The rise of the media presidency through radio and television broadcasts has heightened the visibility and importance of presidential speeches in determining the effectiveness and popularity of the President of the United States. Not surprisingly, this development has also witnessed the rise of professional speechwriters to craft the words the chief executive would address to the nation. Yet, as this volume of expert analyses graphically demonstrates, the reliance of individual presidents on their speechwriters has varied with the rhetorical skill of the officeholder himself, his managerial...

With the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the American presidency underwent many profound changes. Chief among those was a radical evolution in the interaction of the president with the general public.
Divided into three sections, the ten essays of this volume focus on that evolution and offer thought-provoking analyses concerning the role of presidential rhetoric in passing policy, generating support, and promoting public discourse.
In Part I, Jeffrey Tulis, who introduced the concept of the rhetorical presidency more than a decade ago, considers how the...

For George H. W. Bush, the distinction between campaigning ("politics") and governing ("principles") was crucial. Once in office, he abandoned his campaign mode and with it the rhetorical strategies that brought electoral success. Not recognizing the crucial importance of rhetoric to policy formation and implementation, Bush forfeited the resources of the bully pulpit and paid the price of electoral defeat.In this first-ever analysis of Bush's rhetoric to draw on the archives of the Bush Presidential Library, scholars explore eight major events or topics associated with his presidency: the...

Boldly breaking the mold of previous anthologies, Words of a Century: The Top 100 American Speeches, 1900-1999 contains the complete--and authentic--texts of the best American speeches of the twentieth century as delivered to their immediate audiences. It features a remarkable array of speakers, from Woodrow Wilson, Clarence Darrow, and Carrie Chapman Catt to Martin Luther King, Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy, and Barbara Jordan.
As diverse in type as they are in subject matter, the speeches open a unique window on the twentieth century, and many continue to resonate in our own...