Senator Robert Byrd’s speeches before the Senate exhibited the oratorical skills of nineteenth-century statesmen, complete with flowery rhetoric and grand gestures. He recited poems; quoted historical figures, particularly the Roman statesman and orator Cicero; and frequently cited parables from history and classical fairy tales to make his point—his use of the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 fairy story is typical in this regard. His “Emperor Has No Clothes” speech, one of the U.S. senator’s twenty-seven speeches on the war in Iraq given between October 2002 and April 2004, summarized his belief that Iraq posed no direct threat to the United States. The “emperor” George W. Bush, he believed, had promoted a war based on nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and no records that established that Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, was involved in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In this speech, delivered October 17, 2003, Byrd criticizes President Bush for trying to take power from the Senate and for attacking the civil liberties of Americans.