Public impeachment hearings began last week with "Walter Cronkite" trending on Twitter. Why? One of the first witnesses, acting Ukraine ambassador William Taylor Jr., sounded somewhat like the legendary newscaster--a bourbon barrel of a baritone, mellow and oaky with age.
If a bureaucrat is going to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee and be streamed into households around the country, it doesn't hurt for him to remind Americans of the most trusted man in news. Rightly or not, you felt like you could trust a man like this; you'd heard and trusted his voice before.
The next day, Marie Yovanovitch took her turn at the witness table. Impressively credentialed and poised, the former Ukraine ambassador's testimony prompted a standing ovation in the hearing room, but it didn't prompt adoring comparisons to any deceased icons. Hers was the precise, measured tone of a polite 61-year-old woman. And we don't have as many reference points for 61-year-old women who've been elevated to the status of most trusted voice in anything.
We're in the early stages of building a listening library of powerful female voices. We still can't ask, as Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) pointed out in Wednesday's presidential debate, "Who is your favorite woman president?" During the height of Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, the candidate was so besieged with charges of shrillness that the Atlantic magazine interviewed experts to figure out what made her voice so allegedly irritating.
The issue wasn't how she sounded. It was how she sounded to us, a listening public without the aural reference library to assess female authority, trustworthiness and power.
That brings us to Fiona Hill. At Thursday's hearings, the former National Security Council official leaned into the microphone, and from her earliest words--"I have a short opening statement"--it was apparent we were in vocal uncharted territory.
"I grew up poor with a very distinctive working-class accent," the British-born Hill told the committee.
By now, her Yorkshire accent has been tempered by years of living abroad in multiple countries and holding multiple high-powered posts. Her testimony came with rolled r's and drawling vowels. She would have sounded lovely reading bedtime nursery rhymes, but she spoke with the authority of a Harvard Ph.D who has exactly no time for nonsense and no patience for fools. I saw one online commenter suggest that she should play Q, the brilliant character in the James Bond universe; I saw another reply that no, she should just be James Bond.
Editorial on 11/23/2019