The World Is Listening

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency

The words and phrases of power fly like intercontinental missiles, finding targets both intended and accidental within minutes of launching. The analogy, mercifully, is inexact: declarations sometimes can be corrected in flight or even called back. Yet each year, in our taut environment of colliding political interests and swelling military arsenals, careless words grow more dangerous and create an alarming impact on strained alliances or suspicious adversaries.

A large part of international politics today is a ritual followed by 50 or so men and women around the globe trying to figure out each morning what their counterparts in other nations are truly thinking. From these deductions, armies are massed and shifted, resources expended and freedoms enlarged or restrained.

The failure to understand fully the importance of the precise use of language in discussing the exercise of power has been a grave weakness of all the recent American presidential pretenders. Two weeks ago, Ronald Reagan was trying to put his China genie back in the bottle. He was not even sure what he had said that got him into trouble, and at one point in a press conference argument about having government-to-government relations with Taiwan, Reagan confessed: "I don't know. I don't know that I said that or not, ah, I, I really don't." When his running mate George Bush offered, "He did not say that," a relieved Reagan piped up, "George says I didn't say it." In fact, Reagan did say it (that we should have "governmental" relations with Taiwan), and he said it in an almost offhand manner in Cleveland several months ago.

For nearly four years now the world has suffered from the same kind of indiscriminate musings of Jimmy Carter, whether on having neighborhoods of "ethnic purity," or providing the Palestinians a "homeland," or declaring that his friendship with the Shah of Iran was "irreplaceable." These fellows who come out of the movie business or peanut warehouses--amateurs, if you will--naturally carry a lot of original ideas of how to run the world. Like all people, they are products of their environment, harboring folklore from parents, favorite uncles, teachers, and books they have read. Some of it is fresh and good. Much of it is half-baked, naive and wrong.

What they rarely calculate is that when they become serious contenders for the presidency they enter a special world in which almost everything they say becomes the basis for a judgment by someone, somewhere on their policy or on themselves as leaders. Governors, Senators and Congressmen can say almost anything that comes to mind (and very often do) with little fear of its upsetting national aspirations. Let them battle their way up to the plateau of running for the presidency and everything changes. The degree to which they deliberate every issue before they speak and then think through every utterance is a critical measure of their competence.

Even men in our time who grew up around politics and matured in a power environment were astonished at the changes in how they were perceived when they reached the presidential level. Six months after taking office, John Kennedy was still marveling to friends over the deep impact of his words around the world. And Lyndon Johnson loved the idea that a few of his comments delivered from the White House could send the stock market up or down five points in an hour or two.

When Ronald Reagan had stumbled on to the end of his China press conference, a few experienced journalists gathered and wondered if they had witnessed the beginning of the end of his bid for the presidency. One such episode does not a campaign make or break; it is only a fragment of the image of a man as President, an image that the public will gradually construct out of many pieces, some deeply personal, as the campaign proceeds. Yet the China flap stands as a warning to Reagan: he is now in an arena where new disciplines of precision and perceptions apply.

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