Cold War Rhetorical Techne

     On June 26, 1963 President John F Kennedy gave a speech within sight of the Berlin Wall to a large crowd of West Berlin citizens. The wall was built in 1961 to prevent the citizens of communist East Berlin from escaping to the non-communist side of the city. The ‘free’ Non-communist citizens were enclosed by the wall and surrounded by the communist portion of Germany then known as the German Democratic Republic.

     Rhetoric is defined by Aristotle in On Rhetoric as one of the techne or arts. Kennedy wisely and artfully makes his case against those who would ignore the importance of freedom for all people. He demonstrates through this effective and famous speech what Aristotle refers to in Nicomachean Ethics as “wisdom in the arts” (140). Much rhetorical artistry was needed in that time when the US was affecting the post WWII policy known as the Cold War, an intellectual battle against the communist USSR.

     Aristotle said, “Intellect itself, however, moves nothing, but only the intellect which aims at an end is practical:” ((139). Kennedy’s intellectual and practical end was to, eventually and bloodlessly, defeat communism.  ‘Rhetoric’s aim,” says Warnick, “as a techne is systematically to produce and judge arguments and…produce right action.”  Kennedy points to the right action (freeing people) by challenging communism as a good system, and challenging unnamed others who prefer to ride the diplomatic fence by allowing communism to continue unchallenged at the expense of those who have, like Berliners, to endure it.

     “All art,” says Aristotle, “is concerned with coming into being, i.e. with contriving and considering how something may come into being which is capable of either being or not being, and whose origin is in the maker and not in the thing made.”  Kennedy shares the idea of the thing he wants to create, freedom, with some of those who most want and need it. Their enthusiastic response as he commiserates with their situation by concluding just as Pluto might have done by stating in, effect that, if Berliners are not free, then no man is free. I am a man; therefore, I am not free. I am not free; therefore, “I am a Berliner!”

     With that statement Kennedy demonstrates his philia, and that of his countrymen, with Berliners. “A friend, “says Aristotle, “is necessarily one who shares pleasure in good things and distress in grievous ones…. And are those to whom the same things are good and bad and have the same friends and the same enemies.” (On Rhetoric 1381a)

     The effect of this stated philia is drama and pathos. He places every listener behind the Berlin Wall. He hits his rhetorical mark, and as Aristotle says, “ There is a faculty which is called cleverness; and this is such as to be able to do the things that tend towards the mark we have set before ourselves, and to hit it.”