The Reagan Rhetoric examines the extraordinary connections between President Ronald Reagan's conversations with the American people and the profound changes that swept the nation under those conversations' influence. Through the lens of history, rhetoric, and memory, Bates' work draws connections between the style, manner, and consistency of Reagan's oratory and the social and cultural settings in which it played so vital a role. Specifically focusing on the 1980 Neshoba County Mississippi Campaign visit, the popular culture memory of the Vietnam War, and the controversy of Iran-Contra, this book illustrates Reagan's sweeping ability to change how Americans thought about themselves, their past, and their politics. By concluding with an examination of media coverage of Reagan's 2004 death, Bates reveals that certain interpretations Reagan rhetorically offered during his presidency had become an accepted collective memory for millions of Americans. In death, as in life, Reagan had the last word. Through extensive archival research, the careful examination of well-known and obscure 1980s print media and popular culture, as well as new interviews, Bates challenges the prevailing Reagan historiography and provides a thoughtful reality check on some of the traditional views of his eight years in the Oval Office. The Reagan Rhetoric offers new and important contributions to Reagan studies that will appeal to scholars of the 40th president. This look at the 1980s will be of great interest to the growing number of historians studying that decade.

Part of the Praeger Series in Political Communication, Playing the Game offers an exploration of the rhetoric of the Reagan Revolution. The book fully explores how the rhetoric supported, impeded, and affected Reagan's policy goals and political success. In this work, the author shows how Reagan's use of language in his public speech was instrumental in the creation of the Teflon Presidency, and how use of this language created a situation whereby the President would not remain unscathed forever--as was the case in 1986. Further, Stuckey shows how Reagan's rhetorical success was built around foreign policy events. From this premise, the book demonstrates why a foreign policy event (the Iran-Contra affair) provided the most conspicuous failure of the Reagan administration. The data for this volume includes speeches, remarks, addresses, statements, memorandums, and other forms of public speech during the Reagan years. The design of the book is both chronological and thematic, given the theme of the development of Reagan's rhetoric over time and the eventual exposition of its weakness. Following the introduction, the book presents an analysis of Reagan's relationship with the White House press corps. The second chapter details the first two years of the Reagan presidency and analyzes the learning process by examining both the smooth and rough spots of those years. The third chapter focuses on the foreign policy events of 1983-1985, and on how Reagan and his staff used those events to consolidate his personal standing. Chapter four provides an exegesis of the unraveling of that success between 1986-1988, and Reagan's increasing vulnerability to criticism. The book includes a summary of rhetorical aspects of Reagan's presidency and discusses lessons for the past and his legacy for the future. The concluding chapter focuses on Reagan's rhetorical legacy through an examination of the public speech of various candidates from the 1988 presidential election. This book should be of interest to scholars of American presidency in departments of communication, political science, and history.

The best guide yet to the practical aims and consequences of Reaganomics.--Philadelphia Enquirer

How did Ronald Reagan go from calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire” in his first term as president to saying the US had “forged a satisfying new closeness” with the Soviets by the end of his second term? In Reagan’s Soviet Rhetoric: Telling the Soviet Redemption Story, rhetorical scholar Mark LaVoie examines the ways Reagan negotiated his shift from a vehemently anti-communist discourse to a rhetoric of guarded optimism about the future of US-Soviet relations that ultimately revealed a Soviet redemption narrative. Following Reagan’s Soviet rhetoric from his 1947 testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee to his Farewell Address in 1989, LaVoie considers the President’s use of “Soviet/Nazi analogy,” “historical narrative,” “reciprocity,” and other rhetorical strategies in creating the narrative. Scholars and students of rhetoric, history, and international relations will find this book particularly interesting.

Successful presidential leadership depends upon words as well as deeds. In this multifaceted look at rhetorical leadership, twelve leading scholars in three different disciplines provide in-depth studies of how words have served or disserved American presidents. At the heart of rhetorical leadership lies the classical concept of prudence, practical wisdom that combines good sense with good character. From their disparate treatments of a range of presidencies, an underlying agreement emerges among the historians, political scientists, and communication scholars included in the volume. To be effective, they find, presidents must be able to articulate the common good in a particular situation and they must be credible on the basis of their own character. Who they are and what they can do are thus twin pillars of successful rhetorical leadership. Leroy G. Dorsey introduces these themes, and David Zarefsky picks them up in looking at the historical development of rhetorical leadership within the office of the presidency. Each succeeding chapter then examines the rhetorical leadership of a particular president, often within the context of a specific incident or challenge that marked his term in office. Chapters dealing with George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton offer the specifics for a clearer understanding of how rhetoric serves leadership in the American presidency. This book provides an indispensable addition to the literature on the presidency and in leadership studies.

Annotation. The chapters in this book (two by former White House speechwriters) give insight into the process of presidential speechwriting, from Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration to Ronald Reagan's.