The Power of a Phrase - 18 July 2003

Listening the other evening to the President of the United States telling us with his roguish smile: "There's no need to doubt the authenticity of the 'uranium from Africa' phrase - it was authenticated by British intelligence, wasn't it?"

The head of the CIA believed it, George W Bush believed in it and believes in the CIA. No problem, huh?

I yearned for Mr Bush to recall and emulate one Fiorella La Guardia, who for 10 years before and into the Second World War was Mayor of New York city.

A cocky, militant, deadly honest reform mayor, who called corrupt politicians by name and jailed the most untouchable gangsters in the country.

He was a hurricane of a clean sweep and those of us who lived through him will never forget him.

But in his headlong style he made mistakes - he never covered them up or explained them away.

So I yearned for Mr Bush to recall and repeat a famous line of Mayor La Guardia. It was this. "I seldom make a mistake but when I do, it's a beaut."

If only Mr Bush had said, just once, "Among the thousands of items of intelligence that came and come to us about Iraq there was no doubt one that was a fraud and may well have been manufactured, I beg everybody's pardon.

"And now let's get on with planting and strengthening the new, remarkable, all-party, all-religion, multi-ethnic governing council of Iraq - the first representative people's government the country has ever known."

At this point in my meditations, up spake my nurse, companion and most merciless critic.

"For heaven's sake," she whined, "no more weapons of mass destruction. Give us a break!"

"Yes, ma'am," I said and I switched to wondering whether the simple phrase - uranium from Africa - would finish off someone's political career, as simple phrases or more often casual remarks have done.

I recall way back after President Lyndon Johnson had announced he would not run for the presidency again, a whole new flock of hopefuls looked in the mirror and thought they saw the next president.

One of them was an able, amiable governor from a Midwestern state. He seemed a very likely prospect until he went to the White House to call on President Johnson.

He had, he hoped, a simple solution to the raging war in Vietnam. President Johnson then performed an execution on the governor, telling him more in half an hour about the hideous complications of Vietnam - military, political, social, economic - than he'd heard from anybody or read anywhere.

The man stumbled out of the White House in a haze and all he said to the inquiring press was: "I was brainwashed."

He was quoted all over. Who wants a brainwashed president? It was the end of his political career.

A little nearer to home do you remember General Alexander Haig, President Reagan's dapper, manly, handsome secretary of state?

On the day in March 1981 when the demented college boy, Hinkley, shot President Reagan in the lung and the president was rushed to the hospital there was understandable confusion at the White House. When a president is disabled, the vice president is officially qualified to take over but Vice President Bush was, at that moment, in the skies on an overseas trip.

The White House officials assembled quickly in the so-called War Room of the White House and there was evidently a moment when nobody was sure who would bring things to order.

Luckily the Secretary of State, General Haig, was close by and went dashing into the War Room and settled the hassle by saying - I'm in charge here. Implying, if not saying outright, that he was the next in succession to the presidency.

Secretary Haig in that short, sharp phrase committed a boo-boo or clanger of the first order.

The Constitution decrees that if for any reason the president is unable to perform is office and the vice president is unavailable to step in, the supreme executive power passes to the Speaker of the House.

Everybody knew this evidently except Secretary Haig. He too had ambitions for the highest office but few people took General Haig seriously from then on as a presidential candidate.

On the other hand a single phrase can make or polish up a political reputation.

The phrase "wind of change" had been in the language for centuries but had lapsed from the rhetoric of politicians until in 1960 Britain's Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, speaking before the South African parliament about that country's future, said: "The wind of change is blowing through the continent."

The sentence made him known and admired in countries that had scarcely heard of him.

American history is choking with phrases that have elevated their speakers to godhead on the evidence of that phrase alone.

Patrick Henry, a professional 18th Century demagogue, who just before Virginia decided to break with England, cried: "As for me give me liberty or give me death!"

He got his liberty, was invited to Philadelphia to the convention that drew up the Constitution but on no published evidence he said he smelled a rat in Philadelphia, tending toward monarchy.

He stayed away, took no further part in the revolution and lived to a ripe old age.

There is one supreme example of one man, a foreigner, managing to establish in America a shining reputation for his whole country that lasted for nearly 200 years.

One of the principal cultural shocks that hit me when I first settled down at Yale was the discovery that of course there were Anglophile Americans and Anglophobes - one man I remember pestered me all the time for not giving India her freedom.

But I never met anyone who disliked, let alone hated, the French. Somehow the French were special and sacrosanct in the American memory.

All because of one 19-year-old Frenchman, a marquis and a professional soldier, a captain of dragoons and a fervent young idealist.

When he heard that the American colonies had declared their independence of Great Britain he wrote to his 17-year-old wife that "my heart was enrolled in the cause" and made a quick deal to slip off to America in spite of a ban by the king on anyone's joining a reportedly failing cause.

Lafayette landed on the coast of South Carolina as unidentified as a vagrant.

He had the true aristocrat's indifference to appearances or even of mentioning his rank. And he trekked his way to Washington where it took three months for anyone to become aware of his presence.

Eventually the Congress passed a resolution accepting the services of this eccentric young nobleman soldier and next day George Washington himself made him a major general and gave him command of a division.

He fought bravely, he was wounded several times and - astonishingly in a war being fought over rough terrain the area of Europe - the 19-year-old Lafayette became to the Americans a conquering hero.

After four years he went home to France, enthusiastically supported the French revolution until he turned away in horror from the savagery with which the leaders turned on each other. He was declared a traitor and spent five years in prison.

As an old man he paid a final visit to America and received a congressional and a national reception that could not have been grander for a resurrected Washington himself.

When during the First World War in 1917 the first American troops landed in France the chief aide to the American commander greeted the welcoming French general with the line: "Lafayette, we're here!"

This splendid little episode and the gallantry of Lafayette's life in America was henceforth taught in the schools in America well into the 20th Century until a day in 1970 when, on an ill-timed visit, Monsieur Pompidou, the President of France, appeared before Congress.

Only three days earlier he'd sold a fleet of jet fighter planes to Libya, whose tyrant Gaddafi was at the time America's chief demon.

Today American history is not a compulsory subject in schools and, where it is taught, it's mostly taught badly.

A recent poll, not of high school but of college graduates in California, revealed that 40% of them had no idea which century the American Civil War was fought in.

So until last autumn, I suspect, France had become a land whose food and wine is admired but otherwise is a country like any other you can take or leave alone.

When in those Iraqi debates in the Security Council, France - as one commentator put it - chose like a bystander at a nasty street accident to exercise its well-known privilege not to get involved, it became - for the first time in my long era - a most unpopular nation.

A small town in North Carolina boasted of being the first place to banish the phrase "French fries" from a menu and substitute "freedom fries".

As for Monsieur Pompidou it must be a melancholy consolation to his old admirers that in this country his principal footnote to history will associate him not with any high deed of political derring-do but with the contemporary fashion in architecture otherwise known as the outdoor plumbing style.

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