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Preface
- University Press of Florida
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Preface History represents a conversation with the past, one that is often inspired by the problems of the present. So it should come as no surprise to discover that the presidency of George W. Bush prompted historians to take a hard look at how modern American presidents have “sold” episodes of war and international conflict to the public. After all, the Bush administration was both brazen and open about its campaign to sell the Iraq War in 2003, publicly describing its efforts to garner support for the invasion as a “product launch.”1 A 2008 memoir by former Bush press secretary Scott McClellan provoked a media frenzy merely for conĀrming what many observers had suspected all along: that the administration had deliberately manipulated public opinion to secure its support for the invasion of Iraq. In a chapter titled “Selling the War,” McClellan revealed how Bush and his advisors created “enormous momentum for war” through a “carefully orchestrated campaign” of political propaganda. Shading the truth and manipulating the press, the Bush administration “managed the crisis [with Iraq] in a way that almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option .”2 George W. Bush may have drawn attention to the ways in which a president sells a war, but the essays in this volume reveal that he was hardly the Ārst to do so. Throughout U.S. history, America’s chief executives have worked to shape public opinion on issues of war and peace, efforts that have become more systematic in the past century. The communication and information revolutions of the twentieth century made influencing mass public opinion a prominent feature of presidential leadership—so much so, in fact, that political science and communication scholars have characterized the modern presidency as “the rhetorical presidency”—in which public persuasion is the president’s primary task.3 As President Bush confessed to a group of schoolchildren in an unscripted remark in 2005, “See, in my line x · Preface of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.”4 Although the American public often considers propaganda to be the work of enemies or despots, the contributors to this book illuminate how the central goal of propaganda—influencing public opinion—has shaped how American presidents have approached the most momentous duty of their office: waging war. From garnering support for a war not yet launched, to waging a “cold war” with no shots being Āred, to maintaining support for an unpopular engagement, presidents have worked to shape and manipulate the public’s perceptions of international conflicts involving their country. Many of these essays analyze the ways in which American presidents—from William McKinley to George W. Bush—sought to influence how the media covered, and the public perceived, major wars and undeclared conflicts involving U.S. forces. Some of the essays focus predominantly on how the American people responded to these efforts, stressing the limits to the president ’s ability to sustain public support for protracted military engagement abroad. Several of the essays pertain to the Cold War, even though it was not, strictly speaking, a war. As the preeminent conflict of the twentieth century, one that spawned numerous wars and conflicts around the globe, the Cold War was often perceived as a war by government officials and the public alike. Moreover, from the earliest days of the conflict until the collapse of the Soviet Union, U.S. presidents and their advisors worked to “sell” the Cold War to the American public with sustained rhetorical and propaganda campaigns that exerted a profound impact on both domestic and foreign affairs. As a whole, the essays in this volume suggest that presidents have experienced mixed success in their campaigns of salesmanship, often producing unfortunate unintended consequences. Short-term successes created longterm problems and complications. Many presidents, as Scott McClellan noted of George W. Bush, “confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candor and honesty so fundamentally needed to build and then sustain public support during a time of war.”5 Not infrequently, as a result, Americans became cynical, doubtful, or outright hostile to the country’s wars and to the presidents who sold them. Occasionally, the very efforts to sell a war backĀred and produced not patriotic fervor but skepticism and disillusionment. Indeed, it seems generations of Americans learned and relearned what the Greek dramatist Aeschylus observed over 2,000 years ago...