Syntax Levy

Articulating some long and sinuous thought at a press conference, President Eisenhower, like many another ad-lib speaker, occasionally loses his bearings ("It was also clear that there was a lot of nations in the country, in the world, feeling as we do, wanted to associate themselves together"). These examples of mangled presidential syntax are prized by White House correspondents, who swap them like bubble-gum cards and sometimes chortle about them in print. Their little game stirred Morley Cassidy, columnist and assistant editor of the Philadelphia Bulletin, to impose a syntax levy on the correspondents themselves.

Searching through the transcripts of presidential press conferences, Cassidy came upon some verbal wandering that made the President's answers fit right into the pattern of the questions. He caught the New York Times's Felix Belair Jr. splitting an infinitive (". . . If you have had time to even think about it"), and the Associated Press's Spencer Davis defying sense (". . . The State Department has warned several times of its concern over the situation in Laos . . ."). But his prime example was a question by the New York Times's William H. Lawrence: "Mr. President, to revert back to Mr. Belair's question, in terms of the 1960 campaign do you regard your role as party leader, and President, as one in which you will exercise purely a veto power over a prospective Republican nominee who would be unsatisfactory in terms of your foreign and domestic policies? You have told us, too, that you would not express a preference. Do you feel--is this because you feel that the eight or ten men that you have mentioned as a group, without identifying them, are so evenly matched in terms of the presidency that you have no real preference as between one and the other?"

Passed up by Cassidy were even riper examples of correspondent rhetoric, such as this grammatical haggis `a la Sarah McClendon, who represents a purseful of papers: "Sir, we have here a very strange thing. When you started this session of Congress, you were at somewhat of a disadvantage in your second term, and you had a big Democratic majority in Congress. It looked for a while as if Congress might wag the White House, but now it looks as if you have the power, not only through, in the veto and in the bills that you are able to get passed, to work your will on Congress; it also looks as if you were winning the propaganda war sort of between the Democrats and the Republicans. Would you give us some idea of how, what system you employed to do this?"

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