Extract from ABC News
Some of the greatest speeches not only mark moments in history, they also make history.
For example, it's 10 years since former prime minister Julia Gillard delivered the so-called misogyny speech on the floor of the Australian parliament. Her powerful words 'Not now, not ever' still reverberate around the globe.
Yet that speech almost didn't happen.
"I did reflect on whether or not to speak, or to give it to someone else, and I decided I would speak and hence we have the misogyny speech. So history could have been quite different," Gillard told ABC RN Breakfast.
So what happens to the speeches that were never delivered?
Jeff Nussbaum, author and former senior speechwriter for US President Joe Biden, former vice-president Al Gore and senator Tom Daschle, explores these speeches in his new book, Undelivered: The Never-Heard Speeches that would have Rewritten History.
The book considers how historical events could have turned out very differently and what could have been said.
"I realised there's so many other occasions beyond politics, where the outcome is so in doubt that there's a draft prepared for it. And history really, really does rest on a razor's edge," he says.
'Humanity's suicide note'
One of the most chilling undelivered speeches Nussbaum found could have been delivered by President John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
In 1962, the Soviet Union introduced nuclear missiles into Cuba, which posed a potential threat to 90 million Americans.
In a 2003 documentary, former US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara remembers those turbulent October days as looking "down the gun barrel into a nuclear war".
Nussbaum says at the time, many of Kennedy's military advisors wanted immediate air strikes against the missile sites. Others favoured a blockade of the island to prevent further Soviet shipments of missiles.
So, as he weighed his options — and the world held its breath — the president asked advisors from each camp to put together speeches to be made in the event of either outcome.
Eventually Kennedy decided to blockade Cuba and de-escalate tensions with the Soviet Union. He gave the Cuban Missile Crisis speech on October 22, 1962, during a radio and television address.
He famously said: "Our goal is not the victory of might, but the vindication of right — not peace at the expense of freedom, but both peace and freedom, here in this hemisphere, and, we hope, around the world. God willing, that goal will be achieved."
However, in the event of an airstrike on Cuba, there was a very different speech prepared:
"The size, speed and secrecy of the deployment, the bare faced falsehoods surrounding it, and the newly revealed character of the conspirators involved, made plain that no appeal, no warning, no offer would shift them from their course.
Prolonged delay would have meant enormously increased danger and immediate warning would have greatly enlarged the loss of life on all sides.
It became my duty to act. The tragedy here, self-evidently, is in the loss of innocent lives on all sides. For the United States government, I hereby accept responsibility for this action, and pledge that all appropriate efforts will be made on request to assist the families of these innocent victims."
At the beginning of the speech, the speechwriter left a sentence in brackets to be filled in later. It said: 'Follow a description of first reports of action'.
"And to me, that parenthetical, it could have been humanity's suicide note," Nussbaum says.
"Because what we didn't know and only learnt later was that those [Soviet] missile sites weren't being built, many of them were already operational.
"Had these [US] airstrikes taken place, you could have really had an immediate nuclear counter strike, wiping out much of America's eastern seaboard.
"It could have really marked the end of humanity," he says.
'I have a dream'
The following year, another iconic speech was given to the American public, this time addressing racism, segregation and civil rights.
But Martin Luther King Jr's 1963 I Have a Dream speech, which was delivered on August 28 during the March on Washington, could have gone very differently.
"King's advisors wanted him to give a much stronger, slightly angrier speech that they titled Normalcy Never Again," Nussbaum says.
The idea for this speech was in response to southerners who suggested that there would be progress on civil rights "when things return to normalcy". It was a reference to Republican Party senator Warren G. Harding's use of the slogan 'Return to Normalcy, which he used during his 1920 candidacy, calling for business as usual following World War I and a series of race riots.
In 1963, King's advisors wanted him to go directly to that argument and say there would never be 'normalcy' in the United States.
Instead King wanted to deliver what became his most famous speech.
His advisors were initially disappointed at this, as he'd given a version of that speech a few times before.
"But I tell people I work for [that] King proved in that speech … that it's a hundredth time you say the exact same thing that people finally hear it," Nussbaum says.
'Chiselled in marble'
Nussbaum also obtained a copy of what would have been Hillary Clinton's victory speech in the 2016 US presidential election.
He was surprised by some of the inclusions.
"In parts [of the speech] you see all the cracks that ran through her campaign run right into her victory …. here's a paragraph for the elite media that would have expected a larger victory. And here's something for the Trump supporters who [she] accidentally called deplorable," he says.
One moving inclusion was a reference to Clinton's mother's difficult life and how that impacted her daughter.
Abandoned by her parents, Clinton's mother was sent across the country by train when she was eight, with her three-year-old sister, to live with her grandparents. Sadly they treated the little girl like a servant.
Nussbaum says, at the end of what would have been her victory speech, Clinton imagined sitting down next to her mother on that train ride with her little sister and talking to her.
"She says, 'You know, these things will happen, and it will be hard, but you will have a daughter, and that daughter will grow up to be president of the United States'," he says.
"[And] it would have been one of those moments that would be chiselled in marble."
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