The state of shock into which the country has fallen as a result of the language used in the Tapes comes as something of a surprise. One was unprepared for the wave of barely concealed horror caused by the President’s rough-hewn verbiage, which has practically immobilized newsmen, congressmen, college students, truckdrivers, and platoon sergeants. One scarcely dreamed, even in the wildest of Com stockean fantasies, that such an instinct for refined language prevailed among our people.
Moreover, if the taping of all future Presidential Conversations should become mandatory (as Mr. William F. Buckley Jr. playfully suggested in a recent column), we can certainly anticipate pressures of a unique kind upon succeeding Presidents. We picture an atmosphere that is cleaner, nobler—one had almost said more sanctimonious— than the dreary one that so offends our high-minded citizenry.
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