Buttery Goodness

It's hard to give a speech when everyone's booing you or, worse, bored. Marshall was a smart cookie, so he made sure to butter his audience up almost immediately.

After outlining what's going on with Europe, he's quick to point out, to a group of no less than Harvard students:

"That must be apparent to all intelligent people." (1.2)

Oh, Marshall. You sly dog.

This statement leaves the audience is left with a decision: either they're intelligent and they accept his proposal, or they're idiots and they don't. Well, no one is taking option two, especially if they go to Harvard.

Addressing the crowd in this way gets them to accept the thesis right off the bat. While he backs it up with some facts later, these early words helped the audience feel good about coming to the right conclusion so early on. "See, I am intelligent," they'd think, "because I saw all of this coming right up front."

Getting the audience on his side is important. After all, he was trying to persuade them to give a ton of cash to countries they were just bombing. It's what they call a tough sell.

Still, it's a little underhanded. The only way he could have been more obvious about getting the crowd on his side, is if he was like, "Cambridge, the best town in America!" (Or said something disparaging about Yale.)