Oval Office Address

An Oval Office address is a speech made from the Oval Office in the White House by the President of the United States. It is sometimes considered the most solemn setting for an address made by the President, often delivered on or during an occasion of national disaster.

The first Oval Office address was delivered to the nation by President Harry S. Truman, who urged Americans to conserve food to aid postwar Europe. President Dwight D. Eisenhower used the format in 1957 to inform the United States of his decision to send troops to Little Rock to enforce school desegregation. Being only the second ever televised address directly from the president's office, Eisenhower had to explain as much to the audience, saying, "in speaking from the house of Lincoln, of Jackson, of Wilson, my words would better convey both the sadness I feel today in the actions I feel compelled to make, and the firmness with which I intend to pursue this course."

Some previous addresses include John F. Kennedy's 1962 news of the Cuban Missile Crisis,Jimmy Carter's 1979 "Malaise" speech,Ronald Reagan's speech following the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986,George W. Bush's Address to the Nation on the evening of the 2001 September 11 terrorist attacks and Barack Obama's June 2010 speech addressing the issue of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

There have been suggestions that the traditional Oval Office address is falling out of favor in the Information Age, with White House aide Daniel Pfeiffer describing it as "an argument from the 80s" when President Ronald Reagan would draw tens of millions of viewers per address (29 in all, the most of any president; Nixon ranks second, having given 22). Television networks are increasingly reluctant to sacrifice airtime for a political purpose. President Obama preferred to use the East Room, as in his announcement of the death of Osama bin Laden.

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