Rhetorical Analysis of Ronald Reagan’s 40th Anniversary D-Day Speech

On June 6, 1984, the 40th anniversary of the D-Day invasion, US President Ronald Reagan gave a commemorative speech at the site of one of the most difficult battles in the entire invasion: the US Army Rangers’ assault on the fortified cliffs of Pointe Du Hoc in Normandy, France. His audience included many of those Rangers who had participated in the assault and a number of French, American, and other dignitaries as well as a worldwide TV and radio audience. Reagan used a simple emotional appeal in his speech but also, in masterful fashion, gradually expanded the scope of his address to include the state of the world at present and the application of the principles for which the Allies had fought to an end of the Cold War and the implementation of nuclear disarmament.

Reagan’s speech was first and foremost an elegy. While he gave pride of place to the Rangers, he quickly segued into an acknowledgment that they were but a few of many who took part in the invasion and in the years-long struggle to free Europe. He also stated that not just the US, but Britain, Canada, Poland, and many other nations had participated in this battle and that effort. He, in particular, mentioned the bravery and seeming indifference to danger of a bagpipe-playing Scots officer. He then moved to a long exposition of the moral justification for the war and the assertion that God had been fighting on the side of the Allies.

Since this was before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the liberation of Eastern Europe, Reagan also remarked that sadly, many of the nations that the huge Allied effort had liberated had lost their freedom to the Soviets. He also noted that Russia had lost twenty million citizens in WWII and asked them to cooperate in ridding the world of nuclear weapons. These were his constant themes for the rest of his presidency, and many credit him for the subsequent end of the Cold War.

Reagan used simple but powerful words with deep emotional impact, usually in short sentences. He avoided complex language and metaphor. The organization of his speech was like a camera starting with a close-up and then zooming out; he focused on the small group of Rangers and then expanded his speech to include the fate and the future of the entire world. He brought home his points with repetition, both in repeated invocations of God and in parallel sentence structures such as “faith that…faith that…faith that…”

Reagan not only used simple language; he also used simple thought processes. There was no hyperbole in his speech, nor was there any other kind of rhetorical exaggeration. This was wise; everyone there knew what sacrifices had been made and nothing needed to be inflated. Elegies are supposed to be acknowledgments of lives well spent, and Reagan confined himself to that. The emotion of the moment didn’t need enhancement or overstatement.

Of the three rhetorical appeals (logos: the law, reason, what we should do in the future; pathos: emotion, values, what we should do now; ethos: our experiences and what has been important to us, what we have done in the past), Reagan’s most powerful appeal was to ethos, though he did use all three devices. Ethos was crucial because his speech was about what people of a prior generation had sacrificed and why that sacrifice had been worthwhile. However, there was certainly pathos as Reagan skillfully crafted an emotional appeal in what was already an emotional moment, particularly when he “zoomed in” to the heart-stopping moments when the Rangers climbed the cliff under the fire of enemy guns. When Reagan “zoomed out” to reference the unfree state of much of Europe and the need for reconciliation between America and the Soviet Union, he used logos effectively, in that he asserted that peace and the elimination of nuclear weapons were obligations based on what prior generations had sacrificed and the mission of bringing freedom to the world that had been explicitly stated but not completed.

The simplicity and powerful emotional appeal of this speech made it highly effective as an elegy, but there was more to Reagan’s diplomatic agenda than that. At this time, he was actively engaged in an effort to end Cold War tensions and establish a rapport with the Soviet Union. He turned this simple memorial speech into an appeal for world peace. He did so with carefully crafted pacing, moving from the experiences of a few to those of the whole, then referring to common goals, values, and ethics as they applied to a task not yet completed. The controlled pacing, effective use of language, and the “meta-message” of world peace made this a brilliant rhetorical accomplishment.

Work Cited

Reagan, Ronald. “Remarks on the 40th Anniversary of D-Day.” Pointe Du Hoc Memorial, Normandy, France. 6 Jun 1984. Commemorative Address.