Rhetorical College
Dwight Eisenhower's command of the language on the campaign trail was not up to par with his command of the Allied troops.
Welcome to “Off the Clock,” the fortnightly Saturday edition of Timeless & Timely that’s a fun look at language and words.
As always, I try to put a historic or literary spin on it because—well, you understand. I’m a nerd. And I hope this resonates with other like-minded souls out there.
We’re in the closing stretches of the presidential election, meaning that the candidates are crisscrossing the country in an effort to make a last-minute case to voters.
As such, their verbal ability (or inability, as the case may be) are on full display.
In September 1952, when Dwight Eisenhower had traded the beaches of Normandy for the battleground states of America, his campaign was not against Nazis but against Adlai Stevenson, who wielded language deftly.
Time magazine (September 1, 1952) contrasted the candidates’ speaking styles, from Stevenson’s buttoned-up prepared speeches to Eisenhower’s proclivity to speak off the cuff, making him more accessible to audiences. There was a wrinkle, though:
“Ike, however, sometimes seems to have a balloon up that cuff. A sentence will start simply, belly out and break loose from its grammatical moorings. Sometimes it lands safely, sometimes it floats on & on.”
Eisenhower had always been a leader who was able to connect to his troops through his rhetoric, although those communications had been in writing.
When his verbal ad-libbing was transcribed during his political campaigning, it was… less impressive.
The editors of Time shared some of his convoluted utterances from the previous week alone:
“In our efforts throughout the world, on outpost positions, I mean positions that are exposed to immediate Communist threat, physical threat, if we will help those people hold out and get ourselves back where we belong as reserves to move in to any threatened danger point if they carry it to that point, carry it to that level, then what we will be doing it will be taking these 22 million South Koreans, pushing programs for getting them ready to hold their own front line.”
“I had some service friends that came to me along about May and some things beat around my head, and asked me, ‘General, why are you so crazy to ever get into this kind of thing?’ I had to find some answer that was quick because I was pretty busy in Europe. I got a picture of my three grandchildren and I put it on my mantel and I said, ‘Look at that.’ I want to talk about the future for a second in their terms. This is my particular philosophy. We have been talking about social gains for all our people in terms of, first, political issues, and secondly as of goals in themselves. Now I reject both doctrines, both ideas.”
“We are not going to let our citizens, through no fault of their own, fall down into disaster they could not have foreseen and due to the exigencies of our particular form of economy, this modern economy where they have no power to keep themselves out of that.”
What Eisenhower lacked in the rhetorical, he made up for in the electoral. He went on to win the 1952 presidential election that November, with 442 votes in the Electoral College to Stevenson’s 89.
While he once again commanded a victory, it was in spite of Eisenhower’s inability to command the language.
We’ll see what kind of language resonates with the American people in just over a week…
Oh, and here’s more vintage Ike, as his style was applied to the Gettysburg Address:
There’s so much to learn,
