Richard Nixon's Rhetorical Analysis: Peace With Honor

Peace with Honor – Richard M. Nixon – Rhetorical analysis

In the context of a long-term proxy war’s ending, executed in the country of Vietnam. The factual victory was held by the North Vietnam who achieved a communist regime and thereby defeated the western idea of a democracy. In this occasion Nixon held a speech, which addressed the surrender of America with the discourse “Peace with Honor”.

The speech can be parted in to three segments. The first one being an informative description of the situation. The second one is embossed with the Aristotelian term called ethos and third is filled with pathos. With that said, the first part is the actual statement: “we today have concluded an agreement to end the war and bring peace with honor
in Vietnam and in Southeast Asia” And a reading out loud of the physical peace contract follows. Now this is the first time the discourse “peace with honor” appears in the speech. It will be repeated and used as a literary tool to emphasize the goal of the speech. Nixon uses the plural personal pronom “we” to indicate that he maintains the best interests for his country: “we have been in the closest consultation with President Thieu and other representatives of the Republic of Vietnam.” In this given example, he both implies the “we” as the government and as a suggestion for the people to trust that the government’s intentions are for the best. Therefore one could argue that the “we” could be a loaded word emphasizing the ethics in respecting the prior enemy: the Republic of Vietnam. Furthermore, this underlines the credibility he gives himself as president of U.S.A. This is where ethos plays its main part. Nixon wants to maintain his authority and role as a leader, and does this by shifting between “we” and “I”. When he uses the singular personal pronoun as an object, he indirectly states that he knows what he’s doing. And as said before he uses the plural personal pronoun as an object, as a feature of the ethos: “Therefore, I know that you now can understand why, during these past several weeks, I have not made any public statements about those efforts.”
The peculiar thing about the “we” in the speech is that it also appeals to pathos by applying ethnical responsibility towards the listener who is the American citizen. The president knows that he can’t manipulate the listener to believe that the war has been without severe casualties and therefore he speaks with empathy of the dead soldiers and their families: “Let us be proud of those who sacrificed, who gave their lives so that the people of South Vietnam might live in freedom and so that the world might live in peace.”
What’s notable about this is firstly that he uses a plural personal pronoun again to indicate the responsibility.
Though this time it is used introverted towards America, and not the outside world. Pathos dominates this statement because it implies that soldiers had to give the ultimate sacrifice to allow South Vietnam peace, which also portrays the war with a higher meaning and purpose. There appear an amount of carefully selected loaded words in the text that is relevant to point out. Nixon speaks of a right kind of peace that works in coherence with the soldiers not dying in vain. He uses this loaded word connection to indicate that there has been achieved a very unique kind of peace in Vietnam. Only one comparison appears in the speech and it is very important for the outcome of the successfulness of it: “Johnson endured the vilification of those who sought to portray him as a man of war. But there was nothing he cared about more deeply than achieving a lasting peace in the
world.”
When Nixon Says that Lyndon B.
Johnson is referred to as a man of war it is because that he was the president who led America into the war. Nixon wants to achieve pathos through this with appealing to the citizen who voted for Johnson. And he wants to show that he able of being a compassioned leader too. This statement relies on the listeners trust in Nixon because Johnson is dead and the statement only provides and relies on personal knowledge between Nixon and Johnson. So if the listener determines not to believe this compassion between the two leaders the statement loses credibility and Nixon loses ethos. The front page of this rhetorical analysis shows a word cloud, which proportionally sizes the most used phrases in the speech. As seen, it is Peace with honor, which is also the name of the speech. This is the most central rhetorical trope used and this is because it connects with a former held speech were Nixon promises an honorable end to the Vietnam War. The trope is both embossed of intertextuality and loaded words and it is repeated a lot. Intertextualy the quote stretches all the way back to 30 B.C. Where Kaiser Augustus pledged Cleopatra to make peace to keep her honor or else he would wipe out her entire army. The loaded word honor is used to redeem the national patriotism, assuring that America only redrew because of the interest in American ideals. The American ideal in the sentence is peace but Nixon speaks of a right kind of peace that refers to peace
contemplated with the ideal of freedom. With this in mind, the purpose of the speech is to insure that the citizens of America know that the western world’s ideologies always win, even in defeat.
With a historical retrospective this makes sense because of the Vietnam War being a proxy war and therefore a sub conflict of the, much larger, cold war that held the world in an iron fist. Yet we known, as humans living in the twenty-first century, that the Eastern communist ideal did loose and America became the last country in the dyeing race of the superpowers.

Jens Asger Lykkeboe Morutizen