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In October 1962, the fate of the world hung on the American response to the discovery of Soviet nuclear missile sites in Cuba. That response was informed by hours of discussions between John F. Kennedy and his top advisers. What those advisers did not know was that President Kennedy was secretly taping their talks, providing future scholars with a rare inside look at high-level political deliberation in a moment of crisis. Talk at the Brink is the first book to examine these historic audio recordings from a sociological perspective. It reveals how conversational practices and dynamics shaped Kennedy's perception of the options available to him, thereby influencing his decisions and ultimately the outcome of the crisis. David Gibson looks not just at the positions taken by Kennedy and his advisers but how those positions were articulated, challenged, revised, and sometimes ignored. He argues that Kennedy's decisions arose from the intersection of distant events unfolding in Cuba, Moscow, and the high seas with the immediate conversational minutia of turn-taking, storytelling, argument, and justification. In particular, Gibson shows how Kennedy's group told and retold particular stories again and again, sometimes settling upon a course of action only after the most frightening consequences were omitted or actively suppressed. Talk at the Brink presents an image of Kennedy's response to the Cuban missile crisis that is sharply at odds with previous scholarship, and has important implications for our understanding of decision making, deliberation, social interaction, and historical contingency.

In October 1962, the fate of the world hung on the American response to the discovery of Soviet nuclear missile sites in Cuba. That response was informed by hours of discussions between John F. Kennedy and his top advisers. What those advisers did not know was that President Kennedy was secretly taping their talks, providing future scholars with a rare inside look at high-level political deliberation in a moment of crisis. Talk at the Brink is the first book to examine these historic audio recordings from a sociological perspective. It reveals how conversational practices and dynamics shaped Kennedy's perception of the options available to him, thereby influencing his decisions and ultimately the outcome of the crisis.

AbstractThe US Supreme Court conducts much of its business through talk, including during oral arguments, where a central activity is the consideration of hypotheticals posed by justices. Using conversation analysis, I examine a key segment of the oral arguments for Citizens United v. FEC, one that arguably changed the course of campaign finance history. I identify the conversational devices employed to advance and contest one particular hypothetical, involving an imagined ban on books, subject to a speech-exchange system that differentially empowers justices to dictate both the terms of the discussion and the time afforded the advocate to respond to any particular question. The article offers the first disciplined qualitative analysis of interaction during oral arguments, illustrates the place of temporality in legal reasoning and argumentation, and makes several contributions to conversation analysis: it advances the study of institutional talk to a new legal setting, identifies some ways in which the machinery of talk can be harnessed for rhetorical effect, and demonstrates the analytical utility of prior knowledge of what a participant arrives to an encounter equipped to say.

AbstractMeeting minutes (and similar records) provide a cherished window into the internal workings of important bodies, but scholars usually have little option but to trust their veridicality. However, the production of a record of talk as it happens is a difficult task, especially when talk is animated and turn-taking unregimented. I compare recordings of four National Security Council meetings secretly made by Presidents Kennedy and Nixon with minutes and notes taken by NSC principals and staff members. While minute-taking practices differed in level of detail, all minute-takers engaged in processes of preservation, deletion, and transformation as they sought to distill and disambiguate. Moreover, the need to omit some talk made it possible to suppress certain kinds of content, such as evidence of internal disagreement. The loose relationship between talk and its written incarnation is consequential for lay actors, such as subordinates who rely on minutes for insight into their superiors' wishes and mindsets; for scholars tempted to read minutes as an accurate account of what transpired; and, potentially, for other sorts of investigators looking to apportion responsibility for misbehavior and bad outcomes.

Conversation is incrementally, progressively produced, subject to constraints that ensure linearity (one person speaks at a time) irrespective of the identities, motives, and conversational resources of those present. And yet conversation is also receptive to influence from—or permeation by—external factors, such as attributes, formal status, and relationships. This review summarizes conversation-analytic work on how talk-in-interaction is produced and then evaluates quantitative research on permeation in terms of the realism of its assumptions. Research on rates is found particularly wanting, although the robustness of its results presents a challenge to the claim that the meaning of an action is inextricably tied to its local-sequential context. More theoretically adequate are modeling approaches that focus on transitions, sequences, and the local determinants of discrete events. However, these also frequently make unwarranted assumptions, such as that we can generalize from people who speak to those who do not or that what someone does upon speaking can be considered separately from who speaks in the first place. A solution to the second problem is to model who gets recruited from the ranks of all potential speakers to perform a particular conversational action. The review concludes with directions for future research.