John F. Kennedy Rhetorical Context: The Audience

John F. Kennedy

Rhetorical context: The audience is a conservative political group that advocates smaller federal government and the right for local communities and states to control as much of their needed government as possible. The occasion is their annual meeting, and the purpose is to demonstrate that although Kennedy was a liberal in many ways, he was still a great, if flawed, man.

John F. Kennedy: the very name makes political conservatives cringe. However, his short role in the political history of the Presidency was so pivotal that is necessary to consider what kind of President he really was beyond the hype and the active public relations campaign that kept his many flaws out of the news media. Because the media remained silent about his personal flaws, the country was able to nearly canonize him after his untimely death.

He was a Liberal. Of that there is no doubt. He pondered how best to improve the rights of Negroes, and supported the idea of a larger government. That is the hidden message in his famous quote: Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." He didn't ask us to help our local government or work at the state level. He wanted to expand federal government, of that there is no doubt.

And yet, in his short-term in office, he turned the Cold War with the U.S.S.R. from a stalemate into something where the United States had the upper hand. He and Kruschev went eye-to-eye over the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Kruschev blinked first. Not everyone wants a strong central government that can manage all our health care, provide a generous welfare system and take over how the public schools are run, but we can all agree that until we gained the upper hand in the Cold War, we lived under the constant threat of a pre-emptive nuclear attack from the U.S.S.R.

What is forgotten about Kennedy is that he actually won the election by a very small margin. While he was inaugurated as President, he did not win any great or sweeping mandate from the public. In fact he passed few domestic bills during his short-range, but he did fight for his country in the international arena. He maintained our involvement in Viet Nam, knowing that our influence there might make a big difference in the ideologies of the region. It is not his fault that this policy was handled badly after his death.

Kennedy was a weak man in many ways. We know now that his philandering knew no limits and included at least woman with ties to the Mafia. WE know that he often took significant amounts of pain pills because of an extremely painful and chronic back injury. We know that he could wield his power ruthlessly, even using the Internal Revenue Service to go after certain conservatives. These are all very distasteful facts, but he won perhaps the most important conflict this country has ever been engaged in when he made the U.S.S.R. back down and remove missiles from Cuba. After this event, the U.S.S.R. knew that they could not realistically expect to bury us, as Kruschev had claimed he would. Slowly, carefully, the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis led to detante', and ultimately, the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of most Communist governments.

Foreign affairs brought Kennedy one significant triumph - the successful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Apart from this he showed a strong initiative in pushing through the nuclear test-ban treaty of 1963, and a mixed record elsewhere. Following the Bay of Pigs episode, an ill-advised effort to topple Fidel Castro, the administration pursued efforts to assassinate the Cuban leader, with the assistance of organized crime. The White House was lucky that this sinister initiative did not become public knowledge until a decade after Kennedy's passing.