Reading David Pitt’s new book about John Kennedy and his gay friend, Lem Billings, made me nostalgic for the early 1960s. So I rented Advise and Consent, the 1962 movie based on Allen Drury’s blockbuster novel about the seamy underside of Washington politics.

The film, although dated, is still worth watching, if only for Charles Laughton’s spread-eagle performance as Seab Cooley, the senior senator from South Carolina.

Laughton was English, but he was also a consummate actor. With his shock of white hair, rumpled white suit, outrageous tie, honeysuckle drawl and foxy expression, he is so convincing as an old-time southern pol that he looks and sounds uncannily like Sam Ervin, the North Carolina senator who presided over the Watergate hearings over a decade later.

In the novel, Alan Drury says something about Seab Cooley’s rise to power that should be especially heartening to speechwriters. He says this:

It had begun, like so many careers in American politics, with a speech. The story is a familiar one in the annals of the Congress: there was a high school valedictory, and the hero had delivered it with extraordinary fire and brilliance; or there was a debating contest, and the hero defeated ten other eager lads and carried off all honors; or the featured speaker at the county political rally dropped dead and the hero took his place with an impromptu oration that made strong men weep and maidens swoon; or casting about for a speaker at the annual Fourth of July picnic, somebody said, “Why not get young Seab Cooley? He’s just back from law school and ought to know a thing or two.” And they did, and there was awe and shouting and dancing in the streets.

The story of a career launched by a speech is indeed a familiar one in American politics. It was a speech at New York’s Cooper Union in February of 1860 that first made Abraham Lincoln a national political figure, rather than just another Republican from the Midwest. It was the “Cross of Gold Speech” at the Democratic convention of 1896 that catapulted an obscure former Nebraska congressman named William Jennings Bryan to the nomination and made him, at the age of 36, the youngest presidential candidate ever. It was a televised campaign fundraiser on behalf of Barry Goldwater in 1964 that started Ronald Reagan on the road to Sacramento, and then to Washington. And it is because of the speech he gave at the Democratic convention in 2004 that Barack Obama may yet become our nation’s first black chief executive.

Speechwriters of the world, take heart! We may toil away anonymously, but the work we do is important. Even in this cyber age, a really good speech can still produce “awe and shouting and dancing in the streets.”