Churchill in America
Times Ignorance.

September 19, 2001 5:30 p.m.

n an editorial today entitled Wartime Rhetoric, the New York Times took exception with President George W. Bush's use of the phrase "Wanted: Dead or Alive" in describing the fate of Osama bin Laden. It suggested that he should take rhetorical lessons from Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, both of whom "understood the power of words and put them to effective use ..." The opinion writers behind this editorial should study their subject before lecturing the president and their readers. And how little research would have been required.

For instance, Architects of Victory by Joseph Shattan (published by the Heritage Foundation), provides several useful examples of Churchill's rich language.

In 1919, Churchill wrote of Lenin and Trotsky:

They seek as the first condition of their being the overthrow and destruction of all existing institutions and of every State and Government now standing in the world. They too aim at a worldwide and international league, but a league of the failures, the criminals, the unfit, the mutinous, the morbid, the deranged and the distraught in every land; and between them and such order of civilization as we have been able to build up since the dawn of history there can, as Lenin rightly proclaims, be neither truce nor pact?

Even worse, at least from the perspective of the New York Times editorial board, Shattan notes that "the barrage of invective unloosed by Churchill against the Bolsheviks was unparalleled in modern British political history." "'Criminality and animalism,' 'fungus,' 'cancer,' 'a plague bacillus,' 'a deadly and paralyzing sect,' 'a barbarism ... devoured by vermin, racked by pestilence,' 'avowed enemies of civilization,' 'criminals,' 'deranged and distraught,' and 'subhuman' were among his choicer epithets."

The president's language is wholly appropriate. In fact, it's Churchillian. The phrase "dead or alive" communicates that the United States is not mincing words or actions in pursuit of bin Laden and his ilk. President Bush's statement is not in question, but the pettiness of the New York Times certainly is.