Thundering silence: The rhetorical reconstruction of George Herbert Walker Bush's foreign policy discourse.

详细信息   

• 作者：Harlow ; William Forrest.
• 学历：Doctor
• 年：2002
• 导师：Ritter, Kurt
• 毕业院校：Texas A&M University
• 专业：Speech Communication.;Political Science, International Law and Relations.;History, United States.
• ISBN：0493764585
• CBH：3060814
• Country：USA
• 语种：English
• FileSize：7602995
• Pages：208

文摘

George Herbert Walker Bush's presidency, from 1989–1993, was marked by a profound series of changes to the international order. When this happened, Bush largely declined to give public speeches on the matter. Many people in both the scholarly and the popular communities were dismayed by Bush's lack of rhetorical response to the massacre in Tiananmen Square, to the fall of the Berlin Wall, to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and to the abomination of apartheid in South Africa. However, Bush's choice of silence was not one of ignorance or unconcern. Rather, he made an intentional strategic decision to remain silent in each of these cases in the hope of achieving some policy goal. Using documents available from the George Bush Presidential Library and other sources, this study evaluates whether Bush's use of rhetorical silence was prudent. Beyond simply being a case study of the Bush presidency, this dissertation also draws tentative conclusions concerning when it might be strategically sound for presidents to remain silent and to advance their foreign policy goals by discreet, diplomatic means.