Summary Overview

Senator Robert Byrd’s speeches before the Senate exhibited the oratorical skills of nineteenth-century statesmen, complete with flowery rhetoric and grand gestures. He recited poems; quoted historical figures, particularly the Roman statesman and orator Cicero; and frequently cited parables from history and classical fairy tales to make his point—his use of the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 fairy story is typical in this regard. “The Emperor Has No Clothes” Speech, one of the U.S. senator’s twenty-seven speeches on the war in Iraq given between October 2002 and April 2004, summarized his belief that Iraq posed no direct threat to the United States. The “emperor” George W. Bush, he believed, had promoted a war based on nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and no records that established that Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, was involved in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. He criticizes President Bush for trying to take power from the Senate and for attacking the civil liberties of Americans.

Defining Moment

Byrd was a former defense hawk who voted in favor of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in August 1964. This resolution broadened presidential power to wage war without a formal declaration. Byrd, however, became the Senate’s most outspoken critic of the 2003 Iraqi war. He believed that giving the president such broad authority to engage in war gave away power that belonged to the legislative branch of government. He insisted that Congress alone had the right to declare war under the U.S. Constitution and that presidential usurpation of that power, particularly under the administration of George W. Bush, disrupted the Constitution’s system of checks and balances among the judicial, legislative, and executive branches of government.

Author Biography

Robert C. Byrd was born Cornelius Calvin Sale, Jr., in North Carolina in 1917. Adopted and raised by his aunt and uncle, Byrd grew up in the coalfields of West Virginia, where his father worked as a teamster, farmer, and coal miner. The Byrd family was poor, and Robert Byrd frequently did his homework by the light of oil lamps because their home had no electricity. After Byrd graduated from high school in 1934, he worked as a gas station attendant and a produce boy. After taking welding classes, he helped build cargo ships during World War II.

In 1946 Byrd ran for the West Virginia House of Delegates and won. In 1950 he ran for a seat in the West Virginia Senate and won. Then, halfway through his Senate term, he ran for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives and was elected in 1952. In 1958, he won the first of nine consecutive terms in the U.S. Senate.

Byrd remained a traditionalist throughout his career. He always carried a copy of the U.S. Constitution in his pocket and often waved it on the Senate floor while he spoke. His strong defense of constitutional law resulted in his adamant opposition to proposed changes to the Constitution, such as line-item veto or balanced-budget amendments. Still, during his fifty years in the Senate, he became increasingly liberal, focusing on government spending for social programs that improved education and health care and voting for civil rights.

Byrd’s congressional career spanned numerous presidential administrations. On June 21, 2007, he became the first senator ever to cast eighteen thousand roll call votes in American history, and in November 2006 he was elected to an unprecedented ninth consecutive term in the U.S. Senate. Over the years, he served as majority leader, majority whip, minority leader, and president pro tempore of the Senate as well as on such key committees as the Senate Appropriations Committee, which he chaired. While still in office, Byrd died at the age of ninety-two, in June 2010.

Document Analysis

One of Byrd’s twenty-seven speeches on the Iraq War, referred to as “The Emperor Has No Clothes” Speech, summarized his belief that there was no direct or imminent threat from Iraq. Byrd used Hans Christian Andersen’s classic 1837 fairy tale to make his point. In the story, an emperor decks himself out in a suit of clothes thought to be visible only to those pure of heart and mind. All the townspeople exclaim over the beauty of the raiment as the emperor appears before them—except one child, who proclaims the truth of the emperor’s nakedness.

On October 17, 2003, Byrd gave his speech prior to the Senate’s vote on the Iraqi Supplemental Bill, an $87 billion presidential bill that would provide additional funding for the U.S. military in Iraq and for the reconstruction of the country. Continued military force, it was argued, would make Iraq more secure from outside terrorists groups and provide for the training of a new Iraqi military, and more funding was needed to rebuild needed public services such as electricity and water systems. Byrd pressed for improvements in the bill at least twelve times, calling for more accountability and congressional oversight of the money. Each time, President Bush garnered enough support to override Byrd’s amendments to the proposed legislation.

In this speech, the “emperor” is President Bush, who, according to Byrd, promoted a war on the basis of something that was not there. Before the war, Bush claimed the war was necessary because Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but no weapons of mass destruction were found during the months and years after the invasion. Bush also claimed that Iraqis were oppressed under Saddam Hussein’s regime and that American troops would be seen as liberators, yet, Byrd insists, American troops were not welcomed with open arms. Despite the belief that Hussein’s Iraq sponsored terrorism in America and was collecting materials from other countries to build nuclear weapons, Byrd says that no records were found to indicate that Hussein was involved in the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, and no evidence shows that he bought material to produce nuclear weapons from other nations. Bush told Americans that the conflict was over two months after the initial invasion while standing on the deck of an aircraft carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln. Dressed in his “new” clothes, a flight suit worn by U.S. military pilots, Bush gave a speech in front of a large banner that proclaimed “Mission Accomplished.” However, the mission was not over. The war dragged on, and, Byrd notes, more soldiers died after Bush declared the war over than during the invasion. Byrd claims that although the emperor knew nothing was there, he continued to insist Iraq was a threat to America. Since these threats, like the emperor’s clothes, could be seen only by those who were “pure of heart,” or patriotic, many Americans agreed with the “emperor.”

Byrd maintains that by stirring up fears of imminent danger and denouncing those who did not believe in the danger as unpatriotic, Bush persuaded Americans to believe in something that was not there. Byrd ends the speech by comparing Bush’s leadership to that of the Nazi Hermann Goering, the second man in Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, Germany’s Fascist and racist government during World War II. Goering believed that leaders determined policy in any society and could always sway people to follow their policy by telling them they were being attacked and then denouncing pacifists for their lack of patriotism. Goering’s belief led millions of innocent people to their deaths during the war. Byrd attracted widespread criticism for these remarks.

Essential Themes

In his “The Emperor Has No Clothes” speech, Senator Robert Byrd has a very clear message for the American people: “you are being deceived.” This deception is coming from the highest levels of the government of the United States. In particular, he attacks the Bush administrations misuse of patriotism to persuade Americans to support the war in Iraq. He argues that in his arrogance Bush created a war based on falsehoods and that he lied to the American people as well as to America’s allies throughout the world.

Many of Byrd’s criticisms of President Bush stemmed from his belief that Bush had little regard for the Constitution. He accuses Bush of trying to usurp the power of the Senate, particularly the power to declare war, and he insists that Bush abused the civil liberties of Americans as established in the Constitution through the creation and passage of laws such as the USA Patriot Act (October 26, 2001), a law that expanded the authority of U.S. law-enforcement agencies. Intended to provide agencies with widespread power to fight terrorism, the act authorized the search of telephone and e-mail communications and medical and financial records and redefined “terrorism” to include domestic terrorism.

Bibliography and Additional Reading