Peggy Noonan: Just the Facts, Mr. President (comparing Obama and JFK)
[Peggy Noonan is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal whose work appears weekly in the Journal's Weekend Edition and on OpinionJournal.com.]
The president has been taking time thinking about Afghanistan. I cannot see why this is bad. If he's really thinking, he's not dithering—thought can be harder than action, weighing plans as hard as choosing and executing one. A question of such consequence deserves pondering. A president ought to summon and hear counsel before committing or removing American troops.
The president is not, apparently, holding serious discussions with the most informed and concerned Republicans from Capitol Hill and what used to be called the foreign-policy establishment, and this, if true, is bad. The cliché that politics stops at the water's edge is a fiction worth preserving.
It's a story that ought to be true and sometimes is true. There seems to be something in this president that resists really including the opposition. Maybe it's too great a sense of self-sufficiency, or maybe he's bowing to the reigning premise that we live in a poisonously partisan age, that the old forms and ways no longer apply. But why bow to that? To bow to it is to make it truer. The opposition is full of patriots who wish their country well. Bow to that.
All will depend on the outcome. If his decision is sound and ends in success, history will not say he was indecisive and Hamlet-like. If his decision results in failure, history will not celebrate his wonderfully cerebral deliberative style...
... One day in October 1962, a young president had to tell America something dreadful. What had once been a friendly nation 90 miles from our shore, a nation we'd long and until very recently been used to seeing as peaceful and nonthreatening, was receiving from the Soviet Union nuclear weaponry that we had every reason to believe would be or were aimed at us. It was dreadful news—literally, dreadful.
The president had to tell his country, which didn't have a clue, all about it, and announce in the same speech what exactly he was going to do and why exactly his plan was the right one and deserved support.
That was a lot of pressure for one speech to bear. John F. Kennedy and his speechwriter Ted Sorensen bore it by being direct, densely factual and no-frills. Hard to imagine a speech beginning more bluntly than this:
"Good evening, my fellow citizens. This government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba. Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere. Upon receiving the first preliminary hard information of this nature last Tuesday morning at 9 a.m., I directed that our surveillance be stepped up. And having now confirmed and completed our evaluation of the evidence and our decision on a course of action, this government feels obliged to report this new crisis to you in fullest detail."
He did, in a style that assumed the intelligence of those listening, that assumed as a matter of course their ability to follow an argument and absorb densely presented data.
It would be a real relief to hear this approach from anyone in public life today. Politicians in general no longer assume that we all more or less operate on the same intellectual level, with roughly the same amount of common sense. Instead they talk down to us...
Read entire article at WSJ
The president has been taking time thinking about Afghanistan. I cannot see why this is bad. If he's really thinking, he's not dithering—thought can be harder than action, weighing plans as hard as choosing and executing one. A question of such consequence deserves pondering. A president ought to summon and hear counsel before committing or removing American troops.
The president is not, apparently, holding serious discussions with the most informed and concerned Republicans from Capitol Hill and what used to be called the foreign-policy establishment, and this, if true, is bad. The cliché that politics stops at the water's edge is a fiction worth preserving.
It's a story that ought to be true and sometimes is true. There seems to be something in this president that resists really including the opposition. Maybe it's too great a sense of self-sufficiency, or maybe he's bowing to the reigning premise that we live in a poisonously partisan age, that the old forms and ways no longer apply. But why bow to that? To bow to it is to make it truer. The opposition is full of patriots who wish their country well. Bow to that.
All will depend on the outcome. If his decision is sound and ends in success, history will not say he was indecisive and Hamlet-like. If his decision results in failure, history will not celebrate his wonderfully cerebral deliberative style...
... One day in October 1962, a young president had to tell America something dreadful. What had once been a friendly nation 90 miles from our shore, a nation we'd long and until very recently been used to seeing as peaceful and nonthreatening, was receiving from the Soviet Union nuclear weaponry that we had every reason to believe would be or were aimed at us. It was dreadful news—literally, dreadful.
The president had to tell his country, which didn't have a clue, all about it, and announce in the same speech what exactly he was going to do and why exactly his plan was the right one and deserved support.
That was a lot of pressure for one speech to bear. John F. Kennedy and his speechwriter Ted Sorensen bore it by being direct, densely factual and no-frills. Hard to imagine a speech beginning more bluntly than this:
"Good evening, my fellow citizens. This government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba. Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere. Upon receiving the first preliminary hard information of this nature last Tuesday morning at 9 a.m., I directed that our surveillance be stepped up. And having now confirmed and completed our evaluation of the evidence and our decision on a course of action, this government feels obliged to report this new crisis to you in fullest detail."
He did, in a style that assumed the intelligence of those listening, that assumed as a matter of course their ability to follow an argument and absorb densely presented data.
It would be a real relief to hear this approach from anyone in public life today. Politicians in general no longer assume that we all more or less operate on the same intellectual level, with roughly the same amount of common sense. Instead they talk down to us...