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their policies coherent to the public. When into a key ideological marker for the Ameri-
conceived as a narrative, she argues, terrorism can culture. Accordingly, quite a bit has
has been repeatedly presented to the public been—and will be done—in its name.
‘‘as a moral drama, pitting good against evil
in an ongoing battle for the survival of civili- William Jennings
zation itself’’ (p. 10). But in their own unique University of Cincinnati
manner, each administration has the oppor-
tunity to create new, or modify existing, nar-
ratives to shape the contours of public
discourse and insert its own ideology.
Each substantive chapter of this book
retells one of these startlingly different stories.
Lyndon Johnson, for example, could expect
his Cold War era audience to follow his depic-
tions of ‘‘communist terrorists’’ as if the two
wordswere synonymous. This associative strat-
egy, of course, was not available to a post–Cold
War president like George Bush, who instead,
opted to frame terrorism as a threat to a fragile
New World Order. Taking a moral perspective,
Jimmy Carter could present the Iranian hos-
tage crisis as human tragedy, whereas Bill Clin-
ton spoke of the World Trade Center bomb
plot legally and framed it as criminal act. More
recently, George W. Bush has described terror-
ism expansively and has stated that the events
of September 11, 2001, have ushered in a new
phase of American history. The variety of these
narratives makes for interesting comparisons.
But Winkler reminds us that these narratives
possess a sense of gravity and momentum.
Events like military offensives, Olympic boy-
cotts, United Nations resolutions, economic
embargoes, criminal investigations, and the
enhancement of presidential powers during
wartime have all come in their wake.
After studying the presidential rhetoric
surrounding terrorism, Winkler concludes
the book with an empirical analysis of the
character, geography, and frequency of ter-
rorist incidents over time. This exercise serves
to juxtapose the most memorable incidents of
political violence with broader statistical
trends. The results illustrate the contrast
between the reality of political violence, the
rhetoric it inspires, and the policies it produ-
ces. In this light, Winkler argues that these
contrasts reveal how terrorism has evolved