Cornerstone: A Collection of Scholarly and Creative Works for Minnesota State University, Mankato
Abstract
During contemporaneous rhetorical criticism of his style in discourse, President Ronald Reagan was assessed in terms of his living up to the eloquence of John F. Kennedy‘s Inaugural Address. In those two Speaker & Gavel Essays, Reagan was found to be deficient and thus a less-than-great communicator. After revisiting and reassessing those two essays, Reagan‘s essentially conversational mode of communication for television was found to embody rhetorical elements that indeed may have fostered eloquence sufficient to retain the sobriquet of great communicator