Speech and Rhetorical Studies Commons^™

The Cuban Missile Crisis Speech: An Analysis Of Text Evolution, Ashlyn Gentry

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

On October 22, 1962, President John F. Kennedy delivered a televised speech announcing the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba. This speech has been a subject of scholarship in the field of communication, yet no critic has performed a comprehensive analysis of its multiple drafts and their relationship to the final version. By using a comparative analysis, one can examine the process of presidential decision-making, the translation of those decisions into prose, and the strategic language used to communicate a particular message. This project follows the evolution of Kennedy's address, tracing the changes from one draft to the next, in …