An Effort to Understand: Hearing One Another (and Ourselves) in a Nation Cracked in Half

by David Murray

Overview

This new collection of essays from rhetoric authority and celebrated writing blogger David Murray applies his signature blend of humor and heart to a free-wheeling conversation about how we communicate in America

“An insightful book packed with wonderful writing, practical advice, and hope for a better, kinder future.” —Jonathan Eig, author of King: A Life

You’re ready to give up. Throw up your hands and walk out the door. You don't know what else to say—to some dear family and close friends, let alone the crazy strangers that seem to populate half the country. You're ready to read An Effort to Understand.

But don’t worry. This is not a book about civility.

Instead, David Murray (blogger, speechwriter, rhetoric authority, and professional curmudgeon) is urging readers to join him in a near-spiritual movement, one that pushes us to consider communication as more than a means of persuading others to our way of thinking, but as a way of thinking all its own.

With his signature blend of wit, warmth, and four-letter words, Murray’s essays tackle subjects from the specter of cancel culture and the responsibilities of citizenship to the art of dealing with annoying neighbors and the challenges of talking to kids about injustice. His words show that the personal and political gulfs between us are small compared to our common desire to connect.

It may be a last-ditch effort, but Americans have a chance at trust, peace, and solidarity if we make an effort to speak more honestly and listen to understand.

Because when it comes to communication, we’re all the bad guys. Thankfully, we have a chance to be the good guys too.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781633310483
Publisher:	Disruption Books
Publication date:	03/02/2021
Pages:	225
Sales rank:	1,025,205
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

David Murray heads the global Professional Speechwriters Association and comments daily on communication issues on his popular blog Writing Boots. He is an award-winning journalist and is editor and publisher of Vital Speeches of the Day, one of the world’s longest continuously published magazines. He is the author of Raised By Mad Men, a memoir about his advertising parents, and co-author of the New York Times bestseller Tell My Sons: A Father’s Last Letters. The son of two writers, Murray grew up in Hudson, Ohio, and studied English at Kent State University before moving to Chicago to make his own writing life. He lives in Chicago with his wife, Cristie Bosch, and daughter, Scout Murray.

Read an Excerpt

INTRODUCTION 
 
What Is “An Effort to Understand”?
 
“Do they know about Martin Luther King?”

You can hear Senator Robert F. Kennedy ask someone this as he stands on the back of a flatbed truck in the early-spring dark, on a street corner in a park in an all-Black neighborhood in North Indianapolis.

You can just make out the answer of a white official: “We have left it up to you.”

Kennedy hesitates for exactly two seconds, and then makes a request that must have come to members of the ebullient crowd as the first signal that this was not going to be a typical campaign rally.

“Could you lower those signs, please?”

Another two seconds.

“I have some very sad news for all of you . . . and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.”

The whole crowd screams at once, then grows quiet just as quickly, which might have surprised Kennedy. He waits nine seconds before beginning again.
 
"Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it’s perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are, and what direction we want to move in."

That was April 4, 1968, about a year before I was born.

Hundreds of times, I’ve listened to the speech that Kennedy went  on to deliver that night. I’ve shown it to audiences of writers all over    the United States and all over the world. Every time I’ve shown it, it has meant something more to me. And every year, it seems to me less a relic of America’s past and more a haunting prediction of America’s future.

The speech is only five minutes long, and 543 words. When you hear a speech that short that many times over a period of time, different words begin to get under your skin and start to itch:
 
"We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization—Black people amongst Blacks, white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion and love."
 
That phrase: an effort to understand. A little later he repeats it again: “But we have to make an effort in the United States. We have to make an effort to understand.” It sounds so bland. So obvious. So preachy. So white.

So why did he say it three times to an all-Black crowd reeling in shock and despair?

And why did they listen?
 
**
 
My fascination with Robert Kennedy began with a story about his own assassination, only two months later—told to me by my mother when I was very young. Kennedy was shot after a midnight celebration of his victory in the California primary. My mother learned the news in the morning through her clock radio. In the 1960s, clock radios were a big thing. Instead of a harsh ring or tone for your alarm, the radio would come on. The news must’ve crept in through her sleep that night, because she remembered waking up already crying. “For Bobby,” she explained to me.

What kind of politician could make my intellectual, often sardonic mother cry like that? Who could make her call him Bobby?

My interest in Kennedy’s Indianapolis speech, on the other hand, was professional at first. As the editor of a magazine called Vital Speeches of the Day, I was getting invited by groups of professional speechwriters and other communicators to give speeches about what makes speeches great. I soon figured out it was good to show clips from speeches, so audiences could see and hear and feel what I was talking about. Kennedy’s speech had a few advantages: It was short, and I could show the whole thing. It also had a subtly sophisticated structure, and it achieved a lot, rhetorically speaking, in just a few minutes’ time. And it was old enough that it didn’t divide my audience along political lines.

And Kennedy’s Indianapolis speech added one more benefit to my lectures, in the heroic stories that bookended it: Beforehand, Kennedy had insisted on showing up to deliver the speech even though all his advisors had cautioned against it and the local police had refused to give him an escort. And afterward? That night every major city in America burned with riots—except Indianapolis, where Bobby Kennedy had called for peace.

Speechwriters appreciate that tidy grace note. If you write speeches for a living, you like to think that a speech has the power to make good things happen, all by itself. But that story seemed a little too immaculate to me, even just in terms of logistics: a five-minute speech in a little park on the north side of Indianapolis prevented a whole city from rioting?

Eventually, that became another itch I wanted to scratch.
 
**
 
For an article I was writing to mark the fiftieth anniversary of MLK’s death and Kennedy’s speech, in 2018, a friend and I drove from Chicago to Indianapolis, to see the spot where that flatbed truck had been parked— and to try to find someone who had been there that night. There’s a really wonderful sculpture at the corner, showing Kennedy and King reaching toward one another across a sidewalk. The neighborhood is still mostly Black, still pretty poor. Kountry Kitchen Soul Food Place is within walking distance, and we ate lunch there and asked a few old-timers about April 4, 1968. One said he knew a guy who had been there that night, and who was now in city politics. I got the guy’s number, and when I returned home to Chicago, I called him up.

Indianapolis City Councilman William Oliver was willing to talk about that night, but like the overwhelming majority of Black residents of Indianapolis, he hadn’t been at Kennedy’s rally. Still, he gave me exactly what I needed.

A twenty-eight-year-old screw machine operator at the local Chrysler plant in 1968, Oliver was actually at another political rally three miles across town, this one for Congressman Andrew Jacobs, who was running for reelection, backed by the United Auto Workers union. Oliver was aware that Kennedy was in town, but he wouldn’t have attended the Kennedy rally anyhow, because it was located in a neighborhood unfriendly to the neighborhood he grew up in: “I had no business going there, and they had no business going where I was.”

And anyway, Oliver said to me, “Who was Bobby Kennedy?” All he knew about the Kennedys as a kid was that it seemed as though they were “kind of procrastinating about civil rights in the South.”

As a matter of fact, Martin Luther King hadn’t exactly mesmerized young Oliver either. King was maligned in the local Indianapolis papers for being disruptive on one hand and ineffective on the other, and Oliver was influenced by those views. He thinks a lot more people—even Black people—claim to have marched with King, whether literally or figuratively, than actually did. But as Oliver describes the night he learned King was killed—when word spread through the crowd at the Jacobs rally “and the women started wailing”—he recalls a feeling of “emptiness, like, ‘They . . . they . . . have taken something away from us. One of the few good things about the whole world was this Martin King. Is he really gone?’ It took our hope away.”

As Oliver said to me, “I didn’t know he was here—until he was gone.”

In any case, Oliver is annoyed that Robert Kennedy gets credit for calming down Indianapolis that night. He remembers many times since then in his life when racial unrest begat violence in various American cities. For local cultural reasons that Oliver doesn’t understand, Indianapolis’s Black community never resorted, he said, to “burnin’ down the town.”

Kennedy?

No, said Oliver. “He didn’t do this.”

Every April 4, Oliver attends a remembrance at the site of the speech, along with a few hundred other Indianapolis residents. It seems to him that each year, Kennedy’s speech gets more emphasis and Martin Luther King’s life gets less. And Oliver thinks to himself, Wait a minute. We’re making a monument out of someone who just passed on the information.

Of course, Kennedy did much more with that speech than pass on the news of King’s death. Oliver confessed to me he’d never actually seen the whole speech before. I sent him a YouTube link and asked him to watch it. He watched it twice. “I would appreciate it today,” he told me afterward. “I can feel every word of that now, and it almost makes me want to tear up.”

The day after his speech in Indianapolis, with the help of his speechwriters, Kennedy gave a more formal, more philosophical version at the City Club of Cleveland. “We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of all,” he said.
 
"We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge . . . that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short movement of life, that they seek—as we do—nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can."
 
What was Oliver doing on April 5, while Kennedy was addressing white men in suits over dessert at the City Club luncheon? “What day of the week was it?” he asked me. It was a Friday. He probably went to work at the Chrysler plant.
 
**

Tonight in the park where Robert F. Kennedy called for understanding a half century ago, Kennedy and Martin Luther King, their words still ringing out on YouTube, reach out to each other in perpetuity. As I reached out to William Oliver, and as the city councilman reached back out to me. As we must all reach out to one another and make an effort to understand, in our own difficult time now in the United States.

But of course my phone conversation with Oliver was too little, and fifty years too late. Am I able to travel back in time and tell a young Black screw machine operator that he should be more attuned, over the din   of the late 1960s, to this particular Kennedy’s gentle words, sincerely offered and courageously delivered? No more than I can go back and hasten a young Bobby Kennedy’s plodding spiritual journey to social enlightenment—which also came too late, both for him and for the rest of the nation.

Surely our own effort to understand one another is just as urgent. Will it, also, be too little and too late? That’s up to us: me and you.

Communication requires listening as much as speaking. It requires deep listening and constant listening. It requires careful listening, imaginative listening, and repeated listening. And in our own time, if we are going to have a society that is worth living in, we must learn to truly listen, to hear. We must sense—with the tiniest cilia of our ears and the tenderest membranes of our hearts—not just the words of our friends and family, our coworkers and leaders, but the deepest intent of those words and their emotional source. We must listen with the assumption, so hard to sustain in the daily madness of American life, that the other person came by his or her views as honestly (or maybe as dishonestly) as we came to ours. And we must listen with the belief that with an effort, we can understand.

That’s communication, and that’s what this book is about. In these pages, I talk about my own evolution—from a writer who tried to draw crowds around my work by using words to start fights, to a communicator who gives most of my energy and talents to cultivating lots of rich, common soil where people can gather in peaceful productivity.

In these pages, I urge readers to join me in a near-spiritual movement toward thinking of communication as more than a means of persuading others to our way of thinking, but as a way of thinking all its own—and indeed a way of life. I describe how the leaders in our lives ought to communicate, and I suggest what those leaders need from us. I talk politics: how we can all engage with one another more honestly on fraught subjects, and why we must do so. And I talk about how we can communicate more productively with our colleagues, more lovingly with our friends and family, and more thoughtfully with acquaintances and strangers.

This is not a call for “civility”; in fact, that concept gets a spanking in here. We will always have trouble in America, and we will always have discord. But I believe that Americans can have more peace when we crave it, more solidarity when we require it, and more trust when it comes right down to it—in every aspect of our American lives.

I believe that even the most politically opposed or culturally estranged or emotionally isolated Americans share vastly more common experience and values than we know—a reality we would become more consciously aware of if we redirected some of the intellectual energy we use to draw distinctions and describe our differences, and instead we applied that energy to see one another more clearly. And we would see ourselves more clearly as a result. As another Kennedy said—and as we were so brutally reminded in the coronavirus spring of 2020—“in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

Can we always understand? Maybe not.

But we can always make an effort to understand.

I’ve been writing these essays not just since President Trump was elected, but since President Obama was elected. We think of this as a uniquely divided moment, but do you remember the 2008 election, won by a man who—according to a large chunk of the country—was some combination of communist, terrorist, and malevolent foreign national?

I was live-blogging on Election Night 2008 from my condo in Chicago, in happy anticipation: “It’s 6:00 p.m. Central time. I’m on the couch next to my wife, in my pajamas, with a load of pad Thai on the way, a bottle of red wine on the coffee table, and in case of a nasty surprise, a thirty-pack of Pabst in the refrigerator.”

One of my very best friends, who hated Obama for reasons of his own, emailed to say that I was “tiresome and gross,” and that he hoped I’d choke on the pad Thai. I published his email on the blog, with his name on it. Things were never the same between us after that, and I haven’t seen him in many years. (I did text him on the eve of Chicago’s official order to shelter in place to tell him I love him. He returned the sentiment, and we promised to get together as soon as we can. We’ve made this vow before. Perhaps this time it will stick.)

So it’s been a long twelve years in America. It’s been a long fifty years in America. Indeed, it’s been a long 244 years in America. The question is, will it be a long future for a nation that’s worthy of the pride that all of us— even the most discouraged—feel at the very sound of the word America?

To answer that question, you have to take the long view. I’ve developed these ideas over three decades in and around journalism, oral history, public relations, leadership, and psychology. And as you’re about to learn, my soapbox is the shoulders of the wise writers who raised me, the giant humanists whom I’ve been lucky enough to count as mentors, and the hundreds of professional communicators I have called my colleagues. All these people have given their whole lives to communication—to the essential idea that with sincere intent and real imagination, all human beings can understand one another. As Harold said to Maude in the classic film Harold and Maude, “You sure have a way with people.” And as Maude replied, “Well, they’re my species!”

I have taken every bit of wisdom I can from all these people. And this is the sum total, so far, of one man’s life in communication, in today’s America.

I hope you are able to put some of it to use in your life—for the good of our species and our life together

Table of Contents

Introduction: What Is "An Effort to Understand"? 1

I Life, Communicated 11

Communication Is Everything You Do and Everything You Never Do 17

Communicating Is Hard Because Being a Person Is Hard 20

Ask for What You Want 23

Communication Can Bring Us Together, Even in Mutual Appreciation of How Far We Are Apart 25

In Communication, Your Enemies Are Your Friends 28

When I Get Tired of Listening to the Living, I Talk to the Dead 30

If You Know How It's Going to Turn Out, It's Not Communication 33

In Communication, the Style Is Part of the Substance 35

"Civility" Is Not Communication 39

II Talking Heads: An Empty Limousine Pulled Up, and America's Leaders Got Out (and Read Prepared Remarks) 43

Talking with the Poor, and Communicating with the Rich 48

Authenticity as the New Eloquence 52

Communication Is Action! 55

The Unbearable Weight of Gravitas 59

If I've Told You a Thousand Times, I've Tol'd You Once 63

Your People Aren't Any More Cowardly and Selfish Than You Are 64

Once Upon a Time … A Story about Rhetorical Pink Slime 66

Real Leadership 73

III What Our Leaders Need from Us (Hint: They Need Us to Grow Up) 75

Follow the Leader? 79

Speaking Truth to Power: Talking to Myself 83

An Open Letter to the "Man in the Arena" 86

Our Leaders Have Plenty to Be Vague About 90

We Deserve Leaders Who Act Like They Like Us 93

"Because They Know, They Understand" 95

Civics Is as Civics Does 103

IV We, Citizen: American Patriots Don't Call Their Fellow Americans Nasty Names 105

Other Life, Not So Far Away 109

We'd Get Along Better if We Listened Better-to Ourselves 115

Do You "Vote Your Interests" 117

Hey, Washington: This Can Go All the Way Bad 119

Republicans Have Feelings, Too 121

Universities Are Not Safe Spaces 123

What's Really "Deplorable"? Taking Communication Out of Context 126

We Know Bullshit Is Bad for Us, but We Love the Taste 129

Talking about Money Is Talking about Feelings 132

Why I Like Politicians 135

And Seriously: Stop Calling the People Names 138

V Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday: Communicating with Your Colleagues 141

Working on Eggshells 146

Real Bonding in a Virtual World 150

Tech, as in Wreck 156

Rhetoric and Bullshit: The Difference 161

Kids Learn about Sex from Each Other-but How Do They Learn about Work? 163

Working with the Enemy 166

VI First, Do No Harm: Communicating with Acquaintances and Strangers 169

Privileged Is a Fighting Word 173

Why We Don't Like Environmental Nags, Even Though They're Right 176

Ghosting Is a Crime Against Humanity 178

It's Called "Decorum," and It's Not the Worst Thing in the World 180

Speaking of Decorum, Did You Know Chicago Has Three Streets That Rhyme with Vagina?^* 183

A Handshake Means Never Having to Text I'm Sorry 185

"Sniper, Take Out the Subject": Killing the Conversational Assassin Within Us All 187

Do You Tell Stories to Connect with People or to Keep Them Away? 190

VII Wanting and Beloved: Communicating with Our Families and Our Friends 195

Marital Communication Is Wiping Your Eyes in a Monsoon 198

Words Hold People Together 201

It's Easy to Communicate with Your Kids-at First 205

Communication Works Best in Large Doses 207

Stay Away from People Who Hate You, Even if They Love You, Too 209

Love Thy Neighbor (and Like Him, Too) 210

Elder, Respect Thyself 214

Healed for Life 217

The Painful Intimacy of Saying You're Welcome 219

There Must Be a Better Word Than Grief 221

Conclusion: Communicating with Yourself 225

Acknowledgments 229

References 233

Editorial Reviews

"Writing simply, directly, and with great kindness, Murray reminds us that the ways in which we communicate show us who we are. A worthy and reparative tool for these times.”
—Phoebe Judge, Host and cocreator of the podcasts Criminal and This Is Love


“An insightful book packed with wonderful writing, practical advice, and hope for a better, kinder future.”
—Jonathan Eig, author of King: A Life


“Sharp, witty, and entertaining, An Effort to Understand is a fun—but equally instructive—read!”
—Mike DeWine, Governor of Ohio


"With decades of experience in organizational communications, Murray examines public speeches, from political candidates to corporate CEOs, for clues to how we all can better express ourselves and empathize with friends, family members, co-workers, and fellow citizens."
—David Kusnet, Chief Speechwriter for President Bill Clinton and author of Speaking American 


"If we as a nation are to heal, we need to make an effort to understand all the things we have in common, and relate to how and why we differ. This collection of essays is for the people who won’t give up the hope that we can.”
—James R. Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence


"David Murray’s reflections on communication—by leaders, among citizens, and between friends and family members—come at a time when it is clear that forthright, civil, and thoughtful communication is desperately needed. His words could not be more important.”
—General David Petraeus, former commander of the surge in Iraq, US Central Command, and Coalition Forces in Afghanistan, and former Director of the CIA


“In this most American book, writer David Murray teaches you how to make your own truly honest Effort to Understand.”
—Admiral James G. Stavridis (Ret.), former European Supreme Allied Commander, NATO 


"David Murray says great communication requires great listening. I hope everyone reads David’s compelling book and applies the lessons in real life. We’ll be better off for it."
—Bob Feldman, Founder, The Dialogue Project


“The ultimate communicator’s analysis of how to bridge the gaps in our understanding of each other, no matter how great the divide.”
—Viv Groskop, author of How to Own the Room: Women and the Art of Brilliant Speaking

From the Publisher

"Sharp, witty, and entertaining, An Effort to Understand is a fun—but equally instructive—read!”
—Mike DeWine, Governor of Ohio

Mike DeWine

"David Murray says great communication requires great listening. I hope everyone reads David’s compelling book and applies the lessons in real life. We’ll be better off for it."
—Bob Feldman, Founder, The Dialogue Project

Bob Feldman

"The ultimate communicator’s analysis of how to bridge the gaps in our understanding of each other, no matter how great the divide.”
—Viv Groskop, author of How to Own the Room: Women and the Art of Brilliant Speaking

Viv Groskop

"If we as a nation are to heal, we need to make an effort to understand all the things we have in common, and relate to how and why we differ. This collection of essays is for the people who won’t give up the hope that we can.”
—James R. Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence

James R. Clapper

"Writing simply, directly, and with great kindness, Murray reminds us that the ways in which we communicate show us who we are. A worthy and reparative tool for these times.”
—Phoebe Judge, Host and cocreator of the podcasts Criminal and This Is Love

Phoebe Judge

"In this most American book, writer David Murray teaches you how to make your own truly honest Effort to Understand.”
—Admiral James G. Stavridis (Ret.), former European Supreme Allied Commander, NATO 

Admiral James G. Stavridis (Ret.)

"David Murray’s reflections on communication—by leaders, among citizens, and between friends and family members—come at a time when it is clear that forthright, civil, and thoughtful communication is desperately needed. His words could not be more important.”
—General David Petraeus, former commander of the surge in Iraq, US Central Command, and Coalition Forces in Afghanistan, and former Director of the CIA

General David Petraeus

"An insightful book packed with wonderful writing, practical advice, and hope for a better, kinder future.”
—Jonathan Eig, author of King: A Life

Jonathan Eig

"With decades of experience in organizational communications, Murray examines public speeches, from political candidates to corporate CEOs, for clues to how we all can better express ourselves and empathize with friends, family members, co-workers, and fellow citizens."
—David Kusnet, Chief Speechwriter for President Bill Clinton and author of Speaking American 

David Kusnet

2020-12-26
A veteran writer delivers a plea for renewed communication in American public and private life in this collection of essays.

As the son of parents who were both “writers by trade” in the advertising industry, Murray was raised with a deep appreciation for the power of words. Today, he heads the Professional Speechwriters Association and serves as editor and publisher of the venerable monthly magazine Vital Speeches of the Day. In this book, he offers readers over 50 essays loosely centered on the thesis that America lacks meaningful avenues of authentic communication. Indeed, despite the nation’s ideological and cultural divides, the author maintains that most Americans actually “share vastly more common experiences and values than we know.” The work’s title comes from the famous remarks delivered by Robert F. Kennedy shortly after news broke of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, as the United States presidential candidate urged Americans to follow the slain leader’s example of making “an effort to understand” one another across racial and political divides. Though Murray, with a trademark candor, notes that in retrospect the speech “sounds so bland….So preachy. So white,” its message is “just as urgent” today. With a firm command of U.S. politics and history and a matching wit, the author’s short essays present keen insights on figures ranging from President Donald Trump to former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Despite his call to “understanding,” Murray is equally emphatic in rejecting a feigned civility that glosses over real differences, noting that some of the nation’s most acclaimed communicators, from H.L. Mencken to Hunter S. Thompson, were renowned for their acerbic critiques of fellow Americans. Though politics is Murray’s bailiwick, it is his later reflections on the importance of communication in one’s personal life that stand out. Essays on the value and intersection of effective communication with marriage, grief, and technology provide a poignancy that transcends politics, though they sometimes make for a thematically disjointed read. Some readers may also balk at the book’s suggestion that the term privileged is a counterproductive “fighting word” that fails to win converts while the essay itself neglects to supply a meaningful alternative.

A smart, witty account of America’s failure to communicate.

Kirkus Reviews