The Trouble with Loose Lingo

The Presidency/Hugh Sidey

In the unwritten book of presidential records, many entries are clustered under the heading "Worst Speech ever Given." Kennedy in Pocatello, Idaho, in 1960. Johnson at Henry Gonzalez Day in San Antonio in 1965. Nixon beside China's Great Wall in 1972. So it is inevitable that Jimmy Carter will make a run at the record. He probably did not break it in his televised energy talk last week, but it was a commendable warmup. The President elbowed aside Mulligan's Stew for 20 prime minutes and delivered his own hash. He said nothing new. He smiled as he described an energyless catastrophe. He issued this clarion call: "All of us in government need your help." And he explained further. "These are serious problems, and this has been a serious talk."

Jimmy Carter has a problem with words and how he uses them. More words have flowed from him--in speeches and written messages and press conferences--than from any other President in office for so short a time. The hallmark has been the casualness of his words. This has contributed mightily to the arguments over the Middle East, SALT and the American economy. Things said in haste have been retracted, modified, further explained. Carter uses words as if they were Band-Aids. Chauncey Schmidt, chairman of the Bank of California, complained that the President just did not seem to understand the tremendous impact of his words. Presidential Band-Aids are hard to peel off. Schmidt suggested that Carter talks before he thinks.

That may be the heart of the problem. Carter has been thinking out loud. Much of his talk is unnecessary, a lot of it ineffective, some of it troublesome. The world is slightly paranoid over word meanings. Bureaucrats and diplomats get exorbitant salaries these days to ponder the depths of "homeland" or "defensible borders." In the torrent of Carter words there are always contradictions for those who want to find them. For others, there is growing boredom.

Scholars like Rutgers' Emmet John Hughes, who wrote for Ike, wonder if Carter would not be better off with more limited and formal rhetoric. Harry McPherson, one of L.B.J.'s speechmen, has long contended that important presidential speeches are far more than just speeches. When done properly, they force an Administration through a laborious internal process, establishing directions, making decisions, hammering out exact language and calculating how to arrest attention and enlist the public. If the preliminaries are not done, or are done badly, the speech is rarely worth anything and is frequently alarming for the evidence of inner doubt it presents.

Carter may at last be aware of this. He is giving more structured speeches. His talk about the Middle East to the World Jewish Congress was meticulously planned, crafted and delivered. Unfortunately, it came after a long season of open presidential musing about the world's worst tinderbox.

Carter has tried to remain the fellow talking to the League of Women Voters. He wants to sound in public as he does in private. He is not Kennedy or Churchill, so his sentences march ahead with subject, verb and object followed by a period as soon as possible. Adjectives and adverbs are dropped. Carter does not like to quote others or make allusions. He is his own reference point. His favorite words are from his engineering days: "competent," "effective," "specific."

Carter is not much for "the Fourth-of-July stuff," as one aide says. He stabs such rhetoric in the heart with his felt-tipped pen. He pondered a sentence in a speech draft a while back, then changed "cynical" to "callous." Working people would better understand the meaning of callous, he explained. Carter simply does not enjoy playing with words, as F.D.R. did. Words are machine parts. They are not an orchestra to him, which may be another part of Carter's problem in a nation nurtured on Muzak.

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