Bush’s speech: One for the ages? Maybe

George Bush’s speech on Iraq might not have supplied any instant aphorisms for the ages, no single phrase to stand nobly, like a Marine at parade rest, alongside FDR’s “date which will live in infamy” or Winston Churchill’s “give us the tools and we will finish the job.” Perhaps one will emerge Thursday night, when the president is expected to face the nation again on television.

It’s also too soon to tell how his quarter-hour address may shape Bush’s long-term historical persona, said a number of linguists, political commentators, historians and image analysts who were tuned in to their TV sets Monday night.

But at a minimum, America’s 43rd president may have coined a new type of oratory: the prime-time ultimatum to a foreign head of state, which one observer likened to a Wild West sheriff warning the bad guys to get out of town.

Robert Schmuhl, professor of American studies at Notre Dame University and author of “Statecraft and Stagecraft, American Political Life in the Age of Personality,” said it was “striking that such a sweeping change in American foreign policy ... was presented in such personal terms. It seemed less us versus them than us versus him [Saddam].”

As for the unusual backdrop -- not the intimate confines of the Oval Office, but an imposing White House hallway covered in red carpeting and lined with gilded chairs -- Schmuhl said that it benefited Bush’s image because he “is better on his feet than he is sitting down.” The hall, he said, “is a good setting. Ronald Reagan used it a lot.”

Craig Smith, a former speech writer for President Gerald R. Ford, said Bush’s speech succeeded because he took a minimalist approach to language, avoiding flourishes that would have been distracting. “The situation is so dramatic in and of itself that you don’t need to use language to get their attention. At other times you have to get and hold people’s attention. This is a case that would have been inappropriate.”

Smith characterized Bush’s style as “quite decisive,” saying that “he doesn’t care which way the wind is blowing and he doesn’t look at poll data.” He compared Bush to Harry Truman, and also said the setting for the speech was “a wonderful stroke.” He said presidents in general have not done well when seated in the Oval Office. “There’s an old thing in playwriting that when a character sits down, the audience lets down.”

Written by chief speechwriter Michael Gerson and political advisor Karen Hughes, Bush’s address avoided the Scriptural references he has used in the past but made references to historical episodes in which appeasing “murderous dictators” led to “genocide and global war.” Alluding to the Nazis and the Holocaust, the president warned Iraq’s military not to engage in war crimes. “It will be no defense to say, ‘I was just following orders,’ ” he said.

Joan Hoff, a professor of history at Montana State University in Bozeman and former president of the Center for the Study of the Presidency in New York, rated the speech as “anticlimactic” compared with the address Bush gave last spring at West Point, in which he outlined a policy of military action that would countenance pre-emptive strikes. That policy, she said, represents “a historical fissure, a seismic break in history.”

Monday’s speech, she said, “had the same artificial, somber tone that he used in [his] last press conference. It was artificially somber, because that is not normally how he delivers these talks, so he was very careful to look calm and not as though he was inciting Americans to some kind of vengeful action.” Other historians wondered whether the speech would rally Americans to the cause of war. Robert Dallek, professor of history at Boston University, said the question of where the speech puts Bush “in the context of other presidents will be determined by what happens in Iraq.” The president, Dallek said, “is going to war with a divided country.... There is a great deal of antagonism out there.”

Simon Schama, professor of art and history at Columbia University, said that Bush had used only generalizations in giving Saddam and his sons 48 hours to leave the country or face war. “He’s morphed Osama bin Laden into Saddam Hussein.”

He further criticized Bush for not giving the American people a clearer idea of what will be required of them if Iraq is attacked. “He did nothing to disabuse Americans that this is ... a drive-through war,” Schama said. “It’s more like, ‘Geez, this is ring-around-the-collar. We’ll go do it and it will be a cleaner, brighter place.’ ”

Though a frequent Bush critic, Molly Ivins approved of Bush’s demeanor. “I thought the speech was quite good,” said the Texas-based, nationally syndicated political observer. “I’ve known him since about high school. And I thought that today he looked somewhere between seriously to desperately worried. I much prefer him in that mode than one in which he’s a flip cavalier, what the Europeans would call the cowboy mode.”

Even so, Ivins questioned whether Bush’s speech had succeeded in making the case for war. “I know Saddam Hussein is a miserable S.O.B.,” she said. But “why Iraq and why now?”

Jo-Ellan Dimitrius, author of “Reading People” and a jury consultant on the O.J. Simpson trial, called the speech “outstanding,” giving Bush high marks for presentation, facial mannerisms and body language. “Everything that he wore, the dark suit, the royal blue tie, the white shirt, the American flag lapel pin, indicated that he meant business, that this was not something that was a light matter in any fashion,” Dimitrius said. The president also kept a straight, smirk-free face, she said, “which is obviously a very good thing in this situation.”

Though Bush made no major gaffes, his presentation was terrible, said Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media studies at New York University. “He spoke like someone in a trance, as if hypnotized by his own team’s propaganda,” Miller said. “He had the glassy look and distracted air of someone who has taught himself to say things, to make assertions regardless of the facts.”

Nor did the speech contain any memorable lines that will define the Bush presidency, Miller said. “He was basically giving Saddam and his boys 48 hours to get out of Dodge. It’s not in the same league with any of the memorable [presidential] speeches.”

Considered simply as a piece of prose, the speech was memorable for its ironies, said Walter Mosley. Best known as the author of the Easy Rawlins mystery series, Mosley recently published a personal essay, “What Next: A Memoir Toward World Peace,” which was inspired by the Sept. 11 attacks. “To use language like ‘we will not be intimidated by thugs and killers’ when we are intimidating them with violence -- the whole speech turns on itself,” Mosley said. Rather than being reassuring, he said, Bush was “frightening.”

But Forrest McDonald, a retired history professor at the University of Alabama and author of a book on the American presidency, said that Bush rose to the occasion, much as Truman did during the Korean War. Despite a divided U.N. Security Council, “Truman sent the troops in,” he said. As for Bush’s performance, McDonald said, “He’s well ahead of the game. He’s doing a heck of a job, and everyone I know thinks he’s doing a heck of a job.”

Times staff writers Renee Tawa and J. Michael Kennedy contributed to this report.