Citation

Richardson L. Psychol. Sci. Public Interest 2007; 8(3): i-ii.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2007, Association for Psychological Science, Publisher SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1111/j.1539-6053.2008.00034.x

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Long before the dust had cleared in New York and Washington on the evening of September 11, 2001, the president adopted the war metaphor as characterizing the appropriate American response (Bush, 2001a). It was a powerful, popular, and tragically flawed reaction. It was not the first time an American president had spoken of a war on terrorism. President Reagan had done so in 1986, and the phrase had been quite widely used in the late 19th century to describe international efforts to stop assassination attempts by anarchists. In recent memory, other American presidents had declared their own metaphorical wars. President Johnson declared a war on poverty in his 1964 State of the Union Address, and in 1971 President Nixon declared a war on drugs. The fact that none of these wars had reached a successful conclusion by 2001 might have given a more thoughtful leader pause before returning to the phrase.

Language: en