Words as Signals: Drafting Cold War Rhetoric in the Eisenhower and Kennedy Administrations

Abstract

This article compares the speech-writing processes of the first two American presidents to begin their terms during the Cold War, Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy. It examines the two major initial communications of the presidents, their inaugural address and state of the union message, focusing on passages that pertain to the Soviet Union and the Cold War. While the article primarily analyzes the drafting of the speeches, it also examines the speeches themselves and the signals they may have conveyed to Soviet leaders about each administration's intentions. The thesis of this article is that Alexander L. George's “multiple advocacy” recommendation for presidential foreign policy decision making is applicable to presidential speech writing. Appropriately designed formal advisory meetings of speech writers and policy makers are more likely than exclusively informal procedures to take account of the signals that presidential speeches can send. Yet multiple advocacy has a trade-off: institutionalized debate about content can result in speeches that have less rhetorical appeal and thus may be less well-suited to mobilizing domestic support for a president's policies.