Le silence de Cheney

Un chroniqueur britannique, David McKie, du Guardian, considère le phénomène aujourd’hui bien établi et démontré durant l’incident de chasse du Texas, du silence public du vice-président Cheney. Il fait la comparaison entre cette attitude et celle d’un autre vice-président, dont le destin fit un président à cause de la mort du président en fonction, Harding, en 1923 : Calvin Coolidge.

« 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?

» 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.)

(…)

» 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.) »

La proximité des circonstances politiques, avec des hypothèses implicites pour l’accompagner, est évidente. Coolidge était vice-président comme Cheney ; il remplaça son président en cours de mandat et fut réélu. Cela pourrait-il être le destin de Cheney ? (Avec d’autres hypothèses concernant le président, comme l’“impeachment” de GW.)

La parabole politique va plus loin encore : Coolidge fut, avec en partie Hoover (1928-32) qui suivit, l’ordonnateur de la formidable période de croissance économique et d’ivresse psychologique de l’Amérique des années 1920, une période politique et psychologique d’excès et d’affirmation de l’Amérique. Le résultat fut le crash d’octobre 1929 suivi de la plus grave crise de l’histoire de l’Amérique, la Grande Dépression.

L’hypothèse en forme de parabole est acceptable de ce point de vue, avec l’hypothèse que les choses, aujourd’hui, vont plus vite que dans les années 1920.

Mis en ligne le 23 février 2006 à 07H47