John F. Kennedy at American University: The Rhetoric of the Possible, Epideictic Progression, and the Commencement of Peace

Abstract

In his American University address, Kennedy employed epideictic progression, a pedagogical process drawing upon dissociation and epideictic norms to convince listeners, gradually, to embrace a new vision-in this case, a world in which a testban treaty with the U.S.S.R. was possible. To do so, Kennedy's words: (1) united the audience behind the value o f " genuine peace"; (2) humanized the Soviets as worthy partners in genuine peace; (3) established the reality o f the Cold War and the credibility o f U.S. leadership; and (4) connected lessons on genuine peace to domestic civil rights.In 1963, an ideological battle-begun in the post-war era-continued to dominate U.S.-Soviet relations, and President John F. Kennedy was in a tough spot. After campaigning on charges of a missile gap, he had intensified his cold warrior persona by creating the most formidable military the world has ever seen and continuing his hardline anticommunist rhetoric.1 In the terrifying wake of the missile crisis, however, the Kennedy administration identified the need for a more conciliatory relationship with the U.S.S.R., which could occur only through a new foreign policy strategy of detente.2The first major step toward such a strategy was achievement of a limited nuclear test-ban treaty, which Kennedy now was in a better position to persuade Americans to accept owing to his increased political capital after the missile crisis. Although

Epideictic memories of war: reconceiving the classical funeral oration as exigence-driven discourse

“…Recent scholarship has noted the importance of epideictic discourse to social identity construction in contemporary war rhetorics (Ivie, 2007;Bostdorff, 2011). As Bostdorff and Ferris's (2014) recent essay on John F. Kennedy's American University Commencement address highlights, epideictic's contribution to public understanding of war cannot be oversimplified to a mere reinforcement of archaic values that motivate citizens to fight. Because "epideictic rhetoric places the rhetor in a pedagogical position of authority," it helps provide him or her the ethos needed to criticize (and eventually modify) the accepted conventions of a culture should one choose to do so (p. 431).…”