Fulbright's Essay On The Arrogance Of Power

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On the Arrogance of Power, 1966 Senator J. William Fulbright’s essay, “On the Arrogance of Power, 1966” is a very inspiring and moving piece. It conveys the growing arrogance of America as a Nation and gives reasoning behind such accusation. In addition, Fulbright also gives a solution to such problem and freely contributes his opinion to inform his audience what rewards he predicts. In his essay Fulbright is able to reach his audience through the effective use of the organization and pathos, on the other hand, due to the negligence of ethos his work in turn becomes unsuccessful. Starting with the organization, Fulbright placed the facts in chronological order. In doing so, it helped his essay greatly by making it easy for the reader to understand where he was going with the matter. He began his writing with a strong thesis and continued to his first point explaining the current war with Vietnam and his opposition towards it. Fulbright follows with clarification on the negativity coming from the Vietnamese and why it was …show more content…

In his essay Fulbright talks about how “we”, America, are out defending other nations and how “we” can’t seem to stay out of other nations business due to it feeling an honorable duty to them. Though Fulbright’s essay was not successful, his use of pathos is very effective. By way of his words, Fulbright is able to reach his audience by appealing to their emotional connection to America and its soldiers. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to change the minds of congress, or America would have not gone to war again after reading this essay and exercising its content. Fulbright also tried to appeal to the happiness of Americans through a second approach. He told them that if his plan was followed, there was a possibly of tremendous compensation ahead. Luckily, his tact to appeal towards Americans emotions succeeded though his use of ethos