WarSclerotic

Listening to President Obama hem and haw on America’s future response to ISIS, I was reminded of one of Israel’s most famous speeches – perhaps infamous is the more accurate term – delivered by then Prime Minister Levi Eshkol a week before the outbreak of the Six Day War. It is registered in the annals of oratory as “the stuttering speech” and it had a profound impact on Eshkol’s legacy in particular and on Israeli history as a whole.

This is the background: The date is May 28, 1967, and Israelis are in a panic. Two weeks have passed since the start of what came to be known as the “waiting period” after Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s ejected UN peacekeepers, closed the Straits of Tiran and promised to destroy Israel. The IDF has called up all of its reserves, the already stagnating economy is grinding to a complete halt, and the government is engaged in all sorts of diplomatic maneuverings instead of striking a military blow that might save Israel from a “second Holocaust.” Mapai’s uncharismatic Eshkol is under fire, especially from the breakaway Rafi party led by David Ben Gurion and Moshe Dayan, and so he decides to address the nation.

The draft of his speech was hurriedly prepared in the Prime Minister’s Office. After being typed, it was shown to Mapai stalwart Israel Gallili and possibly others, who made corrections, addendums and substitutions, but all in handwriting. The copy was not retyped but handed to Eshkol just a few short minutes before he sat down to deliver his speech in a Tel Aviv studio of Israel Radio. Disaster, inevitably, ensued.

Eshkol found it difficult to decipher some of the changes in the text and with others he simply disagreed. When he reached the sentence in which “movement of troops” was changed to “withdrawal of troops” he started to stumble, to stutter and to wave frantically to his aides, who desperately waved back to remind Eshkol that he was being broadcast live. After a few excruciating moments the prime minister recovered, but by then a flabbergasted Israeli public was well on the way to total hysteria.

“Eshkol’s stuttering speech has spread confusion and exacerbated the despondency and frustration,” Haaretz wrote in its editorial the next day. “If we were confident that Mr. Eshkol was fit to navigate the ship of state we would willingly follow him, but such confidence is sorely lacking.” Similar sentiments were voiced across the political spectrum, including in some of the Mapai circles closest to Eshkol himself, where the prime minister’s possible removal was discussed. Ariel Sharon, then a major general, came perilously close to calling for a military coup.

Realizing that he was on the verge of being deposed, Eshkol decided to cut his losses and salvage what he could: he succumbed to the pressure to appoint Dayan as defense minister and he invited Menachem Begin, then the head of Likud’s precursor Herut, to join the government for the first time ever. Israel was thus molded, one can argue, in the brash and self-confident image of Dayan rather than the diligent and restrained Eshkol and the road for the deposal of Mapai/Labor by Begin and the Likud a decade later was paved.

Eshkol, for his part, was robbed of the glory of the ensuing IDF victory for which he, as defense minister during the four years leading up to the war, was immeasurably more responsible than the charismatic Dayan who was enlisted to the cabinet at the very last minute. Eshkol continued as prime minister after the war but sank into depression, was struck by cancer and died a year and a half later of a broken heart. It took two or three more decades for Israeli historians to reach the conclusion that Eshkol had been one of best prime ministers Israel has ever had, if not the best of them all.

Which brings us back to “no drama Obama,” his seemingly lackluster public reactions to world crises and his unfortunate “we don’t have a strategy yet” confession regarding ISIS. Contrary to Eshkol, Obama’s problem is not with typos on his teleprompter. When he is in campaign mode, Obama has no compunctions about employing lofty rhetoric in order to rally enthusiasm and support, but when he is being presidential, it sometimes seems that he finds it beneath him to cater to popular demand. To his credit, Obama does not play to the tune of media pressure or public opinion polls, and has proven steadfast in handling America’s foreign policy in a careful and studied way that often infuriates both critics and admirers.

Nonetheless, with all due respect to Obama’s deliberative process of examining options and building coalitions, there are times when leaders need to lead: to reassure an anxious public that their government knows what it is doing and to rally public support in advance of a looming confrontation with the enemy, especially one like ISIS that, justifiably or not, seems to be scaring the bejesus out of many Americans. The speeches don’t all have to emulate Henry V’s “Once more unto the breach” or Churchill’s “We shall never surrender” or even Joe Biden’s “to the gates of hell,” but they shouldn’t sound like a recitation of storeroom inventory either.

But as the Eshkol precedent proves, there are moments when what you say and how you say it is much more important than what you did and how you managed to do it. One lousy stammering speech in the face of an unnerving enemy or a looming national security crisis and your tenure is tarnished, your achievements undone and your legacy poisoned for decades to come.