The Great Silent Majority: Nixon’s 1969 Speech on Vietnamization by Karlyn Kohrs Campbell (review)

Any course dealing with the history of rhetorical criticism probably includes discussion of the debate between Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Forbes Hill on the role of the critic. Any course dealing with the political history of the United States probably treats the Vietnam War and necessarily also Richard Nixon’s duplicity in conducting that war and in justifying it to the American people. These two observations are not unrelated, and they come together in this book, which revisits both Nixon’s conduct of the war and the role rhetorical criticism and rhetorical critics can and should play in assessing political speech and the politics in which it is embedded.

The first chapter details the historical and cultural context of the Vietnam War and this particular speech justifying American involvement in it, paying specific attention to civil rights, the counterculture, and the antiwar movements as well as providing a brief political biography of Richard Nixon. This chapter sets up the Vietnamization speech as important both to the broader American political culture and to the developing politics of academia. Campbell then provides a brief history of American involvement in Vietnam, including important military events abroad and their political consequences at home. Chapter 3 treats Nixon’s rhetoric on the war in general and his Vietnamization speech in particular. Chapter 4 details the varied responses she, Hill, Robert P. Newman, and Hermann G. Stelzner offered at the time as well as a contemporary look back at those responses. The book concludes with a brief discussion of the nature and lasting power of presidential rhetoric and an argument for the necessity of criticism that takes both political history and political theory into account.

Campbell locates the speech both within the genre of war rhetoric and within the corpus of Nixon’s speech generally, noting the particular constraints imposed by the fact that the nation was prosecuting an undeclared war within the context of the Cold War. Her reading of the speech is thus placed within these broader contexts, and she is able to connect this speech to larger national and presidential agendas. She notes in particular the exigencies posed by the need to communicate both to the American people and to the Vietminh, the need to muster support for the war at home, and to enable negotiations for ending the war. Domestically, Nixon’s efforts were assisted by politicians (such as Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield), who wanted to both support the presidency, especially in the context of the Cold War, and to end the war in Vietnam. The larger problem, of course, was ending the war without ending it in defeat or apparent defeat. Given that there was no way to end the war with a clear victory, this problem proved insurmountable, and Nixon sought refuge in a “rhetorically strategic” and “truncated” history of the war (53), which justified his policy of “Vietnamization.”

In Campbell’s deft hands, this rich and complicated text becomes intelligible as an exercise in duplicity that entailed the creation of a specific kind of audience, attractive to Americans in general and to conservatives in particular (57), culminating in his request for the support of the “great silent majority” (59). Importantly, this strategy depended upon the conflation of Nixon as president with the presidency as whole, making it difficult for his audience to separate the institution, its occupant, and the policy Nixon espoused (62). Campbell includes in this chapter a discussion of the White House strategy for selling the speech as well as public and media reaction to it. She also includes a quick discussion of his later speech on Cambodia, which ties this speech again to the larger context and the president’s efforts to control it.

This last point is pivotal to the book, because Campbell then moves to a discussion of the role of rhetorical critics, and in doing so, that...