Slipping the Surly Bonds: Reagan's Challenger Address

chapter 4

chapter 4 The Memory of Challenger Despite initial appearances, the Challenger address is neither simple nor straightforward.Rather,it is complex and achieves its ends through indirection. As we have seen, it was written in response to two specific exigencies. The fact of the crew’s horrific and very public deaths required a presidential response to the nation and especially to its children . That exigency required an equally public act of remembrance. At the same time, the president, wanting to defend the space program, needed to frame the explosion in ways that de-emphasized the technological failure and contextualized it in a politically acceptable manner. By doing so he could fulfill the immediate needs that called for his remarks in the first place and also address the shock and sadness felt by the nation. In the talk, technological failure became reconfigured as an inevitable part of the risk taking required by pioneering, and agency for the disaster was displaced from the actors and placed on the scene.1 The public,who accepted this framework,was thus encouraged to deliberative ends (the protection of NASA and the space program) through the vehicle of ceremonial speech.2 Reagan accomplished this contextualization by asserting the role of chief executive as definitional authority, his use of separate audiences, and the unity provided by the mythology of the American frontier. The speech itself is a progression: Reagan addressed first the nation, then the families of the astronauts,schoolchildren,NASA,history,and [83] the memory of challenger the nation once again.As each specific group was addressed in turn,the national audience was divided and then brought together once more in a unity premised on specific acts of remembrance. In Burkean terms, the speech worked to displace agency from actor to scene so that the astronauts could be portrayed as heroes of the country’s pioneering mission. Through the manipulation of agency, the remarks allowed Reagan to place the Challenger explosion within a specific historical background, a strategic use of public memory that reinforced both his constitutive and his instrumental ends.3 The National Audience It seems obvious that whenever a president speaks on an issue of national concern, he will have a national audience. Certainly, in this speech, given in place of the canceled State of the Union address, such an audience could be taken for granted.4 Reagan’s opening comments acknowledged those listeners,but,more significantly,they set the criteria for the speech and for the public’s understanding of the Challenger explosion.In doing so,Reagan relied upon and exerted the presidential role as definer of national events, what I have elsewhere called his position as interpreter-in-chief.5 That power both provided him with the authority to speak and lent his words authority. This influence was important, for it helped establish the president’s proffered frame as definitive and allowed Reagan both to call upon elements of public memory (the cultural mythology of the frontier) and to constitute memory in the instance of the Challenger catastrophe.6 Reagan first set the frame. He began the address with reference to the exigency that called forth this speech, noting that he had“planned to report to you tonight on the state of the Union, but events of earlier today have led me to change those plans.”7 He referred to the explosion and the deaths of the astronauts as“events,”a neutral term that avoids any precise characterization—he did not use the term “accident” or “explosion”; he did not use the word “death.” Knowing that nearly everyone in the audience had seen the explosion, either live or in one of itsendlessiterationsduringtheday,Reaganusedlanguagethatpurposely [84] chapter 4 stayed away from evocative imagery and instead sought to check any such evocation. In fact, that dampening effect was quite important, especially when paired with the characterization that followed in the next sentence, as he gave meaning to the speech: “Today is a day for mourning and remembering.”Americans had spent the day watching replays of the Challenger explosion; there is good evidence that the audience brought to this occasion poorly defined and inchoate feelings of shock, sadness, and perhaps even apprehension, for the causes and consequences of the explosion were still unknown.8 By beginning with a relatively neutral description of the events, Reagan also muted the terrible images of...