Losing the Words of the Cold War

Recently, the Chronicle of Education published an article highlighting the most influential books of the last twenty years. In honor of University Press Week, we’re highlighting the three HUP books that were included in the list. First, here’s a brief excerpt from Age of Fracture by Daniel T Rogers, selected by Jonathan Holloway who called it an evocative meditation on the last 25 years of the 20th century. Rodgers, one of our greatest intellectual historians, asks how we think about judging history in the first place. This excerpt focuses on presidential rhetoric.

Modern presidential oratory is a highly structured affair. The major speeches of a president — the Inaugural and State of the Union addresses in which the particularly heavy lifting of social articulation is performed and in which the trail of social thought is etched particularly clearly — proceed within scripts already half written, as if they were welded to massive subterranean templates of grammar and conviction. State of the Union messages report and propose, always in two parts, domestic and foreign. Inaugurals begin, profess continuity, and announce an era of renewal: a “new hope” (Truman), a “new purpose” (Johnson), “a new era” (Nixon), or, down to tautological bedrock, a “new beginning” — the phrase that Reagan’s speechwriters swiped from Carter’s, just as Carter’s had swiped it from Nixon’s. Speechwriters learn their art by copying the work of other speechwriters in the way that Peggy Noonan, new to the Reagan speechwriting staff in 1984, set out to find the authentic presidential “sound” by reading the speeches of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The “grammar of the presidency,” as Noonan called it, was the work of the speechwriters’ continuous, creative recycling of the words and gestures of their predecessors.

The key to that grammar in the post-1945 years was an urgent sense of history’s demands. To talk in the presidential voice was to talk against a backdrop of crisis, danger, and trial. Presidents addressed their most important speeches to a world in peril: a “shaken earth” in its “season of stress” (Eisenhower), a nation in its “hour of maximum danger” (Kennedy), at its “time of testing” (Johnson). In the contest with Communism, the urgencies turned intense and apocalyptic. “It is of the utmost importance that each of us understand the true nature of the struggle now taking place in the world,” Eisenhower drew out the theme in 1955:

It is not a struggle merely of economic theories, or of forms of government, or of military power. At issue is the true nature of man. Either man is the creature whom the Psalmist described as “a little lower than the angels” . . . or man is a soulless, animated machine to be enslaved, used and consumed by the state for its own glorification. It is, therefore, a struggle which goes to the roots of the human spirit, and its shadow falls across the long sweep of man’s destiny.

In this sustained crisis, the task of presidential leadership was to warn and awaken the American people. This was the axis on which presidential oratory recapitulated the forms of a Protestant sermon and on which the president assumed the preacher’s part. The words that defined leadership, the Cold War presidents insisted, were uncomfortable words. “We sometimes chafe at the burden of our obligations, the complexity of our decisions, the agony of our choices,” Kennedy had admonished the nation in his State of the Union message in 1962. “But there is no comfort or security for us in evasion, no solution in abdication, no relief in irresponsibility.” Presidents were expected to know and to name, as Johnson put it in 1967, the “disorders that we must deal with . . . the frustrations that concern us . . . the anxieties we are called upon to resolve . . . the issues we must face with the agony that attends them.” As watchman on the walls of the republic, the president awakened the citizenry from its narrow contentments. As preacher, he called his nation to its better self, prescribed its obligations, enunciated its resolve, and blessed its endeavor. The sermonic turns of phrase that coursed through presidential oratory in the post-1945 years — “let us begin” (Kennedy), “let us resolve” (John- son), “let us accept that high responsibility not as a burden, but gladly” (Nixon) — were emblematic of the relationship between the people and their presidential preacher.

Of all the dangers against which presidents spoke after 1945, none called out stronger rhetorical effort than a weakening of public resolve. In the standing tension between “our common labor as a nation” (as Eisenhower put it) and the temptations of a purely private life, Cold War presidents spoke for the imperatives of public life. “America did not become great through softness and self-indulgence,” Eisenhower warned. Greatness was achieved through devotion, courage, and fortitude, through “the utmost in the nation’s resolution, wisdom, steadiness, and unremitting effort.” Here freedom’s “burden” was clearest. To remain free required resistance to the allure of selfish comfort, the sirens’ call of self- gratification. “This is no time of ease or rest,” Eisenhower insisted in his Second Inaugural. “High will be its cost” in “toil” and “sacrifice” of the “labor to which we are called.” John F. Kennedy’s famous challenge “ask not what your country can do for you,” his summons “to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle . . . against the common enemies of man,” were cut from the same cloth.

The upheavals of the 1960s overtly changed none of that. Nixon’s speeches were filled with echoes of Kennedy’s high rhetorical gestures polished anew. Talk of “crisis,” “purpose,” “responsibility,” and the “honor” of responding to “our summons to greatness” propelled them. The unattached self was, as before, an object of high suspicion. Nixon’s speechwriters piled up repetitions of the word “together” in heaps in his major speeches, as if the words themselves could bridge the raw social divisions that the wedge issues of race and the Vietnam War had cracked open in the late 1960s. Nixon, the constant political calculator and polarizing political force, went to the public in the self-abnegating language of his predecessors. “Until he has been part of a cause larger than himself, no man is truly whole,” Nixon repeated the conventional rhetorical wisdom in his First Inaugural. “To go forward at all is to go forward together.”

The first breaks in the formula that joined freedom and obligation all but inseparably together began with Jimmy Carter. From the start he brought to the presidency a markedly different language shaped not only by his outside-Washington experience but, still more, by his immersion in Protestant evangelical culture. No president’s inaugural address in a century had mentioned the Bible on which he had lain his hand to take the oath of office (it was Carter’s mother’s), much less the passage (Micah 6:8) to which he had had it opened. The idea of the nation as a gathered congregation of faith saturated Carter’s rhetoric. He talked easily of the “common good” and the “beloved community.” For all his experience as a na- val officer and business owner, Carter was never comfortable in the high leadership style of Cold War political culture. In his low-church image of the presidency, the congregation held the nation’s moral force; the president was the people’s temporary servant.

Carter brought all this into the presidency in 1977 in a flurry of populist symbols. He had campaigned on a promise of a government “as good as its people.” His challenge, as he articulated it, was to stay as intimate with the people as a low-church preacher was with his flock. “You have given me a great responsibility,” he pledged in his Inaugural: “to stay close to you, to be worthy or you, to exemplify what you are.” The people’s “sense of common purpose,” he repeated the formula the next year, “towers over all our efforts here in Washington . . . as an inspiring beacon for all of us who are elected to serve.” The antigovernment line that Carter articulated — “government cannot solve our problems, it can’t set our goals, it cannot define our vision,” he admonished in 1978 — was premised on the assumption that the “new spirit among us all” ultimately mattered more than policies. The presidency, in passages like these, was merely a vessel for the nation’s moral will and faith.

But as Carter’s administration collided with the economic ruptures that were to reshape the age, the new formulas strained and fell apart. The economic crises had begun in the last years of the Nixon administration. The runaway inflation of 1973–1974 had already ebbed by the time Carter took office in 1977; unemployment receded slowly in the first three Carter years. But by the end of the 1970s, the annual inflation rate had shot up all over again. The Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan and the shock to global oil production as revolution dried up Iran’s oil exports set off tremors throughout the world. In the context of inflation, gas shortages, and renewed Cold War fears, as Carter strained to amass the political capital necessary to address the crises that beset the country, the high Cold War style flowed back into his speeches.

Already in his Inaugural address in 1977, Carter’s belief in an “undiminished, ever-expanding American dream” had mixed uncertainly with his admonition that even the greatest of nations faced “limits.” By his State of the Union message in 1979 Carter was warning of the unprecedented subtlety and complexity of the problems facing the nation. At the depths of the crisis over oil and economics that summer, as angry, bumper-to-bumper drivers queued up for gas in lines that seemed to snake on without end, Carter reached back to the Cold War tropes of crisis, commitment, and sacrifice. He had already invoked the crisis leader- ship of Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Truman. Now, in this time of “challenge,” “pain,” and “danger,” he pledged to lead the people against the “fundamental threat” that the oil crisis posed to the “social and political fabric of America.”

The fight for independence from foreign oil was the nation’s new moral equivalent of war, Carter urged. “Self-indulgence and consumption” had sapped the nation’s will. Worship of material goods had emptied lives of meaning and eroded a sense of common purpose. Faith in the future was unraveling. But by joining hands and pledging themselves to a renewed faith and action, a united people could resist the path “that leads to frag- mentation and self-interest.” “On the battlefield of energy we can win for our nation a new confidence, and we can seize control again of our common destiny.” The “malaise” speech, as it was quickly dubbed in the media, was later to be accounted a blunder: too pessimistic and too moralistic in tone. But the pollsters reported that Carter’s approval ratings, which had sagged badly during the spring, shot up 11 points in its wake.

Dedication, courage, responsibility, self-scrutiny, and sacrifice: these were the nouns that bore the burden of Cold War presidential rhetoric. The terms clustered together: freedom with responsibility and discipline; peril with wisdom, leadership, firmness, and resolve. The key words of political culture in the third quarter of the century were social, historical, and relational. Whatever the context of the moment, whatever the other voices straining to make themselves heard in the divided and contention- filled public sphere, this was the way presidents sounded.