Bill Safire on Bush's 'Freedom Speech'

Safire on Bush's 'Freedom Speech':
"On his way out of the first Cabinet meeting after his re-election, President Bush gave his longtime chief speechwriter the theme for the second Inaugural Address: 'I want this to be the freedom speech.'
In the next month, the writer, Michael Gerson, had a heart attack. With two stents in his arteries, the recovering writer received a call from a president who was careful not to apply any deadline pressure. 'I'm not calling to see if the inaugural speech is O.K.,' Bush said. 'I'm calling to see if the guy writing the inaugural speech is O.K.'"

"...the Texan evoked J.F.K.'s 'survival of liberty' phrase to convey his central message: 'The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.' Bush repeated that internationalist human-rights idea, with a slight change, in these words: 'The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.' The change in emphasis was addressed to accommodationists who make 'peace' and 'the peace process' the No. 1 priority of foreign policy. Others of us - formerly known as hardliners, now called Wilsonian idealists - put freedom first, recalling that the U.S. has often had to go to war to gain and preserve it. Bush makes clear that it is human liberty, not peace, that takes precedence, and that it is tyrants who enslave peoples, start wars and provoke revolution. Thus, the spread of freedom is the prerequisite to world peace. It takes guts to take on that peace-freedom priority so starkly. Bush, by retaliatory and pre-emptive decisions in his first term - and by his choice of words and his tall stance in this speech, and despite his unmodulated delivery - now drives his critics batty by exuding a buoyant confidence reminiscent of F.D.R. and Truman. He promised to use America's influence 'confidently in freedom's cause.' He jabbed at today's Thomases: 'Some, I know, have questioned the global appeal of liberty, though this time in history, four decades defined by the swiftest advance of freedom ever seen, is an odd time for doubt.'"