This week's New York Times Book Review is a particularly rich issue. Fouad Ajami's concise essay about Pervez Musharraf's memoir, In the Line of Fire, for example. I didn't know how much I didn't know about both Pakistan and the man who runs it until I read this review. I have the book on my file. I'll take it to bed with me tonight. And Bill Buckley's review of two chronological volumes of American speeches (from the revolution to the Civil War and from Lincoln to Clinton), edited by Ted Widmer. Buckley raises the sensitive issue of whose speech is it when it is written by someone else. An important issue. He makes all of the salient distinctions. One difference is that in the early republic up through the mid-twentieth century, most of our public personages had the stern eloquence of the King James version in their heads [note to readers: I originally wrote, mistakenly, of the "Saint James" version]. Now almost no one does. They had grown up with it. (Both Wynton Marsalis and Skip Gates had separately observed to me that this was the difference between the great black poets and novelists and rap.) They also had political theory in their brains, the political theories of John Locke and David Hume and the French philosophes. One more asset they had: They were literate. One has only to read the gorgeous prose of Lincoln, of Macaulay, of Disraeli, even of William Jennings Bryan to understand that inspiring facility with words comes from reading gorgeous prose. How could Bill Clinton be in the second volume of this anthology? For that matter, how could JFK? Newspapers and magazines are largely responsible for the free pass to eloquence given our public servants. They print articles and op-eds that one is not even sure the "authors" have read. I know I've heard U.S. Senators deliver speeches that seem unfamiliar to them. Editors at TNR have almost never been excited when we receive an article from a public figure. We assume that it is not their prose. That's why we were confident in Pat Moynihan's prose. It was distinctive, and he was so precise that he wouldn't trust anyone else to write it. The same thing is true of Al Gore. He's a terrible person to edit. He wants your cotton-pickin hands off his words.