Guardian<\/a>, consid\u00e8re le ph\u00e9nom\u00e8ne aujourd’hui bien \u00e9tabli et d\u00e9montr\u00e9 durant l’incident de chasse du Texas, du silence public du vice-pr\u00e9sident Cheney. Il fait la comparaison entre cette attitude et celle d’un autre vice-pr\u00e9sident, dont le destin fit un pr\u00e9sident \u00e0 cause de la mort du pr\u00e9sident en fonction, Harding, en 1923 : Calvin Coolidge. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n\t\u00ab Shooting a fellow pursuer of quail may be a grievous blunder, but keeping your mouth shut afterwards, US opinion seems to have concluded, is a still more serious offence. Was there, it’s being asked, a cover-up? Had he, perhaps, been drinking? Or did his evasiveness simply reflect his aversion to having to deal with the media? But another explanation suggests itself. Could it be that Dick Cheney is a disciple – perhaps the only surviving disciple – of a former vice-president who went on to take the top job, whose taciturnity was a matter of legend, and who used to maintain that over the years he’d got into far more trouble for the things he had said than the things he had failed to say?<\/p>\n<\/p>\n\t\u00bb Calvin Coolidge, 30th president of the US, believed in keeping his mouth shut. Inactivity was his ideology, and reticence his religion. Endless tales were told of his disinclination to talk. A woman who sat next to Coolidge at dinner confessed that a friend had bet her she wouldn’t get three words out of him. You lose, he told her in his only words of the night. Asked by a reporter to name the theme of a sermon, he replied: The minister preached on sin. And what had the minister said? He was against it. There’s a further story, for which I cannot trace the provenance, of a reporter granted a rare interview. One by one, he read out a list of questions that he’d submitted beforehand. To each, the president replied, after a pause: No comment. At the end, the reporter was leaving without a word in his notebook when the president beckoned him back. And by the way, he instructed, don’t forget – that’s all off the record. (A certain mischievous, often malicious, deadpan humour was also one of this trademarks.)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\t()<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\t\u00bb Coolidge was a wildly popular president, as Harding now invariably rated the worst of all US presidents had been before him. It was only after Harding’s death that the scale of his administration’s corruption emerged; and Coolidge, even his detractors admitted, was clean. And while he slumbered, the US economy prospered as never before. The business of America, he had declared, is business. A man who builds a factory builds a temple, he once observed. He subscribed to the teachings of a business guru whose bestselling book described how Jesus picked up 12 men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organisation that conquered the world. A huge boom, built on cheap money, was still raging away when, in 1927, Coolidge announced to the press: I do not choose to run for the presidency in 1928. (That’s 11 words.) Besieged with further questions, he waved them away with this supplementary answer: There will be nothing more from this office today. (That’s nine.)<\/em> \u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tLa proximit\u00e9 des circonstances politiques, avec des hypoth\u00e8ses implicites pour l’accompagner, est \u00e9vidente. Coolidge \u00e9tait vice-pr\u00e9sident comme Cheney ; il rempla\u00e7a son pr\u00e9sident en cours de mandat et fut r\u00e9\u00e9lu. Cela pourrait-il \u00eatre le destin de Cheney ? (Avec d’autres hypoth\u00e8ses concernant le pr\u00e9sident, comme l’impeachment<\/em> de GW.)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tLa parabole politique va plus loin encore : Coolidge fut, avec en partie Hoover (1928-32) qui suivit, l’ordonnateur de la formidable p\u00e9riode de croissance \u00e9conomique et d’ivresse psychologique de l’Am\u00e9rique des ann\u00e9es 1920, une p\u00e9riode politique et psychologique d’exc\u00e8s et d’affirmation de l’Am\u00e9rique. Le r\u00e9sultat fut le crash<\/em> d’octobre 1929 suivi de la plus grave crise de l’histoire de l’Am\u00e9rique, la Grande D\u00e9pression.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tL’hypoth\u00e8se en forme de parabole est acceptable de ce point de vue, avec l’hypoth\u00e8se que les choses, aujourd’hui, vont plus vite que dans les ann\u00e9es 1920.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\tMis en ligne le 23 f\u00e9vrier 2006 \u00e0 07H47<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Un chroniqueur britannique, David McKie, du Guardian, consid\u00e8re le ph\u00e9nom\u00e8ne aujourd’hui bien \u00e9tabli et d\u00e9montr\u00e9 durant l’incident de chasse du Texas, du silence public du vice-pr\u00e9sident Cheney. Il fait la comparaison entre cette attitude et celle d’un autre vice-pr\u00e9sident, dont le destin fit un pr\u00e9sident \u00e0 cause de la mort du pr\u00e9sident en fonction, Harding,… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1294,5117,4574],"class_list":["post-67297","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bloc-notes","tag-cheney","tag-coolidge","tag-harding"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67297"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67297\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}