Learning Activity #3: Effective Commemorative Speech Exercise Read Chapter 18 of

Question

Learning Activity #3: Effective Commemorative Speech Exercise

Read Chapter 18 of the Lucas textbook, giving special attention to Commemorative Speeches.

The speech we will focus on is President Reagan’s commemorative speech after the Challenger space shuttle disaster on January 28, 1986.

For a full version of Reagan’s speech, go to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qa7icmqgsow

Read the full text of this speech at the “History Place: Great Speeches Collection” to be found at the historyplace.com website.

Write a one-page response (about 250 words) explaining how President Reagan’s Challenger speech fulfills Lucas’s expectations of a good commemorative speech. Reference Lucas in your response and use quotations from the speech to underscore your points.

Explanation / Answer

It's bitterly bloodless in the nations capital for State of the Union Day. Twenty-eight years in the past, on a equivalent morning, another second-term president was getting ready to give his State of the Union tackle. The speech would come, but not for yet another week. It used to be postponed by a tragedy that unfolded on country wide television and left adults explaining to kids why a cherished public institution trainer would in no way set foot in a school room once more.

The January 28, 1986, flight of the distance shuttle Challenger was constantly going to be like no different even before it exploded seventy three seconds after takeoff. It was the twenty fifth launch in the application, a milestone so ho-hum that when congressman invoice Nelson spent six days orbiting the earth in the shuttle two weeks previous, few men and women outside his state of Florida even observed.

Sharon Christa McAuliffe was once a entire extraordinary story. She used to be high tuition social reports teacher from harmony, N.H., and her mantra to her pupils used to be, fittingly, attain for the celebs.
Unaffected and likeable, she beat out 11,000 other applicants who had vied to turn out to be the primary schoolteacher in space. The 1985 ceremony to announce the winner all 10 finalists had been gift was broadcast are living from the White apartment, with vice president George H.W. Bush asserting McAuliffe's name as the winner.

She was just so excited, her mom, Grace Corrigan, stated later. She used to be thrilled to be happening the commute of a lifetime.

Mrs. Corrigan made these feedback lengthy after the fact to my then-colleague Annie Groer. Asked what Christa was once like, her mother delivered: She made each person think form of good about themselves. She made the schoolchildren learn as so much as they might and she taught them how fundamental they were. That was what she was once striving to do.

instead, the us's children and their mum and dad and cherished ones learned an additional and extra painful lesson. It was once a televised occasion that involved the entire nation, recalled Sally Karioth, a nursing professor at Florida State school who focuses on grief counseling.

We had this lovely little curly-headed trainer in that blue astronaut outfit, and we had dragged in each child in the usa to jot down her letters earlier than the launch, so it used to be like Christmas Eve, she brought. Then it blows up within the sky and thats the Grinch.

That very morning, apartment Speaker Tip O'Neill had made up our minds that the Grinch in Washington was Ronald Reagan. O'Neill had emerged from of an Oval place of work assembly with the president fuming over what he considered Reagan's high-passed angle toward american citizens who couldn't find employment.

But then the unthinkable happened, and the two men rapidly joined forces. White condominium officers desired to understand: would the State of Union tackle be postponed? Of path, responded aides in the speaker's administrative center.

Reagan himself discovered of the tragedy whilst getting ready for the typical State of the Union lunch with community anchors. Acting press secretary Larry Speakes was giving Reagan some final-minute briefing points when contributors of the White condo employees rushed in with news of the Challenger catastrophe. They became the tv on and watched with horror, just like the relaxation of the country.

The president would later describe January 28, 1986 as some of the hardest days I ever spent within the Oval place of business. meanwhile, his speechwriting staff drafted an alternative presidential deal with. Delivered at 5 p.M., it's still remembered as probably the most rhetorical highlights of Reagan's presidency.
the long run would not belong to the faint-hearted, it belongs to the courageous, he stated that night. The Challenger crew used to be pulling us into the future, and we are going to proceed to follow them.

Reagan ended his 648-phrase homily by borrowing a passage from a world warfare II generation sonnet:

we will be able to under no circumstances put out of your mind them, nor the last time we noticed them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.

Three days later, the president and Nancy Reagan traveled to Houston for a memorial service for the fallen astronauts. On the airplane, the primary Couple sat between the widowed wives of Challenger commander Francis Scobee and crew member Michael Smith. I discovered it elaborate to assert anything, Reagan recalled in his autobiography. "All we could do was once hug the households and take a look at to preserve again tears.

Reagan might do extra, however, and he did when it was once his turn at the lectern. Eulogizing each and every of the seven individuals of the crew via title, the president gave them their suitable situation in historical past: the usa itself was once built by way of men and females reminiscent of our seven celebrity voyagers.

frequently once we attain for the celebs, we fall short, Reagan added. however we ought to opt for ourselves up once more and press on despite the soreness. Our nation is indeed fortunate that we will still draw on substantial reservoirs of courage, character, and fortitude; that we're still blessed with heroes like these of the gap shuttle Challenger.

looking back on that ordeal, Tip O'Neill would later write that he had noticeable the worst of Ronald Reagan, and the first-class, in only some hours time.It was once a trying day for all americans," O'Neill wrote, and Ronald Reagan spoke to our highest ideals.

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