Reagan's Speech Research Articles

The Not-So-Puritan Origins of the American Self

The Not-So-Puritan Origins of the American Self Gideon Mailer (bio) Evan Haefeli, Accidental Pluralism: America and the Religious Politics of English Expansion, 1497–1662. Chicago & London: Chicago University Press, 2021. viii + 383 pp. Notes and index. $45.00. Twenty years ago, while I was studying at Cambridge University, my accommodation overlooked a college chapel that had once been a victim of Puritan iconoclasm. The chapel of Peterhouse was consecrated in 1633 by supporters of Archbishop William Laud and his Beauty of Holiness movement. Unsurprisingly, its quirky Renaissance-Gothic synthesis did not appeal to the thousands of Parliamentary troops who were quartered in Cambridge during the English Civil Wars, nor the newly appointed "Commissioner for the destruction of monuments of idolatry and superstition" for the Eastern Association, William Dowsing (1596–1668). Though Dowsing succeeded in removing statues of angels and cherubs from the chapel in 1643, High-Church-leaning Peterhouse fellows managed to hide the Flemish stained-glass panel that depicted Rubens's Le Coup de Lance, which they reinstalled after the restoration of the Stuart royal line in 1660.1 Ten years after gazing at that chapel roof, during my two-day campus interview for a job at the University of Minnesota, I included its iconoclastic story in my response to a question from a search committee member. I had been discussing how the 1707 Act of Union between the English and Scottish parliaments had created a bi-confessional British state, which provided a model of jurisdictional pluralism for dissenting Protestants in North America. But the professor asked me to rewind one century to consider how the 1603 Regal Union between the English and Scottish monarchies might also help us to understand the origins of religious pluralism in colonial North America and the nascent United States. I used the chapel story to illustrate a warning that I offered to students: be careful mining seventeenth-century Anglo-Scottish history for the disestablishmentarian roots of British imperial life and American religious pluralism, or even the notion that multiple religious establishments might cohere within a single political union. As demonstrated by the deployment of authority by William Dowsing, iconoclastic Puritans shared a tendency for [End Page 7] centralized statecraft and bureaucratic control with their Laudian adversaries, even as they sought to devolve some forms of power to local Congregational churches. Those who opposed the nature of the Anglican establishment of religion did not necessarily repudiate public and civic support for religious authority in principle, nor hold tightly to grand theories of religious pluralism. Following my Peterhouse vignette, therefore, I suggested that civic leaders in Massachusetts, Maryland, and Virginia were likely to have demonstrated similar ambiguities in their approach to religious pluralism during the foundational period of their colonies. But I was not able to support my assertion with any historiographical reference. I certainly raised a knowing eyebrow as I played an audio recording of President Ronald Reagan's speeches from the Oval Office, which claimed that the liberty of religious conscience had spearheaded the American Founding during the 1770s and the destruction of "Godless communism" during the 1980s; and that those successes were rooted in the work of pilgrims to America such as the "early freedom man" and Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop.2 Yet I could not yet point to any Americanist who had examined conceptual similarities between the work of mainland English leaders and the constrained approach to religious pluralism among settler elites in Anglican Virginia, Puritan New England, or Catholic Maryland during the first half of the seventeenth century. Instead, I quickly turned to the more familiar historiographical terrain of the 1688 Glorious Revolution, the contingency of Lockean contractual theory, and their influence on the freedoms enjoyed by dissenting Protestants in British North America. Patriots eventually complained that the British Kingin-Parliament had afforded too many religious liberties to French-speaking Catholics in the territory of Quebec, which included Indigenous lands in present-day Minnesota. Notwithstanding the move towards disestablishment in the nascent United States, I finished with a flourish, some Patriots looked back to the Glorious Revolution as they opposed London for expanding religious pluralism in the British imperial realm.3 If I had had recourse to Evan...

“If the gas pipeline would be built, we lose”: transcript of Reagan's speech at the US National Security Council Meeting on the Sanctions against Soviet Union

The object of this research is the declassified transcript of the US National Security Council Meeting of July 9, 1981, dedicated to introduction of the economic and political restrictions on building of the Soviet gas main pipeline. The subject of this research is the analysis information-bearing capabilities of the office documentation of the US National Security Council Meetings for conducting the scientific assessment of sanctions policy of the US government against the Soviet Union in the 1980s as part of directives on restricting the access of the Soviet Union to foreign markets. The article examines the published protocol the US National Security Council Meeting and related documents that contain information on creating the regime to impede the construction of the gas main pipeline to Europe. The novelty of lies in the fact that this article is first within the framework of historiographical analysis to study the plans of the US President R. Reagan on interruption of the active efforts of the Soviet Union to supply Western Europe with energy. Publication of the document clearly demonstrates that the ideas of restarting the trade-economic development of the Soviet Union were later implemented in other countries in the XXI century, when the Russian Nord Stream pipeline became one of the crucial vanguards within the system of control of the US national security interests in Europe. Based on the newly introduced documents from the foreign archives of the CIA, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, materials of the US periodical press, and memoirs, the author explores the options prepared by the US agencies aimed at complete shutdown, and restriction of access of the participants of the Soviet-German gas pipeline deal to foreign markets and resources, as well as the response of business community to trade embargo with the USSR.

"And No One Will Keep That Light from Shining": Civil Religion after September 11 in the Speeches of George W. Bush

Nearly ten years after September 11, 2001, in an effort to focus in sharp relief the events following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the failed attempt aimed at the White House, Nicole Janz examines then President George W. Bush's endeavor to pull the nation together under the banner of civil religion. The title of the book is taken from one of those inspiring post-9/11 speeches. Originally a master's thesis at the Free University of Berlin, Janz's study points out that presidents throughout America's history have woven civil religion into their speeches, and Bush's rhetoric following 9/11 was nothing new or unique. He most certainly was not espousing some personal agenda based solely on his born-again Christianity in his speechifying as some political pundits and reporters at the time suggested. When populations are under siege, it becomes necessary for leaders to draw their people together to inspire unwavering unity in a common cause to vanquish the enemy and restore order and security. “God talk” is a powerful motivator. Civil religion often involves ritualistic expressions of patriotism, most often given credibility by leaders within a society by the invocation of God in political speeches and addresses to Congress, reverence for patriotic holidays such as America's Fourth of July, Memorial Day, and Martin Luther King Jr. Day, or the eulogizing of a national tragedy, such as President Ronald Reagan's speech following the space shuttle Challenger disaster of 1986.

Reagan at Bergen-Belsen and Bitburg (review)

Reviewed by: Reagan at Bergen-Belsen and Bitburg B. Wayne Howell Reagan at Bergen-Belsen and Bitburg. By Richard J. Jensen. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007; pp. xii + 164. $35.00 cloth; $18.95 paper. In May 1985, President Reagan attended the Western Economic Summit in Bonn, Germany. The summit concluded just days before the fortieth anniversary of victory by the Allies in World War II. Following the summit, Reagan delivered two speeches on May 5, 1985: the first at the site of the former Bergen Belsen concentration camp, the second at the U.S. Air Force Base in Bitburg, West Germany. Between these two events was a speechless ceremony that had [End Page 334] become surrounded by controversy: a wreath-laying at the Kolmeshohe cemetery in Bitburg. No American soldiers were buried there, and among the approximately 2,000 Germans entombed, almost 50 were Waffen SS soldiers. Many Waffen SS had committed atrocities against Jews, civilians in occupied territories, and American troops. In their advance work, White House staff and other U.S. officials failed to recognize the SS soldiers' graves. Members of the Jewish community, U.S. military veterans, and members of the U.S. Congress voiced their outrage. In response, the White House added a visit to the site of the former Bergen-Belsen concentration camp with accompanying remarks by Reagan, and the original speech scheduled for the Air Force base took on new meaning. In Reagan at Bergen-Belsen and Bitburg, Richard J. Jensen examines these speeches as epideictic oratory and concludes that they were not "successful" responses to the controversy that surrounded them. Jensen's approach to evaluating the "degree of success or failure" (xi) of Reagan's speeches makes this book compelling. Jensen begins his examination of Reagan's speeches by providing alternative portraits of Reagan through the eyes of his supporters and critics (6–11). From Jensen's perspective, despite scholarly evidence to the contrary, President Reagan was disengaged, even uninterested "in foreign affairs" (8). However, Reagan "possess[ed] natural talents as a speaker" (13), a proclivity for humor (27, 39–40), and an amazing ability at "playing the role of president" (27). Jensen's discussion of Reagan's use of humor seems out of place given the subject matter of the book, especially because he fails to explain its relevance to these two speeches. What is clearly relevant in chapter 1 vis-à-vis Jensen's later analysis of Reagan's rhetoric is the larger geopolitical Cold War context in which the speeches were delivered (16–17). Perhaps a deeper consideration of aspects related to that context would help readers better understand Reagan's purpose(s) in accepting an invitation to visit a German military cemetery. Chapter 3 traces the development of Reagan's two speeches. First, Jensen describes the public controversy that followed the announcement of Reagan's plans to visit the Bitburg cemetery and the attempts by Reagan's staff to quell that controversy. Relying heavily on archived material from the Reagan Library, Jensen provides fascinating insights into the work of Ken Khachigian and Josh Gilder as they helped draft the Bergen-Belsen and Bitburg speeches respectively, tracing the development of themes as they increase in importance and language as it grows in moral vividness (76–90). Here, also, Jensen's previous discussions of Reagan-as-storyteller (25–26, 32–35) are significant as decisions crystallize about which stories to use in Reagan's speeches. In chapter 4, Jensen analyzes the speeches that he claims "Reagan hoped… would calm many of his critics" (91). The analyses bring out important aspects [End Page 335] of both speeches. In the Bergen-Belsen speech, Jensen notes Reagan's "optimism … repeated through the use of hope" (97), the "theme of rebirth and renewal" (98), Reagan's rhetorical posture as "secular pastor" (97, 99), and his use of "one person [i.e., Anne Frank] to personify all those who suffered at Bergen-Belsen" (99). In the Bitburg speech, Jensen points to Reagan's linking of "the effort by World War II veterans to fight Nazis with the current battle with the Soviet Union and other enemies" (109), rejecting "collective guilt" (111), embracing again...

Impoverishment of spontaneous language and the prediction of Alzheimer's disease

The article by Garrard and colleagues (2005) reported the results of the systematic linguistic analysis of Iris Murdoch's final novel published in the year before the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease was made. Garrard and colleagues observed signs of deterioration in her writing, especially in semantic skills and sophistication of vocabulary. Subtle alterations of language were also detected by Brian Butterworth in his analysis of Ronald Reagan's speeches prior to his re-election to the USA presidency in 1984. This was 10 years before the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease was made in his case ( The Sunday Times …

The President's Legislative Influence from Public Appeals

Despite scholars' long-standing appreciation of modern American presidents' plebiscitary powers, no study offers evidence that public appeals systematically facilitate influence, and some research indicates they can actually decrease presidential bargaining power. Our analysis resolves this disparity, developing a theoretical perspective of plebiscitary appeals and testing it on data from the nationally televised addresses of Presidents Eisenhower through Clinton. perspective suggests that appeals should generate influence, but that this influence depends on presidents strategically choosing issues to promote to the public. In particular, a president will promote issues on which his position is popular, but for which Congress would not otherwise enact his preferred policy. To test this perspective, analyze a simultaneous-equations model of the causes and policy consequences of presidential appeals over budgetary policy. results support the hypotheses, establishing the effectiveness of public strategies and conditions to which this effectiveness is limited. n July 27, 1981, less than forty-eight hours before the House was scheduled to vote on President Reagan's proposed income tax reduction of over 25 percent, the president promoted his proposal in a nationally televised address. Speaker of the House Thomas P. (Tip) O'Neill, Jr. surmised that prior to the address, we [the Democrats] had this won.' Yet following Reagan's speech, a number of Democrats switched positions, opting to vote with the president. Why did these members abandon their party? As described by an aide to Representative Beverly Byron, one of the Democrats that switched positions, Byron's office was inundated with calls in support of Reagan's proposal the morning after his speech. Offices across the Hill gave similar reports.2 In the end, the tax cut won by a vote of 238 to 195. Fifteen years later, with the partisanship of the presidency and House reversed (the Senate was again Republican), President Clinton promoted his budget proposals to the public following a breakdown in negotiations with Congress. Ultimately, these efforts helped enable Clinton to achieve his policy goals. As recounted by a Chief Clerk of the House Appropriations Committee, The Republicans pushed their agenda too far, and Clinton was able to capitalize on the situation with the public ... the next

European Security in the 1990s: Deterrence and Defense after the INF Treaty

1. Touring the Western European Defense Horizon.- 2. Western European Defense: The Next Ten Years.- 3. Future Requirements for Theater Weapons in Western Europe.- Appendix: European Security in the Postwar Period: Documents from 1948-1989.- The North Atlantic Treaty Organization.- The North Atlantic Treaty, August 24, 1949.- North Atlantic Council Communique, December 14, 1967.- Speech of M. Laurent Fabius, September 17, 1982.- North Atlantic Council Communique, December 9, 1983.- Lord Carrington, Secretary General, on the Alliance, September 21, 1984.- The Security Policy of the Federal Republic of Germany, 1985.- Maintaining Security in a Changing World [United Kingdom, 1988].- Declaration of the Heads of State and Government, March 2-3, 1988.- Statement on the Ministerial Meeting of the North Atlantic Council, June 9-10, 1988.- European Security Cooperation.- Treaty between Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, March 17, 1948.- Protocols to the 1948 Brussels Treaty, October 23, 1954.- Franco-German Summit Statement, February 27-28, 1986.- Speech by Sir Geoffrey Howe, March 16, 1987.- Arms Control: The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.- Treaty between the USA and USSR, December 8, 1987.- Address by FRG Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, October 28, 1977.- Communique of a Special NATO Meeting, December 12, 1979.- President Ronald Reagan's Speech to the United Nations General Assembly, September 26, 1983.- NATO Nuclear Planning Group Communique, October 28, 1983.- Speech by FRG Chancellor Helmut Schmidt to the SPD Conference, November 19-20, 1983.- Statement by General Secretary Andropov, November 24, 1983.- Communique of the North Atlantic Council, June 11, 1987.- NATO Nuclear Planning Group Communique, November 1987.- North Atlantic Council Ministerial Communique, December 1987.- Arms Control: Short-Range Nuclear Missiles.- Statement by British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, May 14, 1987.- NATO Nuclear Planning Group Communique, May 15, 1987.- Statement by the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany, June 2, 1987.- Arms Control: Conventional Forces.- Document of the Stockholm Conference, September 19, 1986.- Address of the Warsaw Treaty Member States, June 11, 1986.- Press Conference of Francois Mitterrand, April 23, 1987.- Interview with Jacques Chirac, May 16, 1987.- Halifax Statement on Conventional Arms Control, May 30, 1987.- Conventional Arms Control: The Way Ahead, March 2-3, 1988.- Mikhail Gorbachev's Address to the United Nations, December 7, 1988.- Statement Issued by the North Atlantic Council, December 8-9, 1988.- Mandate for Negotiation on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, January 10, 1989.- Position Paper, March 6, 1989.- Conceptual Framework of Agreement on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, March 9, 1989.- Speech by Hans-Dietrich Genscher, April 27, 1989.- President George Bush's Statement, May 29, 1989.- About the Authors.

Ronald Reagan on Lebanon and Grenada: Flexibility and interpretation in the application of Kenneth Burke's pentad

The pentad is most useful when critics take a flexible approach to the five terms, preserving the inherent ambiguity of act, agent, agency, scene, and purpose. Experimentation with different pentadic root terms will produce different readings of any given text. In most cases, such experimentation will result in the identification of a single term that coordinates a critic's understanding of a text. A pentadic analysis of Ronald Reagan's address of October 27, 1983, on Lebanon and Grenada, demonstrates the critical value of employing multiple pentadic frames. Reagan's speech reveals a formulation of American character incompatible with a thorough multinationalism.

Executive Summary and Major Conclusions

The American Physical Society (APS) convened this Study Group to evaluate the status of the science and technology of directed energy weapons (DEW). The evaluation focuses on a variety of lasers and energetic particle beam technologies for their potential applications to the defense against a ballistic missile attack. This action by the APS was motivated by the divergence of views within the scientific community in the wake of President Reagan's speech on March 23, 1983, in which he called on the U.S. scientific community to develop a system that “…could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reach our soil.…” Directed energy weapons were expected to play a crucial role in the ballistic missile defense (BMD).

Defusing a foreign policy crisis: Myth and victimage in Reagan's 1983 Lebanon/Grenada address

This paper investigates the operation of myth and victimage in President Reagan's efforts to remove ambiguity and displace guilt associated with his actions in Lebanon and Grenada. The analysis reveals how Reagan's speech of October 27, 1983 redefined the situation so that guilt for the Beirut bombing and Grenada invasion was shifted to the Soviet Union and American foreign involvement was reaffirmed as both desirable and inevitable. Attention is focused on Reagan's use of three levels of opposing clusters to index myths of progress, freedom, mission, and national self‐interest, thereby generating a positive rationale for U.S. involvement in Lebanon and Grenada while establishing a motive to blame the savage Soviet antagonist for opposing civilized ideals.

Britain's response to the Strategic Defence Initiative

The Strategic Defence Initiative and President Reagan's announcement of the American commitment to seek to acquire effective ballistic missile defences certainly form one of the most difficult defence policy issues a British government has had to grapple with since the Second World War. By aiming at a defence against nuclear weapons, SDI reintroduced into strategic debate an issue which had been shelved at the start of the 1970s, not only because of the signing of the ABM Treaty, but also because ballistic missile defences (BMD) seemed inherently difficult against a determined enemy. The SDI issue carried enormous implications in terms of technological and financial resources, which raised questions about the opportunity costs involved for US conventional forces, and it threatened to inflict further damage on US-Soviet relations which were already strained. These factors made the issue still more awkward. The exotic technologies central to SDI-laser and other directed-energy weapons, and space-based tracking and battle-management systems-were not easy to assess, and a cloud of uncertainty enveloped the whole SDI issue, as to how the Soviet Union would react, how the technology would develop, and how future American Presidents and Congressmen would respond to Reagan's vision and initiative. Moreover, President Reagan's speech on 23 March 1983 laying the foundations for SDI came as a complete surprise to the British government, which, like all the other American allies, had not been consulted in advance. Ministers and officials were caught off balance, and their private responses ranged from (predominantly) concern to hostility. While no one denied the need for the United States to match Soviet efforts, the President's vision of a comprehensive defence was rejected as impracticable. British preference would have been for the United States to continue, or quietly expand, its work already in progress on BMD technologies, while avoiding the high political profile of SDI. Yet the United States had a potent political argument in its assertion that it should seek to defend its population from nuclear destruction. In these circumstances it is scarcely surprising that British policy towards SDI has had a hesitant and even disjointed look, slow to emerge and not particularly well coordinated when it did appear. Up to the end of 1985, British policy in this area was marked by four features, two of style and two of content, to be discussed individually below. However, it should be emphasized that these four features will evolve and perhaps disappear as the SDI debate continues into the late 1980s. Indeed, one of the central doubts about British declaratory policy on SDI has been whether it is relevant as a guide to action in future situations. The four features will be discussed in turn in what follows. They can be summarized as: (1) make no hasty response to the SDI; (2) give the SDI programme only limited support; (3) seek UK participation in SDI research; and (4) deal with SDI on a bilateral basis directly with the United States.

Ban space weapons

Two eminent scientists have initiated a petition urging the United States and the Soviet Union to ban all weapons from space. The petition is dated February 24, 1983, one month earlier than President Reagan's speech advocating a space-based defense against strategic missiles.

Argumentative stance and political faith healing: “The dream will come true”

This essay analyzes President Ronald Reagan's speech “On Our Economic Recovery” as a means of exploring the argumentative resources of political faith healing. By exploiting the illocutionary ambiguity of “shall” and “must,” the faith healer as rhetor permits a state of healing to be seen as either prediction or command. By strategic identification and division, faith healers—both mystical and political—can take credit for successful acts of healing. In contrast, when healing does not occur, strategies such as those used in the Reagan speech can locate responsibility for failures of policy in the failed faith of the populace.

Days of the Jungle: The Testimony of A Guatemalan Guerillero 1972-1976; Introduction by George Black

In the clamor of debate surrounding the crisis in Central America, there is a strange silence. It concerns Guatemala. Guatemala, with 7.2 million people, is the most populous country in the isthmus; it has the region's largest economy. Yet when President Ronald Reagan, for instance, took the unusual step of addressing a joint session of Congress on April 27, 1983, to seek support for his confrontational policies in Central America, Guatemala was all but absent. The key country in the region merited just two mentions in Reagan's speech, both of them cursory.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.