Articulating some long and sinuous thought at a press conference, President Eisenhower, like many another ad-lib speaker, occasionally loses his bearings ("It was also clear that there was a lot of nations in the country, in the world, feeling as we do, wanted to associate themselves together"). These examples of mangled presidential syntax are prized by White House correspondents, who swap them like bubble-gum cards and sometimes chortle about them in print. Their little game stirred Morley Cassidy, columnist and assistant editor of the Philadelphia Bulletin, to impose a syntax levy on the correspondents themselves.
Searching through the transcripts of presidential press...
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