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The Sound of Leadership: Presidential Communication in the Modern Age

The Sound of Leadership: Presidential Communication in the Modern Age
By Roderick P. Hart

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Why did Gerald Ford speak in public once every six hours during 1976? Why did no president spreak in Massachusetts during one ten-year period? Why did Jimmy Carter conduct public ceremonies four times more often than Harry Truman? Why are television viewers two-and-a-half times more likely to see a president speak on the nightly news than to hear him speak?

The Sound of Leadership answers these questions and many more. Based on analysis of nearly 10,000 presidential speeches delivered between 1945 and 1985, this book is the first comprehensive examination of the ways in which presidents Truman through Reagan have used the powers of communication to advance their political goals. This communication revolution has produced, Roderick P. Hart argues, a new form of governance, one in which public speech has come to be taken as political action. Using a rhetorical appraoch, Hart details the features of this new American presidency by carefully examining when and where presidents spoke in public during the last four decades and what they said. Even though presidents have been speaking more and more, Hart reveals, they have been saying less and less. Rather than leading the nation, the modern president usually offers only the hollow "sound" of leadership. Written with great flair and acuteness, The Sound of Leadership will become a standard guide to the voices of modern presidential politics.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #1261392 in Books
  • Published on: 1989-04-04
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 302 pages

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Hart, who analyzed presidential language in Verbal Style and the Presidency, focuses here on speechmaking by American presidents. Using computer methods that note audiences, topics, locations, social settings and other information, he studied some 10,000 presidential speeches made between 1945 and 1985. His findings: rhetorical skill has become a "primary filtering device" and the press and public have lost respect for presidential words. Furthermore, Hart makes links between speech and power and the relationship between the president and the mass media. This is a relevatory and significant study, which includes 42 line drawings and 51 tables.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Roderick P. Hart is the F. A. Liddell Professor of Communication at the University of Texas, Austin. He is the author of Public Communication, The Political Pulpit, and Verbal Style and the Presidency.

Customer Reviews

Verbal Communication and the American Presidency3
Roderick Hart analyses thousands of speeches delivered by U.S. presidents between 1945 and 1985. He interprets this mass of data using his extensive experience in communications research and a carefully-crafted classification of speech content and context. A thorough appendix documents the classification system and other methods used in the author's research. Readers can see the roots of Hart's DICTION content analysis software used in later research. (See Hart's more recent Campaign Talk: Why Elections Are Good for Us.)

Hart first demonstrates that the frequency of presidential speeches has increased across the four decades covered by his research. He argues that presidents have increasingly recognized and exploited political speeches as a source of political power as we have progressed through the decades of the twentieth century. The book explores in depth how modern presidents such as Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon skillfully used speeches as both carrots and sticks in national politics. It then turns to the verbal strategies presidents use when dealing with the media and in campaigning for the nation's highest office.

Interesting questions are raised by Hart's analysis, most centrally the implications of presidents becoming increasingly concerned with the form and impact of their words than with their content. Although dated in its information, the book raises issues still relevant to the presidency and the communication styles of those who hold it. Interested readers may find further value in Presidential Voices: Speaking Styles from George Washington to George W. Bush and The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush. A closer look at presidential personalities behind the speeches is presented in Personality, Character, and Leadership In The White House: Psychologists Assess the Presidents.