The World Is Our Stage

John F. Kennedy's 1963 visit to West Berlin, with his famous Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, is seared into the national memory as a powerful image of a U.S. president on the world stage. When thinking about key presidential moments in international relations like Kennedy in Berlin, we often focus our attention on the speeches themselves. Professor Allison Prasch wants to treat us to a wider view-one that places these speeches in their physical context and allows us to grasp the intentional embodied nature of these carefully orchestrated international trips. In The World Is Our Stage, Prasch takes us along for the ride as Cold War U.S. presidents travel the world to assert power and influence. Drawing on extensive archival research, Prasch examines five representative moments that reveal how the "global rhetorical presidency" evolved during the Cold War: Harry S. Truman's 1945 participation in the Potsdam Conference, Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1959-60 "Good Will" tours, John F. Kennedy's 1963 visit to West Berlin, Richard Nixon's "Opening to China" in 1971-72, and Ronald Reagan's 1984 commemoration of D-Day in Normandy. Prasch uses these key events show how multiple presidential administrations and other government agencies designed these global tours as dynamic persuasive campaigns. As the body of the U.S. president traveled through and encircled the globe, it symbolically extended the spatial reach of U.S. ideology and elevated the nation's place in the Cold War world order"--