Constituting the Cold War Commonplace: U.S. Presidential Public Address and the Inventional Possibilities of Speaking In Situ

Abstract

Although the “spatial” turn has generated significant advances in many areas of rhetorical theory and criticism, few scholars have considered how speakers (and specifically U.S. presidents) have drawn on the symbolic and physical elements of the speech setting as a material means of persuasion. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to demonstrate how U.S. presidents have invoked place as a rhetorical strategy. I contend that recent rhetorical approaches to space and place offer a fruitful theoretical and methodological perspective that enlarges and enriches our understanding of U.S. presidential public address as rhetoric designed for and delivered in situ, or in place. In this dissertation, I analyze three examples of Cold War presidential discourse: Harry S. Truman’s 1947 speech to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People at the Lincoln Memorial, John F. Kennedy’s 1963 “Ich bin ein Berliner” address at the Rudolph Wilde Platz in West Berlin, and Ronald Reagan’s 1984 commemoration of D-Day at Pointe du Hoc, France. I argue that Truman, Kennedy, and Reagan invoked place to (1) invest the speech setting with symbolic meaning; (2) harness always already present political and cultural symbols to build conceptual and literal commonplaces (topoi) for ideological metaphors, analogies, and networks of shared meaning embedded in that place; (3) constitute a specific geopolitical vision of the world and the United States’ role in it; and (4) reaffirm their role as moral leader and head of state. This study also offers a theoretical and methodological framework—specifically, a rhetorical theory of deixis—for analyzing the persuasive power of rhetoric in situ.