The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.
—RONALD REAGAN
On Wednesday, March 28, 1979, James Callaghan lost a vote of confidence in the House of Commons. His Labour government fell and the Tories won the subsequent general election under the relatively unknown and untested Margaret Thatcher. The Conservatives would stay in power for eighteen years, and even when Tony Blair led Labour back into power in 1997, his policies—like those of John Major before him and Gordon Brown and David Cameron after him—would bear the unmistakable influence of Mrs. Thatcher. There was a crisp irreversibility about her as a character. The same would turn out to be true of her ideas. We journalists love to declare watersheds and tipping points in an effort to bend the headlong rush of events into some kind of narrative shape. Surely this was one, probably the only significant one in the British politics of my time—at least until the fateful Brexit vote of June 2016.
But the spring of 1979 was a tipping point for me as well. I was twenty-one, an undergraduate in my final year at Oxford. I was interested in politics, though even then more as an observer than as a participant. Before it finally fell, the Callaghan government had lived for months on a parliamentary precipice—three-line whips, transient deals with minor parties, ambulances bringing dying MPs into the Palace of Westminster to vote. I was at home in Cumbria when that final vote took place but, a few weeks earlier, I’d come down to London in the hope of getting into the gallery to watch one of those previous close calls. I’d arrived at St. Stephen’s Gate in what I’d hazily assumed would be good time, but it was jam-packed already. So I hovered and chatted with some of the other loiterers for a few minutes, before heading back across Parliament Square to the Tube.
I had another reason for being in London that day. After taking the Tube to Oxford Circus, I strolled up Regent Street and dropped off an application at the BBC for one of the corporation’s training schemes. A life in broadcasting or journalism was not a long-standing ambition or indeed anything you could call a plan; in fact, I had no idea what I wanted to do. But everyone I knew was applying to the BBC. So at the last minute I’d filled out the form and, too close to the deadline to rely on the post, ended up pushing it through the letterbox of a sepulchral office building opposite Broadcasting House. Later—when I remembered how much TV I’d watched as a child, how much of an awakening Watergate had been for me in my teens, how easily I’d slipped into student journalism—later this moment, the painstakingly typed form, the polished brass letterbox, the letter that is in your hand one second and gone God knows where the next, would acquire a retrospective inevitability. At the time, it was just one possibility among many, and a remote one at that.
And then all at once I was there. My first day of work as a research assistant trainee, or RAT, was Monday September 3, 1979. Lord Louis Mountbatten, who had been blown up by the IRA in late August, was to be buried later that week. The monitors in one of the control rooms we traipsed through that first day were showing overhead shots of Westminster Abbey, part of a camera rehearsal for the funeral. “Good practice for the Queen Mum,” someone whispered in the reverent hush that I would soon come to associate at the BBC not with royalty, and certainly not with the Almighty, but with proximity to the divine presence of live TV.
The RAT was the lowest of the low, the most junior member of any given team, but paradoxically also somebody whom everyone else knew had been chosen from thousands: a bright young thing, therefore, and conceivably a future boss. Our reception—by turns friendly, suspicious, curious, dismissive, on rare and unsettling occasions respectful, even—reflected all of that. The name was anything but an accident, of course. This was the golden age of BBC acronyms: RAT wasn’t bad, but it paled before the magnificence of that homage to Old MacDonald, EIEIO (Engineering Induction And Engineering Information Officer), which some anonymous genius was said to have slipped through the system.
The scheme consisted of a twelve-month contract with BBC Television which, after a couple weeks of basic training, would comprise four three-month “attachments” on a series of different programs. In theory, each RAT would be exposed to a range of departments and genres, from Sport to Children’s to Drama, before—assuming all went well—settling on a chosen field. In theory we had a say in where we were placed. I told the organizers I particularly wanted an attachment in Current Affairs and was promptly sent to Religion. Soon enough, though, I found myself on the daily evening magazine program, Nationwide.
The day at Nationwide began with a Darwinian morning conference during which you had to pitch a series of suggestions in open competition with every other researcher on the team. The editors weren’t necessarily looking for new stories—most of the items were based on that morning’s newspapers—but for imaginative, punchy angles and clever production ideas. If your suggestion was chosen, then so were you. You became not just researcher, but guest booker, scriptwriter, and producer, and ended the day standing anxiously in the control room behind the live studio director as your precious five minutes went out and were watched by millions. If not, you were condemned to spend the day running errands for another researcher—organizing slides or cardboard graphics to put in front of the camera, say—or, worse, doing nothing and watching other more creative, more energetic, more skillful members of the team going frantically about their business.
Remembered nowadays, if at all, for its jokey end items, Nationwide in fact offered its viewers a mixed diet that included reportage and debate on the day’s major news events. I paid my dues with stories like the one about the world’s fastest turkey plucker—the turkey, alas, freshly throttled and still kicking when we cut to it—but quickly gravitated to the serious stuff: strikes, assassinations (Lennon, Sadat, attempts on Ronald Reagan and the pope), superpower diplomacy, Northern Ireland, but above all domestic politics.
The British Left fractured after their 1979 defeat. The Labour Party took an abrupt radical lurch, and a group of leading centrists split away to create their own new Social Democratic Party (SDP). We followed every twist in that story, as well as the lively story of the new Conservative government: the battles between the “wets” (One-Nation Tories with qualms about the consequences of the government’s economic policies) and the “drys” around Mrs. Thatcher; and the clash between the government and other powerful forces in the land, including Britain’s miners, the Church of England, the educational establishment, and the BBC itself.
So I was there when Neil Kinnock, a future leader of the Labour Party and then an influential left-wing MP, arrived in our studio in tears during the bitter 1981 battle for the deputy leadership of the party. I was standing next to the camera at the 1982 Conservative Party Conference in Blackpool when the BBC interviewer Robin Day called Defence Secretary John Nott a “here-today, gone-tomorrow politician” to his face, and Nott simply yanked the microphone from his lapel, got up, and strode out of the studio. (He eventually got over his fit of pique and titled his autobiography Here Today, Gone Tomorrow.) A few years later, I and a few colleagues would be on the receiving end of nearly an hour of vigorous greenroom persuasion from Mrs. Thatcher herself as she sought to convince us of the irrefutable wisdom of her plans to reform the NHS—plans that marked the starting point of a debate about health-care policy in Britain which, as we shall see, persists to this day along much the same lines.
Elections, budgets, policy debates, political crises—as a researcher, director, producer, and ultimately editor, I was involved in covering scores of them and met virtually every major British politician and public figure of the time. My days and nights were given over to the central preoccupation of every political journalist, which is to figure out what’s really going on, what it means, and what’s likely to happen next.
I was bobbing in a sea of public language—listening to it, cutting it, quoting it, deconstructing and reconstructing it. If I had thought about it at all, it would have been as stuff, the raw and undigested material of journalism, rather than as something worthy of consideration in itself. And yet, although I wasn’t aware of it at the time, the language of politics—and the way I and other journalists sliced and diced that language before presenting it to the public—was already beginning to change.
The Age of Consensus
After the defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945, it was widely believed in the West—given the scale of the challenge of reconstruction and the confrontation with Soviet communism—that this was a moment to put aside the worst excesses of adversarial politics in favor of a consensual approach to public policy, inspired by the potential of science, technology, and evidence-based decision making to transform society.
No one envisioned internal ideological conflict disappearing—class differences and competing visions of the good society would persist, and in any event democracy, the bedrock on which the whole Western postwar project was built, would continue to require at least a pro forma contest between parties of Left and Right. The hope was rather that some of the ideological energy that had torn Europe apart in the first half of the century could be focused and directed against the USSR and its proxies and sympathizers. Other differences could be downplayed as each country’s leaders got on with the immense economic and social challenges facing them.
The two objectives—the eventual triumph of Western democratic capitalism over communism, and the economic and social transformation of Western societies—were closely connected in many politicians’ minds. The war had demonstrated the decisive role that superior scientific and industrial muscle could play in securing victory. Now the West would be engaged in a competition not just between rival worldviews and ways of life but also between scientists, engineers, designers, factory managers, and workers. It would need a new hardheaded, practical politics to win the battle of matériel as well as that of ideology. And it would need a new rhetoric to help it do so.
In West Germany, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and his successors single-mindedly pursued the program that the chancellor laid out in 1949—to rebuild the economy on new technocratic principles and to address the “great social problems” which that ruined nation faced, not least the challenge of providing homes and work for the “flotsam millions” of Germans displaced by the war and its aftermath. Reunification would remain a long-term ambition, but for now Germany’s foreign policy would be NATO and the dream of a “positive and viable European federation.”1 Adenauer’s Christian Democrat Party and its principal opponents, the Social Democrats, put electoral appeal and practical political considerations above partisan purity.
National reconstruction was also the top priority in France and Britain, and there too policy consensus was in the air. In France, the new parties of the Fourth and Fifth Republics would still be clearly identified as Left or Right, but the policies they pursued in government were often indistinguishable. In the UK, the new National Health Service, which had been devised by a Liberal, was passed into law by Labour and supported by successive Conservative governments. The new word Butskellism—a combination of the surnames of the senior Conservative politician Rab Butler and Hugh Gaitskell, one of Labour’s leaders—was coined to describe an approach to politics that at least claimed to put a significantly shared national agenda above ideological difference. It was fully committed to social progress, in contrast to traditional Toryism; but progress that would be achieved through democratic means and a shared commitment to exploit the promise of technology, rather than through class struggle and authoritarian centralism, in contrast to Marxism. The usual vituperation of British party politics—as recently as June 1945, Winston Churchill had warned Clement Attlee’s Labour Party would inevitably “fall back on some kind of Gestapo”2 if elected—was somewhat muted.
America’s case was different. It had not been bombed or invaded, and although the war had required sacrifices, it had left the United States far more powerful than its allies. Nonetheless, faced with narrow (and soon to be overturned) majorities in the Senate and House, the Republican president Dwight Eisenhower also contemplated a different kind of leadership—and political discourse—which he explicitly contrasted with the prewar partisanship of Franklin D. Roosevelt:
People like to think of Mr. Roosevelt as a leader; in the situation where his own party was delighted to hear a daily excoriation of the opposite political party, his methods were adequate to his time and the situation. As of today, every measure that we deem essential to the progress and welfare of America normally requires Democratic support in varying degrees. I think it is fair to say that, in this situation, only a leadership that is based on honesty of purpose, calmness, and inexhaustible patience in conference and persuasion, and refusal to be diverted from basic principles can, in the long run, win out.3
In its heyday, postwar consensus politics had a confident rhetoric of its own: it was heroic about the battle between the free world and communism, reasonable and resolutely modern about everything else. It was a rhetoric of the future, although its residual taste for a stately Edwardian turn of phrase reassuringly connected the listener with a past of shared values and settled social relations.
On the whole, it was not a memorable rhetoric, however, and most of the famous sentences and phrases from that time give little clue as to the speaker’s position on the political spectrum: John Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”; Harold Macmillan’s “The wind of change is blowing through this continent”; Harold Wilson’s “white heat of technology.”
Neil Armstrong’s painstakingly engineered words from the surface of the moon in July 1969 typify its rather affectless optimism: “one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Like ingredients in a hamburger, humanism and hubris, national pride and internationalism were carefully layered to create a sandwich that offered no resistance to the tooth and could therefore be marketed with confidence to consumers in every region of the blue and green planet slowly revolving above Armstrong’s head.
Some Europeans hoped that the new technocratic approach to public policy and government might trigger a more profound break with the rhetoric of class and ideological division that had riven their countries in the past. In 1960s Italy, for instance, the Marxist film director Pier Paolo Pasolini called for the development of a language not just for Italy’s ruling classes but for all Italians. It would be a triumph of the reality of modern Italy (Italia reale) over the “rhetorical” Italy (Italia retorica) of the traditional elites. To others, including the writer Italo Calvino, Pasolini’s new “technological” Italian was not a new national language but a sinister nonlanguage, an antilingua.4
There were also rhetorics of opposition, of course, from the slogans of the ’60s counterculture—by turns retro agitprop and pop-iconoclast—to the measured solemnity of Nelson Mandela standing in a Pretoria dock in 1964 and reaching back to the cadence of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English dissent and reform:
During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.5
Martin Luther King Jr. had drawn on a parallel, if more florid, tradition of Baptist homiletics in his “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington the year before. Acceptance of the reality of conflict, defiance in the face of oppression, a determination to stand for one’s principles regardless of the cost—now regarded as classic, at the time the voices which spoke for those who had so far been denied the benefits of the Western postwar dream had an anachronistic, obdurate quality to them—beautiful old-fashioned structures at odds with contemporary taste, like Victorian churches standing in the path of the modern urban planner and his bulldozer.
At the 1964 Republican presidential convention, a dissident of a different stripe appeared to reach even farther into the past to make his protest against the politics of consensus. Accepting the party’s nomination, the radical small-government conservative Barry Goldwater responded to the “false prophets,” who had “talked and talked and talked and talked the words of freedom,” but whose endless compromises had undermined it. He defended his iconoclasm with words that his speechwriters may have genuinely thought to be a quotation from Cicero—they certainly sound Ciceronian—but were instead their own neoclassical invention: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”6
Liberal opponents dismissed Goldwater’s assault on government interventionism and the New Deal as a dotty throwback; his campaign slogan, “In your heart you know he’s right,” was immediately met with the lapel button riposte, “In your guts you know he’s nuts.” That judgment seemed vindicated when he was roundly thrashed by Lyndon Johnson in the subsequent election.
But Goldwater was speaking not for the past but for the future. The spirit of consensus could not dominate indefinitely, and over the last third of the twentieth century it was progressively weakened: by buoyant new intellectual and political forces on both Left and Right; by the end of the Cold War that had given it much of its rationale; above all, by its own growing shortcomings. In many countries, voters—especially younger voters—came to view the politicians of the era of compromise not as high-minded and patriotic pragmatists but as members of a corrupt and unaccountable elite. Unaccountable because, when political parties seem to agree about most things, elections do not bring real change, and even though the constitutional machinery of democracy may be working perfectly, voters are effectively disenfranchised and must either take to the streets, as some did, or turn to leaders committed to breaking up the cozy club.
Political pragmatism and a faith in technocratic policy making would not disappear, but from the 1980s on, they would face constant challenge. As a result, they would often go underground: they would continue to inform what political leaders did, but no longer what they said. In due course this growing gap between words and actions would magnify preexisting suspicions about both politicians and political language itself. That charge, however, was never laid at Margaret Thatcher’s door.
Where There Is Discord
Let’s return then to that moment when Mrs. Thatcher swept into power and consider the political language of the time. It’s a rhetoric in transition. Speeches, interviews, press reports, and campaign messaging still owed much to the recent past: technocratic competence remained the gold standard, and politicians on all sides still appealed to reason and the facts as they strove to win policy arguments.
But Margaret Thatcher’s radicalism extended beyond the realm of political ideas to the rhetoric in which those ideas were expressed and gave it an unmistakable quality—hard-edged, insistent, utterly sure of itself. She and her allies would be described as “conviction politicians,” suggesting a motivation that derived from character, or even faith, rather than cold-blooded rationalism.
The reaction of political opponents and significant sections of the public was equally visceral, and the temperature and bitterness of the language employed by all sides quickly rose. Though the topics and targets have changed over the years, to a great extent that higher intensity persists in our public language. Meanwhile, new and radical ideas began to be tested in the late 1970s in the field of political marketing and the handling of the media that point directly to our world and the gravamen of this book.
Take the most famous poster of the time, and indeed of modern British political history. Against a white background, it showed a long, snaking line of people waiting in a dole queue. The main caption read: LABOUR ISN’T WORKING. A second caption in smaller letters to the bottom right added: BRITAIN’S BETTER OFF WITH THE CONSERVATIVES.
The initial impact of the poster came not from its limited physical life—it was first put up in 1978 on a small handful of sites—but from the political row it ignited. The Labour government decided to go for it on two grounds. First, that it was fake: those people photographed in that long “dole queue” weren’t actually unemployed, they were Tory activists posing for the poster; and the photograph was a montage to make the queue look longer. Second, that the poster overstepped the line that separated political messaging from commercial marketing. A few weeks before the poster appeared, Denis Healey, Labour’s chancellor of the exchequer, had accused the Conservatives of no longer trusting in their policies to appeal to the British public, but of relying instead on the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi to market them with the “same techniques” it used for Penguin biscuits, Quality Street, and Fairy Snow.7 He returned to the attack when the poster came out, and other Labour leaders would repeat the charge—that the Tories were attempting to sell politics like soap powder—again and again in the years to come.
The critique is of a piece with what became a broader pessimism on the Left about even the possibility of a worthwhile public discourse about political choices. On this view, money from big business and a shadowy circle of rich backers had given Mrs. Thatcher and her party access to a cynical image-making machine and the malign gifts of Charles and Maurice Saatchi, Tim Bell, and other advertising and PR gurus. The object was to undercut and dumb down the traditional ideas-based debate between the parties. The right-wing press was already part of the conspiracy, and most of the other newspapers were too compromised or too supine to oppose it. In a perfect world, the BBC might have been an effective counterbalance, but that organization was seen as craven when it came to powerful vested interests, and obsessed with preserving its reputation for impartiality at all costs.
This dichotomy between the politics of “issues” and “policies,” and that of “personalities” and other superficialities, and the lamentable tendency of the British media to focus on the latter rather than the former, had been a bugbear for the Left for decades, but the arrival of Margaret Thatcher seemed to crystallize an essentially Marxist thesis: the public’s inability to understand the truth about Thatcherism was the result of a false consciousness that the forces of reaction had managed to create by working their many direct and indirect levers of influence and control over the media. What Margaret Thatcher said was untrue—it was rhetoric in the most pejorative sense of the word—but her backers were able to ensure that she and her self-evidently destructive policies went largely unchallenged.
So much for theory. The practical effect of Labour’s attack on the poster was to put it on the evening news and bring it to the attention of millions of voters who otherwise likely would have missed it. It was a marketer’s dream: a small investment on paid-for media magnified a hundred- or thousandfold through news coverage, commentary, and the propagation and amplification that now take place on social media, but that was then largely a matter of word of mouth. The poster struck enough of a chord that a follow-up version—predictably LABOUR STILL ISN’T WORKING—was deployed in the actual campaign the following year. Along with a second phrase—“Crisis, what crisis?”—which James Callaghan was said to have exclaimed on his return from a foreign trip in the midst of the Winter of Discontent, the poster became a shorthand, not just for the reasons why Mrs. Thatcher won in 1979 but for the moment when “old” Labour—in other words, Labour as a mass democratic Socialist party—lost the confidence of the British electorate, never to recover it.
Callaghan didn’t actually say the words attributed to him: the conservative newspapers invented the remark as the kind of thing he might have said and then headlined it as if it were an actual quotation. This technique would, in due course, become standard practice for some journalists.
Puns are usually a bad idea in public language, but the pun in the poster works because of its seriousness and the precision of its irony. Isn’t it strange, goes the thought, how the party that claims to represent the working class has presided over so much unemployment? They can’t even look after their own heartland supporters. As with the death panel, the phrase operates as a synecdoche: unemployment stands for a failed economy, which in turn stands for a government that has also failed at everything else.
But the craftiest aspect of this apparently broad-spectrum message is that it simultaneously targeted a critical segment of the electorate. To win a majority, the Tories had to persuade some voters who had previously supported Labour to change allegiance. Among them were members of the C1 and C2 socioeconomic groups—junior supervisors, clerical workers, and skilled manual workers and their families. Many of these had been Labour supporters but unemployment and the fear of unemployment were now their foremost concern. In 1979, a decisive number would indeed change sides, especially in southern England, and—much as the so-called Reagan Democrats would do for twelve years in the United States—would keep the Conservatives in power until Tony Blair reclaimed them in 1997. The poster resonated with almost everyone, but it spoke directly to the specific anxieties of these bellwether voters.
Much was made at the time and has been since about the role that advertising and image making played in Margaret Thatcher’s political success. She had chosen able media advisers and a brilliant advertising agency, and like British political marketers before and after them, they had immediately flown off to America to discover and then purloin the latest innovations there. There are the famous stories of her hair, her clothes, and of the political strategist Gordon Reece making her lower the pitch of her voice so that she would sound more authoritative.
In fact, Margaret Thatcher was intractable material for any image maker to work with. She was what she was, and her strengths and limitations were immediately apparent to everyone from the moment she gained prominence. Unlike many other modern politicians, moreover, her views and her public persona did not change greatly between campaigning and governing, or during her twelve years in office.
Like every British and American woman politician to this day, Mrs. Thatcher was subjected to a continuous critique of appearance, manner, and mood. The media were also inevitably intrigued about her as a wife and mother, and the members of her immediate family soon became minor celebrities in British public life. But although she sometimes entertained questions about her home life, it was almost always with serious political purpose. Her enemies wanted the world to believe that her main ideological influences were outré Austrian and American free-market economists and the Svengali-like Sir Keith Joseph.8 Her stories of her upbringing in Grantham and her life with Denis and the children were intended to emphasize instead the role that family, patriotism, and English thrift played in her makeup.
But she had no easy way of shifting gears from the public to the personal—indeed, no real public language for the personal at all. Arriving at the door of No. 10 after her 1979 election victory, she reached for St. Francis of Assisi, of all people, to express the spirit with which she hoped to govern—“Where there is discord, may we bring harmony,” and so on. But that came out sounding like an out-of-body experience, and when David Frost asked her, some years later, whether she had ever actually felt the presence of God in the room, she didn’t really have an answer. Watching her on TV, one could sense a moment of puzzlement, the mighty mainframe whirring through its databases in search of a safe response. She ended up saying, “I am very wary of talking about personal belief, because it could be so easily misinterpreted.”9
Both in office and in retirement, she sometimes appeared in the media in an informal setting—I shepherded her one evening for an appearance on the BBC telethon Children in Need—but essentially still in full formal public character. It is impossible to imagine her playing the saxophone on a late-night talk show like Bill Clinton, or hamming it up with Catherine Tate for Comic Relief 10 as Tony Blair would do while still prime minister. Boris Yeltsin’s and Silvio Berlusconi’s antics, and Vladimir Putin’s pumped-up pecs, are emanations from a different PR universe altogether.
Mrs. Thatcher’s oratory is best remembered today for a handful of phrases, especially those which her opponents believed could be used to demonstrate how out of touch and inhuman she was. Like “Crisis, what crisis?,” they were often “improved” and taken out of context in the retelling. “There is no such thing as society,” “they’re frit, frit,” and “moaning minnies” all fall into this category. She was certainly capable of memorable outbursts and, as we shall see, deliberate phrasemaking, but what is most striking about her speeches when one reads them today is their seriousness and willingness to delve deep into the details of the underlying policies themselves.
Let’s take her speech to the Conservative Party conference in Brighton in October 1980. This was a difficult period for her government. The postelection honeymoon was definitely over, the economy that hadn’t been “working” under Callaghan showed few signs of recovery under the new regime, and unemployment was going up. Mrs. Thatcher and her chancellor, Sir Geoffrey Howe, were under acute pressure, not only from the political opposition and elements of the media but also from some members of her own cabinet, to moderate their economic policies. The point of the speech was to explain why that would be a terrible mistake. Mrs. Thatcher gives her answer to these critics in the speech’s most famous passage: “To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the ‘U’ turn, I have only one thing to say. ‘You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning.’”11
This is characteristic of Mrs. Thatcher’s comic style—serviceable, delivered with brio, essentially leaden. The phrase “that favorite media catchphrase” does double duty: it lets her audience know that she’s not deaf, she knows there’s a mounting public clamor for a change in policy, but because the words “media” and “catchphrase” both suggest trendiness and shallowness, it also implies that not just the media speculation but the actual political idea of a major course correction is feckless and not thought through.
Then we get two puns in quick succession, the “U” and “You,” and “The lady’s not for turning.” The first should be the better of the two. “You turn if you want to” has an attractive snappiness, especially after the long preceding sentence, and its defiance is unexpectedly informal, saucy even. The second is based on the title of Christopher Fry’s 1948 verse drama The Lady’s Not for Burning, and really shouldn’t work. The play is remembered only for its name, and many people haven’t even heard of that; and anyway Fry’s play has nothing to do with the point Mrs. Thatcher is trying to make. It’s scarcely even a pun, more like one of those feeble titles one comes across in magazines that are generated by giving a familiar phrase a slight twist. But of course it does work; it’s at once spirited and intriguingly loopy, especially in that turn to the third person. Yet even at the time it didn’t really sound like Mrs. Thatcher. It’s a speechwriter’s line, one of a handful of mandatory jokes that she delivered like a trooper. Not really ethos, then, but pseudo-ethos. By contrast, “You turn if you want to” sounds like the woman herself.
There are a couple of further, slightly painful efforts at humor—echoing a famous Heineken beer slogan of the time, she nods to her foreign secretary, Lord Carrington, as “the peer that reaches those foreign parts that other peers cannot reach”—but the bulk of the speech is deadly earnest, a vast defensive fortification erected to protect the core elements of her young government’s agenda: at home, monetarism, deregulation, and a determination to pursue long-term growth despite immediate economic and social pain; abroad, a steely but not yet unfriendly approach to Europe and steadfast opposition to communism and the Soviet Union.
It is generally closely argued and cogently expressed, sometimes with sophisticated technique. One of the potentially troublesome sections of the speech is the part that deals with unemployment. The problem is that Mrs. Thatcher is speaking to two audiences: the Tory faithful in the hall and in the country, who believe that the Thatcher-Howe medicine is necessary and likely to work; and the general public, many of whom will be neither firmly for her nor against her, and who will need to be convinced, not just of the merits of her policies but also that she understands and has carefully weighed the human consequences.
So with that second group in mind, she starts by facing the issue head-on: “Meanwhile we are not heedless of the hardships and worries that accompany the conquest of inflation. Foremost among these is unemployment. Today our country has 2 million unemployed.” There. She’s said it. It’s a shocking number. But is it really such a shocking number? And has she really said it? Having apparently acknowledged that unemployment is the “foremost” of the “hardships and worries” that the public is facing, Mrs. Thatcher at once begins to gloss both the number and the story.
However, she knows she has to be careful. Her many enemies will be looking for any hint of callousness, any overt attempt to belittle the suffering of the unemployed. So she makes use of a rhetorical tactic with elements of both procatalepsis and apophasis. The first, sometimes called prebuttal, is when a speaker anticipates and answers a potential objection to her argument before anyone else has a chance to raise it. The second (also sometimes called paralipsis) refers to a family of techniques in which the speaker brings up a subject while apparently either refuting it or arguing that it should not be brought up: “I’ve never paid any attention to what people say about the senator’s private life, and I certainly don’t intend to mention it in this campaign.”
What Mrs. Thatcher attempts is a kind of converse procatalepsis with an apophatic flavor. She summons an interlocutor (an anonymous “you”), whom she imagines raising a number of qualifications to that bald “2 million” number. They are in fact qualifications she herself wants to make—and that her first audience will certainly want to hear—but she wants to distance herself from them as well:
Now you can try to soften that figure in a dozen ways. You can point out—and it is quite legitimate to do so—that 2 million today does not mean what it meant in the 1930s; that the percentage of unemployment is much less now than it was then. You can add that today many more married women go out to work. You can stress that, because of the high birthrate in the 1960s, there is an unusually large number of school leavers this year looking for work and that the same will be true for the next two years. You can emphasise that about a quarter of a million people find new jobs each month and therefore go off the employment register. And you can recall that there are nearly 25 million people in jobs compared with only about 18 million in the 1930s. You can point out that the Labour party conveniently overlooks the fact that of the 2 million unemployed for which they blame us, nearly a million and a half were bequeathed to us by their Government.
But when all that has been said the fact remains that the level of unemployment in our country today is a human tragedy.
“You” can try to soften that figure in a dozen different ways but I, Margaret Thatcher, would never attempt to do so. The prime minister manages to enumerate all the reasons why she believes that the unemployment figures are actually less serious than they appear, without actually saying as much herself. She presents herself instead as listening to the points being made by someone else, sometimes reluctantly having to concede that this insistent “you” may have a point—“and it is quite legitimate to do so,” she notes judiciously in a gesture of fairness to her imaginary opponent—but in the end returning to the experiental/moral point she began with: “the level of unemployment in our country today is a human tragedy.” It’s as if heart has conquered head after all and revealed that Margaret Thatcher has far more emotional intelligence than this admittedly very well-informed but rather chilly “you” with whom she has been sparring.
This is rhetoric of some finesse, and it allowed Mrs. Thatcher to steer a safe course through tricky narrows. But it’s a complicated message—unemployment isn’t as bad as our opponents say, but I still recognize how painful it is for those affected—and it didn’t stand a chance against “the lady’s not for turning.” It was the unflinching resolve, not the sympathy, that made the headlines. This was what the media expected. It was also what Mrs. Thatcher and her speechwriters doubtless intended. Despite its technical accomplishment, the “human tragedy” passage was never likely to make much of an impression.
But at least it was there for anyone who wanted to find it. It was also likely to be reported, albeit toward the bottom rather than the top of the story. In the early 1980s, British broadsheet newspapers gave more room to extracts from political speeches than today, as well as providing more detailed reports of parliamentary debates. Parliament was not yet televised, but audio broadcasting had been introduced, and political reports on TV as well as radio included extracts of speeches in sound, accompanied in the case of TV with a slide with the speaker’s name and photograph. Mrs. Thatcher’s 1980 conference speech was more straightforward: captured by outside broadcast cameras in the conference hall and transmitted live, it was recorded on Ampex reel-to-reel videotape machines in the BBC’s Lime Grove studios where passages could be selected, edited, and ultimately injected into that evening’s program. I helped turn the clips of it around myself that night.
Typically, a researcher would be looking for two or three extracts from a major speech like this one. You’d certainly want the line that would grab tomorrow morning’s headlines, and at least one other, more substantive passage, and you would expect to cover three or four other points in the presenter’s script. The clips were known as sync, or sync-bites—sync standing for “synchronized,” a word taken from film meaning a shot or sequence in which the separately recorded audiotape and film had to be matched up. No such synchronization was needed with videotape, but the name stuck. In practice, sync almost always meant speech or interview, which in current affairs meant public language. The suffix -bites was borrowed from American TV, where such clips were called sound bites.
Later, political aides and communications chiefs would obsess about generating exactly the right bite, but at this point it was generally a demand-side term, used by reporters and producers to mean something they hoped to extract from a given speech or interview. These morsels were seldom offered up to you on a plate; you had to search for them, watching the entire thing and drawing up a short list of candidate clips. You could make the right choice, moreover, only if you’d already reached an underlying editorial judgment about what was most important, controversial, or memorable within the person’s wider remarks.
I was one of the output editors of Newsnight, and on the ground in Moscow in 1986, when Mikhail Gorbachev gave the general secretary’s report to the 27th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Everyone knew it was a historic moment, but no advance copies of the speech had been made available, and apart from a brief conversation with a sphinxlike young man who claimed to be a Novosti correspondent but was obviously KGB, almost no guidance or spin was provided. There was nothing to do but hunker down, listen to the simultaneous translation, and (thankfully with the help of a couple of specialists) try to make sense of the thing in real time. Gorbachev spoke for hour after hour; the English translation that was made available late in the afternoon was the size of a short novel. We knew that somewhere in this endless thicket of language lurked suggestive hints about glasnost and perestroika and the rest of Gorbachev’s program of change. The challenge was to find them, analyze them, and turn them into a coherent piece of television in the minutes we would have between his sitting down and our feed back to London.
Even in the 1980s, however, everyone in politics and the media knew that it was the headlines and the broad impression a leader left that mattered most, and slowly but steadily Margaret Thatcher lost a rhetorical battle not at the level of logos—in straight argument she could give at least as good as she got to the very end—but that of ethos. The One-Nation Tories she had swept out or marginalized might often have looked and sounded like grandees, stuffy and not quite of this world, but they were capable of expressing real empathy when the occasion required, empathy that was all the more effective because it was unexpected; Michael Heseltine’s passionate response to the Brixton and Toxteth riots of 1981 was a notable instance. Whether they felt it or not, Margaret Thatcher and many of those closest to her, like Norman Tebbit (once described by Michael Foot, James Callaghan’s successor as Labour leader, as a “semi-house-trained polecat”), struggled to articulate it even when they tried. And as we saw in the case of “the lady’s not for turning,” the few attempts at nuance they did make tended to be crowded out by the more strident passages that everyone expected from them.
And public expectations were changing—especially about the prerogative of average citizens to be listened to. Ironically, Mrs. Thatcher’s strong sense of herself as an ordinary person, different from the mass of humanity only by dint of intelligence and ability, meant that she lacked the patricians’ defensive radar, that moment in the interplay of ethos and pathos when a klaxon goes off inside your head to warn you that you better say something to your audience right now to demonstrate that you understand them and feel their pain. This capacity is not limited to patricians of course: a handful of politicians are born with it—none more than Bill Clinton—and most learn to give a fair impression of it. Not Margaret Thatcher.
The public’s growing disenchantment with her is often attributed to divisive policies, most notably the attempt to introduce the deeply unpopular Poll Tax. Those policies no doubt played a part, though it’s worth noting that her fall was followed not by electoral defeat for the Conservatives but by another victory and seven more years of Tory rule. Other political leaders have been able to maintain the trust of the electorate through crises and conflicts greater than anything Britain lived through under Mrs. Thatcher. More than her policies, what many members of the public—and many in her own party—had a problem with was her. It was a question of ethos, then, one that was closely entwined with the way she spoke. Perhaps she thought of her inability to bend and express softer emotions as a strength—she was clearly chuffed by all that Iron Lady talk. In fact, it was an ominous flaw. Those who hated her said (and still say) that it was a moral flaw. We could debate that until the cows come home. To me, as a practical matter, it was a flaw in her rhetoric.
In 1983, during the campaign that led up to her second general election victory, the prime minister made an appearance on Nationwide to answer live questions from voters in different parts of the country. I had left the program to work on the BBC’s new breakfast TV service, but I was in the BBC’s Lime Grove studios on the day that Mrs. Thatcher’s small cavalcade swept in and, an hour or so later, swept out. By then, I’d seen for myself what had happened.
These public grillings were not new. The BBC already had weekly programs on radio and TV in which panels of politicians and other public figures gave their own views about current events and fielded questions from a live audience. During elections there were phone-ins involving the party leaders and other senior politicians. Nonetheless, a television Q&A with the prime minister was always an event, all the more so in the middle of an election campaign. The format of Nationwide differed from a typical phone-in in one significant respect moreover: rather than dialing up, the questioners were invited into television studios around the country so that they could be seen as well as heard. This had the effect—which had never previously seemed important—of putting the questioner on a more equal footing with the politician in the studio.
And on this occasion, Mrs. Thatcher found herself unexpectedly in the gladiatorial ring with a woman who, though scarcely a doppelgänger, was similar to her in age and class and, more to the point, gave every impression of being as tough as she was. Diana Gould, a schoolteacher from Gloucestershire, pursued a closely argued line of questioning about the precise circumstances of her ordering the sinking of the Argentine cruiser the General Belgrano during the recent Falklands War. Mrs. Thatcher’s evasive zigzags—summary assertion, contradiction, condescension, attempted “last lines” to shut the thing down—were as ineffective as the Belgrano’s had been, and the torpedo struck home. It was one of those public arguments in which the detail is obscure (for Mrs. Gould, much hung on the precise bearing on which the Belgrano was sailing when it was attacked), but where the general viewer can still see who is gaining the upper hand.
There was a point of substance at the center of the argument. Not only did Mrs. Thatcher seem to have a less sure grasp of the facts than Mrs. Gould, she never found a satisfactory answer to the question of why the Belgrano was targeted, despite the fact that it was outside the maritime “exclusion zone” the UK had declared around the Falkland Islands, and was sailing away from the islands when the British submarine HMS Conqueror sank her.
But style was just as important. Mrs. Thatcher tried several times to move from the particular to the general—“My duty was to look after our troops, our ships, our Navy, and my goodness me, I lived with many, many anxious days and nights”—but these efforts sounded obfuscatory and self-serving. Her tone was courteous but imperious, and at a key moment she managed to forget Mrs. Gould’s name. Quite understandable given the rigors of an election campaign, but something else that seemed to betray arrogance (she can’t be bothered to remember ordinary people’s names) and lack of grip.
As is often the case, this memorable piece of television—which some in Labour fondly hoped would be a game changer—had no discernible effect whatsoever on the outcome of the election. Mrs. Thatcher won handsomely and remained in power for many more years. But it had been a politician’s nightmare: a well-prepared, articulate, and tenacious challenger comes out of nowhere, and suddenly the champ is reeling. At the time, Mrs. Thatcher was said to have been enraged and to have suspected that it had been a deliberate setup; as she left Lime Grove, people claimed she remarked that she would never set foot in the place again, and indeed she never did. But these are the kinds of stories that swirl constantly around the BBC, and the truth is that she sustained little immediate damage beyond embarrassment. Yet to some viewers the incident served to confirm an image of a leader who neither understood nor cared about them. As the years went by, that image became, like an iron mask, irremovable. By the end, it was the only public face she had.
Margaret Thatcher’s speeches in office concentrated on policy and did so with precision and seriousness. But she allowed the media—sometimes even colluded with them—to create a version of herself that emphasized what she took to be her distinctive strengths but that came at a considerable cost: conviction and consistency ended up looking like monomaniacal inflexibility. This, taken with the growing compulsion of the mass media even then to simplify and simplify again, meant that it was the fiery eyes, the wagging finger, and the sharp-tongued rejoinders, rather than the grand sweep of policy, that stuck in people’s minds. By the beginning of the 1990s, the Conservatives believed they needed a leader who sounded more conciliatory if they were to avoid electoral defeat, and they concluded that even if Margaret Thatcher were able to get the appropriate words out, if they came from her lips no one would listen anyway.
Despite her immense conviction and all her barrister’s skills, despite the tutelage of brilliant marketing minds, some of whom showed by their work that they understood how political messaging needed to adapt to address a changing audience and media environment, she lacked the rhetorical range and suppleness necessary to keep control of her own narrative. As a result, she could not prevent herself from becoming, or seeming to become, the thing her enemies said she was.
There You Go Again
On July 5, 1983, just a few weeks after Mrs. Thatcher’s appearance on Nationwide, I arrived in America for the first time. I landed at JFK and took a yellow cab into Manhattan. Although I’d got there at lunchtime, it was still a reasonably full day. I unpacked and set up shop in a midtown apartment, was introduced to everyone in the BBC office where I would be spending the next eight months, watched the evening news shows go out, helped edit a couple of TV packages for the overnight satellite back to London, attended a performance of 42nd Street on Broadway, and met my future wife.
My job was to produce short news reports and general features for the new Breakfast Time program. One of the problems any British morning show had to grapple with in those days before twenty-four-hour cable news was where the news was going to come from. The London news cycle was geared to meet the deadlines of the national newspapers and early evening TV news bulletins, so most “planned” news had happened by 6 P.M. The House of Commons sat on into the night, but even then rarely produced much in the way of stories. The New York Breakfast team—the veteran BBC foreign correspondent Bob Friend and a producer (that would be me)—were meant to fill the gap. The American news cycle was similar to the British one, but because of the time difference, the US was still producing news long after the UK had gone to sleep.
So we would comb the CBS and NBC evening news programs for fresh stories that might resonate with a British audience, and then we’d repackage and revoice them. We would also find, shoot, and edit features of our own. All of the above would then be put on a late-night satellite to arrive in the UK just in time for the following morning’s show. And Breakfast wanted everything: hard news, US politics, events at the UN, business stories, social stories, Brits-in-America stories, art, fashion, movies, books, music, celebrities, food, and every stripe of general and particular American wackiness.
The differences between American and British TV news were stark. The network evening news programs were much shorter than their British equivalents once the many ad breaks were taken into account, and the amount of time the executive producers were prepared to devote to serious subjects within that smaller compass was itself much less.
One academic study comparing the TV news coverage of the 1983 general election in the UK with the 1984 US presidential election found that the BBC’s main TV news bulletin spent an average of nineteen minutes a day on the election during the main twenty-four-day campaign. By contrast, during the equivalent period in the presidential campaign, NBC devoted an average of five minutes a day to the election, CBS four minutes, and ABC just three minutes. The typical duration of individual stories was also shorter. The average length of an election story on the BBC was 2:07, while on CBS it was 1:35, on NBC 1:30, and on ABC 0:54.12
Similar differences in editorial priorities and in durations applied during nonelection periods. The gap would grow wider with the relaunch of The Nine O’Clock News in 1988; after that, the length of the lead stories and the overall amount of time reserved for serious news on the BBC’s main TV news program actually went up. But the far more concise American style would increasingly become the norm on most channels in most Western countries. Together with the idioms of short-form tabloid print journalism, it would be a decisive influence on the way news would one day be packaged on the Web, smartphone, and social media.
The cadence of US network news also differed sharply from the British style. The packages were cut much more aggressively. Individual shots were shorter, sometimes as short as two seconds, so that there were often many more shots in their reports than in our longer ones. There was usually no attempt to combine shots to create sequences or to smooth out sudden jumps in sound. The result would be a rough, fast, often rather exhilarating visual montage. This was of a piece with the pace and syntax of much of the rest of US TV, and especially of some of its new cable offerings like MTV, which had been launched two years earlier.
There was no attempt on these programs to find a second or third quotation from a given speech, or to allow the clips to extend to thirty or forty-five seconds. It was rare for anyone to get more than one bite, and frequently the speaker—even the president—would be cut off midflow. Voice-over was breakneck and wall-to-wall. Picture was generally cut to words rather than the BBC tradition of cutting the visuals carefully together first, and only then asking reporters to write and deliver their words against them.
Urgent to the point of brutality, it was a style of editing that could deliver TV news with panache and immediacy. It lacked the stuffiness of British broadcast journalism and that air of a cozy club of politicians and correspondents from which the viewer was excluded. Yet it also prefigured some of the concerns of this book. The compression of actuality and language saved time and increased the intensity of the viewing experience, but it came at a price: everything had to be shortened and simplified. There was no room for nuance or for conditional clauses or other qualification. There could only ever be two sides to any given argument, and even they would be presented in fleeting summary.
The other thing that was obvious, even in 1983, was how far the coverage of political news in America had already come to influence the generation of that news. In the UK, Whitehall departments and political parties still tended to issue press releases, hold press conferences, and offer interviewees on their own timetable, one that was probably fixed in Tudor times and was largely limited to weekday office hours. In America, everyone lived the news cycle. Appearances in front of the live cameras outside the Capitol, big revelations in major running stories, coy phone calls to tell the guest booker that so-and-so would, after all, consent to be interviewed by Jane Pauley and Bryant Gumbel—pretty much everything that was intended to make a splash was aimed at the morning or evening peaks of the cycle, while stories that the politicians and press secretaries wanted to bury were carefully timed to avoid them.
Things were about to get even more intense. CNN had launched in 1980, and its coverage of the series of major stories that unfolded over the coming years—the Challenger disaster of 1986, Tiananmen Square in 1989, and the first Gulf War in 1991 among them, all stories that took place beyond the control of press departments or media executives—paved the way for a new 24/7 news cycle. The Internet then made it normative. The 24/7 cycle still had peaks and troughs, but the most important thing about it was the most obvious: it was on all the time, and the gaps that had provided reporters and editors with their thinking time in the past were abolished.
By the end of the decade, I was the editor of the BBC’s main TV news program and ran most of the BBC’s coverage of the Tiananmen Square crisis from Beijing. Many of the accoutrements of the emerging digital era were already on hand—cell phones, lightweight video cameras and editing kit, the ability to broadcast from the middle of the square around the clock. So too the inevitable corollary of the cycle—an explosion of demand for journalism. Every BBC outlet, radio and TV, wanted a fresh report every time anything happened, no matter at what time of the day or night. In one twenty-four-hour period, we fed more than two dozen radio and television edited packages, as well as offering up countless “two-ways” and live updates. Looking at the pile of cassettes that day, I thought, This is new.
Whether you were a political leader, a press officer, a reporter, or an editor, the new news cycle was a monster that had to be continually fed. There was an unnerving sense that, if you couldn’t find anything else to feed it, it might end up eating you. The benefit was astonishing immediacy and relevance; the risks—given that editorial thinking time was being compressed sometimes into seconds—were superficiality, distortion, and error.
Making TV in the United States of the mid-’80s differed from my first years at the BBC in other ways. The place was wired—we could feed tape or go live from more or less anywhere. And everyone you interviewed seemed to know exactly what to say. Attempt a vox pop* on a British street at this time, and most people would either turn away in alarm or stare sheepishly at the camera. Here they would immediately adopt a recognizable TV persona and deliver short, crisp statements of shock, amusement, anger, or whatever else the given piece called for.
This knowingness about the ways of TV and the rest of the media would spread to the UK and the Continent. Soon Brits who had never been in front of a camera would talk with the relaxed confidence of old pros. In the 1990s, the limitless resource of TV-savvy citizens would lead to the development of essentially new television genres that are now collectively referred to as Reality. The new formats—doc soaps, format documentary, Big Brother–style observation, factual entertainment—were created for the most part in the UK and Holland and then shipped in bulk freighters to the United States and the rest of the world.
The flavor of Reality—demotic, articulate, capricious, by turns brazen and maudlin in tone—was partly drawn from tabloid journalism, but it would soon return the compliment and become a major contributor of material to and influence on that journalism itself. Eventually, it would also provide much of the tone of voice and subject matter for the new wave of digital publishers.
The public’s increasingly sophisticated awareness of how language and character played out on TV and other media would have another effect. It would break the spell that had, until then, given the public language of political leaders some measure of protection from the extremities of ridicule and contempt. Soon the audience would extend no special favors to the politicians, or indeed to anyone else.
* * *
The politics of the America I was now living in was dominated by one man, Ronald Reagan. Then, and later when I was back in the UK working on Newsnight and The Nine O’Clock News, his face and voice were everywhere—at home on TV, on the monitors in the office and the control room, in the edit. Forward, stop. Backward, stop. Come in here, cut away there.
Much of my time in the United States was spent outside New York and Washington, shooting the short, generally light features that were such a big part of the job. I met dozens of ordinary Americans, black and white, rural and urban, rich and poor. In the liberal citadels of the Northeast, Reagan was a mystery, a long-standing joke who had incomprehensibly won a presidential election. But many of the people I met had voted for him and revered him.
Reagan is often mentioned in the same breath as Margaret Thatcher. There was certainly plenty they agreed on: the need to roll back the state and make way for the creative power of the private sector, tough-mindedness when it came to the USSR, and so on. But he was a politician, and above all a rhetor, of a quite different feather.
As we have seen, there are elements in the Thatcher story that smack of the rhetorical future, but she never really stepped over the threshold that separated the stately old world of public language from the one we now inhabit and which was then beginning to be discernible. In this respect, she remained a conformist, a woman who had always been determined to be taken seriously, and who had assumed that the best way to achieve that was to speak seriously.
Ronald Reagan was a prophet of the future. He had an unrivaled command of every register of modern oratory, from the most informal and subversive to the most grandiloquent, and he could move from one to another in a trice. His political intent was just as serious as Margaret Thatcher’s, but he could present it playfully, dramatically, emotionally—whatever the mood of the occasion required. He could sense the media’s mood too, knew their appetites and their little ways, and until his faculties began to fail him in the last years of his presidency, he could mesmerize them like a cobra.
By the time Reagan took office in 1981, the American version of the rhetoric of the postwar consensus was giving out. Failure in Vietnam, the 1973 oil shock and stalemate in the Cold War meant that foreign policy had become a fraught topic. Economic instability and recession had shaken confidence at home in the promise of a Great Society which combined prosperity driven by technology with enlightened social policy delivered by an active government. Presidents no longer felt able to channel Churchill or FDR: the vocabulary of traditional grandiloquence, of swords and destiny, no longer rang true. They knew they still needed to aim high, but they no longer possessed the rhetorical means. Here’s Richard Nixon giving the State of the Union address to Congress in January 1970:
But let us, above all, recognize a fundamental truth. We can be the best clothed, best fed, best housed people in the world, enjoying clean air, clean water, beautiful parks, but we could still be the unhappiest people in the world without an indefinable spirit—the lift of a driving dream which has made America, from its beginning, the hope of the world.13
And there it is—an American exceptionalism that transcends the materialism and consumerism of which America is often accused. But the expression? Nixon’s speechwriters first tell us that the spirit is “indefinable” and then immediately attempt to define it: it’s “the lift of a driving dream.” The intention was presumably to convey the elements that make up the American spirit—lofty idealism and unstoppable energy—using everyday words: “lift” like the Saturn rocket that had just taken men to the moon, “driving” hinting not just at America’s momentum in industry and technology but also at the collective certainty and willpower of a nation.
Alas, “the lift of a driving dream” would soon be held up as a classic example of Nixon’s ugly gracelessness as a speaker. “Lift,” “driving,” and “dream” have literal as well as figurative meanings and, put together, the literal meanings are sharply dissonant. “Lift” suggests vertical movement, while “driving” suggests horizontal. But worse is “driving dream.” Dreams can be many things—kaleidoscopic, ethereal, photorealistic—but has a dream ever felt as if it was about to put its foot down on the accelerator? Alliteration can give a phrase a tight phonetic logic, but it’s got to be just so. In this case, it sounds like a shot in the dark from a man who’s never had a dream in his life.
And then along came Ronald Reagan. “It’s morning again in America” was a line in a 1984 TV ad for Reagan rather than a line in a speech, but it accurately conveys his ability to express political abstractions and airy ideals in evocative everyday phrases. Like Margaret Thatcher, his great moment arrived at the end of the 1970s. And like her, he benefited from a broader turning of the cultural tide. But even if 1980 was the year when it finally made sense to a majority of Americans, Ronald Reagan’s rhetoric was not itself a product of that moment. He’d always spoken like that or, to put it more cautiously, we can hear the relaxed mature Reagan in some of his earliest political utterances.
His opponents naturally focused on his prehistory as a Hollywood actor and—just as we saw their counterparts doing with Margaret Thatcher in Britain—dismissed him as a puppet, in his case an actor brilliantly delivering words that he was obviously not intelligent enough to have written himself. It wasn’t true. Reagan was not only an exceptional performer; he also was an exceptional creator of rhetoric. Later on he used speechwriters, as every president does, but their work was based on a preexisting style. It was his style. In fact, it was him.
Let’s join him early on. It’s October 1964 and the general election is only days away. Lyndon Johnson, who has been president for less than a year, will shortly achieve that annihilating victory over Barry Goldwater. Reagan, who will claim in this notable speech to have “spent most of my life as a Democrat,” but who is now a fervent Goldwater supporter, is thus about to speak up for a cause that he must already know is headed for defeat. Mindful of that Hollywood career, he is careful to emphasize right at the start exactly who is responsible for the material:
Thank you and good evening. The sponsor has been identified, but unlike most television programs, the performer hasn’t been provided with a script. As a matter of fact, I have been permitted to choose my own words and discuss my own ideas regarding the choice that we face in the next few weeks.14
“The performer hasn’t been provided with a script” is a pre-echo of the wry, confident humor of Reagan’s heyday a couple of decades later. “My own words” and “my own ideas” reinforces the point that this is not merely a celebrity endorsement. Ronald Reagan does indeed want to endorse Barry Goldwater but, believe it or not, he has some thoughts of his own.
What follows is a full-throated attack on specific Johnsonian policies—agricultural subsidies, the extension of Social Security, his alleged “appeasement” of Communist Russia—as well as on the central themes of the Great Society and the War on Poverty. Much of the speech works this way: Reagan presents his listeners with a series of quotations or semiquotations from Democrats and others on the Left, offered out of context and often in summary form or without attribution, and then keys off them into an indignant response. Senators J. William Fulbright and Joseph Clark have, he claims, been revealing the Democrats’ true ambitions: the first describing Johnson as “our moral teacher and our leader” and the Constitution as “this antiquated document”; the second defining liberalism as “meeting the material needs of the masses through the full power of centralized government.” This is Reagan’s reaction to the artificial edifice he has just carefully set up:
Well I, for one, resent it when a representative of the people refers to you and me, the free men and women of this country, as “the masses.” This is a term we haven’t applied to ourselves in America. But beyond that, “the full power of centralized government”—this was the very thing the Founding Fathers sought to minimize. They knew that governments don’t control things. A government can’t control the economy without controlling people. And they knew that when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. They also knew, these Founding Fathers, that outside of its legitimate functions, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector of the economy.15
Reagan’s quotations from the two senators are artfully chosen to make them sound like thoroughgoing Communists: the word “leader” in “our moral teacher and our leader” is made the equivalent of the Russian word used of Josef Stalin, vozhd, while “the material needs of the masses” and the “full power of centralized government” transport us in a flash to downtown Moscow with Gosplan on one side of the square and the KGB on the other. Scarcely what the two senators had in mind, of course, but Reagan has manipulated their words to give character and color to an otherwise familiar pair of arguments: first, that excessive government involvement in the economy inevitably leads to totalitarianism; second, that in almost all fields, the public sector is nothing like as effective and efficient as private enterprise anyway. With the first, we’re back on that same old conservative slippery slope (unchecked, those farm subsidies will lead straight to communism), while the second is a free-market article of faith presented as if it were a clause in the Constitution.
But Reagan extracts a kind of rhetorical logic from his bundle of found objects. “This was the very thing the Founding Fathers sought to minimize.” Essentially true, but not principally for the reason Reagan suggests. “They knew that governments don’t control things.” Well, governments do, actually (borders, nuclear weapons, the currency). “A government can’t control the economy without controlling people.” This is the big leap in the argument, but he presents it as if it was just another logical step. Controlling the economy includes an array of things, many of which (maintaining a tight monetary policy to restrain inflation, for instance) Reagan would himself become a strong advocate of, and all of which can be gradated—the imposition of taxes or regulations to safeguard competition doesn’t have to add up to Soviet-style central planning. But Reagan makes it an absolute and then equates it with “controlling people,” which is also to be taken absolutely and which means robbing the citizenry of all their freedoms. He then claims that the Founding Fathers foresaw all of this, which is why they erected protective walls against it in the Constitution, walls that those devious Democratic senators and their “moral teacher,” Lyndon Johnson, are now intent on demolishing.
If you suspend all sense of proportion and probability, it fits together admirably. We might dismiss it as what classically minded rhetoricians once called an argumentum ad captandum vulgus, an argument to beguile the gullible “masses,” were it not for the fact that the speaker so clearly believes it himself. But Reagan expresses it deftly, more deftly than most of the speeches uttered by incumbent leaders with teams of writers to help them, and—despite the elisions and exaggerations—he at least leaves us in no doubt about his own conviction. And some passages are striking: “No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. So governments’ programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.”16
Both this and the preceding passage depend on a definition of government to which Reagan would hold true throughout his career: it is of government not of, by, and for the people, but as a self-protecting, self-aggrandizing, essentially antidemocratic organism, an enemy that needs to be confronted and cut down to size. Even in 1964, Ronald Reagan is finding ways of turning the tables, of making mainstream assumptions about the role of government seem weird and threatening and his own critique of them the most normal thing in the world. You didn’t have to be a Goldwater supporter to suspect that Reagan was on to something about the creep of government and of entitlement, and though it’s not that funny, the government bureau/eternal life punch line is a memorable one.
Perhaps influenced by the memory of the harangues of the European Fascists and Communists, many people in the late twentieth century assumed that whereas centrists were likely to speak calmly and rationally, radicals—and especially conservative radicals—were bound to reveal themselves by rolling their eyes or frothing at the mouth. The Left seized on the admittedly eccentric rhetoric and persona of Reagan’s hero, Barry Goldwater, with exactly this implication. But Ronald Reagan himself was living proof that the assumption was wrong. He was neither a moderate nor a “nice” politician, but an ideologically committed conservative radical. He held America’s prevailing political establishment in contempt and he meant to expel and supplant it. Far from hiding his intentions, he spelled them out with utter clarity. But he didn’t shake his fist or chew the carpet. He sounded sensible, human, charming, funny.
None of that made him soft. Here he is slipping a dagger into President Jimmy Carter during one of the television debates in the 1980 presidential campaign. A rather glassy-eyed Carter has just delivered an answer on his plan for (our old friend) national health-care reform, in this case a proposal for a universal insurance scheme not unlike that originally proposed by Truman, or the one ultimately made into law by Obama. It has been weighty and detailed, and Carter concludes it with the words: “These are the kinds of elements of a national health insurance, important to the American people. Governor Reagan, again, typically is against such a proposal.”17 Reagan will go on to answer the point, but before he does so, he looks at President Carter with a long-suffering smile and murmurs four words almost under his breath: “There you go again.”
It’s a perfect modern refutatory enthymeme. This is of a piece, it seems to say, with everything you stand for, Jimmy Carter. Your answer to any question is more government, more control, higher taxes. Reagan doesn’t attack the policy as such—he knew that Medicare, the existing entitlement that guaranteed affordable health insurance for older people, was popular with many prospective Republican voters—but rather his own imputed version of Carter’s philosophy of government. But it’s also a character study in a phrase, or rather two character studies: Carter is the eager-to-please nerd who talks knowledgeably about inpatients and outpatients and catastrophic care; Reagan is the scalawag at the back of the classroom, the boy with the guts to say that the emperor has no clothes. It’s not remotely gracious—this is a gladiatorial lunge, openly disrespectful of a sitting president, intended to maim—but Reagan makes it sound like a rueful long-suffering gibe between friends.
Like someone hoping to make a romantic conquest, every modern statesman or -woman needs a semblance of humor, and as we saw in the case of Margaret Thatcher, speechwriters who will duly provide you at least a simulacrum of it no matter how devoid of levity you happen to be. In Reagan it was obviously real and ran deep, but he used this abundant natural resource throughout his presidency for a specific political end: to lift himself rhetorically out of the persona of the politician into something altogether different—a vicarious ordinary citizen who has unexpectedly found himself in charge of the nation but who remains both amused and bemused by the antics of the professional politicians and steadfastly refuses to stoop to their level.
The “you” of “there you go again” is not just Jimmy Carter—it’s all of you: lobbyists, special interests, unions, the whole monstrous machine of big government, not only in Washington but in every city and state capital. This isn’t far from the rhetorical position of today’s antipoliticians, but Ronald Reagan wasn’t one of them either. He lacked their reckless fury and vainglorious self-righteousness, and managed to come across as an outsider and a safe pair of hands at the same time.
When he became president, the overt vituperation diminished, the generosity increased, and the wit was polished until it sparkled like wisdom. Commentators would attribute much of his political success and enduring popularity to the optimism he projected about America’s future, a belief in the possibility of a clean slate and a new beginning. In the context of conservative politics, he also managed to achieve a more particular rhetorical victory.
Both before and after Reagan, the central problem of expression for the small-government Right has been negativity. The best lines (those death panels) and the greatest heat and passion have been associated with what they are against, the tone disbelieving, censorious, sometimes near paranoid; they can come across as der Geist der stets verneint, like Goethe’s Mephistopheles, the spirit that always denies. Reagan’s criticisms of corporatist government and the welfare state were as trenchant as anyone’s, but he made his proposal to roll back government sound like progress and something based on sound insights into human nature rather than ideology as such.
Reagan’s genius for seizing the moment encompassed many rhetorical styles. There is the old showman at the Brandenburg Gate in 1987, using repetition and progressive simplification to move from the language of diplomacy to something much more human:
There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev—Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
The first sentence is nothing special: “dramatically” is feeble (as it always is) and breaks the rhythm of the sentence; the phrase “the cause of freedom and peace” doughy, pious. But the next sentence and that series of ifs makes us think—hello, now we’re in the world of real rhetoric, we’re building up to something. And then the three ifs are matched with three suggested actions, or rather three steps that add up to one big action: the Soviet leader is to come to the gate, then he’s to open the gate—no, more than that, he’s to tear down the entire Berlin Wall (which was just a few feet from where Reagan was speaking). The repetition of Gorbachev’s name, especially that final “Mr. Gorbachev—Mr. Gorbachev,” is masterly, rollicking bravura combined with something that feels genuinely personal, a real call from one human being to another. Reagan was a Cold War purist, a builder of missiles and missile shields, and he was playing not for a draw but for a win. Yet he finds a language that implies the possibility of reconciliation. Notwithstanding St. Francis, it was a language that always eluded Margaret Thatcher.
Eighteen months earlier, the loss of the Challenger space shuttle presented Reagan and his writers with a different challenge. There is no argument to win here, no logos, rather a moment of national pathos to capture and express. The opportunity is to speak for all; the risk is sounding as if you’re just going through the motions, saying the things people always say on these occasions. Their noble sacrifice. Our hearts go out. We will never forget. Did not die in vain.
As luck would have it, we have a benchmark against which to compare Reagan’s rhetorical answer. At the end of the 1960s, Richard Nixon’s speechwriter William Safire prepared a statement in case the Apollo 11 astronauts were unable to return from the lunar surface:
In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man. In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.18
“Their sacrifice,” “the brotherhood of man,” “we do much the same.” It would have sufficed if it had ever been needed, but it is as lifeless as the dead astronauts it mourns in this defunct alternative universe.
Now listen to this:
There’s a coincidence today. On this day three hundred and ninety years ago, the great explorer Sir Francis Drake died aboard ship off the coast of Panama. In his lifetime the great frontiers were the oceans, and an historian later said, “He lived by the sea, died on it, and was buried in it.” Well, today, we can say of the Challenger crew: their dedication was, like Drake’s, complete.
The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and “slipped the surly bonds of earth” to “touch the face of God.”19
The address was written by Peggy Noonan, who claimed that there was a fierce argument about that final sentence, which quotes two fragments from the poem “High Flight” by the American aviator John Gillespie Magee Jr. (who was himself killed in a crash during World War II). According to Noonan, a member of Reagan’s national security team tried to get it replaced with a more general line about “reaching out and touching someone.” Presumably they feared that Magee’s heightened and obviously poetic language would come over as distant or old-fashioned, perhaps also that talk about God is always risky—safer surely to suggest that the American people give each other a comforting hug. Reagan showed in his exquisite delivery why there had never been anything to worry about. By pacing and expression, he managed to suggest subtle quotation marks around the two poetic phrases and thus convey that Magee’s words were, like the death of Drake at sea, a way of placing the dead Challenger astronauts within a wider history of heroic endeavor.
* * *
At the time, neither the Left nor the majority of the media knew quite what to make of Ronald Reagan and the way he spoke. Unlike Margaret Thatcher, who usually sounded as if she was spoiling for a fight and was easily typecast as a Cromwellian figure, fierce and uncaring, he pursued combative policies at home and abroad and argued for them as relentlessly as anyone else, but he was somehow able to express them in a way that seemed above and beyond confrontation.
If you are ideologically committed, you may find it impossible to believe that the rhetoric of a successful political opponent can be ever be genuine. Since the Greeks, there have always been people who were prepared to recognize something as great oratory only if they agreed with the sentiments expressed and who have regarded all other rhetoric as trickery or rubbish or both. For some on the Left then, there will always be something phony about Ronald Reagan’s down home fluency, just as many on the Right could never warm to Bill Clinton’s unique ability to weave policy wonkery and heart-on-the-sleeve emotionality into rhetorical whole cloth. But such critics were a lost cause anyway. Reagan and Clinton were too astute to waste time or words on them, or on those voters whose ideological orientation was such that they could never be won over. Their aim was to move beyond their own heartland to the uncommitted center of the nation, and it was here that their gift for attunement came into its own.
It is reflected in their reputations to this day. Whereas Mrs. Thatcher has remained a divisive and widely detested figure even in death, Reagan is by a wide margin America’s most popular recent president. While his average approval rating in office was unexceptional (at 53 percent, less than both George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton),20 a CNN/ORC poll in late 2013 gave him a rating of 78 percent. That other great empathizer, Bill Clinton, was close behind at 74 percent, while George W. Bush trailed at 42 percent and Nixon at 31 percent. Of modern presidents, only the assassinated Kennedy was ahead of Reagan, at 90 percent.21 That figure implies support and affection for Reagan not only among Republican voters and independents but among many Democrats as well—this despite the deep current polarization of the country.
It’s hard to attribute this stark difference in public attitude to Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan to policy or achievement. They may be lily-livered by the standards of today’s Tea Party, but at the time, Reagan’s policies were every bit as radical and divisive in an American political context as hers were in a British one. The outcomes—economic success gained at what was, for many, a troublingly high social cost—were much the same. Some will argue that the different political cultures of the two countries are a factor. For me, although I don’t know how one would set about proving it, the critical difference is in the way these two political leaders spoke to their countries. No one could deny Margaret Thatcher her intellect and fighting spirit, but as we’ve seen, she was a prosaic and intractable rhetor whose words and style were easy for her enemies to target and use against her. Until his last fraught years in office, Reagan’s tonal range and suppleness prevented his opponents from ever beginning to get the measure of him. No subsequent Western leader would be so lucky.
But we should note what has been gained and lost. Ronald Reagan’s strengths in ethos and pathos, character and attunement, achieved brilliant results with both the media and the public. Instead of a handful of memorable one-liners in a political career, he and his team seemed to deliver them every week and on every conceivable occasion (“I hope you’re all Republicans,” he said to the surgeons in 1981 after being shot). Logos, argument, which for a democratic leader principally means the exposition and advocacy of public policy proposals, is certainly still present, but it is given less space and prominence and is almost always cast in strongly partisan terms. We saw how, even in Britain with its drier political tradition and a far more rhetorically conventional leader, a good line like “the lady’s not for turning” could crowd out much if not all of the substance. In 1980s America, against that constant stream of alluring and characterful one-liners, serious policy didn’t stand a chance.
A trend had begun. Soon other forces of change—the challenge of political differentiation after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the full professionalization of political marketing, the arrival of the Internet, and the deepening revolution in news media—would accelerate and intensify it. As a news editor and then as an editor-in-chief, I would find myself in the middle of all of it.