President John F. Kennedy was, and is, a very iconic figure. He planned the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the manned mission to the moon, and participated in the Civil Rights Movement. After the election, Kennedy began to compose his inaugural address. President Kennedy’s address is one of the most critically acclaimed addresses that a president has ever given. The day after he addressed the nation, he received an average 70% approval rating, the highest of all post-World War II presidents (Coleman). That was a very high number. He persuaded the nation so well, that they trusted him that much. President Harry S. Truman, while speaking to the National Conference on Family Life, stated, “The principal power that the President has is to bring people in and try to persuade them to do what they ought to do without persuasion” (Truman). Looks like President Kennedy persuaded us very well. President Kennedy’s …show more content…
Devices such as Glittering Generalities, Plain Folks, and Doublespeak are most common in his address. The way he says things also played a big role in persuading the nation. The device known as Glittering Generalities, which “is a device by which the [person] identifies his program with virtue by use of ‘virtue’ words… which appeals to our emotions of love, generosity, and brotherhood” (“Institute” 429). Words such as freedom, liberty, loyalty, progress, and American, which are virtue words, come up in Kennedy’s speech. Kennedy states, “In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom” (Kennedy). Freedom from what? Since freedom has such a positive meaning to it, people assume that only good can come from it, when in reality, freedom has a bad side that no one sees. Since Kennedy was the youngest elected, he felt as if had to speak plainly to the nation using words that did not take much to think