Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [199]
Roosevelt found the right idiom to steel his people: he was measured, implacable, and utterly determined. We should contrast this with President Bush’s reaction to tragedy in 2001, when he told the American people:
I have spoken to the vice president, to the governor of New York, to the director of the FBI and have ordered that the full resources of the federal government go to helping the victims and their families, and to conduct a full-scale investigation to hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act.18
This confused amalgam of tortuous bureaucratic prose and the wholly off-key “folks” to describe mass murderers has continued through the president’s further statements, up to the present. In part, his problem is technical: President George W. Bush is not a natural public speaker. However, modern technology can usually help even the most inarticulate to improve their performance. The difficulty is not just with presentation, for the president’s mixed messages derive not from incoherent speech but from conflicting registers.
In the nearly 150 years since Lincoln was elected president, the means and modes of communication have been transformed. Yet the essence of winning an audience remains the same. Lincoln and the two Roosevelts all perfected the art of speaking individually and intimately to every individual in their audience. Today, reading the Gettysburg Address, or listening to recordings of TR and FDR, it is impossible not to be drawn. Theirs was a rhetorical skill, which they had honed and practiced like preparing for a battle. Words were their weapons, and like many martial arts, their success came from an absolute control. By contrast President George W. Bush (and his father before him) both exemplify the opposite. Neither has ever seemed entirely in control of what he says. Sometimes their tongues seem to take on a life of their own.19
Under normal circumstances, this might not be a disadvantage. Many people find it difficult to speak in public, and hearing a political leader stumble sometimes makes them seem more honest, human, and endearingly fallible. But in conditions of crisis, this tolerance vanishes: the endearing frailty suddenly becomes a weakness. For the second President Bush, the “crusade” episode that I described in the last chapter was a first significant example of misspeaking. That off-the-cuff comment reverberated around the world, although its impact at home was much less dramatic. A second slipshod utterance was little remarked outside the United States. But at home, in a changed political environment, it produced a storm of criticism and possibly damaging consequences.
On the morning of July 2, 2003, the president told a group of journalists gathered in the White House that he would take a couple of questions. The first was an easy lob: “What is the administration doing to get larger powers, like France and Germany and Russia, to join the American occupation there [in Iraq]?” It needed a soft and emollient answer: something along the lines that the whole world should be helping the coalition to get Iraq back on its feet. But for some reason the president took a different tack:
Well, first of all, we’ll put together a force structure who meets the threats on the ground. And we’ve got a lot of forces there, ourselves. And as I said yesterday, anybody who wants to harm American troops will be found and brought to justice. There are some who feel like that if they attack us that we may decide to leave prematurely. They don’t understand what they’re talking about, if that’s the case.20
The reporters, satisfied with this reply, assumed he had finished and hands went up for further questions. But the president had more to say. He relaxed visibly, leaned forward toward them, and continued.
Let me finish. There are some who feel like—that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is, bring ’em on. We’ve got the force necessary to deal with the security situation … We’ve got plenty tough force there right now to make sure the