The Reagan Rhetoric: History and Memory in 1980s America (review)

Although Ronald Reagan’s preternatural oratorical skills made him an obvious choice for scholarship in the fields of communication, history, psychology, and political science, the last several years have seen an explosion of renewed scholarly interest in the Reagan legacy. This has been due, in part, to the resurgence of American conservativism after the 2008 presidential election and the rise of the Tea Party movement in the midterm elections of 2010. This revival in Reagan scholarship has also been aided by the release of almost 60,000 pages of his presidential papers in 2002, as well as papers released following his death in 2004. Consequently, Reagan scholars have a tremendous amount of new primary source material to consider as they assess his legacy.

Toby Glenn Bates’s new book, The Reagan Rhetoric: History and Memory in 1980s America, seeks to utilize the new papers to understand how Reagan was able to present a simple rhetorical style and a constant vision of the world to a country that was unsure about its role in the world. Following the tumult of the war in Vietnam, the scandal of Watergate, and the failed presidencies of Ford and Carter, Reagan’s rhetoric structured a consistent worldview that seemed sincere and inspired confidence in his predictability as a president in an unpredictable world.

To understand how Reagan’s consistency built his ethos as a speaker, Bates applies Pierre Nora’s notion of “sites of memory” and Maurice Halbwachs’s notion of “collective memory” across three case studies: Reagan’s 1980 Neshoba County Fair speech, his Vietnam rhetoric, and his statements on the Iran-Contra Affair. Bates approaches these case studies as a “cultural and social historian of the period” (5). As a historian of memory, Bates hopes to create “a bridge between the various perspectives that have so far dominated the scholarship into Reagan’s presidency” (5). In doing so, Bates is able to avoid the kind of intense veneration that often accompanies Reagan scholarship and to provide a more critical assessment of Reagan’s rhetorical strategies as president.

Bates sets out to accomplish the building of this bridge through three main arguments. First, Bates demonstrates that consistency was the most important factor for Reagan as he wrote and revised his public speeches. Second, Bates argues that Reagan’s years as spokesman for General Electric and as president of the Screen Actors Guild provided training in speech writing, creating image events, and managing public expectations. Consequently, Reagan’s rhetorical dependability across his long public career made it difficult for the public to view him as politically fickle or unpredictable. Bates demonstrates that these two aspects of his life illustrate the rhetorical skills that made Reagan a successful politician, though scholars would be hard-pressed to find Reagan hagiographers who do not make these claims a central part of any argument about the president’s rhetorical strategy.

However, in his third and final argument, Bates contends that Reagan’s consistency often created problems for him, for example, in Neshoba when he used states’ rights language to appeal to white voters despite the legacy of violence against civil rights workers, or during the Iran-Contra scandal when he pleaded ignorance to claims that his administration funneled the money from illegal weapons sales to the president’s favorite insurgency in Nicaragua. Bates argues that although the problems in each case study were created by Reagan’s fidelity to a few main narratives over the entire course of his career, they were all resolved through that same uniformity of message. This final argument is where the book makes its mark in understanding the ways in which Reagan’s rhetorical constancy both created problems like those above and solved those problems as time passed.

As a cultural historian, Bates is detailed and clear in his construction of events. Chapter 1 examines how the 1964 Neshoba County murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael...