Date of Award

2014

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Alcock, Frank

Keywords

Truman, Harry, Nixon, Richard, Cold War, Politics, United States

Area of Concentration

Political Science

Abstract

It is well established that Harry S. Truman created a set of confrontational metaphors to describe communism at the beginning of the Cold War. The purpose of this rhetoric was to garner support for his administration’s containment policy. This study explores how this rhetoric evolved past Truman and explains what happened to it when the United States transitioned away from containment and towards détente. In order to achieve the first of these goals, this study traces the replication and development of Truman’s rhetoric by his succeeding Cold War presidents. Here, it finds that while each had his own unique rhetorical style and set of metaphors, presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon all replicated and built on Truman's containment rhetoric. This study then demonstrates Nixon’s rhetorical departure from his predecessors through the examination of a set of key speeches given throughout his presidency. It finds that Nixon re-appropriated containment metaphors and introduced new peace-oriented metaphors to garner support for his détente policy.

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