The Rhetoric of Freedom

However the Carter Administration is remembered, it won’t be for its stirring rhetoric. President Carter’s speeches, like most of those of Ford, Nixon, and Johnson, fell to earth with a thud—not even with a big thud —and are hardly to be remembered. To be sure, he once declaimed on the “national malaise,” but I remember that speech not because it was persuasive but because it was factitious and laughable. My only other memory of the former President’s rhetoric—aside from his Farewell Address, for nothing became his speech-making like the leaving of it—was his startling announcement that “mammoth Russian troops” had invaded Afghanistan, confirming my long-standing suspicion that Soviet soldiers really are ten feet tall.

Ronald Reagan’s Presidency marks a reverse in the decline of American political rhetoric, but even so happy an event will not check the plunge in the quality of congressional and judicial deliberations. To understand this decline (and the corresponding decline in American statesmanship, for great words engender and accompany great deeds), a more comprehensive viewpoint is needed. Hence the recent conference on “Rhetoric and American Statesmanship” at the University of Dallas, coordinated by Professor Glen E. Thurow of the Department of Politics and Dr. Peter W. Schramm, Western Director of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute; and sponsored collectively by ISI, the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship, and the Willmoore Kendall Program in Politics and Literature of the University of Dallas.

About the Author

Charles R. Kesler

Charles R. Kesler, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, is the editor of the Claremont Review of Books.

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However the Carter Administration is remembered, it won’t be for its stirring rhetoric. President Carter’s speeches, like most of those of Ford, Nixon, and Johnson, fell to earth with a thud—not even with a big thud —and are hardly to be remembered. To be sure, he once declaimed on the “national malaise,” but I remember that speech not because it was persuasive but because it was factitious and laughable. My only other memory of the former President’s rhetoric—aside from his Farewell Address, for nothing became his speech-making like the leaving of it—was his startling announcement that “mammoth Russian troops” had invaded Afghanistan, confirming my long-standing suspicion that Soviet soldiers really are ten feet tall.

Ronald Reagan’s Presidency marks a reverse in the decline of American political rhetoric, but even so happy an event will not check the plunge in the quality of congressional and judicial deliberations. To understand this decline (and the corresponding decline in American statesmanship, for great words engender and accompany great deeds), a more comprehensive viewpoint is needed. Hence the recent conference on “Rhetoric and American Statesmanship” at the University of Dallas, coordinated by Professor Glen E. Thurow of the Department of Politics and Dr. Peter W. Schramm, Western Director of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute; and sponsored collectively by ISI, the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship, and the Willmoore Kendall Program in Politics and Literature of the University of Dallas.