Presidential Crisis Rhetoric

            I grant you that being President of a University and being President of the United States are two very different enterprises.  Yet there are insights to be had if one reflects upon President Steger’s responses with an understanding of presidential crisis rhetoric.  As the leader of the Hokie Nation, Virginia Tech students, faculty, staff, alumni, and associates worldwide looked to President Steger for leadership following the rampage.  His was a difficult role to fill, given that the nature of the crisis was different for the many different groups associated with Virginia Tech.

            Before I move to how President Steger responded to the crisis, it makes sense to spend some time discussing what communication scholars know about presidential crisis communication.[4] One item seems certain, that crises involve the perception of “immediacy and urgency," as well as the public expectation of “strong leadership qualities."[5] Traditional conceptions of crisis rhetoric view crises largely or even completely as rhetorical creations, that a president announces a crisis as a crisis and that the situation demands that he “act decisively."[6] With this act of announcement, the president asks for his decision to be supported, not for debate upon what should be done.   So long as the crisis is not one of a military attack upon the United States, the reasoning goes, it is to be considered a “political event rhetorically created by the President."[7] The president is not, however, free to do as he pleases when discursively responding to a crisis; his rhetorical options are limited by “precedent, tradition, and expediency."[8]

            I know, the shootings were not a political event; they were pre-meditated and carefully performed executions.  So, President Steger was responding to an event, but he was still in a position to characterize that event in a certain way.  How he did this helped to shape the perception of Virginia Tech and additional tens-of-millions of Americans.  In a sense, President Steger found himself responding to a complex and large rhetorical situation.    Rhetorical situations—a combination of exigency, audience, and constraints—act to suggest a variable range of responses from a speaker, in this case, the president announcing a crisis situation.[9] One could, then, understand crises as situationally bound; moreover, they are delimited by context (both discursive and material surroundings) acting upon text, and by text acting upon context, within a limited period of time.[10] This is to say, an inter-animation of text and context occurs; text and context are naturally interacting and evolving elements within any rhetorical situation.  Crisis situations often involve a rather violent mix of text/context interaction, often with a demand for quick interpretation from the public.  This view supports a reading of crises that views an exigency as highly unstable and mutable.   Put another way, the slayings had created a crisis; all interested parties wanted a context through which to understand what happened; President Steger acted to provide this context.  What he had to say not only served to explain the situation, but also acted to create a stable context through which to understand the situation.[11]

            The invention of a stable context may take some period of time, yet it is the most important criterion for a fitting response to a crisis situation.  Viewed traditionally, presidential speeches announcing a crisis “begin with an assertion of the President’s control of the facts of the situation and an acknowledgement that the New Facts which occasion the speech constitute a New Situation—a crisis for the United States."[12] First utterances are first characterizations; they set the tone.    Steger’s initial tone was one of gravity, objectivity, and patience responding to questions about the situation.