This chapter discusses the characteristics of the data, the research design
(including the research questions) and the methodology employed in this work. The data section includes a discussion of the speeches chosen for analysis; speech sources and selection criteria; and a list of the speeches, where they were given, the date they were given and their web addresses. The list is summarized in Tables 3.1 and 3.2. The research design section features a discussion of the theory upon which this work relies, the
reasoning for comparing the Johnson and Bush speeches, research expectations, advantages and disadvantages of the research design, and problems and challenges related to the design. The methodology section discusses how the content of speeches was analyzed using the computer program, NVivo 7, the capabilities of the program, descriptive categories that arose from the data and methods used to measure the speeches.
The research questions are as follows:
1) How did these presidents use rhetoric to try to talk us into war?
2) How were their addresses similar and different in terms of the words and emphases they used?
3) How did they frame their causal stories in terms of who (or what) was to blame for the circumstances or events precipitating the war/conflict?
Data Speeches Chosen For Analysis
The Johnson data consist of the president’s pre-Vietnam-War-escalation speeches, from the day he was sworn into office after President Kennedy’s assassination
(November 22, 1963) to his major address at Johns Hopkins University of April 7, 1965.29 His first address mentioning Vietnam was his state of the union address on November 27, 1963. The Bush data consist of the pre-Iraq-War speeches by the president from September 11, 2001 (commonly known as 9/11) until March 18, 2003, the day before the invasion of Iraq (American time). However, the last speech chosen that met the criteria was on March 17, 2003.
Speech Sources and Selection Criteria
The speeches were selected from a variety of sources, in both print and electronic format. Primary among them was the Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, which is published by the U.S. Office of the Federal Register and is the official publication of U.S. presidents’ public writings, addresses and remarks. The Public Papers are published in annual print volumes and online through the U.S. Government Printing Office (online versions are only available from 1991 forward).30 They list the
29This research ends with the Hopkins speech rather than the Gulf of Tonkin incident (August 2 and 4, 1964) speech because Johnson did not make a consummate speech laying out why the United States was in Vietnam until the Hopkins address. In addition, just prior to that speech, on March 5, 1965, he had given orders for the commencement of Operation Rolling Thunder, which escalated the war. Historians have debated the authenticity of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, saying the administration’s justification for retaliation “proved to be based largely on seriously flawed intelligence and possibly, according to some critics, manipulated” (Prados 2004).
30 See http://www.gpoaccess.gov/pubpapers/
presidential addresses, radio and television broadcasts, speeches to Congress, short messages, news conferences, and speeches given on the road.31
All the print volumes for Johnson and Bush were manually examined to select speeches, then checked with various online sources. For each president, speeches were electronically loaded into NVivo from the online resources.
As there were no online Public Papers for Johnson, the online Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library and Museum32 was used to load electronic copy into NVivo.
The online library only makes available selected speeches and messages, so the online American Presidency Project 33 also was used.
For Bush, the resources used were the online Public Papers, the White House web site archives and the online American Presidency Project. The latter two sources were used because at the beginning of the research, the online Public Papers version did not contain all the relevant Bush speeches. The online Public Papers provide the
convenient Document Categories of “Addresses to the Nation” and “Addresses and Remarks,” which allow more easy selection of major addresses. For Bush, only highly topical speeches, especially (but not limited to) those listed under “Iraq” or “terrorism,”
were selected from the “Addresses and Remarks” category.
31“The public activity of presidents is listed in The Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States.
The Public Papers, in annual volumes, lists all presidential addresses, radio and television broadcasts, speeches to Congress, short messages, news conferences, and speeches on the road. Typically, the format, subject, audience, time, and place are provided … In short, the compilation provides a comprehensive and authoritative record of the president’s public and verbal activity, from George Washington to the present.
This record is limited to actions that are presidentially defined and excludes the following categories:
nonpublic actions, as in White House conversations, available only through the accounts of participants;
actions by other officials – such as cabinet members or White House aides – taken in the name of the administration; and purely nonverbal appearances” (Hinckley 1990, 18). However, presidents included in the online Public Papers only date from 1991, meaning Johnson is not included.
32 See http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu
33 The American Presidency Project, established in 1999, is an online collaboration between John Woolley and Gerhard Peters at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Its archives contain 84,345 documents related to the study of the presidency. See http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/
All speeches chosen for Johnson and Bush were delivered in person or were televised live.34 Only one radio address was used, and that was for Johnson. For an address to be considered major, it had to be “a speech before a nationwide audience:
inaugural addresses and nationally broadcast speeches to Congress and the American people” (Hinckley 1990, 19), or a speech that marked a significant milestone,
substantively pertained to the war, was given to a prominent audience and may or may not have been broadcast, but may have gotten news coverage. As Johnson spoke sparingly of the Vietnam War, and often in the context of peace and foreign policy, the researcher’s inclination was to be more generous in including one of his speeches that might pertain to war, even if Johnson said little about the war or just seemed to allude to it generally, especially if it was a major speech within the time frame specified in this research. This was done for the sake of having enough comparative data in relation to the Bush speeches, as Bush spoke prolifically and specifically about the need for his war.
Speeches to large interest groups (such as the AFL-CIO, conferences of U.S. attorneys, groups of lower level-officials, such as mayors, and large religious groups) were used, as were foreign addresses.
Minor speeches, such as those given to a special audience (Hinckley 1990, 19), were excluded. In their study of the impact of presidential speeches, Brace and Hinckley (1993) classified major speeches as “all live addresses televised to a national audience”
(385). By inference, minor speeches are not necessarily live and not necessarily televised to a national audience.
34 When this project was begun, some of the Bush speeches were not available from the online GPO Public Papers of the Presidents, where speeches are categorized and therefore easier to evaluate for importance to this work. It was therefore necessary to rely upon the White House web site, and now those links all connect to Spanish versions. Near the end of the project, there was much more online availability. Thus, as speeches were chosen at the beginning of this work, it was very much a judgment call as to what to include.
Also excluded were remarks pertaining to appointments and nominations, bill signings, communications to Congress, communications to federal agencies, directives, interviews with the news media, joint statements, letters and messages, meetings with foreign leaders and international officials, resignations and retirements, and statements by the president, all categories used by the Office of the Federal Register and the
Government Printing Office in the print and online versions of the Public Papers.
Also excluded were introductions of new cabinet members and radio addresses, with the exception of one Johnson address used in this category, again for the sake of having enough comparative data in relation to the Bush speeches. Bush gave many radio addresses on the war and on terrorism, in addition to his abundance of other addresses, which were excluded. Campaign speeches and single-community speeches to relatively small groups (such as federal employees, corporations, etc.) were also excluded.
The criteria for using speeches was also based upon the amount of references to the war (with exceptions made for Johnson, as noted), the intended public nature of the speech, the news value of the speech (state of the union addresses, for instance, are highly publicized) and the importance of the venue. Using these criteria and what Neuendorf (2002) calls “immersion in the message pool” (in this case, reading all the speeches of the two presidents prior to the beginning or escalation of their wars), the researcher
discovered which speeches it made sense to use for this study (72).
Thus, this research analyzes 29 Bush speeches and 16 Johnson speeches. The Johnson speeches totaled 1,084 inches of copy, and the Bush speeches totaled 1,167 inches of copy, as measured in the print version of the Public Papers, which standardizes line length. Although there was some difference in formatting the printed copy for the
two presidents, measurements were made to ensure that there was an equivalency so that each could be counted in the same way. The count was made by manually measuring the length of the copy in the Public Papers using a ruler. Only the copy of the speech and any included speech headings were measured, including the small amount of space preceding and following any headings. Neither the introductory information (name of speech, date delivered), nor the ending notations (when and where the speech was given and any supplementary information about the speech or its audience) was measured.
Copy inches were rounded up or down to the .25 inch measure, depending on which was closest. The speeches were measured twice for reliability purposes.
List of Speeches
Tables 3.1 and 3.2 list the speeches that were chosen for Johnson and Bush, respectively, by president, name of the speech, locale of the speech, date of the speech and online source.
Table 3.1. Pre War-Escalation Speeches by President Lyndon B. Johnson: