In modern American politics, one of the most important roles for the President is that of communicator, transmitting his or her version for the country’s future to the American people, so that they will get behind this vision. In the last four decades, Ronald Reagan has been praised as an excellent speaker and communicator for his ability to connect to the American public in a manner that far outweighed that of his contemporaries. Far more than the other men who held the office of President during the past 40 years, Reagan was noted for his ability to capture the American attention. Reagan acquired the title “The Great Communicator” during his political career. But the focus of this piece is not to praise these three Presidents for their ability as speakers; rather, it is to take a closer look at the language and specifically the rhetorical aspects of the language they and their administrations used in discourse about particular issues that arose during their presidencies. There is a great deal that can be gleaned from analyzing their presidential rhetoric, far more than exists simply in the words themselves.
One of the earliest lessons (and one of the most important ones) that the Reagan administration learned about counter-terrorism strategy came from Reagan’s predecessor, President Jimmy Carter. The lesson, coming from Carter’s inability to deal with the Iran Hostage Crisis, was that failure to deal effectively with terrorism was a fatal mistake for a President to make. In fact, the disastrous attempt under Carter to use military force to free the American hostages was considered the final nail in the coffin for his re-election hopes. But this is not meant to be a history lesson. What is most interesting about the Reagan administration’s counter-terrorism strategy is, given the focus of this piece, the rhetorical posturing that was used to create the strategy. George Schultz, Secretary of State from 1982 until 1989, pushed hard for pre-emptive action to combat terrorism, cautioning that, “We cannot allow ourselves to become the Hamlet of nations worrying endlessly over whether and how to respond.” Now, this metaphor is incredibly fascinating, not only due to the specifics of the Reagan administration, but also due to the intricacies of the relationship of the character and play Hamlet to judgment and decision-making. The point is that there is a wealth of insight that can be gained from delving into the literary aspects of Shultz’s metaphor, Hamlet, that is not available by merely looking at this language as a piece of logical argumentation.
Firstly, it is important to establish the importance of rhetoric in the position President of the United States. In politics generally, the rhetoric used to communicate a message can tell us a great deal about the thought underlying the message (Kitchin 111). In fact, certain words appear to trigger activity in different hemispheres (right or left) of the brain, depending on how much they involve emotion, imagery, or abstraction. But what is rather unique to presidential use of rhetoric is its ability to reflect and change the political reality. The language that they use to formulate their positions proliferates, spreading throughout their administrations and making its way into specific policy changes. The goal of this piece is to analyze the rhetorical metaphors of the Reagan administration as determinants and illustrations of political climate and Reagan’s agenda surrounding the transformation of American counter-terrorism strategy.
Prevalent in Hamlet is the question of judgment and the much related question of decision-making. While, given the context, it seems that Schultz’s allusion to Hamlet was meant to be a pejorative one, viewing Hamlet as a pussy-footing weakling, there are levels of complexity to Hamlet’s indecision that bear a close resemblance to the position in which the Reagan administration found itself and that give an uncanny aptness to Schultz’s reference. Borrowing from Vivasvan Soni’s Shakespeare and Judgment and Christopher J. Fuller’s See It/Shoot It, this piece hopes to demonstrate the insights that can be gained from close analysis of the rhetorical elements of political statements in the context of the Reagan administration and more generally.
But, to return to and really dive into Hamlet, the question of judgment is central to the play. Soni provides an extremely helpful definition of judgment as “the process by which a subject, always unhinged from world (madness), strives to bind itself back to the world again (religare), without collapsing itself back into the world (death)” (Soni 46-47). In other words, judgment is how humans connect ourselves to a world which we cannot fully comprehend (and in which we do not have all of the information necessary for comprehension) without becoming objects of said world — i.e. corpses. Judgment is ubiquitous in Hamlet. Hamlet judges the appropriateness of his mother’s marrying Claudius; Polonius judges Hamlet’s behavior with Ophelia; Hamlet observes and judges Claudius’s reaction to the play-within-a-play (Soni 48). Similarly, the Reagan administration was faced with the task of judging the threat of terror attacks against American citizens and judging how best to combat.
But the connection between Hamlet and the Reagan administration goes deeper than this superficial “they both make judgments” comparison. The very literary structure that brings about the actions of the play is strikingly similar to those that guided action taken by the Reagan administration (and subsequent administrations). What is that structure, without which almost none of the action of Hamlet could have taken place? As Soni discusses, it is the ghost of Hamlet’s father and Hamlet’s conversation with the apparition that turns Hamlet from a mourner into an avenger (Soni 50). Soni argues further that the ghost of Hamlet’s father serves as a story within the play. This story takes the events that have occurred up to that point and arranges them narratively to increase their significance; where once those events could have been ignored, they become like burning pokers against the flesh, driving one to action, impossible to disregard (Soni 50).
This notion of story or narrative is key to understanding the internal debate within the Reagan administration over counter-terrorism policy. The fact that American citizens faced foreign terror threats abroad was undeniable. Where the debate existed was in the narrative underlying these attacks and threats. Were these, as Secretary of State Alexander Haig argued, part of a larger strategy by the USSR to strike against Cold War targets in the West (Fuller 27)? Were they “‘weapon[s] of unconventional war against the democracies of the West, taking advantage of their openness and building on political hostility toward them,’” as Secretary of State George Shultz argued (Fuller 28)? Was terrorism a criminal act, one that American citizens were used to seeing handled through arrests of suspects and trials in federal courts (Fuller 30)? Within the Reagan administration, the choice of narrative was often the de facto choice of policy. Most internal accounts agree that Reagan was very hands off, allowing specific members of his cabinet to handle the policy details: “It was…left to [Reagan’s] advisors to make policies that would be generally consistent with [Reagan’s] speech[es]; Reagan’s job, as he saw it, was then the sell the policies to the public.” (Fuller 51) The narrative that was used to discuss a problem determined the policies that would be used to solve the problem. In the realm of counter-terrorism, it was Shultz’s narrative and his proposed solution of a U.S. military increasingly willing to strike pre-emptively in order to prevent strikes that won out.
To Shultz’s credit, his use of Hamlet as a caution against the perils of dawdling is sensible in that Hamlet wishes that he did not have to bear the responsibility of judgment (Soni 58). Thus, he waits. He forestalls the moment of decision-making. In this way, it is likely that Shultz and those who promote pre-emptive military action to defend against terrorism are right. Endless delaying of the moment of decision-making is not sensible. It is an attempt to hold the burden of judgment at bay. But there is another element of Hamlet’s thinking that Shultz’s metaphor does not recognize. What eventually destroys Hamlet is not his indecision; it is his haste. He enters the final scene without an end in mind and acts rashly (Soni 62). It is Shultz’s lack of recognition for this that betrays a major flaw in the strategy of pre-emptive military action. It wishes to avoid Hamlet’s indecision and runs directly into his haste. Shultz’s preference for pre-emptive strikes has become mainstream, especially as evidenced by the CIA’s drone campaign to target suspected terrorists abroad, which flourished under President Obama (Fuller 60). It is also hard to forget America’s most recent and ongoing engagements, in Iraq and Afghanistan for example. While justification for pre-emptive military action may be largely along the lines of avoiding indecision, perhaps Hamlet can serve as a reminder of the dangers of haste.
References:
Fuller, Christopher J. “See It/Shoot It: The Secret History of the CIA’s Lethal Drone Program” “THE HAMLET OF NATIONS”: THE RHETORIC AND REALITY OF THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION’S COUNTERTERRORISM POLICY, 1980–1985, Yale University Press, 2017, pp. 22-62 (Accessed via JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1n2tvmf.8)
Kitchin, William. “Imagery, Emotion, and Cause and Effect in Presidential Language”. International Political Science Review / Revue internationale de science politique, Vol. 8, No. 2, Main Currents in Biopolitics (Apr., 1987), pp. 111-119. Sage Publications, Ltd. (Accessed via JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1600685 )
Soni, Vivasvan. “Shakespeare and Judgment” Believing in Ghosts, in Part: Judgment and Indecision in Hamlet, edited by Kevin Curran, Edinburgh University Press, 2017, pp. 45-70 (Accessed via JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1g04zss.7 )
Acknowledgements:
I would like to thank Emily Bannigan profusely for reading and helping me with this paper.