Union of Words
Fields, Wayne
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "Union of Words" Principles of Speech Union of Words: A History of Presidential Eloquence Wayne Fields Free Press / 406 pages / $25 REVIEWED BY Mark W. Davis Iwas but a junior staffer at the Republican...
...If Buchanan wins the nomination he has my vote, and he will have millions of others' votes...
...Furthermore, they know no more about politics than the received truths of the moment...
...It is also inaccurate...
...Principles of Speech Union of Words: A History of Presidential Eloquence Wayne Fields Free Press / 406 pages / $25 REVIEWED BY Mark W. Davis Iwas but a junior staffer at the Republican National Committee in 1988, when I was asked to draft several brief speeches and scripts for President Reagan...
...Every age, one supposes, gets the context it deserves...
...George Bush paused, and I imagined him giving one of those trademark karate chops or head jerks...
...Of his bold, declarative sentences, Fields writes, "The first-person pronoun flew over his speech like a battle flag...
...Fields's reading of Lincoln's Second Inaugural is a masterful synthesis of constitutional history and literary analysis...
...One assignment was to write an address for the professors and students of Karl Marx University in Budapest, where the faculty was divided between young reformers and entrenched reactionaries...
...A White House researcher returned from an advance trip to Hungary with enough detail to write a novel...
...Our press is incapable of dealing with the most elementary facts...
...This time they were stampeding toward Buchanan with charges of extremism and worse...
...And to my delight, the tapes that came back to me showed that he used the scripts and followed the cadences I had imagined...
...He has had years to blurt out a racist line and never has...
...Kristol had moved on to promote the candidacy of Mr...
...Principle, not mere performance, is also at the heart of Union ofWords, a scholarly new study of presidential rhetoric by Wayne Fields, a professor of English at Washington University...
...You cannot understand a presidential address unless you appreciate its moment in history...
...His former speechwriters tell me this was a common, if somewhat awe-inspiring, experience...
...After Lincoln, however, Fields's dialectical tension between plura and unum ceases to be useful for understanding either of the Roosevelts, Wilson, or, for that matter, Reagan...
...The rest of the piece spoke of Forbes in the past tense...
...Here, as elsewhere, Fields fails to consider the context of the speech...
...Facts of Primary Life 72 April 1996 The American Spectator...
...They really do not like what Frank Kent, the Baltimore Sun political correspondent, called some decades back the Great Game of Politics...
...I have had my disagreements with Buchanan, but I know he is no bigot...
...So I came up with the following line, one aimed at academics: "Socialism is a Rubik's Cube that defies solution...
...What drives the press's hysteria is their deep distrust of politics...
...It is also supremely inconsistent coming from those moral paragons who decry "negative campaigning" and abusive rhetoric...
...Acknowledging that Reagan looked to FDR as rhetorical mentor, Fields at times uses this connection as a trope to denigrate him as an imperfect imitator...
...They forget 10o when a boring primary season for the Republicans put people to sleep and a rock'em sock'empleasant tete-a-tete, ten members of the Consilio Cubano were arrested in another of Castro's crack-downs...
...How did the press know...
...As the Reagan administration was winding down to its dreamy conclusion, it was not hard to craft remarks based on genuine pride and principled accomplishment...
...These are people who have distinguished themselves for over a decade at all levels of government...
...I was ecstatic...
...Pedantic and arrogant would be more accurate...
...Does anyone get even slightly irked with Fidel...
...There was a slight frenzy for Lamar Alexander, or is it Alexander Lamar...
...race among the Democrats set John F. Kennedy on the road to the White House...
...Alexander, or is it Mr...
...Fact #8: There are no extremists or racists prominent in American life —save in some instances those partisan political animals who call others extremists or racists...
...And was John F. Kennedy not disesteemed by Eleanor Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson as being too far right...
...Stop the primary season...
...It was for moments like these that sharp objects had been removed from the offices of Bush speechwriters...
...Two years later, I had a very different experience as a White House speechwriter for George Bush...
...This was the equivalent of your neighborhood garage mechanic being asked to tune up Dale Jarrett's Thunderbird at the Daytona 500...
...But he does observe, "If Bush emphasized the postwar success story popular in the 1950's, Clinton stressed the family traumas familiar to 1990's talk show viewers and readers of self-help books...
...Where TR seemed intent on getting the nation up to his speed, and Wilson, up to his intellectual level, FDR was promising to bring the presidency up to where the people already were...
...Wilson, who spoke of himself as embodying the accumulated wisdom of the people, is portrayed by Fields as charmingly professorial...
...Okay, how about a quiz...
...Adherence to principle was at the heart of Reagan's success...
...Who in the Washington press corps can identify Eleanor and Adlai...
...Fields begins by linking the design of the Washington monument to the design of constitutional principles underlying the presidency: "That the monolith, under its marble skin, testifies to the pride of jealous states demonstrates the central paradox of America's national life — a union of states, a plura that is, as the great seal proclaims, also unum — a paradox that George Washington tried throughout his presidential career to tip to the side of singularity...
...They think, for instance, that the lively Republican race is "tearing the party apart...
...04 The American Spectator • April 1 9 9 6 71 Editorials (Continued from page 17) reporter chronicles in this very piece, Fidel Castro remains a thug...
...He actually gave quite a rousing defense of the free market until he got to the key line...
...And so the brain-dead keepers of American political culture snooze on: Castro, the reformer, America the belligerent and bully of the Cold War, expropriation of the Kennedy boys' family compound in Cuba, justified...
...Always important with modern readers taught that "rhetoric" is a synonym for "blather," Fields re-establishes the Aristotelian definition of rhetoric as logical argument...
...Fact #6: Character will be an issue...
...And he is at his best comparing Jefferson's cool, rational Enlightenment language to the Biblical cadence of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address...
...The Rubik's Cube itself made a good metaphor for the impossibility of central managers lining up prices, supply, and demand...
...To my surprise, he also employed inflection and emphasis to squeeze subtler meanings I had neither imagined nor intended...
...The Times report ends with a laconic reference to the fact that before this jokey, The condition of the Republic's press corps must be near exhaustion...
...And then he said: "Socialism is a Rubik's Cone...
...I felt we had something here...
...And if he gets as excited as the press, his health may be impaired...
...They found plenty, for instance, Bill Kristol fresh from prophesying the Colin Powell presidential juggernaut...
...Then they were in a stampede to bury him...
...Among the many things she told me was that the most admired alumnus of Karl Marx was Enro MARK W. DAVIS is a senior director of the White House Writers Group...
...A few months ago as Steve Forbes entered the race with a popular message, they went into a stampede toward his banner...
...What were their positions on cigarette smoking in public...
...The Rubik phenomenon seemed not only a metaphor for the success of the market...
...Now Forbes is doing well again...
...Rubik, capitalist millionaire and inventor of the famous brain-teasing puzzle...
...Castro mocks them to their faces, telling them he will consider release of the wretches if our government adjusts its policy to his liking...
...Senator Christopher Dodd, who has no national standing, called the millions voting for Buchanan neo-Nazi skinheads...
...But it would be a mistake to assume that artful communication alone is what makes or breaks a presidency...
...Steve Forbes, an attractive speaker with a sound economic grasp and a message not far removed from that of the most successful president since President Eisenhower, plus plenty of money and a record of how to manage it, was told he was hopeless before his recent victories...
...To return to the press corps' uselessness...
...Fact #2: The promise to cut taxes and of withdrawing the tentacles of government from private lives recently won Republicans their first Congress in forty years...
...Lamar...
...Fields is too preoccupied with the past to devote much time to our current president...
...He notes that Reagan redirected FDR's slaps at "unscrupulous moneychangers" to government bureaucrats: "There was in Reagan's speech no denigration of 'material things,' none of Roosevelt's insistence that the primary concern was 'social values,' but rather emphasis upon the promised `bounty of a revived economy.— So what...
...The hacks need a rest...
...I imagined what Reagan wanted to say...
...Truth to tell, the average Americano desirous of learning about this campaign is at a dreadful disadvantage if all he reads is the American press...
...Well reporters looked around the Beltway for what we might call "cooperating witnesses...
...A week later, I listened to the president speak at Karl Marx, patched in over the internal White House audio network...
...I imagined how he would say it...
...This principle, and the ability to express it, was also Ronald Reagan's genius...
...No, that would be the behavior of the discredited Cold Warriors...
...And Emerging Fact #7: Any of the major Republican candidates willbeat him except for Alexander Lamar, who along with the burden of being just another slick Southern governor has the burden of a financial record not unlike Hillary Rodham Clinton's...
...Kristol pronounced in the New York Times, "I'm a friend of his, and I hope he gets out of the race...
...For my part my eyes not only see movement in the room but my brain is alert to meaning...
...The Kennedy brothers ask him about releasing political prisoners he still holds...
...By contrast, FDR set the gold standard of presidential rhetoric...
...The stampede against Buchanan by people who were perfectly happy to work with him in media has been as idiotic as all the other stampedes...
...I forget...
...Watch out, Steve—the bovine herd with its cameras and microphones might be headed your way again...
...In juxtaposing the violence of Gettysburg with Jefferson's calm composition, Lincoln dramatized the limits of reason...
...Fact #3: Tax cutters keep getting elected over their opposites...
...Jesse Helms's legislation to ensure just compensation...
...At the battlefield, there was no way "to soar on logical wings above the grief and devastation of soearthbound an occasion...
...In fact Buchanan's beliefs square with 75 percent or more of the views held by most conservatives...
...When the Kennedy brothers mention family property that he expropriated, he mocks Sen...
...He forgets that Reagan was addressing the children of the FDR generation, grown to prosperity, preparing for retirement, and scared silly by a blundering government that had given us double-digit inflation and the highest interest rates since the Civil War...
...Senator Alan Simpson, who is retiring, accused Buchanan of fanning "racist fires...
...My task was to write remarks for trivial political dinners and scripts for video—boilerplate specials...
...George Bush elucidated clear principles in his signal success, marshaling a world alliance and executing a war...
...And then there is the sudden discovery by the press corps that their colleague in Washington broadcast punditry, Pat Buchanan, is an "extremist...
...Fact #5: Clinton has no economic policy...
...Before not too long I would like to see Fidel Castro brought to justice by his sorely abused countrymen...
...Fact #1: The economy and, in recent years, taxes are the major concern of the electorate...
...Fact #4: The Clinton economy is beginning to display the kind of anemia that Our President exploited in 1992...
...My directions were clear—embarrass the old guard...
...That did not work out, but after Pat Buchanan won in New Hampshire the press went again into stampede...
Vol. 29 • April 1996 • No. 4
