Searching for Presidential Rhetoric
Students should study extensively the presidential rhetoric of earlier times, because it often demonstrates civility far better than the rhetoric of the present.
“Civility prevails,” read the headline of the Spanish newspaper El País. “Walz and Vance embrace an endangered species: agreement,” reported the Guardian. Such responses to the recent US vice-presidential debate between Republican J.D. Vance and Democrat Tim Walz were a world away from those that followed the bitter Trump–Biden and Trump–Harris debates in the preceding months. In the hours following each of those earlier presidential debates, my mind drifted back to last November, when the senior rhetoric class I teach at a classical high school watched and analysed the presidential debate between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon held in Chicago in 1960.
Walz and Vance embrace an endangered US political species: agreement https://t.co/sKAxs0bctf
— Guardian US (@GuardianUS) October 2, 2024
The Kennedy–Nixon debate was the first-ever televised encounter of its kind between two presidential candidates. After watching it, one of my students remarked with a sigh: “We need politicians like that today.” He was not referring to the substance, but the style—both candidates took care to conduct themselves with civility, good faith, a spirit of service, and unmistakable competence. No matter who won, viewers could rest assured that an intelligent, qualified, capable, and mentally stable leader would enter the White House the following January. As a result, this turned out to be one of the closest elections in US history, with Kennedy winning the popular vote by a margin of just 0.17 percent.
But for American high-school seniors graduating this year, presidential debates have been filled with vitriol and invective since they were in kindergarten or first grade, when Obama faced Romney in 2012. Kennedy-Nixon is a reminder of a time when political discourse had a more civil and cerebral tone.
Like Vance and Walz, neither Kennedy nor Nixon divided the electorate into the real Americans and the rest. Neither implied that some Americans are pure and others stained. They did not demonise one another. They did not attack each other’s motives or character. Neither accused the other of lying. Many voters in 1960 were wary of how Catholicism would influence Kennedy’s judgement (he would become the first Catholic president), but Nixon did not make religion an issue. Nor did he bring up the fact that Kennedy came from one of the richest families in America. When he was 29, Kennedy had become the youngest congressman in US history, and he was seeking to become the youngest elected president in US history. But when Nixon was asked about his own past statement that Kennedy was naïve and at times immature, he responded, “I have no comment.” In short, Nixon let the issues facing the country be the issue.
Vance and Walz helped to keep the focus on the issues by using a technique recently dubbed “star-manning” by Angel Eduardo of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). While “straw man” arguments engage with a weak version of an opponent’s argument and “steel man” arguments engage with the strongest version of an opponent’s argument, the “star man” argument, Eduardo writes, engages “the most charitable version of your opponent, by acknowledging their good intentions and your shared desires despite your disagreements.”
Referring to gun violence, Walz said, “I one-hundred percent believe that Senator Vance hates it when these kids [get killed in school shootings]. It’s abhorrent, and it breaks your heart. … But that’s not far enough when we know there are things that worked.” Vance replied, “I think that Governor Walz and I actually probably agree that we need to do better on this. The question is just how do we actually do it?” These comments echoed Nixon star-manning Kennedy in 1960. “I know Senator Kennedy feels as deeply about these problems as I do. But our disagreement is not about the goals for America, but only about the means to reach those goals.”
Julian Adorney
Civility is a skill often learned through emulation, which is why many parents today worry about the tenor of contemporary American presidential rhetoric. They may be able to see past it themselves, but they worry that it will have some formative effect on their kids. The tone of presidential rhetoric trickles down to playgrounds and dinner tables. Nixon identified this concern in his third debate with Kennedy. When a moderator asked both candidates about remarks by former president Harry Truman, a Democrat, who had “bluntly suggested where the vice-president and the Republican Party could go,” Nixon responded:
We all have tempers. I have one; I’m sure Senator Kennedy has one. But when a man’s president of the United States, or a former president, he has an obligation not to lose his temper in public. One thing I’ve noted as I’ve traveled around the country are the tremendous number of children who come out to see the presidential candidates. I see mothers holding their babies up, so that they can see a man who might be president of the United States. I know Senator Kennedy sees them too. It makes you realise that whoever is president is going to be a man that all the children of America will either look up to, or will look down to. … I only hope that, should I win this election … whenever any mother or father talks to his child, he can look at the man in the White House, and whatever he may think of his policies, he will say: “Well, there is a man who maintains the kind of standards personally that I would want my child to follow.”
With so much civility on display in 1960, it seems regressive that so much presidential rhetoric sounds so unpresidential in 2024. After the Kennedy–Nixon debates, many commentators predicted that televising debates would act as an antiseptic for electoral politics. They assumed that the intense public scrutiny of a nationwide television broadcast would incentivise decorum. “As time goes on, television may well purge American politics of gross ill manners,” said poet Kenneth Rexroth. “I don’t think there is any question but that it would be impossible today to run, much less elect, a gross buffoon, a ruffian, or even a boozy, good-natured rascal.”
Boozy rascals had been in the White House before. Andrew Johnson was vice-president under Abraham Lincoln, and at Lincoln’s second inauguration in 1865, Johnson was so drunk that he was unable to swear in the new senators (which left this duty to a Senate clerk). He was also plastered when he delivered his vice-presidential inaugural address. After Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, Johnson became president. In the summer of 1866, he gave around sixty speeches on a nineteen-day speaking tour called the “Swing Around the Circle.” According to Jeffrey Tulis in his 1987 book The Rhetorical Presidency, Johnson spoke extemporaneously and often attacked some part of the audience. He argued with hecklers, accused Congress of “poisoning the minds of the American people,” called certain congressmen “traitors,” compared himself to Christ, and offered himself as a martyr, before professing his affinity for the people and asking for their support.
Johnson was eventually impeached in 1868, partly for this kind of unpresidential rhetoric. The tenth article of his impeachment stated that he had delivered “with a loud voice certain intemperate, inflammatory, and scandalous harangues, and did therein utter loud threats and bitter menaces as well against Congress as the laws of the United States. … Which said utterances, declarations, threats, and harangues, highly censurable in any, are peculiarly indecent and unbecoming in the Chief Magistrate of the United States [and brought] contempt, ridicule, and disgrace, to the great scandal of all good citizens.”
But in the 18th and 19th centuries, the civility of presidential rhetoric had far less direct effect on American culture than it does today, because far fewer people were exposed to it. Presidents communicated mostly in writing, and mostly among the branches of government. The public speeches that presidents did give were mostly ceremonial, or about constitutional questions or wars. Most presidents gave few, if any, speeches trying to win over citizens to their domestic policy agenda.
Times have changed. Since the early 20th century, presidential rhetoric has evolved into one of the primary forces shaping public opinion. Now, presidents “regularly go ‘over the heads’ of Congress to the people at large in support of legislation and other initiatives,” says Tulis. For example, in his 1955 State of the Union address, Dwight Eisenhower told Americans that a “modern, efficient highway system is essential to meet the needs of our growing population, our expanding economy, and our national security.” The next year, the US Interstate Highway System was born. In his 1962 Moon Shot speeches, Kennedy persuaded America that it should be the first country to put a man on the moon. In 1969, the Apollo 11 mission made it happen.
Tulis says this transformation of presidential rhetoric—from a mostly insiders’ affair to regular direct communication with the American people meant to sway their opinion—has gone relatively unchecked by the media and academia. “Today it is taken for granted that presidents have a duty constantly to defend themselves publicly, to promote policy initiatives nationwide, and to inspirit the population … and such leadership is offered as an antidote to ‘gridlock’ in our pluralistic constitutional system, the cure for ‘ungovernability.’”
Indeed, contemporary presidential rhetoric often makes it sound as if presidents can and must singlehandedly unite the whole country and drive policymaking. But this is misguided. As Vanderbilt professor Dana Nelson observes, America was founded on the principle that a vast, diverse country that loves liberty will, by nature, always be divided on many issues. The Founders hoped it was enough for the country to be unified only to an extent—for example, on the basic principles outlined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. In fact, in Federalist 10, James Madison argued that it was the very divisions and competition among the multifarious factions in America that would ensure that no single faction could take all the power.
Given these natural divisions in America, Nelson argues that overplaying the ability of the presidency to unify the country “infantilises citizens.” The idea that a superman in the White House can create unity and fix all of America’s problems leads citizens to misunderstand how government really works and overlook all the things that they and Congress must do. Tocqueville foresaw this dynamic in 1835, asking in Democracy in America, “[W]ill the head of the government have to leave the helm of state to come hold the plow?”
Similarly, in his new book American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—And Could Again, Yuval Levin argues that the nation becomes most unified over the long-term not through presidential rhetoric but through the legislative process. While presidents do lead the nation in many actions in the present, for example in wars and other crises, Congress is the mixing bowl where clashing interests slowly grind out compromises to create e pluribus unum. But contemporary US politics has distorted the policymaking process, turning the president into a sort of chief legislator. Says Jon D. Schaff, a political scientist at Northern State University, “We have turned the presidency into a plebiscitary office, with policy being driven by the executive branch rather than through the deliberation of Congress as the founders had assumed.”
Levin traces this distortion of presidential powers back to Woodrow Wilson. In Wilson’s 1908 work Constitutional Government in the United States, published five years before his presidency, he argued that, by virtue of being elected, a president has a mandate to be the sole voice of the nation in virtually all political matters. This, of course, is severely at odds with the design of the American Founders. Wilson knew that. In fact, he cast doubt on the feasibility of the very system of checks and balances that made the Constitution a pathbreaking document: “The makers of the Constitution constructed the federal government upon a theory of checks and balances … but no government can be successfully conducted upon so mechanical a theory. Leadership and control must be lodged somewhere.” Wilson thought the presidency ought to be more than the Founders envisioned:
As a matter of fact [the president] has become very much more. He has become the leader of his party and the guide of the nation in political purpose. … The nation as a whole has chosen him, and is conscious that it has no other political spokesman. His is the only national voice in affairs. Let him once win the admiration and confidence of the country, and no other single force can withstand him, no combination of forces will easily overpower him. His position takes the imagination of the country. He is the representative of no constituency, but of the whole people. When he speaks in his true character, he speaks for no special interest. If he rightly interpret the national thought and boldly insist upon it, he is irresistible.
Levin says that Wilson is operating under a false assumption, that “the nation actually is [already] unified, but our system is preventing us from acting in a unified way, and the president’s job is to express the unity of the nation.” On the contrary, says Levin, the Founders’ assumption was “that the Congress’ job is to make unity where it doesn’t exist yet, rather than express the unity that does exist.” In other words, “national thought” is only a possibility once Congress negotiates, articulates, and agrees upon it.
This raises an important question: If Congress is meant to be the fundamental force unifying America’s diverse citizenry, how is it that presidents and presidential candidates get away with rarely, if ever, explaining their strategy for working with Congress? In the Trump–Biden and Trump–Harris debates, the moderators never asked about this topic, and it never came up. No candidate mentioned how they would go about working with representatives to get any specific bill passed in Congress.
The only mention of the president’s role vis-à-vis Congress was to say that Roe v. Wade abortion protections could hypothetically be restored, and that bills on the border and student loans had been killed. The media, Congress, and the public should push presidential candidates to explain in detail how they will promote unity by facilitating the legislative process. In the meantime, Levin argues that too much presidential rhetoric today “has too little to do with the nature of the presidency in our system.” He says more assertive rhetoric from Congress is one way to help rein in presidential rhetoric, so that it better fits “the Constitutional shape of the office.”
Perhaps not coincidentally, Woodrow Wilson developed his grandiose vision during the term of Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt pushed presidential rhetoric into new territory, both literally and figuratively. Coining a phrase, Roosevelt called the presidency a “bully pulpit” (with bully at the time being a popular term for “superb” or “wonderful”), meaning a great platform for championing an agenda. He used it to preach about ideals like manhood, hard work, greatness, environmental conservation, and pioneer virtues.
Alexandra Hudson
Unlike any president before him, Roosevelt gave numerous speeches in rugged and remote places like the Black Hills of South Dakota, the Rocky Mountain copper mining town of Butte, Montana, and the Grand Canyon in Arizona. The founder of the world’s first national park system, Roosevelt used presidential rhetoric to take environmental conservation mainstream. He situated it among the other causes of the progressive movement, which sought to protect the public interest from corporate monopolies and industrial exploitation. “The preservation of our forests is an imperative business necessity,” said Roosevelt in his First Annual Message to Congress. “We have come to see clearly that whatever destroys the forests … threatens our own well-being.” Teddy Roosevelt stretched the boundaries of presidential rhetoric, thematically and geographically.
During the half-century between Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency and the Kennedy–Nixon debates, the scope of the audience who could hear presidential oratory expanded from those within earshot of the president to those within earshot of a radio, and then a television. Americans first heard a president’s voice over the radio on 30 May 1922, when Warren Harding delivered his address at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial. But it was in the decade after Harding that Franklin D. Roosevelt pioneered a new way of speaking to Americans over the radio. In 31 fireside chats over his twelve-year presidency, FDR addressed average Americans not as an orator before a crowd but as a wise leader and advisor sitting in their living room.
As the height of the Great Depression neared, 60 million people listened to his first fireside chat on 12 March 1933, just eight days after his first inauguration. Some 5,000 banks had failed, nine million savings accounts had been wiped out, and unemployment had risen to 25 percent. FDR calmly explained to distraught Americans the mechanics of how the country got into a banking crisis, and how he planned to get it out. But, he told his audience:
There is an element in the readjustment of our financial system more important than currency, more important than gold, and that is the confidence of the people. … We have provided the machinery to restore our financial system; it is up to you to support and make it work. It is your problem no less than it is mine. Together we cannot fail.
Americans believed him. Within two weeks, they had redeposited over half of the cash they were hoarding into the banks. Supreme Court justice Frank Clegg was among the many Americans who wrote a letter of thanks to the president the following week, in which he described his experience of listening to the first fireside chat with family and neighbours: “The frantic individuals of a few moments before declared that they would leave their money in the banks and that they were not afraid of the future.”
Like FDR, Abraham Lincoln used rhetoric to shepherd Americans through a profound crisis. His Second Inaugural Address on 4 March 1865 came a month before the end of the Civil War and 41 days before his assassination. Lincoln could have congratulated the Union, or his own administration, on finally nearing victory. He could have laid out his plans to unify the country after the war, or criticised the South for seceding. But instead, he turned the spotlight on the common traits and tasks, and common God, that unified all Americans, North and South.
In an example of civility on the grandest scale, Lincoln did not blame a single faction for slavery, but rather referred to “American slavery,” a shared national problem. “[God] gives to North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offence came.” To move on from this collective offence, Lincoln, like FDR, asked the whole population to pitch in to heal and rebuild the nation:
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
The civil tone of Vance–Walz and Kennedy–Nixon—and that of Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, and Lincoln—embodies the sort of political rhetoric we need more of today: speech that highlights Americans’ common beliefs, interests, and destiny, and that encourages them to find ways to overcome their disagreements and build a shared future together. Students should study extensively the presidential rhetoric of earlier times, because it often demonstrates civility far better than the rhetoric of the present. “[C]ivility is not a sign of weakness,” said Kennedy in his 1961 inaugural speech. “Let both sides explore what problems unite us instead of belabouring those problems which divide us.”
