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In 1981, as Ronald Reagan began the first of his two terms as President, the first cases of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) were diagnosed in America. During the first six years of his presidency, the "Great Communicator" maintained a prolonged silence about AIDS. On October 22, 1986, Reagan's Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop, published the Surgeon General's Report on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Released "without letting the White House see it in advance" (Shilts, 1988, p. 588), this document drew "warm praise from the New York Times, Time, and Newsweek" (Lutton, 1987, p. 54) and condemnation in some circles for "appearing to advocate the teaching of safe sodomy in public schools" (Stanley, 1987, p. 24). Within a year of its release twelve million copies of the controversial document had been distributed by members of Congress to their constituents (Miller, 1987; "U.S. May Mail," 1987).
Even though Reagan's silence concerning AIDS would continue until the Spring of 1987, we maintain that the Surgeon General's Report and the media coverage that attended it constituted a rhetorical watershed in both the national debate concerning AIDS and the Reagan Administration's response to the crisis. We explore this assertion by examining first how Reagan's prolonged silence concerning AIDS conflicted with the modern doctrine of the "rhetorical presidency," which equates speaking with governing and thus demands that the chief executive address issues of public concern. We then focus on Surgeon General Koop and the dramatic manner in which his report departed from Reagan's silence. Next, we explore how the release of this report, and the media coverage it engendered, altered the socio-political environment concerning AIDS in a manner that challenged the efficacy of continuing the White House silence. We close by suggesting some implications for our case study.
We believe that this situation merits attention for several reasons. First, our focus on President Reagan's prolonged silence concerning AIDS affords an excellent opportunity to expand our knowledge concerning the rhetorical dimensions and implications of presidential silence--an area that has thus far "received meager attention" (Erickson & Schmidt, 1982, p. 403).(1) Presidential silence has been examined as a calculated and successful rhetorical strategy, occurring during a specified time period, usually during a perceived crisis (Bostdorff, 1994; Brummett, 1980; Erickson & Schmidt, 1982). However,...