How to turn unknown unknowns into ignored knowns to save political face - An instruction manual by George W. Bush

This is an analysis of Donald Rumsfeld's (in)famous speech. Ignore the line references, my piece was written based on a transcript, but I figure its easier to watch the video.

This speech is a statement made to the press by Donald Rumsfeld in 2002. At that time he was serving as the American secretary of defence. His statement was intended to address the distinct absence of evidence to substantiate President Bush's claims that the Iraqi government was in possession of nuclear weapons which they planned on distributing to various Iraqi terrorist groups. Despite that these allegations were later proved false (as was the general opinion) it was Rumsfeld's duty to convince the press (and by extension, the general public) that the American government had sufficient evidence to justify their invasion of Iraq, regardless of whether they did or not. In actual fact Rumsfeld was really discussing an "unknown known" which provided faulty justification for the war

The speech conforms relatively well to its formal, spoken mode. Whilst the frequent repetition of the words “known” and “unknown” (and their many combinations) renders the speech more difficult to follow and ambiguous, (as the ideas are not presented very explicitly) parenthesis is employed to combat this (lines 5 7 8 10) by unpacking the concepts and facilitating comprehension.

The speaker is evidently mindful that spoken language is generally harder to make sense of than written language, particularly when it is more formal, as the drafting and editing processes enable it to become more complex and condensed than spontaneous spoken language. Instead of using this knowledge to present his argument in a concise and clear manner, it could be contended that Rumsfeld has crafted his speech to obfuscate his audience. Formal language enables users to carefully negotiate social taboos and delicate subjects through the employment of euphemisms, non-discriminatory language, figurative language and political correctness. Through answering a question (line 1) which seems to necessitate a explicit and straightforward answer with one that is ambiguous, Rumsfeld successfully appears objective and diplomatic to the issue, rather than directly accusing Iraq of possessing weapons of mass destruction (that is until anyone attempts to derive meaning from his speech)

The lexical choices made by Rumsfeld are significant to the cohesiveness of the speech. The semantic field of the speech remains constant over its entirety. Repetition of the “knowns” and “unknowns” ties the text together by having the same idea running through the speech, creating cohesion. Conjunctions such as “also” (line 9) and “and” (line 14) serve a dual purpose in connecting old ideas and transitioning them to new ones. The transitional phrase “that is to say” functions in the same manner (line 10)

Often material with high communicative value and new information is left for the end to enable the contact to maintain is impact. In this speech however, the new information (I.e known knowns etc.) is given initial focus in order to prevent the reader from becoming too confused. By bringing forward material which would usually be placed last, in accordance to the usual organising principle the information which Rumsfled esteems to be the most important it mentioned first, before it is unpacked slightly using parenthesis

Rumsfeld attempts to alleviate the complexity of his speech and persuade the audience through employing various visual cues and hand gestures to “point to” and effectively distinguish the known knowns, from the unknown knowns and from the unknown unknowns. He is also cautious to place strategic pauses after mentioning each of his concepts; the known knowns (line 7), the unknown knowns (line 10) and the unknown unknowns (line 12) to let them sink in. Further facilitating comprehension of Rumsfeld's speech is the choice to place immediately after the statement of each of the ideas, the parethesis which explains them (lines 5 7 8 10). Contrastingly, the discourse particles (lines 16 18 19), false start (line 4), complete lapse in memory (line 19) and subsequent laughing (line 20) is utterly detrimental to the prosodic and rhetorical elements of Rumsfeld's speech.