Rhetorical Analysis Of Jfk's Speech To The Citizens Of West Berlin

Fighting Fascism: J.F.K.’s Speech to the Citizens of West Berlin

On June 26, 1963, shortly after visiting the Berlin Wall, former President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy gave a speech to the citizens of West Berlin. The speech, titled “Ich bin ein Berliner”, was meant to ensure the citizens that he and the United States stand in solidarity with them in combating the communism that had imprisoned them, and in a sense, their democratic political system. Throughout the entire speech, Kennedy remains sympathetic to his audience’s oppression while being critical of the Soviet-supported East Germans who constructed the wall and any others who may support communism. To connect with the audience, Kennedy used many appeals and strategies, but arguably
His most masterful use of this strategy comes when he uses more than three different types in just one sentence, “Two thousand years ago, two thousand years ago, the proudest boast was, ‘civis Romanus sum.’ Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is “Ich bin ein Berliner.” In this statement, Kennedy is most impactful by using parallelism and likening his boast, “Ich bin ein Berliner.” , to one of Marcus Tullius Cicero’s, “civis Romanus sum”. Not only do these two boasts essentially mean the same thing, but they were both spoken as a plea for the rights of citizens in their respective countries, centuries apart. Another example of Kennedy’s use of a rhetorical device comes when he says, “Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect.” Here, Kennedy is offering a concession to the proponents of communism. He knows that there are individuals who believe that “communism is the future” and he wants to make it difficult for them to present a counterargument against his promotion of capitalism. At the end of that statement, Kennedy strengthens the tangibility of his appeal by saying, “But we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in to prevent them from leaving us.” Another form of rhetorical devices Kennedy takes advantage of in his speech are metaphors. One example of this is when he says, “You live in a defended island of freedom, but your life is part of the main. . . . beyond the wall to the day of peace with justice, beyond yourselves and ourselves to all mankind.” By saying this, Kennedy is using metaphorical language to appeal to the greater good by asking the citizens to not think of this as only being about the human rights of Berlin, or even German, instead, he wants them to think about this as being about the collective human rights of all