Washington College Magazine
The Grammar of Leadership
By Professor Michael Harvey
ON THE STORMY, ANXIOUS DAY of June 5, 1944, as a vast Allied armada steamed toward the beaches of Normandy, Dwight Eisenhower, the invasion’s commanding officer, wrote a short press release:
Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and the troops have been withdrawn. This particular operation was based upon the best information available, and the troops, the air and the navy did all that I asked. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.
As it turns out, the simple and succinct message was not needed. The weather moderated, the landings worked, and the liberation of Europe began. But the “failure message,” now preserved at the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum in Abilene, Kansas, lets us see how a great leader like Eisenhower chose to talk about adversity. There are certainly other choices leaders can make. The simplest choice is avoidance: George W. Bush, for instance, in his recent Second Inaugural Address—in many ways a soaring and memorable speech about the power of freedom—simply avoided any mention of Iraq, preferring to stick with glittering generalities about liberty. (Over time, I suspect, this will come to be seen as a profound weakness in an otherwise powerful speech.)
In my little book on writing, I tell college students that it’s important to write clearly, and in particular to be clear about “who is doing what.” Of course it’s one thing to tell students this—but how do you make them care? One way, I think, is to show that clarity about “who is doing what” goes beyond esthetics or elegance or even, dare I say it, grades: Clarity goes to the ethical heart of persuasion. There are many ways that great leaders communicate—through attention to the rhythm and the sound of words, through rhetorical tropes like parallelism, alliteration and repetition, and through the ability to draw on their listeners’ hopes, fears, memories and values. But one of the most important and powerful ways that leaders communicate is through a grammar of leadership that is clear about identities and actions:
• Martin Luther, before the Emperor Charles V (1521): “Here I stand; I can do no other.”1
• Queen Elizabeth, as the Spanish Armada approached England (1588): “I myself will take up arms.”
• Susan B. Anthony (1897): “There never will be complete equality until women themselves help to make laws and elect lawmakers.”
• Nelson Mandela (1964): “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.”
IDENTITIES. In 1801, the inauguration of Thomas Jefferson as America’s third president was overshadowed by the bitter struggle between Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans and the rival Federalists led by John Adams and Alexander Hamilton. In his inaugural address, Jefferson used the grammar of identity to appeal for unity: “We are all republicans; we are all federalists.” A century and a half later, at the height of the Cold War in 1963, America’s thirty-fifth president, John F. Kennedy, made a similar use of the grammar of identity in his famous speech in West Berlin: “All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’”
The grammar of identity can also be used destructively, to assign blame for failure. Shakespeare, in his great play Henry V, shows us both uses. The play’s arrogant and out-of-touch French nobles use identity to distance themselves from failure in one battle. “Normans, but bastard Normans, Norman bastards!” cries the Duke of Britaine, blaming his men rather than his poor leadership for defeat (3.5.10). Later in the play, just before the climactic battle of Agincourt, Shakespeare gave Henry one of the most powerful examples of how a leader can make use of the grammar of identity, as the young English king seeks to rally his outnumbered men: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers, / For he today that sheds his blood with me / Shall be my brother” (4.3.61-3). Just as powerful, perhaps, is how Sojourner Truth, the great American advocate of freedom, used the grammar of identity. Born a slave, Truth became a powerful advocate for abolition and women’s rights. At a convention in 1851 she turned an attack on women into a ringing assertion of powerful identity:
That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman? Interweaving her identity—asserted in the repeated rhetorical question—and her actions—described in hammer-strokes of verbs (ploughed, planted, gathered, work, eat, bear, borne, cried out)—Truth changed her listeners’ understanding of what a woman is, and does.
ACTION. The second key element in the grammar of leadership is action. For good communicators, that means active verbs. Julius Caesar wanted to portray himself as decisive, effective, swift: “Veni, vidi, vici” (“I came, I saw, I conquered”). More typically, the leader talks about action in the future, laying out a vision of what a united group can achieve. A classic example comes from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech (1963): This is the faith with which I return to the South. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together. . . .
As King’s verbs show, the plainest and strongest way to describe action is usually the active voice, where a clause’s subject does the action (I hit the ball, rather than the passive-voice The ball was hit). But while I tell my students to develop an active-voice bias, the active voice is not always the best choice. In a December 2004 speech, Dubai’s Crown Prince, insisting on the need for political reform in the Arab world, deftly combined active and passive voice statements: “I say to my fellow Arab [rulers]: If you do not change, you will be changed.” The change in voice underscores the prince’s message, that his fellow rulers have only a limited time in which to act.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt employed a similar strategy of weaving together passive and active voice in his great Pearl Harbor address (1941). He began with the passive voice, to emphasize America’s innocence:
Yesterday, Dec. 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
Then, matching his grammar to his message of Japan’s perfidy, FDR turned to the active voice:
Yesterday, the Japanese government also launched an attack against Malaya. Last night, Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong. Last night, Japanese forces attacked Guam. Last night, Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands. Last night, the Japanese attacked Wake Island. This morning, the Japanese attacked Midway Island. Japan has, therefore, undertaken a surprise offensive extending throughout the Pacific area.
And at the end of the speech, affirming his faith that America would ultimately triumph, Roosevelt turned naturally to the active voice again, this time cast in the leader’s favorite tense, the future: “The American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.”
AVOIDANCE. It takes courage for leaders (and indeed the rest of us!) to speak and write plainly. Examples of leaders avoiding plainness abound. The classic example is “Mistakes were made,” and the classic text remains George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language.” But here are a few other examples worth glancing at. One of my favorites comes from the Bible. Aaron is Moses’ brother and second-in-command, but he utterly lacks his brother’s authority. When Moses descends Mount Sinai bearing the Ten Commandments (themselves a model of lucid, clear, simple language), he finds that all heck has broken out among the Israelites—dancing, drinking, idol-worship (think of your average WC residence hall on a Friday night—eh, just kidding, parents). Moses has some questions for his brother: What on earth happened? Where did this horrid golden calf figurine come from? Aaron, squirming under his brother’s angry attention, tries desperately to conjure up some person or force—anybody but him—responsible:
And Aaron said, “Let not the anger of my lord burn hot; you know the people, that they are set on evil. For they said to me, ‘Make us gods, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.’ And I said to them, ‘Let any who have gold take it off’; so they gave it to me, and I threw it into the fire, and there came out this calf.” (Exodus 32:21-24, RSV)
“There came out this calf.” If you want, you can try a similar tactic next time you have to face the music: “That number filled itself in!” . . . “That memo went and hid itself!” . . . “My car just started speeding, officer!”
A slightly different tactic for avoiding the glare that a simple “I did it” can bring was employed in March 2004 by Senator John Kerry. Kerry, trying to explain his, um, nuanced stance on Iraq, tried to present himself as a model of action while giving himself some wiggle room: “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.” Not as memorable as Aaron, perhaps, but still a pretty good effort at avoiding clarity. We should remember that rather than protect Kerry, this line became a lightning rod for criticism of his inconsistency and lack of principle: Words do matter, and it is part of our responsibility as citizens to pay close attention to how leaders use them.
CONCLUSION. We began with Dwight Eisenhower’s short message in case the D-Day invasion failed. But there’s more to the story. Eisenhower, an accomplished writer, was not satisfied with his initial effort. Even with the anxiety of the landings pressing on him, he took pains to rewrite the message. Here is his final draft:
Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.
This is how an inspired leader communicates. When he was talking about failure, Eisenhower increased his own grammatical role: the troops have been withdrawn became I have withdrawn the troops. This particular operation became My decision. And when he wanted to call attention to how his men fought, he reduced his grammatical role: all that I asked became all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. These changes simplify the passage. But more importantly, they clarify our understanding of the action, of ”who did what.” It takes courage to write and speak like this—but I tell my students that if a general can do this on the eve of a great battle, so can they when they write a paper for me. Michael Harvey is an associate professor and chair of the Business Management Department. His research and teaching focus on leadership, literature, and language. He is the author of The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing (2003), published by Hackett. This semester he is teaching a freshman seminar on leadership in literature and art.
(Footnotes)
1 It is unknown whether Luther actually uttered these words, or whether an inspired chronicler added them later on.
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