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Abstract
On June 11, 1962, President John F. Kennedy addressed the economy at Yale University. This essay explains the symbolic charge of his economic rhetoric, a persuasive campaign that enjoyed considerable success and marked the first time that a president took explicit responsibility for the nation's economic performance. I argue that the president crafted the authority to take command of the economy through construction of a liberal ethos, the use of dissociation, and a definition of the times. His arguments, in turn, were invented from the liberal matrix that dominated politics in the mid‐twentieth‐century United States and represent the ways in which that mode of discourse develops a historically contingent and politically powerful form of technical reason. President Kennedy's speech illustrates a set of strategies that can raise the status of one political language above its competitors in the process of public argument.
Notes
John M. Murphy is an Associate Professor of Speech Communication at the University of Georgia. Correspondence to: Communication Studies, Terrell Hall, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, U.S. Email: [email protected].
This account derives from Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1965), 583–88; Richard Reeves, President Kennedy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 294–304; Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963 (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 2003), 480–89. Other accounts include Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy (New York: Bantan, 1965); Hugh Sidey, John F. Kennedy, President (New York: Fawcett, 1964); Herbert S. Parmet, The Presidency of John F. Kennedy (New York: The Dial Press, 1983); Bruce Miroff, Pragmatic Illusions (New York: David McKay, 1976); James N. Giglio, The Presidency of John F. Kennedy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991). For the text of Kennedy's 1962 Economic Report, see James Tobin and Murray Weidenbaum, Two Revolutions in Economic Policy (Cambridge, MS: MIT Press, 1988). Kennedy's concern about the steel industry arose partly from his economic advisor, Walter Heller, who informed him that steel “could upset the price applecart all by itself,” a claim Heller supported by arguing that between 1947 and 1958, “forty percent of the rise in the Wholesale Price Index was due to the fact that steel prices rose more than the average of all other prices.” Dallek, Unfinished Life, 482. In contrast, Richard Godden and Richard Maidment argue that the economic consequences of the price increase were minor. Richard Godden and Richard Mainment, “Anger, Language, and Politics: John F. Kennedy and the Steel Crisis,” in Essays in Presidential Rhetoric, 2nd ed., ed. Theodore Windt and Beth Ingold (Dubuque, IA: Kendall Hunt, 1987), 105–24. Kennedy's reaction, then, could only be traced to his determination to preserve his reputation as an honest broker. Those two reasons do not appear to be mutually exclusive. Harry Sharp, Jr., makes a convincing case that both the consequences for Kennedy's prestige and the economy played a role in his thinking and led to a coherent and powerful persuasive campaign. See Harry Sharp, Jr., “Campaign Analysis: Kennedy vs. Big Steel,” in Explorations in Rhetorical Criticism, ed. G. P. Mohrmann, Charles J. Stewart, and Donovan J. Ochs (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1973), 32–50.
There are odd discrepancies over the obscenities Kennedy employed. My account follows Reeves until the businessmen remark. Reeves reports that as “pricks” (which would be consistent with the macho sexual imagery), as does Dallek, but it was leaked and became famous as “sons of bitches,” particularly when Kennedy, in an unusual display of a tin ear, said that his father had referred only to steel men, not all businessmen, as if that would make it better. Schlesinger also offers “bastards” as a favored Kennedy epithet for businessmen. Kennedy could never remember whether he called them sons of bitches, or bastards, or pricks, distinctions without a great deal of difference. Reeves, President Kennedy, 296; Schlesinger, Thousand Days, 584; Dallek, Unfinished Life, 484.
Reeves, President Kennedy, 297.
Dallek, Unfinished Life, 486.
Reeves, President Kennedy, 298, 303.
Giglio, Presidency, 132.
John F. Kennedy, “Commencement Address at Yale University, June 11, 1962,” Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1962 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1963), 470–75. All subsequent references will appear in the body by page number.
The 72 percent figure comes from Giglio, Presidency, 135. The rest come from Lewis J. Paper, John F. Kennedy, The Promise and the Performance (New York: DaCapo, 1975), 236. Accounts of the reaction and of this speech as the first in a series can be found in Sidey, John F. Kennedy, 344–46; Schlesinger, Thousand Days, 595; Reeves, President Kennedy, 321. Subsequent major speeches on the economy and the tax cut included: August 13, 1962 (nationally televised), December 14, 1962, September 10, 1963, and September 18, 1963 (nationally televised). The two televised speeches had some unusual features. In the first, Kennedy, anticipating Ronald Reagan and Ross Perot, used graphs, charts, and visual aids to illustrate his comments. The second pulled together the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the tax cut into a coherent whole. The former, at this point, was almost assured of passage and so it added its popularity to the latter.
H. W. Brands, The Strange Death of American Liberalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 87; Reeves, President Kennedy, 320; Giglio, Presidency, 136.
James Boyd White, When Words Lose Their Meaning: Constitutions and Reconstitutions of Language, Character, and Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 6.
Thomas B. Farrell, Norms of Rhetorical Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 79.
Farrell, Norms, 79.
White, When Words Lose Their Meaning, 193.
Philip Wander, “The Rhetoric of American Foreign Policy,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (1984): 348–49. Wander condemns technocratic realism, but prefers it to prophetic dualism and praises the cleverness with which Kennedy, using dissociation, justified a shift away from a Manichean world in the American University address. Miroff, on the other hand, likes very little about Kennedy.
Miroff, Pragmatic Illusions, 23, 182–86. See also the attack on Kennedy in Bruce Miroff, Icons of Democracy (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 273–307. The passage of time and the example of administrations that truly increased corporate power did little to change Miroff's animus toward Kennedy between the first book (1976) and the second (1993).
G. Thomas Goodnight, “The Personal, Technical, and Public Sphere of Argumentation: A Speculative Inquiry into the Art of Public Deliberation,” Argumentation and Advocacy 18 (1982): 214–27; Thomas Farrell, “Knowledge, Consensus, and Rhetorical Theory,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 62 (1976): 1–14; Thomas S. Frentz, “Rhetorical Conversation: Time and Moral Action,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 71 (1985): 1–18; Walter R. Fisher, “Narrative as a Human Communication Paradigm,” Communication Monographs 51 (1984): 1–22.
Jean‐François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). In U.S. rhetorical studies, notions of traditional reason are most thoroughly dismissed by the adherents of critical rhetoric. See Raymie E. McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis,” Communication Monographs 56 (1989): 91–111; John M. Murphy, “Critical Rhetoric as Political Discourse,” Argumentation and Advocacy 32 (1995): 1–15.
Isaac Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth Century England and America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).
For an account of that faith, or lack thereof, see Garry Wills, A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999).
Quoted in Alan Brinkley, Liberalism and Its Discontents (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 279.
Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 2.
David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 374.
Quoted in Kennedy, Freedom, 373.
On Progressive concerns that citizens were not up to snuff, see David M. Ricci, The Tragedy of Political Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 78–96; Michael Schudson, The Good Citizen (New York: The Free Press, 1998), 144–87.
My account of the liberal consensus is based on Ricci, Tragedy; Brands, Strange Death; James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Godfrey Hodgson, America in Our Time (New York: Vintage Books, 1976). See also Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Cycles of American History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986); Stephen P. Depoe, Arthur M. Schlesinger and the Ideological History of American Liberalism (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994); John Kenneth Galbraith, American Capitalism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952); Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960; 1988). It is important to understand that, given my topic, I am emphasizing the economy. The Cold War, however, was the dialectical backdrop against which this discourse always worked. Brands uses his book to argue that the Cold War was the only factor that made affirmative government possible. I think that an exaggeration, but I recognize its importance. My angle of vision is different.
Michael Weiler, “The Rhetoric of Neo‐Liberalism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (1984): 363.
See Hodgson, America, 76.
Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1955).
Weiler, “Neo‐Liberalism,” 369.
For rhetorical critics, Richard Weaver's writings are a useful index of the extent of this consensus by virtue of his deep dissatisfaction with it. In his famous “Ultimate Terms” essay, he decides that the god term of the era is “progress” and sarcastically notes that “it will validate almost anything.” In The Ethics of Rhetoric, that essay was preceded by a powerful attack on “The Rhetoric of Social Science.” That essay, in turn, was preceded by a lamentation for the lost, spacious rhetoric of the nineteenth century. There was little place for Weaver's traditional conservatism in the liberal consensus. See Richard Weaver, The Ethics of Rhetoric (South Bend, IN: Regnery/Gateway, Inc., 1953), 212.
For this analysis, see Ricci, Tragedy.
Bell, Ideology, 409.
Bell, Ideology, 90, 121. Bell's book has come to symbolize this era, but those two Kennedy advisors also issued major statements that shaped post‐war liberalism. See Galbraith, American Capitalism and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949).
The statistics and the quotation are found in Patterson, Grand, 61.
Patterson, Grand, 70.
Patterson, Grand, 67, 320.
Hodgson, America, 67–84. Oddly, given the later tendency of critics to see all of Kennedy's policies through the prism of the Cold War, he was constantly comparing the United States to Western Europe. The last two pages of the Yale speech return to that theme repeatedly. See also Reeves, President Kennedy, 295.
One of the better accounts of the campaign is still to be found in Schlesinger, Thousand Days. The classic account is Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960 (New York: Atheneum, 1961).
Reeves, President Kennedy, 317. For Kennedy's general ignorance, see Reeves, President Kennedy, 295; Sidey, John F. Kennedy, 336.
Giglio, Presidency, 125.
Giglio, Presidency, 128–29.
Reeves, President Kennedy, 295.
Reeves, President Kennedy, 295.
Reeves, President Kennedy, 316.
Giglio, Presidency, 125.
This discussion of the performance gap is based on Reeves, President Kennedy, 316.
Wilbur Mills, chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, was particularly recalcitrant. See Reeves, President Kennedy, 333.
There are a great many studies of epideictic rhetoric. Among the more useful summaries are: Celeste Condit, “The Function of Epideictic: The Boston Massacre Oration as Exemplar,” Communication Quarterly 33 (1985): 284–99; James Jasinski, Sourcebook on Rhetoric (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2001), 209–15; Yun Lee Too, “Epideictic Genre,” in Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, ed. Thomas O. Sloane (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 251–57. Paula Wilson Youra and Heidi Koring offer an overview of the genre of commencement addresses and a number of examples in Pomp and Circumstance: Ceremonial Speaking (Greenwood, IN: Alistair Press, 2002).
Farrell, Norms, 80.
Hodgson, America, 100–6.
Kenneth Burke provides the classic contemporary account of irony in A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 511–17. Of particular interest here is Burke's insistence that an ironic sense of history “would be a dialectic of characters” in which one language would never obliterate another. Rather, we should “note elements of all such positions (or ‘voices’) existing always, but attaining greater clarity of expression or imperiousness of proportion of [in?] one period than another.” In that sense, I trace the strategies through which Kennedy accords to his language the “imperiousness of proportion” in the public sphere that he desires for it.
Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
See Schlesinger, Vital Center, for a discussion of the “new radicals” that constitute this audience. See also Depoe, Schlesinger, although Depoe emphasizes Schlesinger's debt to Reinhold Neibuhr's version of original sin and the “children of darkness” more than seems appropriate. Again, that is likely owing to the emphasis on the Cold War.
Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrects‐Tyteca, The New Rhetoric, trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), 412. For a fine discussion of dissociation, see also Jasinski, Sourcebook, 175–82.
Robert Hariman, “Status, Marginality, And Rhetorical Theory,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 72 (1986): 41.
Perelman and Olbrechts‐Tyteca, New Rhetoric, 413.
For instance, the last two questions he considers in the speech, the budget and interest rates, reduce alternative discourses to incoherence. In each case, Kennedy proves the “complexity” of contemporary society and the “irrelevan[cy]” of “political labels and ideological approaches” through resort to incompatibility. He cites exactly opposite economic prescriptions from sources such as “Senator Proxmire, who is ordinarily regarded as a liberal Democrat” and a “well‐known business journal” among others to show that complex phenomena defy ideological solution—the same factors lead to opposite recommendations, an obvious incoherence and one that occurs regularly when people are blinded by ideology: “Both may be right or wrong. It will depend on many different factors. The point is that this is basically as administrative or executive problem in which political labels or clichés do not give us a solution” (474).
Roger Stahl has recently noted the paradox of dissociation; he argues that it often acts as the grounds for argument and as a technique of argument. In the face of dissociation's “emphasis on metaphysics,” distinctions such as ground and technique “show a tendency to collapse, and we are left at times with dissociation as a kind of rhetorical transference, one that permeates the approach, the means, and the conclusion. In this way, Perelman and Olbrechts‐Tyteca highlight linguistic configurations themselves as central to decision making.” To accept Kennedy's linguistic configuration is to accept at least the rationality of his economic approach—and, not coincidentally, to agree to argue on his terms. Roger Stahl, “Carving Up Free Exercise: Dissociation and ‘Religion’ In Supreme Court Jurisprudence,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 5 (2002): 453.
Hariman, “Status,” 45.
See John Poulakos, “Toward a Sophistic Definition of Rhetoric,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 16 (1983): 35–48.
Celeste Michelle Condit, “Nixon's ‘Fund’: Time As Ideological Resource In The ‘Checkers’ Speech,” in Texts In Context: Critical Dialogues on Significant Episodes in American Political Rhetoric, ed. Michael C. Leff and Fred Kauffeld (Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1989), 225.
For the sophistic view of time, Poulakos, “Toward a Sophistic Definition.” On further elaborations of time, see the work of Michael Leff, particularly “Rhetorical Timing in Lincoln's ‘House Divided’ Speech,” Van Zelst Lecture in Communication (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University School of Speech, 1984). See also Bruce Gronbeck, “Rhetorical Timing in Public Communication,” Central States Speech Journal 25 (1974): 84–94.
See Hariman, “Status,” 41; Robert Hariman, Political Style: The Artistry of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 13–49.
John F. Kennedy, “Acceptance Address,” in John F. Kennedy: Word for Word, ed. Maureen Harrison and Steve Gilbert (LaJolla, CA: Excellent Books, 1993), 4–6.
Barbara Warnick, “Argument Schemes and the Construction of Social Reality: John F. Kennedy's Address to the Houston Ministerial Association,” Communication Quarterly 44 (1996): 183–96; Wander, “American Foreign Policy”; Theodore Windt, “Seeking Detente with Superpowers,” in Windt and Ingold, Essays, 125–34; Steven R. Goldzwig and George Dionisopoulos, In A Perilous Hour: The Public Address of John F. Kennedy (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995).
Stephen E. Lucas, “The Renaissance of American Public Address: Text and Context in Rhetorical Criticism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 74 (1988): 248. See also James Jasinski, “Instrumentalism, Contextualism, and Interpretation in Rhetorical Criticism,” in Rhetorical Hermeneutics, Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science, ed. Alan G. Gross and William M. Keith (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 195–224; Michael C. Leff, “Hermeneutical Rhetoric,” in Rhetoric and Hermeneutics In Our Time, ed. Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 196–214; Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Inventing Women: From Amaterasu to Virginia Woolf,” Women's Studies in Communication 2 1999): 111–26; James Darsey, The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in America (New York: New York University Press, 1997); Margaret Zulick, “The Agon of Jeremiah: On the Dialogic Invention of the Public Sphere,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 78 (1992): 125–48; John M. Murphy, “Bill Clinton, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Orchestration of Rhetorical Traditions,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997): 71–89; John M. Murphy, “History, Culture, and Political Rhetoric,” Rhetoric Review 20 (2001): 46–50.
Jasinski, “Instrumentalism,” 212.
See Lloyd Bitzer, “The Rhetorical Situation,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 1 (1968):1–14; Maurice Charland, “Rehabilitating Rhetoric: Confronting Blindspots in Discourse and Social Theory,” in Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader, ed. John Louis Lucaities, Celeste Michelle Condit, and Sally Caudill (New York: Guilford Press, 1999), 464–73.
S. M. Halloran, “Tradition and Theory in Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 62 (1976): 235.
Michael C. Leff and G. P. Mohrmann, “Lincoln at Cooper Union: A Rhetorical Analysis of the Text,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 60 (1974): 346–58.
Charland, “Rehabilitating,” 469.
Many sources discuss liberalism's traditional problems with collective life. Kramnick, for instance, goes so far as to say that liberalism “encompasses no idea of community or quest for the common good.” Republicanism, 15.
Kevin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy (New York: Broadway Books, 2002), 74–78.
Paul Krugman, The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way In The New Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 220, 407.
The centrality of the great leader to this version of liberalism is readily apparent in the work of one of its leading intellectuals, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. See, for instance, his argument that great men (and they are men) provoke seismic shifts in U.S. history in The Cycles of American History (Boston: Houghton‐Mifflin, 1986).
I am not sure that is a fair critique. The case against Kennedy is summarized and the case for Kennedy is made in Paper, Promise and Performance.
Celeste Condit, “Rhetorical Criticism and Audiences: The Extremes of McGee and Leff,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54 (1990): 330–45.
With the possible exception of the unelected chair of the Federal Reserve Board. For the most egregious example of “Fed worship,” see Bob Woodward, Maestro: Greenspan's Fed and the American Boom (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).
Although the 1968 election irretrievably shattered the liberal coalition, the language continued to exert power well after that time. For instance, Stephen Ambrose was among the first to write a revisionist history of the Nixon administration, arguing that he put in place a number of domestic reforms, from environmental policy to affirmative action mandates, dear to liberal hearts. See Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician 1962–1972 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989).
See, for instance, an Associated Press piece on President Bush's disregard for the traditionally conservative principle of states' rights. Jim Abrams, “As GOP Gains Power, Enthusiasm for States' Rights Wanes,” Athens Banner‐Herald, 3 January 2004, A3.
Krugman, Great Unraveling. It is worth noting that Krugman has been equally contemptuous of those liberals who fail to hold the appropriate credentials or argue from fallacious grounds. He rose to public prominence partly because of his withering assault on “pop internationalists,” particularly former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich. Facts, Krugman generally argues, will lead us to the promised land. See Pop Internationalism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996).