:56,120 --> 00:40:02,120
Children died first, then
elders, then the strong.

503
00:40:02,360 --> 00:40:07,080
In the years that followed,
Joseph spent much of his life as

504
00:40:07,080 --> 00:40:10,280
a kind of.
Diplomat for the dead.

505
00:40:10,960 --> 00:40:14,680
He traveled to Washington.
He met President Hayes.

506
00:40:15,160 --> 00:40:19,840
He met President McKinley.
He met Theodore Roosevelt.

507
00:40:20,680 --> 00:40:25,360
He spoke quietly and
respectfully to men whose

508
00:40:25,360 --> 00:40:30,040
government had broken every
meaningful promise made to him.

509
00:40:31,280 --> 00:40:38,200
He asked again and again Only
one thing, to be allowed to take

510
00:40:38,200 --> 00:40:42,240
his people home to the Wallowa
Valley.

511
00:40:42,640 --> 00:40:46,440
The answer was always the same,
no.

512
00:40:46,800 --> 00:40:52,520
In 1885, after years of
pressure, the surviving Nez

513
00:40:52,520 --> 00:40:58,000
Perce of his band were finally
moved N but not to the Wallowa.

514
00:40:58,960 --> 00:41:01,720
Some were sent to the Idaho
Reservation.

515
00:41:02,480 --> 00:41:07,000
Joseph and the rest were settled
at Coalville, a reservation in

516
00:41:07,000 --> 00:41:11,640
North Central Washington.
It was a kinder place than

517
00:41:11,640 --> 00:41:17,560
Oklahoma, but it was not home.
He lived out the rest of his

518
00:41:17,560 --> 00:41:20,560
life there.
He continued to ask for the

519
00:41:20,560 --> 00:41:23,920
Wallowa.
The years passed.

520
00:41:24,400 --> 00:41:28,840
His hair turned white.
He became a familiar figure to

521
00:41:28,840 --> 00:41:33,760
journalists and dignitaries, a
living symbol of an era many

522
00:41:33,760 --> 00:41:36,880
Americans were already turning
into nostalgia.

523
00:41:37,520 --> 00:41:42,480
But he was not a symbol.
He was a man who had lost almost

524
00:41:42,480 --> 00:41:47,920
everything, and who carried that
loss with great patience.

525
00:41:48,320 --> 00:41:54,960
He died in September of 19 O 4
by his own fire at Coalville.

526
00:41:56,000 --> 00:42:01,440
His doctor reportedly said that
he died in the end of a broken

527
00:42:01,440 --> 00:42:05,480
heart.
He was buried near a small lake

528
00:42:05,480 --> 00:42:09,560
on the reservation.
He never returned to the valley

529
00:42:09,560 --> 00:42:13,960
where he was born.
His surrender speech, those few

530
00:42:13,960 --> 00:42:19,640
brief words spoken in a snowy
Meadow in 1830, Eleven, became

531
00:42:19,640 --> 00:42:24,080
one of the most remembered
pieces of oratory in American

532
00:42:24,080 --> 00:42:28,000
history.
Not because it was elegant in a

533
00:42:28,000 --> 00:42:33,440
literary sense, not because it
argued anything, but because it

534
00:42:33,440 --> 00:42:39,280
held, in a few honest sentences,
the entire weight of what was

535
00:42:39,280 --> 00:42:43,400
being lost.
The chiefs who were dead.

536
00:42:44,240 --> 00:42:46,560
The children freezing in the
hills.

537
00:42:47,320 --> 00:42:53,520
The world that was ending, the
decision made in cold light to

538
00:42:53,520 --> 00:42:56,640
mark that ending with one's own
voice.

539
00:42:56,960 --> 00:43:03,080
Sometimes a speech becomes great
not because of what the speaker

540
00:43:03,080 --> 00:43:07,240
put into it, but because of
everything that had been taken

541
00:43:07,240 --> 00:43:11,440
away before it.
Joseph's words carry that

542
00:43:11,440 --> 00:43:15,280
emptiness.
They are powerful precisely

543
00:43:15,280 --> 00:43:18,960
because they do not try to be
more than they are.

544
00:43:19,280 --> 00:43:23,520
Lincoln had said much in his
short minutes by trusting the

545
00:43:23,520 --> 00:43:28,800
silence around his words.
Joseph said even less.

546
00:43:29,560 --> 00:43:35,000
He led a single sentence and an
era from where the sun now

547
00:43:35,000 --> 00:43:39,880
stands.
And now, gently, we leave the

548
00:43:39,880 --> 00:43:45,120
Meadow in Montana and the long
flight that ended there.

549
00:43:46,880 --> 00:43:50,880
Joseph spoke at the end of a
fight he could not win.

550
00:43:51,840 --> 00:43:56,600
The army was already on the
field, the chiefs already dead,

551
00:43:57,200 --> 00:44:01,160
the families already broken by
snow and hunger.

552
00:44:01,960 --> 00:44:08,840
His words marked an ending of
finality accepted, even chosen

553
00:44:09,240 --> 00:44:13,160
in cold light.
The next voice we will visit

554
00:44:13,520 --> 00:44:17,880
chose differently.
He stood not in a Meadow at the

555
00:44:17,880 --> 00:44:23,480
close of a long flight, but in a
wood panelled courtroom on a

556
00:44:23,480 --> 00:44:28,880
different continent, with the
power of a hostile state arrayed

557
00:44:28,880 --> 00:44:32,400
against him.
He was not surrendering.

558
00:44:32,720 --> 00:44:36,200
He was speaking into the
certainty of a long

559
00:44:36,200 --> 00:44:41,680
imprisonment, perhaps a death
sentence, and trying to leave

560
00:44:41,680 --> 00:44:44,840
behind something that would
outlast both.

561
00:44:45,920 --> 00:44:53,720
He spoke for nearly three hours,
and then he sat down and waited

562
00:44:54,080 --> 00:44:59,680
to learn whether he would live.
The year was 1964.

563
00:45:00,360 --> 00:45:06,960
The country was South Africa.
The man's name was Nelson

564
00:45:07,040 --> 00:45:11,080
Mandela.
Where Joseph's speech was a

565
00:45:11,080 --> 00:45:14,160
single sentence carrying the
weight of a world that had

566
00:45:14,160 --> 00:45:20,160
already been lost, Mandela's was
a long, careful, almost

567
00:45:20,160 --> 00:45:25,720
methodical statement aimed at a
world that did not yet exist.

568
00:45:26,640 --> 00:45:29,240
He was not speaking for the
present.

569
00:45:29,840 --> 00:45:34,520
The present in that courtroom
was already against him.

570
00:45:35,280 --> 00:45:38,440
He was speaking for a future he
might never see.

571
00:45:39,400 --> 00:45:44,520
He was placing his words into
time itself, the way one might

572
00:45:44,760 --> 00:45:51,080
bury a letter in a wall, hoping
that someone generations later

573
00:45:51,640 --> 00:45:56,960
would find it and understand.
This, too, is a kind of brevity,

574
00:45:57,040 --> 00:46:02,680
though it does not look like it
at first. 3 hours is not short,

575
00:46:03,720 --> 00:46:08,120
but Mandela's speech is brief in
a deeper sense.

576
00:46:08,360 --> 00:46:13,200
It is brief in claim.
It does not try to argue

577
00:46:13,200 --> 00:46:15,840
everything.
It does not try to win the

578
00:46:15,840 --> 00:46:18,760
trial.
It does not even try to save his

579
00:46:18,760 --> 00:46:22,080
life.
It tries to do only one thing,

580
00:46:22,520 --> 00:46:28,120
to name plainly and exactly what
the struggle was for and what

581
00:46:28,120 --> 00:46:31,480
kind of country he hoped one day
to see.

582
00:46:31,800 --> 00:46:36,080
To understand why he stood in
that courtroom and why his words

583
00:46:36,080 --> 00:46:40,640
still travel, we have to step
gently into the world he was

584
00:46:40,640 --> 00:46:47,520
speaking from, a world arranged
by law into the bodies that were

585
00:46:47,520 --> 00:46:53,720
allowed to enter certain rooms
and the bodies that were not, a

586
00:46:53,720 --> 00:46:59,040
world in which his very presence
in a public courtroom was

587
00:46:59,040 --> 00:47:05,720
already an act of defiance.
So let the snow of Montana drift

588
00:47:05,720 --> 00:47:10,720
behind us now.
Let the Meadow grow quiet.

589
00:47:11,600 --> 00:47:15,560
We are crossing the wide ocean
and a wide century.

590
00:47:15,760 --> 00:47:18,920
We are arriving in a country
shaped like a great wedge at the

591
00:47:18,920 --> 00:47:22,840
bottom of Africa, where
mountains meet the sea, where

592
00:47:22,840 --> 00:47:28,000
vineyards and cities and
townships sit beside one another

593
00:47:28,240 --> 00:47:34,400
in uneasy nearness, and where,
for many decades, the answer to

594
00:47:34,400 --> 00:47:39,120
almost every question about a
person's life began with the

595
00:47:39,120 --> 00:47:43,920
color of their skin.
The story we are about to enter

596
00:47:44,200 --> 00:47:49,480
is not a comfortable one, but it
is one of the great stories of

597
00:47:49,480 --> 00:47:54,760
the 20th century, and the words
at its center were spoken by a

598
00:47:54,760 --> 00:48:01,120
man who had decided before he
ever opened his mouth that he

599
00:48:01,120 --> 00:48:05,560
would speak the truth and accept
what came of it.

600
00:48:05,920 --> 00:48:09,480
His name was Nelson.
The country was waiting.

601
00:48:09,840 --> 00:48:14,680
South Africa in the middle of
the 20th century was a country

602
00:48:14,680 --> 00:48:21,040
built on a painful idea.
The idea was that human beings

603
00:48:21,240 --> 00:48:26,520
could be sorted by birth into
separate categories, and that

604
00:48:26,520 --> 00:48:30,600
those categories could be
enforced in nearly every detail

605
00:48:30,600 --> 00:48:35,080
of daily life, where a person
could live, where they could

606
00:48:35,080 --> 00:48:40,000
work, whom they could marry,
what benches they could sit on,

607
00:48:40,600 --> 00:48:43,400
what schools their children
could attend.

608
00:48:44,480 --> 00:48:50,200
The system was called apartheid,
an Afrikaans word that means

609
00:48:50,680 --> 00:48:54,680
apartness.
Apartheid did not begin all at

610
00:48:54,680 --> 00:48:57,600
once.
South Africa had long carried

611
00:48:57,600 --> 00:49:03,040
the legacies of colonization, of
land taken and labor exploited.

612
00:49:03,760 --> 00:49:08,920
Black, mixed race and Indian S
Africans had lived for

613
00:49:08,920 --> 00:49:12,840
generations under laws that
denied them most of the

614
00:49:12,840 --> 00:49:15,760
protections white S Africans
enjoyed.

615
00:49:16,200 --> 00:49:21,280
But in 1948, a new government
came to power that decided to

616
00:49:21,280 --> 00:49:26,800
formalize, to harden, and to
extend that separation into

617
00:49:26,800 --> 00:49:30,240
something more deliberate and
more total.

618
00:49:30,480 --> 00:49:35,400
In the years that followed, a
long series of laws redrew the

619
00:49:35,400 --> 00:49:39,280
country.
The Population Registration Act

620
00:49:39,520 --> 00:49:43,240
required every citizen to be
classified by race.

621
00:49:44,080 --> 00:49:48,400
The Group Areas Act assigned
different races to different

622
00:49:48,400 --> 00:49:53,880
urban zones and forcibly removed
those who lived in the wrong

623
00:49:53,880 --> 00:49:58,320
place.
The Bantu Education Act narrowed

624
00:49:58,320 --> 00:50:01,000
the schooling available to black
children.

625
00:50:01,880 --> 00:50:07,400
Pass laws required black S
Africans to carry identification

626
00:50:07,400 --> 00:50:12,760
at all times and to produce it
whenever asked on penalty of

627
00:50:12,760 --> 00:50:15,880
arrest.
To live under such laws was to

628
00:50:15,880 --> 00:50:22,920
be reminded daily that once full
humanity was not recognized by

629
00:50:22,920 --> 00:50:26,440
the state.
A grandmother could be moved out

630
00:50:26,440 --> 00:50:31,280
of her home of 40 years because
the neighborhood had been

631
00:50:31,280 --> 00:50:35,840
reclassified.
A child could be denied a school

632
00:50:36,440 --> 00:50:40,360
because of how she had been
registered at birth.

633
00:50:41,480 --> 00:50:47,640
A young man could be stopped on
the street, ask for his pass and

634
00:50:48,120 --> 00:50:52,920
jailed for forgetting it.
There was also, alongside this,

635
00:50:53,200 --> 00:51:00,040
a world of ordinary life.
Marriages and births, weekends

636
00:51:00,440 --> 00:51:07,760
and music, soccer matches and
church services, Tea on Stoops

637
00:51:07,760 --> 00:51:12,880
in the warm evenings.
People did not stop being people

638
00:51:13,000 --> 00:51:15,960
because the laws had become
cruel.

639
00:51:16,240 --> 00:51:19,640
Resistance to apartheid was not
new.

640
00:51:20,560 --> 00:51:24,960
The African National Congress,
the ANC, had been founded in

641
00:51:24,960 --> 00:51:30,040
1912, long before apartheid
acquired its official name.

642
00:51:30,360 --> 00:51:34,680
For decades, its leaders had
tried to oppose racial laws by

643
00:51:34,680 --> 00:51:40,000
petition, by letter, by peaceful
protest, by appeals to

644
00:51:40,000 --> 00:51:44,840
international bodies.
They marched, they wrote, They

645
00:51:44,840 --> 00:51:47,880
spoke.
The government answered with

646
00:51:47,880 --> 00:51:51,320
arrests, bans and rising
violence.

647
00:51:51,640 --> 00:51:57,680
In 1960, in the Township of
Sharpville, police opened fire

648
00:51:57,680 --> 00:52:03,640
on a peaceful crowd protesting
the past laws. 69 people were

649
00:52:03,640 --> 00:52:07,080
killed, many shot in the back as
they tried to flee.

650
00:52:07,760 --> 00:52:12,320
The world was shocked.
Within weeks, the ANC was

651
00:52:12,320 --> 00:52:17,760
banned, its leaders were forced
underground and the long

652
00:52:17,760 --> 00:52:21,840
question whether peaceful
resistance alone could end

653
00:52:21,840 --> 00:52:25,960
apartheid became impossible to
avoid.

654
00:52:26,320 --> 00:52:31,000
It was into that question that a
young lawyer named Nelson

655
00:52:31,000 --> 00:52:36,240
Mandela had stepped.
Mandela had been born in the

656
00:52:36,240 --> 00:52:42,360
rural trance K in 1918, into a
family with traditional standing

657
00:52:42,360 --> 00:52:46,640
among his people.
He was sent to mission schools,

658
00:52:46,920 --> 00:52:52,400
then to university and finally
to Johannesburg, where he

659
00:52:52,400 --> 00:52:55,760
trained as a lawyer.
He and his colleague Oliver

660
00:52:55,760 --> 00:53:00,920
Tambo opened the first black law
practice in the country in a

661
00:53:00,920 --> 00:53:05,640
small office where clients lined
up out into the street.

662
00:53:06,080 --> 00:53:10,040
For years, Mandela had been one
of the public faces of

663
00:53:10,040 --> 00:53:14,840
nonviolent resistance.
He believed, like many of his

664
00:53:14,840 --> 00:53:19,440
colleagues, that peaceful
protests sustained over time

665
00:53:19,960 --> 00:53:24,480
could shame and pressure even a
hostile government into change.

666
00:53:25,240 --> 00:53:30,520
Sharpville eroded that hope.
After the ANC was banned,

667
00:53:31,040 --> 00:53:35,600
Mandela and a small group of
leaders made one of the most

668
00:53:35,600 --> 00:53:38,480
difficult decisions of their
lives.

669
00:53:39,440 --> 00:53:45,480
They concluded that a strictly
nonviolent approach was no

670
00:53:45,480 --> 00:53:50,440
longer enough.
In 1961, they founded a small

671
00:53:50,440 --> 00:53:56,960
armed wing called Umconto we
Siswe, which means Spear of the

672
00:53:56,960 --> 00:54:00,520
Nation.
Its first acts were carefully

673
00:54:00,520 --> 00:54:03,080
limited.
They were aimed at

674
00:54:03,080 --> 00:54:07,160
infrastructure, at power lines
and government buildings, with

675
00:54:07,160 --> 00:54:10,160
strict orders to avoid loss of
life.

676
00:54:11,000 --> 00:54:14,800
The hope was to demonstrate that
the system could be made

677
00:54:14,800 --> 00:54:19,520
unworkable without becoming a
war against ordinary people.

678
00:54:19,840 --> 00:54:23,200
Mandela went underground.
He grew a beard.

679
00:54:23,440 --> 00:54:26,720
He moved between safe houses for
a time.

680
00:54:26,920 --> 00:54:32,240
He travelled abroad, training
briefly in Algeria and Ethiopia.

681
00:54:32,880 --> 00:54:37,520
The press began to call him the
Black Pimpernel, A teasing

682
00:54:37,520 --> 00:54:40,600
nickname for a man the police
could not seem to catch.

683
00:54:41,320 --> 00:54:45,920
Then in August of 1962,
returning from a meeting near

684
00:54:45,920 --> 00:54:49,280
Durban, he was stopped at a
roadblock.

685
00:54:50,120 --> 00:54:54,080
Some accounts say a foreign
intelligence service had tipped

686
00:54:54,080 --> 00:54:58,080
off the police.
Others suggest a more local

687
00:54:58,080 --> 00:55:01,560
betrayal.
Either way, the long evasion

688
00:55:01,560 --> 00:55:05,240
ended.
He was tried, convicted of

689
00:55:05,240 --> 00:55:09,800
inciting workers to strike and
of leaving the country without a

690
00:55:09,800 --> 00:55:13,680
passport, and sentenced to five
years in prison.

691
00:55:14,440 --> 00:55:18,320
It might have ended there, but
while he was serving that

692
00:55:18,320 --> 00:55:23,000
sentence, the police raided a
farm in Rivonia, north of

693
00:55:23,000 --> 00:55:28,040
Johannesburg, and discovered
documents linking Mandela and

694
00:55:28,040 --> 00:55:34,600
other ANC leaders directly to
Umkonto Wee Sizwe.

695
00:55:35,240 --> 00:55:39,800
A new trial was opened.
The charge this time was

696
00:55:39,800 --> 00:55:44,480
sabotage, which under South
African law could carry the

697
00:55:44,480 --> 00:55:51,840
death penalty. 11 men, including
Mandela, stood accused.

698
00:55:52,640 --> 00:55:58,720
The eyes of the world turned
slowly toward a courtroom in

699
00:55:58,720 --> 00:56:02,240
Pretoria.
Mandela faced a choice any

700
00:56:02,240 --> 00:56:05,040
defendant in such a position
must face.

701
00:56:05,400 --> 00:56:08,600
He could plead.
He could deny.

702
00:56:09,040 --> 00:56:13,640
He could try to minimize his
role and hope for leniency.

703
00:56:14,120 --> 00:56:18,480
Or he could do something else.
He could refuse to defend

704
00:56:18,480 --> 00:56:23,760
himself in the ordinary sense
and instead used the moment to

705
00:56:23,760 --> 00:56:29,720
speak past the judges, past the
prosecution, past the apartheid

706
00:56:29,720 --> 00:56:34,520
government itself, to a wider
audience that did not yet know

707
00:56:34,520 --> 00:56:38,120
it was listening.
He chose the second path.

708
00:56:38,960 --> 00:56:42,520
He would make an opening
statement from the dock rather

709
00:56:42,520 --> 00:56:45,560
than testify under cross
examination.

710
00:56:46,680 --> 00:56:51,600
He would not be questioned.
He would rise and speak and let

711
00:56:51,600 --> 00:56:54,880
his words stand as the heart of
the defence.

712
00:56:55,240 --> 00:57:01,000
On the morning of April 20th,
1964, in the Palace of Justice

713
00:57:01,000 --> 00:57:06,200
in Pretoria, Mandela rose in the
dock and began to read.

714
00:57:06,960 --> 00:57:10,960
He had worked on the speech with
his colleagues, drawing on his

715
00:57:10,960 --> 00:57:17,640
own life, the history of the ANC
and a careful argument about why

716
00:57:17,680 --> 00:57:22,280
a movement of patient men had
finally taken up arms.

717
00:57:23,200 --> 00:57:28,240
He spoke for nearly three hours.
The courtroom was full.

718
00:57:29,240 --> 00:57:33,760
His mother sat in the gallery.
Reporters from around the world

719
00:57:33,760 --> 00:57:38,840
filled the press benches.
He spoke first about himself,

720
00:57:39,440 --> 00:57:44,080
about growing up in a rural
homestead, listening to elders

721
00:57:44,080 --> 00:57:49,200
tell stories of how the country
had once been before colonial

722
00:57:49,200 --> 00:57:54,560
conquest, about becoming a
lawyer, and about the daily

723
00:57:54,560 --> 00:58:00,520
indignities lawyers of his color
encountered in courts where they

724
00:58:00,520 --> 00:58:05,200
were officially professionals
but unofficially second class

725
00:58:05,200 --> 00:58:08,160
men.
He spoke about the founding of

726
00:58:08,600 --> 00:58:14,200
Umconto Y Siswe.
He explained, with the calm of

727
00:58:14,200 --> 00:58:18,720
someone who has nothing left to
hide, that he had chosen

728
00:58:18,720 --> 00:58:23,920
sabotage carefully with strict
instructions to avoid loss of

729
00:58:23,920 --> 00:58:27,840
life because nothing else had
worked.

730
00:58:28,320 --> 00:58:32,120
He did not deny the charges, he
explained them.

731
00:58:32,480 --> 00:58:37,600
He addressed the suggestion that
the ANC was simply a front for

732
00:58:37,600 --> 00:58:41,560
foreign communism.
He spoke about why some of its

733
00:58:41,560 --> 00:58:46,520
members had accepted help from
the Communist Party in a country

734
00:58:46,720 --> 00:58:51,800
where almost no one else would
help, but insisted that the AN

735
00:58:51,800 --> 00:58:57,680
CS vision was its own, rooted in
African history and African

736
00:58:57,680 --> 00:59:02,960
aspirations.
He spoke of the dignity of work,

737
00:59:03,520 --> 00:59:07,360
of the desire of black S
Africans to live as full

738
00:59:07,360 --> 00:59:12,440
citizens, to walk the streets
without a pass, to send their

739
00:59:12,440 --> 00:59:15,840
children to schools that
prepared them for a real future,

740
00:59:16,000 --> 00:59:19,440
to love and marry whom they
wished to vote.

741
00:59:19,760 --> 00:59:24,600
And then near the very end,
after nearly three hours of

742
00:59:24,960 --> 00:59:31,120
careful, patient explanation, he
set aside the prepared text.

743
00:59:32,120 --> 00:59:37,640
He looked up from his pages and
he spoke directly to the judge.

744
00:59:38,000 --> 00:59:43,160
He said that during his lifetime
he had dedicated himself to the

745
00:59:43,160 --> 00:59:47,360
struggle of the African people,
that he had fought against white

746
00:59:47,360 --> 00:59:52,320
domination and against black
domination, that he had

747
00:59:52,320 --> 00:59:58,360
cherished the ideal of a
democratic and free society in

748
00:59:58,360 --> 01:00:02,880
which all persons would live
together in harmony with equal

749
01:00:02,880 --> 01:00:06,600
opportunities.
He said it was an ideal he hoped

750
01:00:06,600 --> 01:00:11,720
to live for and to achieve.
And then, looking the judge in

751
01:00:11,720 --> 01:00:16,560
the eye, he added the words that
would echo for the rest of the

752
01:00:16,560 --> 01:00:21,960
century if need be.
It was an ideal for which he was

753
01:00:21,960 --> 01:00:25,560
prepared to die.
The court room was silent.

754
01:00:26,040 --> 01:00:30,920
The judge, a man named Quartus
de Witt, did not speak

755
01:00:30,920 --> 01:00:33,760
immediately.
He gathered his papers.

756
01:00:34,080 --> 01:00:38,000
The proceedings continued in
their measured way.

757
01:00:39,120 --> 01:00:42,000
The verdict and sentencing came
in June.

758
01:00:42,480 --> 01:00:47,160
Mandela and seven of his Co
accused were convicted.

759
01:00:47,680 --> 01:00:54,280
The expected sentence was death.
It did not come, whether because

760
01:00:54,280 --> 01:00:59,240
of international pressure or
unease within the South African

761
01:00:59,240 --> 01:01:03,680
legal community or some
calculation, we will never know.

762
01:01:04,240 --> 01:01:08,440
The judge sentenced them to life
imprisonment instead.

763
01:01:09,200 --> 01:01:17,280
Mandela was 45 years old.
He would serve 27 years. 27

764
01:01:17,280 --> 01:01:23,440
years is a long time, long
enough for children to be born

765
01:01:23,440 --> 01:01:29,920
and grow up, long enough for a
country to harden and slowly,

766
01:01:29,920 --> 01:01:35,120
slowly, to soften again.
Long enough for the man who had

767
01:01:35,120 --> 01:01:39,680
spoken in that courtroom to
become, in the eyes of the

768
01:01:39,680 --> 01:01:45,640
world, a kind of patient
absence, a name on lists of

769
01:01:45,640 --> 01:01:51,480
political prisoners, a face on
banners at protests in distant

770
01:01:51,480 --> 01:01:54,680
cities.
A myth, almost.

771
01:01:54,920 --> 01:01:58,760
While the man himself broke
rocks in a quarry on Robben

772
01:01:58,800 --> 01:02:02,000
Island and watched the years
pass.

773
01:02:02,320 --> 01:02:05,960
He was finally released in
February of 1990.

774
01:02:06,560 --> 01:02:10,640
He was 71 years old.
The country he walked back into

775
01:02:11,000 --> 01:02:16,520
was not yet free, but its long
unfreezing had begun.

776
01:02:17,480 --> 01:02:22,480
Four years after that, in 1994,
in the first election in which

777
01:02:22,480 --> 01:02:26,880
all S Africans of all colors
could vote, he was elected

778
01:02:26,880 --> 01:02:30,880
president of the country that
had once tried to put him to

779
01:02:30,880 --> 01:02:34,840
death.
The ideal he had spoken of from

780
01:02:34,840 --> 01:02:39,320
the dock, the democratic and
free society for which he had

781
01:02:39,320 --> 01:02:44,080
been prepared to die, had
finally become possible to live

782
01:02:44,080 --> 01:02:48,480
for after all.
His Rivonious speech is now

783
01:02:48,480 --> 01:02:53,000
considered one of the great
political speeches of the 20th

784
01:02:53,000 --> 01:02:56,640
century.
It is taught in classrooms, it

785
01:02:56,640 --> 01:03:00,880
is studied by lawyers, by
activists, by historians.

786
01:03:01,640 --> 01:03:06,240
But its real power, the deeper
reason it still travels, is

787
01:03:06,240 --> 01:03:10,680
harder to teach.
It lies in the fact that he

788
01:03:10,680 --> 01:03:15,160
meant every word and proved it
by waiting.

789
01:03:15,560 --> 01:03:20,360
He waited in a small cell on a
windswept island.

790
01:03:21,160 --> 01:03:25,680
He waited through the deaths of
friends, the birthdays of

791
01:03:25,680 --> 01:03:30,720
children he could not hold, the
slow erosion of his own youth.

792
01:03:31,640 --> 01:03:35,600
He waited while world leaders
argued about whether to support

793
01:03:35,600 --> 01:03:39,000
him.
He waited while the country he

794
01:03:39,000 --> 01:03:45,400
loved nearly tore itself apart.
And when he finally walked out

795
01:03:45,400 --> 01:03:49,880
of prison, he did not retreat
into bitterness.

796
01:03:50,800 --> 01:03:56,520
He kept the same patience in the
same direction, until the ideal

797
01:03:56,520 --> 01:04:00,000
he had named was no longer only
a hope.

798
01:04:00,360 --> 01:04:03,840
Lincoln had trusted the silence
around his words.

799
01:04:04,440 --> 01:04:09,840
Joseph had compressed an ending
into a single sentence.

800
01:04:10,440 --> 01:04:15,840
Mandela trusted time.
He spoke for three hours and

801
01:04:15,840 --> 01:04:21,400
then waited for almost 3 decades
and the words held.

802
01:04:21,760 --> 01:04:26,160
Now gently, our journey shifts
again.

803
01:04:27,440 --> 01:04:31,840
The next voice we will visit
will surprise us.

804
01:04:32,960 --> 01:04:38,520
We will leave Pretoria and the
long shadow of apartheid and the

805
01:04:38,520 --> 01:04:41,720
court rooms and prisons that
shaped a continent.

806
01:04:42,760 --> 01:04:47,160
We will arrive somewhere much
smaller and much quieter.

807
01:04:47,520 --> 01:04:54,280
A committee room in Washington,
a hot afternoon in May of 1969.

808
01:04:55,120 --> 01:04:59,360
A senator who has been in a
cutting mood all day looking at

809
01:04:59,360 --> 01:05:05,680
his watch, and a slim, slightly
nervous man in a cardigan who

810
01:05:05,680 --> 01:05:09,680
has been given 6 minutes to
speak about something most

811
01:05:09,680 --> 01:05:13,360
people in the room consider
unimportant.

812
01:05:13,800 --> 01:05:16,640
He will not speak about freedom
or empire.

813
01:05:17,000 --> 01:05:20,600
He will not face execution or
imprisonment.

814
01:05:21,120 --> 01:05:27,360
He will speak plainly about how
children feel, and the room,

815
01:05:27,640 --> 01:05:32,880
against its own expectations,
will go very quiet.

816
01:05:33,280 --> 01:05:38,840
Fred Rogers was an unlikely
figure to find at the center of

817
01:05:38,840 --> 01:05:42,800
a political fight.
He was a soft spoken

818
01:05:42,800 --> 01:05:47,200
Presbyterian minister who had
wandered into children's

819
01:05:47,200 --> 01:05:53,040
television almost by accident
after watching the early days of

820
01:05:53,040 --> 01:05:58,120
the medium with quiet alarm.
Most of what he saw on

821
01:05:58,120 --> 01:06:03,480
television aimed at children in
the late 1950s and early 1960s

822
01:06:03,840 --> 01:06:08,600
struck him as loud, frantic and
faintly cruel.

823
01:06:09,160 --> 01:06:14,560
Pies in faces, people falling
over, adults shouting at one

824
01:06:14,560 --> 01:06:18,520
another for laughs.
He believed children deserved

825
01:06:18,520 --> 01:06:22,040
something gentler, so he set out
to make it.

826
01:06:22,440 --> 01:06:28,200
By 1969, his program, Mr.
Roger's Neighborhood, had been

827
01:06:28,200 --> 01:06:30,800
on public television for two
years.

828
01:06:31,280 --> 01:06:35,240
He spoke directly into the
camera, as though to one child

829
01:06:35,240 --> 01:06:39,280
at a time.
He took off his outdoor coat and

830
01:06:39,280 --> 01:06:43,200
put on a cardigan.
He changed his shoes for

831
01:06:43,200 --> 01:06:46,680
sneakers.
He sang quiet songs about

832
01:06:46,680 --> 01:06:51,520
feelings, about anger, about
being scared, about sad days.

833
01:06:52,440 --> 01:06:57,120
He visited factories and museums
in slow, calm segments.

834
01:06:57,880 --> 01:07:01,840
He used puppets to talk about
the things children worried

835
01:07:01,840 --> 01:07:07,080
about but rarely had words for.
The show looked nothing like the

836
01:07:07,080 --> 01:07:10,920
rest of television.
Some critics found it dull.

837
01:07:11,440 --> 01:07:15,640
Others, watching with their
children, found themselves

838
01:07:15,800 --> 01:07:20,920
quietly grateful.
But public television itself was

839
01:07:20,960 --> 01:07:25,600
new and fragile.
It was funded partly by the

840
01:07:25,600 --> 01:07:29,680
federal government, and that
funding was now under threat.

841
01:07:30,720 --> 01:07:35,120
President Nixon, hoping to
redirect federal money toward

842
01:07:35,120 --> 01:07:39,600
other priorities, had proposed
cutting the budget for public

843
01:07:39,600 --> 01:07:43,800
broadcasting in half, from $20
million to 10.

844
01:07:44,560 --> 01:07:49,440
The proposal had to go before a
Senate subcommittee where its

845
01:07:49,440 --> 01:07:52,600
fate would be decided.
The chairman of that

846
01:07:52,600 --> 01:07:57,640
subcommittee was Senator John
Pastore, a Democrat from Rhode

847
01:07:57,640 --> 01:08:01,920
Island.
Pastore was not a cruel man, but

848
01:08:01,920 --> 01:08:07,160
he was a no nonsense 1.
He was famously skeptical of

849
01:08:07,160 --> 01:08:10,920
what he considered soft please
for funding.

850
01:08:11,880 --> 01:08:15,200
He had been listening to
testimony for hours by the time

851
01:08:15,200 --> 01:08:17,399
Fred Roger's name appeared on
the schedule.

852
01:08:17,920 --> 01:08:21,080
The room was warm.
The papers were stacked.

853
01:08:21,680 --> 01:08:23,920
Pastore wanted things to move
along.

854
01:08:24,279 --> 01:08:29,080
When Rogers entered the room, he
carried no slick presentation.

855
01:08:29,720 --> 01:08:35,560
He had no film clips to show.
He had a folder with a few pages

856
01:08:35,560 --> 01:08:40,479
of typed notes.
He was slim, slightly nervous

857
01:08:40,840 --> 01:08:46,439
and dressed in a quiet suit.
He sat down at the witness table

858
01:08:46,640 --> 01:08:51,680
and waited for his turn.
Pastore looked at him with mild

859
01:08:51,680 --> 01:08:55,760
impatience.
He had agreed to give Rogers 6

860
01:08:55,760 --> 01:08:59,399
minutes.
He gestured for him to begin.

861
01:08:59,800 --> 01:09:03,800
What happened next has been
preserved on film.

862
01:09:04,840 --> 01:09:09,279
The exchange has been viewed
many millions of times since.

863
01:09:10,040 --> 01:09:15,240
But on that May afternoon in
1969, no one in the room knew

864
01:09:15,240 --> 01:09:18,080
they were about to witness
anything memorable.

865
01:09:18,920 --> 01:09:23,560
They expected a routine appeal
for federal money on behalf of a

866
01:09:23,560 --> 01:09:28,120
children's show that, frankly,
most of the senators had never

867
01:09:28,120 --> 01:09:30,680
seen.
Rogers began to speak.

868
01:09:31,080 --> 01:09:37,760
His voice was soft, almost too
soft for a Senate hearing room.

869
01:09:38,840 --> 01:09:42,080
The microphone strained slightly
to catch him.

870
01:09:42,520 --> 01:09:45,160
He did not begin with
statistics.

871
01:09:45,560 --> 01:09:49,000
He did not begin with the
structure of public broadcasting

872
01:09:49,319 --> 01:09:54,600
or the merits of educational
programming or the threat of

873
01:09:54,600 --> 01:10:00,200
cutting half the budget.
He began somewhere quieter.

874
01:10:00,760 --> 01:10:04,080
He thanked the senator.
He said he wanted to share what

875
01:10:04,080 --> 01:10:08,240
his program tried to do.
He spoke about feelings.

876
01:10:08,440 --> 01:10:12,080
He said that children grow up
with feelings they do not yet

877
01:10:12,080 --> 01:10:18,120
have words for anger, sadness,
fear, frustration.

878
01:10:19,160 --> 01:10:23,920
He said his program tried to
give those feelings names and to

879
01:10:23,920 --> 01:10:28,240
help children understand that
the feelings themselves were not

880
01:10:28,320 --> 01:10:31,880
bad.
That a child who could name a

881
01:10:31,880 --> 01:10:37,400
feeling and learn that others
felt it too was a child a little

882
01:10:37,400 --> 01:10:41,120
less alone.
Pastora, who had been ready to

883
01:10:41,120 --> 01:10:44,440
keep things moving, did not
interrupt.

884
01:10:44,880 --> 01:10:48,480
He listened.
Rogers explained that the show

885
01:10:48,480 --> 01:10:52,440
did not try to entertain
children with constant motion or

886
01:10:52,440 --> 01:10:56,760
noise.
It tried instead to slow down

887
01:10:56,760 --> 01:11:01,000
with them, to meet them at their
own pace.

888
01:11:01,720 --> 01:11:05,600
He talked about the difference
between, on the one hand,

889
01:11:06,040 --> 01:11:11,400
programming that bombarded young
minds with stimulation and, on

890
01:11:11,400 --> 01:11:16,360
the other, programming that
respected their inner lives.

891
01:11:16,680 --> 01:11:22,160
Then he did something unusual.
He began to recite from memory

892
01:11:22,600 --> 01:11:26,440
the lyrics to a song he had
written for the program.

893
01:11:27,320 --> 01:11:32,400
The song was about anger, about
what to do when you feel like

894
01:11:32,400 --> 01:11:37,440
punching something or yelling at
someone, about finding ways to

895
01:11:37,440 --> 01:11:41,320
manage strong feelings without
hurting others or yourself.

896
01:11:41,640 --> 01:11:47,480
He recited the words slowly,
plainly, as if he were singing

897
01:11:47,480 --> 01:11:50,560
them to a single child sitting
across from him.

898
01:11:51,800 --> 01:11:56,400
The hearing room, which had been
busy with shuffled papers and

899
01:11:56,400 --> 01:12:00,480
quiet side conversations, grew
very still.

900
01:12:00,760 --> 01:12:03,880
When he finished, there was a
pause.

901
01:12:04,320 --> 01:12:09,120
Pastore, who had spent the day
being skeptical, looked at the

902
01:12:09,120 --> 01:12:13,840
man across from him.
The senator was visibly moved.

903
01:12:14,120 --> 01:12:17,520
He said quietly that he had
goosebumps.

904
01:12:18,600 --> 01:12:23,400
And then, almost without
thinking, he added the line that

905
01:12:23,400 --> 01:12:29,080
has been remembered ever since.
I think it's wonderful, he said.

906
01:12:29,600 --> 01:12:33,040
Looks like you just earned the
$20 million.

907
01:12:33,440 --> 01:12:36,640
The funding was saved.
What had happened?

908
01:12:37,160 --> 01:12:40,760
Rogers had not argued.
He had not negotiated.

909
01:12:41,040 --> 01:12:44,800
He had not flattered the senator
or appealed to his sense of

910
01:12:44,800 --> 01:12:48,360
duty.
He had simply described with

911
01:12:48,480 --> 01:12:52,520
absolute sincerity what his work
was for.

912
01:12:53,280 --> 01:12:57,560
He had spoken in a voice that
did not raise itself.

913
01:12:58,400 --> 01:13:02,960
He had treated a tired,
skeptical politician the same

914
01:13:02,960 --> 01:13:06,840
way he treated a four year old
at home, in front of the

915
01:13:06,840 --> 01:13:12,840
television, as someone worth
speaking to gently, as someone

916
01:13:12,840 --> 01:13:18,240
whose feelings mattered.
The senator in that moment was

917
01:13:18,240 --> 01:13:22,160
not a senator.
He was a person, and Rogers had

918
01:13:22,160 --> 01:13:25,760
quietly addressed the person
rather than the role.

919
01:13:26,160 --> 01:13:30,280
There is a lesson here that
returns us to a thread we have

920
01:13:30,280 --> 01:13:35,200
been following all night.
Rogers did not say more than the

921
01:13:35,200 --> 01:13:41,680
moment required. 6 minutes, a
few quiet sentences, a song he

922
01:13:41,680 --> 01:13:45,680
could have skipped.
He trusted the smallness of his

923
01:13:45,680 --> 01:13:51,280
words to carry their weight.
And in that committee room, in

924
01:13:51,280 --> 01:13:56,640
the hot late afternoon, the
smallness was enough.

925
01:13:57,040 --> 01:14:01,520
We have moved tonight from a
battlefield to a Meadow, from a

926
01:14:01,520 --> 01:14:06,200
Meadow to a courtroom, from a
courtroom to a small hearing

927
01:14:06,200 --> 01:14:10,480
room with a tired senator and a
man in a quiet suit.

928
01:14:11,400 --> 01:14:15,600
Each setting has grown smaller
and more intimate.

929
01:14:16,400 --> 01:14:22,160
Each speech has whispered in its
own way the same secret that

930
01:14:22,160 --> 01:14:26,240
power and meaning do not belong
to volume.

931
01:14:26,560 --> 01:14:30,880
Now for our final stop.
The journey reverses itself.

932
01:14:31,560 --> 01:14:35,520
We will leave the rooms of human
affairs entirely.

933
01:14:36,160 --> 01:14:39,840
We will rise above the
buildings, above the cities,

934
01:14:40,040 --> 01:14:43,240
above the weather, above the
atmosphere itself.

935
01:14:44,000 --> 01:14:49,480
We will travel outward, past the
Moon, past the inner planets,

936
01:14:50,040 --> 01:14:57,400
past Mars and the asteroid belt,
past Jupiter, past Saturn, until

937
01:14:57,400 --> 01:15:01,000
we are very far away from
anything that has ever held a

938
01:15:01,000 --> 01:15:06,520
microphone or argued in a
parliament or sentenced a man to

939
01:15:06,520 --> 01:15:09,280
prison.
We will arrive at the edge of

940
01:15:09,280 --> 01:15:14,520
the solar system, where a small
spacecraft built by human hands

941
01:15:14,520 --> 01:15:19,640
is sailing into the dark.
The spacecraft is called Voyager

942
01:15:19,640 --> 01:15:24,400
1.
It was launched in 1977, the

943
01:15:24,400 --> 01:15:29,880
same year that Chief Joseph
Surrender Meadow lay quiet under

944
01:15:29,880 --> 01:15:33,440
summer grass.
Nearly a century after the fact,

945
01:15:34,480 --> 01:15:39,120
Voyager carried instruments to
study the outer planets and a

946
01:15:39,120 --> 01:15:43,880
small gold plated record bearing
greetings from Earth and a

947
01:15:43,880 --> 01:15:47,640
camera.
For more than a decade, it sent

948
01:15:47,640 --> 01:15:51,840
back astonishing images.
It photographed Jupiter's

949
01:15:51,840 --> 01:15:55,240
storms.
It revealed the rings and moons

950
01:15:55,240 --> 01:15:59,520
of Saturn.
It became, by the late 1980's,

951
01:16:00,000 --> 01:16:04,800
the most distant human made
object in the universe.

952
01:16:05,240 --> 01:16:11,480
In 1990, as Voyager continued
its long outward drift, an

953
01:16:11,480 --> 01:16:15,920
astronomer named Carl Sagan made
an unusual request.

954
01:16:16,520 --> 01:16:20,160
He suggested that the
spacecraft, before its camera

955
01:16:20,160 --> 01:16:25,440
was shut down to save power, be
turned around not toward another

956
01:16:25,440 --> 01:16:31,560
planet, not toward a star, but
back, back across the immense

957
01:16:31,560 --> 01:16:36,680
distance it had travelled, back
toward the small blue world from

958
01:16:36,680 --> 01:16:41,000
which it had begun.
The engineers were initially

959
01:16:41,000 --> 01:16:45,680
uncertain the maneuver would
offer almost no scientific

960
01:16:45,680 --> 01:16:48,480
value.
The Earth would appear in any

961
01:16:48,480 --> 01:16:55,680
such photograph not as a planet
but as a speck, a grain less

962
01:16:55,680 --> 01:17:00,760
than a pixel.
That, Sagan said, was precisely

963
01:17:00,760 --> 01:17:05,960
the point the command was sent.
Voyager turned.

964
01:17:06,400 --> 01:17:11,160
Its camera looked back across
3.7 billion miles of empty

965
01:17:11,160 --> 01:17:17,880
space, and then, on Valentine's
Day in 1990, it took the

966
01:17:17,880 --> 01:17:21,160
picture.
The image, when it returned to

967
01:17:21,160 --> 01:17:27,480
Earth, showed mostly blackness.
Streaks of scattered sunlight

968
01:17:27,480 --> 01:17:32,680
ran across the frame, artifacts
of the camera looking too close

969
01:17:32,680 --> 01:17:36,200
to the sun.
And inside one of those bright

970
01:17:36,200 --> 01:17:42,960
bands, almost invisible at
first, was a single tiny dot, a

971
01:17:42,960 --> 01:17:46,680
pale blue point of light.
That was home.

972
01:17:46,960 --> 01:17:49,280
That was every continent and
ocean.

973
01:17:49,720 --> 01:17:53,320
That was every city, every
village, every farm.

974
01:17:53,800 --> 01:17:58,480
That was every human being who
had ever lived, every emperor

975
01:17:58,840 --> 01:18:03,880
and every slave, every
battlefield, every cradle, every

976
01:18:03,880 --> 01:18:10,320
cathedral, every act of cruelty
and every act of kindness, all

977
01:18:10,320 --> 01:18:15,960
of it contained in a fraction of
a single pixel of light.

978
01:18:16,240 --> 01:18:21,640
Sagan looked at the image, and
then, in his soft and patient

979
01:18:21,640 --> 01:18:27,280
voice, he began to speak.
Sagan's reflection on the pale

980
01:18:27,280 --> 01:18:33,600
blue dot was not delivered as a
speech in the ordinary sense.

981
01:18:33,920 --> 01:18:39,000
It was written.
He spoke it later, in his own

982
01:18:39,000 --> 01:18:45,040
voice as narration.
There was no podium, no audience

983
01:18:45,040 --> 01:18:48,680
clapping, no microphone in a
Senate chamber.

984
01:18:49,320 --> 01:18:54,840
There was only the photograph
and his patient writer's voice,

985
01:18:55,320 --> 01:18:59,560
drawing the listener gently
toward something difficult to

986
01:18:59,560 --> 01:19:04,440
feel any other way.
He invited his readers to look

987
01:19:04,440 --> 01:19:09,960
again at that small dot.
He said that everyone they had

988
01:19:09,960 --> 01:19:16,480
ever loved, everyone they had
ever heard of, every human being

989
01:19:16,480 --> 01:19:23,680
who had ever existed, had lived
out their lives there on a mote

990
01:19:23,720 --> 01:19:32,240
of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
He spoke of all the rivers of

991
01:19:32,240 --> 01:19:38,120
blood that had been spilled by
generals and emperors so that in

992
01:19:38,120 --> 01:19:44,360
glory and triumph they could
become the momentary masters of

993
01:19:44,360 --> 01:19:49,120
a fraction of a dot.
He spoke of the

994
01:19:49,120 --> 01:19:54,080
misunderstandings between groups
of people who, on this tiny

995
01:19:54,080 --> 01:19:59,520
stage, were so close to one
another and yet treated each

996
01:19:59,520 --> 01:20:05,640
other as if they were enemies in
some vast separate world.

997
01:20:06,760 --> 01:20:13,240
He spoke of how often human
beings had forgotten how small

998
01:20:13,240 --> 01:20:18,160
the stage really was.
And then, in the same gentle

999
01:20:18,160 --> 01:20:21,320
voice, he turned the lens the
other way.

1000
01:20:22,120 --> 01:20:25,800
He said the image also showed
something else.

1001
01:20:26,200 --> 01:20:33,080
It showed how rare and precious
that pale blue dot is, because,

1002
01:20:33,280 --> 01:20:39,720
so far as anyone has been able
to discover, it is the only home

1003
01:20:39,720 --> 01:20:44,640
any of us has ever known.
There is no evidence yet, he

1004
01:20:44,640 --> 01:20:50,480
said, that help will come from
elsewhere to save us from

1005
01:20:50,480 --> 01:20:54,560
ourselves.
It was not a despairing speech.

1006
01:20:54,920 --> 01:20:58,120
It was not, in the end, even
sad.

1007
01:20:58,560 --> 01:21:04,240
It was simply true, and true in
a way that could only be felt

1008
01:21:04,240 --> 01:21:09,400
from very far away.
Sagan understood that distance

1009
01:21:09,400 --> 01:21:13,720
can be a teacher.
From up close, every quarrel

1010
01:21:13,720 --> 01:21:19,600
feels enormous, every grievance
is real, every loss is the size

1011
01:21:19,600 --> 01:21:24,080
of 1's own life, which is the
only life one has.

1012
01:21:24,920 --> 01:21:30,120
But from far away, the same
quarrels and griefs become

1013
01:21:30,160 --> 01:21:36,480
impossibly small, not
unimportant, just small, held

1014
01:21:36,480 --> 01:21:40,280
inside something larger and more
patient.

1015
01:21:40,760 --> 01:21:46,960
To stand on the pale blue dot is
to feel one's own life as urgent

1016
01:21:46,960 --> 01:21:51,880
and meaningful.
To see the pale blue dot from

1017
01:21:51,880 --> 01:21:58,760
3.7 billion miles is to feel
something different, A

1018
01:21:59,040 --> 01:22:05,560
tenderness, A protectiveness, a
recognition that all of us are

1019
01:22:05,560 --> 01:22:10,000
passengers on the same fragile
vessel, travelling together

1020
01:22:10,000 --> 01:22:15,320
through an enormous quietness,
and that whatever differences

1021
01:22:15,320 --> 01:22:22,640
seem to divide us are not nearly
as deep as the simple fact of

1022
01:22:22,640 --> 01:22:28,200
sharing a single fragile world.
Lincoln had spoken over a

1023
01:22:28,200 --> 01:22:32,240
battlefield, asking what the
dead had given the living.

1024
01:22:33,040 --> 01:22:38,720
Joseph had spoken in a snowy
Meadow, marking the end of a way

1025
01:22:38,720 --> 01:22:42,640
of life.
Mandela had spoken in a

1026
01:22:42,640 --> 01:22:47,720
courtroom, naming an ideal he
was prepared to die for.

1027
01:22:48,680 --> 01:22:54,520
Rogers had spoken in a hearing
room, describing how children

1028
01:22:54,520 --> 01:22:58,920
feel.
Sagan, alone among them, did not

1029
01:22:58,920 --> 01:23:03,440
need a room at all.
His speech was delivered to the

1030
01:23:03,440 --> 01:23:09,960
universe itself, on behalf of
every person who had ever lived

1031
01:23:09,960 --> 01:23:12,920
on.
A small blue speck of light.

1032
01:23:13,400 --> 01:23:18,280
And the speck listened, and so
gently.

1033
01:23:18,800 --> 01:23:24,320
Our journey is ending.
We began with a thought that

1034
01:23:24,320 --> 01:23:30,680
most words pass without record,
that most voices vanish into the

1035
01:23:30,680 --> 01:23:36,200
air that carried them, but that
now and then a voice finds the

1036
01:23:36,200 --> 01:23:41,920
right silence, and what it says
there lasts.

1037
01:23:42,360 --> 01:23:46,200
We have visited five such voices
to night.

1038
01:23:46,800 --> 01:23:50,400
They could not have been more
different from one another.

1039
01:23:51,000 --> 01:23:56,720
A president, a chief, a
prisoner, a children's host, an

1040
01:23:56,720 --> 01:24:02,600
astronomer, a cemetery, a
Meadow, a courtroom, a hearing

1041
01:24:02,600 --> 01:24:07,520
room, a photograph from the edge
of the solar system.

1042
01:24:07,960 --> 01:24:13,600
And yet, as we looked at them
more closely, the same quiet

1043
01:24:13,600 --> 01:24:17,160
truth came forward again and
again.

1044
01:24:18,000 --> 01:24:21,920
Power and meaning do not belong
to volume.

1045
01:24:22,480 --> 01:24:27,480
Speeches are not great because
they are loud or long.

1046
01:24:28,160 --> 01:24:32,640
They are great because they
arrive at the right moment and

1047
01:24:32,640 --> 01:24:38,920
trust the silence around them
and refuse to fill more space

1048
01:24:39,120 --> 01:24:43,280
than they need.
Lincoln spoke for two minutes

1049
01:24:43,680 --> 01:24:50,120
and let the graves do the rest.
Joseph spoke a single sentence

1050
01:24:50,520 --> 01:24:56,200
and ended an era.
Mandela spoke for three hours

1051
01:24:56,680 --> 01:25:00,560
and then let 27 years finish his
argument.

1052
01:25:01,080 --> 01:25:06,600
Rogers spoke for 6 minutes and
changed a senator's mind by

1053
01:25:06,600 --> 01:25:10,280
treating him like a child who
deserved to be heard.

1054
01:25:11,200 --> 01:25:17,040
Sagan spoke into the empty
distance, reminding us that all

1055
01:25:17,120 --> 01:25:23,120
our voices belong to a single
pale blue point of light.

1056
01:25:23,600 --> 01:25:30,320
Each of these voices was, in its
own way, an act of trust.

1057
01:25:31,400 --> 01:25:37,200
Trust that words spoken honestly
in the right place would be

1058
01:25:37,200 --> 01:25:42,240
carried.
Trust that listeners somewhere,

1059
01:25:42,240 --> 01:25:48,440
sometime, would hear them.
None of these speakers could be

1060
01:25:48,440 --> 01:25:53,920
sure of that when they spoke.
Lincoln thought his speech had

1061
01:25:53,920 --> 01:25:58,440
failed.
Joseph spoke, knowing his world

1062
01:25:58,440 --> 01:26:03,600
was ending.
Mandela spoke believing he might

1063
01:26:03,600 --> 01:26:09,320
be sentenced to death.
Rogers spoke into the impatience

1064
01:26:09,320 --> 01:26:14,600
of a tired senator.
Sagan spoke to a universe that,

1065
01:26:14,880 --> 01:26:20,360
so far as anyone knows, had no
listeners at all.

1066
01:26:20,680 --> 01:26:25,320
And yet the words held.
They are still holding now,

1067
01:26:25,760 --> 01:26:31,960
travelling quietly through us on
a small blue planet, late on an

1068
01:26:32,040 --> 01:26:36,320
ordinary evening.
Outside the room, the world

1069
01:26:36,320 --> 01:26:40,720
continues.
Cities turn their slow lights on

1070
01:26:40,720 --> 01:26:44,720
and off.
Snow falls somewhere, and

1071
01:26:44,720 --> 01:26:47,960
somewhere else the warm rain
begins.

1072
01:26:48,680 --> 01:26:54,320
Voices speak and are forgotten,
and a few will be remembered.

1073
01:26:55,200 --> 01:27:00,320
We do not know which ones.
The speakers themselves rarely

1074
01:27:00,320 --> 01:27:03,960
know.
They simply do their honest work

1075
01:27:04,520 --> 01:27:09,040
and trust the silence to carry
it to night.

1076
01:27:09,280 --> 01:27:12,760
Perhaps that is the gift to
keep.

1077
01:27:13,440 --> 01:27:18,880
Not the names, not the dates,
not the perfect sequence of

1078
01:27:18,960 --> 01:27:25,800
every speech we have visited.
Only the mood of it, the sense

1079
01:27:25,800 --> 01:27:33,000
that even small voices spoken
truly can travel further than

1080
01:27:33,000 --> 01:27:36,720
they imagine.
Let the cemetery rest.

1081
01:27:37,320 --> 01:27:41,760
Let the Meadow rest.
Let the courtroom rest.

1082
01:27:42,440 --> 01:27:49,600
Let the hearing room rest.
Let the spacecraft drift on into

1083
01:27:49,600 --> 01:27:55,720
the long dark with its faint
message still in its hold.

1084
01:27:56,200 --> 01:28:02,600
The world is full of noise, but
somewhere, always, of voices

1085
01:28:02,600 --> 01:28:07,640
finding the right silence and
quietly saying something that

1086
01:28:07,640 --> 01:28:11,720
will last.
The room is dim, the day is

1087
01:28:11,720 --> 01:28:17,040
done, the voices have spoken,
and now they rest.

1088
01:28:17,440 --> 01:28:22,560
And so gently, do we Good night.