Hearts and minds will follow

[Jonathan Lighter]

It's surprising that no "early" "winning hearts and minds" cite appears in Gregory R. Clark's fabulously useful _Quotations of the Vietnam War_ (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2001).  The phrase was sometimes abbreviated to WHAM.

  "Hearts and minds," however, has been a cliche'  for centuries, EEBO displaying 344 exx. before 1701. The earliest:

  1582 Thomas Bentley, student of Grey's Inn _The Fift Lampe of Virginitie_ (London: William Seres) 60: To weed out by little and little the noisome w[...]eds of vncomelie demeanour, vnchristian behauiour, rude maners, churlish conditions, euill dispositions, and vngodlie extremities, out of our hearts and minds, with the wholesome precepts of thy diuine word.

  It was primarily a theologian's cliche'. I haven't discovered any ancient collocations of "hearts and minds" with "win/ ning."

  However, to "win hearts and minds" had entered the political vocabulary by the mid-'50s. In a lecture at Dartmouth on Mar. 12, 1953, Spruille Braden observed truly that "Broadcasting badly played rhumbas and tangoes over the Voice of the America is not the way to 'win the hearts and minds' of Latin America."  ( "The Communist Threat in the Americas," in _Vital Speeches of the Day_ XIX [May 1, 1953] p. 436)

  This ex. relates specifically to Southeast Asia :

  "The competition to win the hearts and minds of the emerging nations represents a serious undertaking to which both sides [in the Cold War] have been devoting much attention and energy as well as considerable resources; for success or failure will have wide implications for the future world status of each." (Thanat Khoman, "Which Road for Southeast Asia?" _Foreign Affairs_ [July, 1964] XLII, p. 63.)

  Robert D. Schulzinger quotes the following question posed by "an American reporter" to Gen. Robert Williams, apparently in 1965 or '66 :

  "How do you expect our forces to win the hearts and minds of the people when all they do is take off from one army base and fly overhead at 1500 feet while Charlie is sitting down there and he's got them by the testicles jerking, and every time he jerks their hearts and minds follow?"

  Schulzinger credits Andrew F. Krepenivich, Jr., _The Army and Vietnam_ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. P., 1986), pp. 170-71. I can check the details later today.

  The upshot is that "winning hearts and minds" probably cannot definitively be associated with a single administration "coiner," and its testicular elaboration is almost certainly older than 1969.

  JL

  Charles Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
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Subject: Hearts and minds will follow
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It should be noted--especially for those who don't remember the early 1960s--that the saying "If you've got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow" (which I've always heard/assumed was LBJ's) ridicules JFK's (Rusk's, McNamara's) professed intent to "win the hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese. I have not tried to research the history of the fixed phrase "hearts and minds" or the collocation "win the hearts and minds."

--Charlie

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