The Ethics of Mr. Eisenhower s Rhetoric
Some years ago in The Ethics of Rhetoric, one of the few wise books by a contemporary I have had the fortune to find, Richard Weaver wrote: “An ethics of rhetoric requires that ultimate terms be ultimate in some rational sense.” As I read Mr. Eisenhower’s Inaugural Address, with its insistent repetition of such terms as Justice, Law, Freedom, and as I tried to divine what these words could mean to the man who had so recently acted at Suez and failed to act in Hungary, I was forcibly reminded of that sentence of Mr. Weaver’s.
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