The American Spectator

TAS Live

A Masterpiece of American Oratory

By Norman Podhoretz on 2.14.07 @ 1:51PM

(Page 2 of 3)

The most obvious example is Woodrow Wilson, who promised to "make the world safe for democracy" by sending Americans to fight in World War I. True, the horrors and then the disillusioning aftermath of that war helped to discredit Wilson's slogan. But that did not prevent Franklin D. Roosevelt, the next Democrat to win the presidency, from going even further in preparing the nation for an eventual entry into World War II:

We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
The first is freedom of speech and expression --everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way -- everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want... -- everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear… -- anywhere in the world.

Next we come to Roosevelt's successor, Harry S. Truman. Like Bush, Truman was at first regarded as a mediocre politician with no interest in and no grasp of foreign policy. But as he watched the Soviet Union forcing Communist regimes on more and more countries in East Europe while also using local Communist parties to subvert countries in other parts of the world, Truman (again like Bush after 9/11) amazed everyone by rising to the challenge.

It all began on March 12, 1947, when he appealed to Congress for aid to Greece and Turkey, both of which, he said, were threatened by Soviet-led "movements that seek to impose upon them totalitarian regimes." He was, he went on, "fully aware of the broad implications involved if the United States extends assistance to Greece and Turkey," and in spelling these out he enunciated the main principle of what soon was being called the Truman Doctrine:

At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one.
Our way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual freedom, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression.
The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio; fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.
I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.

Fourteen years later, on January 20, 1961, John F. Kennedy, like FDR in relation to Wilson, went Truman one better:

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

These were the most famous words Kennedy was ever to utter, but in connection with the criticisms of Bush's Second Inaugural as containing too much God and for universalizing the hunger for freedom, it is worth quoting the much less familiar passage that led up to them:

I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forebears prescribed nearly a century and three quarters ago. The world is very different now…. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe -- the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God.

In Bush's Second Inaugural, echoes can be heard of all these speeches, and by drawing in this fashion on three of his Democratic predecessors, he is subtly suggesting that there is nothing narrowly partisan about his own Doctrine. Watch how delicately he plays on some of the pronouncements quoted above without ever mentioning the names of their authors:

We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.

The second sentence evokes Roosevelt, the first plucks the Kennedy string, and the passage about fire I quoted above also harks back to -- and greatly improves on -- this one from Kennedy:

The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it -- and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.

Traces of Truman also appear, as in Bush's declaration

that it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture…

BUT WHAT OF REPUBLICAN predecessors? There are those -- and they can be found within both the old foreign-policy establishment and the conservative camp -- who deny that the Bush Doctrine is true to the traditions of the Republican Party. In fact, going so far as even to deny that (as Bush and others, myself included, often claim) it builds on the legacy of Ronald Reagan, they argue that, on the contrary, it veers off onto a radically different path. No doubt it is with this argument in mind that Bush makes very sure to add an unmistakable echo of Reagan to the ghostly choir of the three Democrats he has assembled.

Here is Reagan, speaking at Westminster Abbey on June 8, 1982:

We must be staunch in our conviction that freedom is not the sole prerogative of a lucky few, but the inalienable and universal right of all human beings…. It would be cultural condescension, or worse, to say that any people prefer dictatorship to democracy.

And here is Bush's version of the same point:

Some, I know, have questioned the global appeal of liberty - though… Americans, of all people, should never be surprised by the power of our ideals. Eventually the call of freedom comes to every mind and every soul…. America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies.

Above even Reagan, however, it is Abraham Lincoln -- the greatest Republican of them all, and the greatest of all American Presidents -- whose spirit hovers most brightly over the face of Bush's Second Inaugural. Lincoln, indeed, is the only one he quotes directly and by name:

The rulers of outlaw regimes know that we still believe as Abraham Lincoln did: "Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and, under the rule of a just God, cannot long retain it."

But there are also many unattributed echoes of Lincoln throughout this speech. For example, on Lincoln's "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy," Bush composes this variation:

Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave.

Another example is the creative adaptation by Bush of Lincoln's summation of the "real issue" of his debates with Stephen Douglas. Lincoln:

It is the eternal struggle between these two principles -- right and wrong -- throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle…. No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.

Now Bush:

We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and every nation: The moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right.

YET TO DEMOSTRATE even more definitively that his own Doctrine is rooted deep in American soil, Bush reaches not only beyond his 20th-century predecessors of both parties and back to Lincoln; he even goes beyond Lincoln and all the way back to the Declaration of Independence. In this he must have been inspired by Lincoln himself, who, in maintaining that slavery was wrong, appealed over the head of the Constitution (by which slavery was permitted) to the Declaration of Independence (by which it was logically forbidden):

I believe the declaration that "all men are created equal" is the great fundamental principle upon which our free institutions rest.

Bush similarly bases what he calls "our deepest beliefs" as Americans on the Declaration, where it is further asserted of "all men" that "they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights." Bush:

From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth.

And he returns to the Declaration in a beautiful peroration which is also Lincoln-like in the biblical music it makes and its play on a biblical verse:

When the Declaration of Independence was first read in public and the Liberty Bell was sounded in celebration, a witness said: "It rang as if it meant something." In our time it means something still. America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world, and to all the inhabitants thereof. Renewed in our strength -- tested, but not weary -- we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom.

If, then, Bush is guilty of excessive universalizing in his Second Inaugural, he has plenty of presidential company, including both the founder of the Republican Party in the 19th century and the greatest Republican president of the 20th.

EVEN SO, given the relentless attacks by Democrats on the Bush Doctrine in general and on this speech in particular, it should be pointed out that the rhetoric of the three Democrats with whom this Republican President associates himself was if anything much more far-reaching in its universalism than his own. After all, Roosevelt asserted that to all human beings "everywhere in the world" no fewer than four freedoms were "essential" (even, remarkably, freedom from fear), but Bush speaks only of freedom from political and religious tyranny; and whereas Roosevelt thought he could deliver all four of these freedoms not in "a distant millennium" but "in our own time and generation," Bush recognizes that "The great objective of ending tyranny is the concentrated work of generations."

Admittedly Truman was a bit less sweeping than Roosevelt had been before him; he did not add "everywhere" to the "free peoples" it would be his policy to support. Still, in moving from Greece and Turkey to "nearly every nation" in the world, he was sweeping enough to alarm Walter Lippmann, the most admired columnist of the day, who wrote:

A vague global policy, which sounds like the tocsin of an ideological crusade, has no limits…. Everyone everywhere will read into it his own fears and hopes…

Nor did Hans J. Morgenthau, then the leading theorist of realpolitik in the academic world, pay any heed to the gestures of caution in Truman's speech, which he denounced for having

transformed a concrete interest of the United States in a geographically defined part of the world into a moral principle of worldwide validity, to be applied regardless of the limits of American interest and power.

Bush introduces some of the same qualifications into his speech as Truman did. Like Truman ("I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way"), Bush insists that "Our goal… is to help others find their own voice, attain their own freedom, and make their own way." Like Truman, too (who stressed aid over military action, but who was soon to show, by going into Korea, that he was prepared to use force when nothing else would avail), Bush believes that the goal of ending tyranny

…is not primarily the task of arms, though we will defend ourselves and our friends by force of arms when necessary.

Not that such qualifications proved any more effective than Truman's did as a defense against attack from today's disciples of Lippmann in the media and of Morgenthau in the academy, let alone from the isolationists and the non-interventionists who still exist, as they also did then, on the left as well as the right.

And if Bush never goes as far as Roosevelt did, and no further than Truman, he is much more restrained than Kennedy was. Certainly there is nothing in his Second Inaugural to match the overkill of Kennedy's "pay any price, bear any burden" passage.

In short, the accusations of overreach that have been thrown at Bush's speech simply do not stand up when we look at it in the context of the oratorical American tradition out of which it flows. But this still leaves us with the question of how we are to understand his universalist language in the context of the present political situation. How does it square with the praise he has lavished on Vladimir Putin, even though the Russian leader has reversed the progress toward democratization that his country seemed to be making after the fall of Communism? How does it fit with the soft policy he has followed toward China, whose government remains politically repressive even though its economy has become relatively free? And what about the virtual alliance he has made with the Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf? In the eyes of some, cases like this expose Bush's universalist rhetoric as empty and/or hypocritical.

YET SURELY THESE CRITICS must -- or at any rate should -- know that, just as the Nazis and fascists were the main and immediate target in World War II, and just as the Communists were the main and immediate target in World War III (the Cold War), so our main and immediate target in what I persist in calling World War IV is the Islamofascist terrorists and the Middle Eastern despotisms by which they are bred, sheltered, financed, and armed.

Surely, too, Bush's critics must, or should, know that when Roosevelt held out the hope of spreading the four freedoms "everywhere in the world," it was clear to all sides that he was challenging only the Axis powers, and not the equally totalitarian Soviet Union or any of the smaller fascist regimes in other parts of the world; nor did anyone think that his willingness to forge an alliance with Stalin meant that he was spouting empty rhetoric or being hypocritical.

Similarly, when Truman promised to come to the aid of "free peoples… resisting attempted subjugation," and when Kennedy spoke of opposing "any foe," everyone recognized that they were talking about the Soviet Union and the Communist regimes and parties controlled by or allied with it. Nor did anyone (not even Lippmann and Morgenthau) seriously imagine that they were preparing to dislodge every tyrant and every dictator on the face of the earth or, conversely, that this prudential limitation exposed the universalism of their language as nothing but rodomontade.

Finally -- as Republican critics of Bush must or should know -- their party had little if anything to say against Reagan when (in complete fidelity to the Truman Doctrine but in clear violation of his own universalist declarations) he adopted a policy of supporting authoritarian regimes that were threatened either directly or indirectly by the much worse totalitarianism of the Soviet Union.

IN TRYING TO UNDERSTAND why it has been different with Bush, we arrive at what is truly new, and genuinely controversial, about the Bush Doctrine, especially in the form it takes in the Second Inaugural. It is not the universalism or the democratizing thrust that the President highlights in this speech and for which he has been so obtusely assailed; both of these, as we have just seen, are as old as the American Republic itself and both have served as lodestars for Democratic and Republican presidents alike. It is, rather, this President's repudiation of the longstanding "realist" policy of tolerating tyrants in the Middle East for the sake of stability, and his correlative effort to institute a new policy of "idealism" that conforms to "the great liberating tradition of this Nation." Which -- to the fury of the old foreign-policy establishment where the realist perspective still holds sway, and to the dismay of those conservatives who are skeptical about the conservative pedigree of the new policy and/or its viability -- is exactly what Bush has done. As he reminds us in the Second Inaugural, because we have now extended this tradition to Afghanistan and Iraq, "tens of millions have achieved their freedom," and millions more, he predicts, will follow suit.

It is a daring prediction, but what gives it credibility is that the words Bush has spoken and the things the United States has already achieved under the aegis of his new policy have shaken the entire region to its core.

Letter to the Editor

topics:
Foreign Policy, Vladimir Putin, Religion, Islam, Books, Constitution, Law, Military, Iraq, Iran, Russia, Pakistan, Communism, Energy, Oil