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CAROL GELDERMAN, All the Presidents' Words: The Bully Pulpit and the Creation of the Virtual Presidency (New York: Walker, 1997), 221 pp., $23.00 hardcover (ISBN 0-8027-1318-1).
Carol Gelderman offers an examination of the process of speechwriting from the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration through the first term of Bill Clinton. Employing a case study approach, the work attempts to illustrate the impact of separating speechwriters from presidents and how it "has changed the functions of the speeches-and, to some extent, the very nature of the presidency" (p. x).
Although Theodore Roosevelt was the first president to use the office as a bully pulpit, Gelderman regards his cousin Franklin as the prototype president for the modern rhetorical age. Because of his gift of teaching and his careful attention to the content of words, the four-term president was successful at changing the nation's mood from isolation to mobilized participant in world affairs. Several of Roosevelt's speeches over the period from 1937 to 1940 are analyzed to verify the latter achievement including the quarantine speech in October 1937 and the arsenal of democracy fireside chats at the end of December...