This is a speech written by John F. Kennedy delivered at the Clearing House Annual conference, Washington, D.C., April 16, 1959 and published in a book called 'The Strategy of Peace' by Senator John F. Kennedy. I think it is a timely ressurection and, though the cold war is over, these ideas are applicable to our current state of world affairs.
Caveat: There are terms used in this speech that may or may not offend certain people. Please know that I have re-typed the speech as it appears in the text mentioned above and is included only for the purposes of quoting exactly what was published and I hope we can all read this text in the interest of context rather than content. There is no offense intended.
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"Faced with the severest test this nation has ever known, the test of survival itself, it is high time we examine the role of civil liberties in helping us meet this test.
The fundamental truths upon which our constitutional structure of civil liberties is based are not very complicated or very subtle. On the contrary, our Founding Fathers held 'these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are institued among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.'
In short, although our civil liberties also serve important private purposes - above all they were considered essential to the republican form of government. Such a government required that the consent of the governed should be given freely, thoughtfully and intelligently. without freedom of speech, freedom of assebmly, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, equal protection of the laws, and other unalienable rights, men could not govern themselves intelligently.
The authors of the Constitution made clear their own belief that self-government on the one hand, and the truth on the other hand that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights are in fact two sides of the same coin. It is up to the American people, said Hamilton in the first Federalist Paper, 'by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice....'
The basic question confronting us today is whether these fundamentals still hold true, whether we really believe in this idea of a republic, whether today the American people would ratify the Constitution and adopt the Bill of Rights - or whether the dangers of external attack and internal subversion, promoted by a foe more sinister and more powerful than any our Founding fathers knew, have so altered our world and our beliefs as to make these fundamental truths no longer applicable. The Constitution, of course, is still in force - but it is a solemn contract made in the name of 'We the People' - and it is an agreement that should be renewed by each generation.
All of us in this room have in recent years expressed our concern over this problem. We are concerned about those who dismiss the safeguards of the Bill of rights as legal technicalities which should not be available in times of danger. We are concerned about those who regard the promise of equal protection of the laws - and the goal of full, first-class citizenship for all Americans - as expendable. We are concerned about the erosion of our rights in times of clear and present danger. We insist-or, at least some insist-that individual rights must come before national security.
It seems to me, when we go back to the fundamentals, that this is a mistake - that the case for civil liberties will always be a losing one as long as it is couched in these terms. I am willing to predict bluntly that so long as the Bill of Rights is weighed in a scale against the interests of national security, most of the people and their representatives will choose national security, the Supreme Court to the contrary, notwithstanding. As Hamilton observed in the eighth Federalist Paper, 'Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct. Even the ardent love of liberty will after a time give way to its dictates.'
What we should be saying, it seems to me, is that there is no such conflict and no such choice to make. Freedom and security are but opposite sides of the same coin - and the free expression of ideas is not more expendable but far more essential in a period of challenge and crisis. I am not so much concerned with the right of everyone to say anything he pleases as I am about our need as a self-governing people to hear everything relevant. If our people are to choose between political parties, between a balanced budget and a progressive America, between more bombs or fewer tests - if we are to know how we really stand in the eyes of the world - then we need to know all the available facts.
We need to receive reports from all parts of the world; and to know the facts in all agencies of the Government. We need to be able to go everywhere we can get in, to see things for ourselves. We need to keep our doors open to visitors from around the world. Above all, we must keep our minds open to criticism and to new ideas - to dissent and alternatives - to reconsideration and reflection.
Only in this way can we as a self-governing people choose wisely and thoughtfully in our task of self-government. And it is only in this way that we can demonstrate once again that freedom is the handmaiden of security - and that the truth will make us free.
The Communists, on the other hand, have no such inner strength - and this is one of our advantages and the seed of their destruction.
It disturbs me when I read that during the winter season here in Washington the grass is dyed bright green where President Eisenhower participates in a public function. I hope this simulated cheerfulness is not symbolic of the kind of information we are given about state of the world. For it is essential when conditions are bleak in our world relations that they not be painted in false colors. Let us not, like the Russian Czar, be fooled by a Potemkin world. The best insurance against this is the full practice of civil liberties.
I want to make sure we know all the facts and hear all the alternatives and listen to all the criticisms. For the Bill of Rights is the guardian of our security as well as our liberty. Let us not be afraid of debate or dissent - let us encourage it. For if we should ever abandon these basic American traditions in the name of fighting Communism, what would it profit us to win the whole world when we would have lost our soul?
But to keep that faith alive - to keep that message meaningful at a time of doubt and despair and disunity - will require more thought and more effort on our part than ever before. It will require leadership better equipped than any since Lincoln's day to make clear to our people the vast spectrum of our challenges.
For the Russian peasant has looked up from his hoe to fling Sputnik into outer space - opening a new frontier of hope for all mankind, but a new and somber frontier of fear. We cannot hope to escape a prolonged and powerful competition with Soviet power - a competition which demands that we act from enlightened impulses but never act impulsively.
The hard, tough question for the next decade, for this or any other group of Americans, is whether any free society - with its freedom of choice, its breadth of opportunity, its range of alternatives - can meet the single-minded advance of the Communist System.
Can a nation organized and governed such as ours endure? That is the real question. Have we the nerve and the will? Can we carry through in an age where we will witness not only new break-throughs in weapons of destruction - but also a race for mastery of the sky and the rain, the ocean and the tides, the far side of space and the inside of men's minds? We and the Russians now have the power to destroy with one blow one-quarter of the earth's population - a feat not accomplished since Cain slew Abel.
Can we meet this test of survival and still maintain our tradition of individual liberties and dissent? I think we can. It is the enduring faith of the American tradition that there is no real conflict between freedom and security - between liberty and abundance. Through centuries of crises the American tradition has demonstrated, on the contrary, that freedom is the ally of security - and that liberty is the architect of abundance.
So let the debate go on - and may the best ideas prevail.
For, as Walter Lippman wrote: 'The freedom to speak can never be maintained merely by objecting to interference with the liberty of the press, of printing, of broadcasting, of the screen. It can be maintained only by promoting debate.'
For what we need now in this nation, more than atomic power, or airpower, or financial, industrial or even manpower, is brain power. The dinosaur was bigger and stronger than anyone else - he may even have been more pious - but he was also dumber. And look what happened to him.
I do not confuse brain power with word power. No age has ever been more prolific in words. But words are not enough. Missiles are not enough. Atoms are not enough. All of these may help us gain time to find a solution - but they are not a solution themselves.
What we need most of all is a constant flow of new ideas - a government and a nation and a press and a public opinion which respect new ideas and respect the people who have them. Our country has surmounted great crises in the past, not because of our wealth, not because of our rhetoric, not because we had longer cars and whiter iceboxes and bigger television screens than anyone else, but because our ideas were more compelling and more penetrating and wiser and more enduring. And perhaps more important, we encouraged all ideas - the unorthodox as well as the traditional.
I do not dare say that we have lost ground in the battle for civil liberties. On the contrary, during the lifetime of this organization - a comparatively brief period in the lifetime of our nation - tremendous strides ahead have been taken, but much more needs to be done. We must vote in the Senate during the coming week on whether to retain the present unworkable non-Communist affidavit requirements of the Taft-Hartley Act - or whether to achieve a balance of ridicule by applying it to employers as well as union officials. Still later this month we shall hold hearings on the bill which I have introduced with Senator clark to repeal the loyalty oath provision contained in last year's National Defense Education Act. Such an oath has no place in a program designed to encourage education. It is at variance with the declared purpose of the Act in which it appears; it acts as a barrier to prospective students; and it is distasteful, humiliating, and unworkable to those who must administer it.
I doubt if many of our high school graduates are members of the Communist party. If they are, at the tender age of seventeen, perhaps a college education will free them. To make all students sign, however, represents a significant victory for those who believe that only by imitating the totalitarians can we remain free and secure. I do not agree.
To cite still another example, I am hopeful that int he near future the Cogress will act upon the immigration measures which Senator Humphrey and I have proposed - in order to eliminate the discriminatory features that damage our image in the rest of the world - to keep alive this importanat part of the traditional American dream - and to encourage the reduction of barriers that hamper our information and understanding concerning the rest of the world.
There is much, much more to be done. There are still violent attacks upon the Supreme Court, th citadel of our liberties. We face new inroads on the public's right to know, new sacrifices to the twin fetishes of secrecy and security, new expansions instead of limitations on wiretapping. A man can still be deported, denied a passport, or fired frmo the Government without elementary due process. Churches, schools and synagogues are still being bombed, though I have worked closely with your chairman on legislation to end this problem; and the ideals of equal opportunity and equal education are yet to be realized. This is not only a problem in those areas where defiance of court orders and denials of equal rights are most blatant - it deserves our attention as well in our own cities and in our own lives, where more subtle pressures operate - in our neighborhoods and churches - in our newspapers and clubs - and in our own attitudes.
Moreover, there is much we must do to reshape our economic life, if the adhievement of equal education and equal opportunities is to mean anything. For even under fair employment practices, Negroes in a recession are likely to be the first fired and the last rehired - and the unemployement compensation they receive during the interval is beneath the standards of decent subsistence. Equal housing opportunities are of little avail if only slums are available - as they are to some fifteen million Americans today. Improved education is of little value for a Negro working in a job not covered by our minimum wage laws, and earning - as a field hand or service employee - considerably less than one dollar per hour. Action must be taken on all of these fronts - and I know that the members of your constituent organizations will be working with us on them.
A tired nation, said David Lloyd George, is always a Tory nation. And the United States today cannot afford to be either tired or Tory. For however difficult, however discouraging, however sensitive these issues must be - they must be faced.
In the words of Woodrow Wilson: 'We must neither run with the crowd nor deride it - but seek sober counsel for it - and for ourselves.'"
Caveat: There are terms used in this speech that may or may not offend certain people. Please know that I have re-typed the speech as it appears in the text mentioned above and is included only for the purposes of quoting exactly what was published and I hope we can all read this text in the interest of context rather than content. There is no offense intended.
------------------
"Faced with the severest test this nation has ever known, the test of survival itself, it is high time we examine the role of civil liberties in helping us meet this test.
The fundamental truths upon which our constitutional structure of civil liberties is based are not very complicated or very subtle. On the contrary, our Founding Fathers held 'these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are institued among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.'
In short, although our civil liberties also serve important private purposes - above all they were considered essential to the republican form of government. Such a government required that the consent of the governed should be given freely, thoughtfully and intelligently. without freedom of speech, freedom of assebmly, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, equal protection of the laws, and other unalienable rights, men could not govern themselves intelligently.
The authors of the Constitution made clear their own belief that self-government on the one hand, and the truth on the other hand that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights are in fact two sides of the same coin. It is up to the American people, said Hamilton in the first Federalist Paper, 'by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice....'
The basic question confronting us today is whether these fundamentals still hold true, whether we really believe in this idea of a republic, whether today the American people would ratify the Constitution and adopt the Bill of Rights - or whether the dangers of external attack and internal subversion, promoted by a foe more sinister and more powerful than any our Founding fathers knew, have so altered our world and our beliefs as to make these fundamental truths no longer applicable. The Constitution, of course, is still in force - but it is a solemn contract made in the name of 'We the People' - and it is an agreement that should be renewed by each generation.
All of us in this room have in recent years expressed our concern over this problem. We are concerned about those who dismiss the safeguards of the Bill of rights as legal technicalities which should not be available in times of danger. We are concerned about those who regard the promise of equal protection of the laws - and the goal of full, first-class citizenship for all Americans - as expendable. We are concerned about the erosion of our rights in times of clear and present danger. We insist-or, at least some insist-that individual rights must come before national security.
It seems to me, when we go back to the fundamentals, that this is a mistake - that the case for civil liberties will always be a losing one as long as it is couched in these terms. I am willing to predict bluntly that so long as the Bill of Rights is weighed in a scale against the interests of national security, most of the people and their representatives will choose national security, the Supreme Court to the contrary, notwithstanding. As Hamilton observed in the eighth Federalist Paper, 'Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct. Even the ardent love of liberty will after a time give way to its dictates.'
What we should be saying, it seems to me, is that there is no such conflict and no such choice to make. Freedom and security are but opposite sides of the same coin - and the free expression of ideas is not more expendable but far more essential in a period of challenge and crisis. I am not so much concerned with the right of everyone to say anything he pleases as I am about our need as a self-governing people to hear everything relevant. If our people are to choose between political parties, between a balanced budget and a progressive America, between more bombs or fewer tests - if we are to know how we really stand in the eyes of the world - then we need to know all the available facts.
We need to receive reports from all parts of the world; and to know the facts in all agencies of the Government. We need to be able to go everywhere we can get in, to see things for ourselves. We need to keep our doors open to visitors from around the world. Above all, we must keep our minds open to criticism and to new ideas - to dissent and alternatives - to reconsideration and reflection.
Only in this way can we as a self-governing people choose wisely and thoughtfully in our task of self-government. And it is only in this way that we can demonstrate once again that freedom is the handmaiden of security - and that the truth will make us free.
The Communists, on the other hand, have no such inner strength - and this is one of our advantages and the seed of their destruction.
It disturbs me when I read that during the winter season here in Washington the grass is dyed bright green where President Eisenhower participates in a public function. I hope this simulated cheerfulness is not symbolic of the kind of information we are given about state of the world. For it is essential when conditions are bleak in our world relations that they not be painted in false colors. Let us not, like the Russian Czar, be fooled by a Potemkin world. The best insurance against this is the full practice of civil liberties.
I want to make sure we know all the facts and hear all the alternatives and listen to all the criticisms. For the Bill of Rights is the guardian of our security as well as our liberty. Let us not be afraid of debate or dissent - let us encourage it. For if we should ever abandon these basic American traditions in the name of fighting Communism, what would it profit us to win the whole world when we would have lost our soul?
But to keep that faith alive - to keep that message meaningful at a time of doubt and despair and disunity - will require more thought and more effort on our part than ever before. It will require leadership better equipped than any since Lincoln's day to make clear to our people the vast spectrum of our challenges.
For the Russian peasant has looked up from his hoe to fling Sputnik into outer space - opening a new frontier of hope for all mankind, but a new and somber frontier of fear. We cannot hope to escape a prolonged and powerful competition with Soviet power - a competition which demands that we act from enlightened impulses but never act impulsively.
The hard, tough question for the next decade, for this or any other group of Americans, is whether any free society - with its freedom of choice, its breadth of opportunity, its range of alternatives - can meet the single-minded advance of the Communist System.
Can a nation organized and governed such as ours endure? That is the real question. Have we the nerve and the will? Can we carry through in an age where we will witness not only new break-throughs in weapons of destruction - but also a race for mastery of the sky and the rain, the ocean and the tides, the far side of space and the inside of men's minds? We and the Russians now have the power to destroy with one blow one-quarter of the earth's population - a feat not accomplished since Cain slew Abel.
Can we meet this test of survival and still maintain our tradition of individual liberties and dissent? I think we can. It is the enduring faith of the American tradition that there is no real conflict between freedom and security - between liberty and abundance. Through centuries of crises the American tradition has demonstrated, on the contrary, that freedom is the ally of security - and that liberty is the architect of abundance.
So let the debate go on - and may the best ideas prevail.
For, as Walter Lippman wrote: 'The freedom to speak can never be maintained merely by objecting to interference with the liberty of the press, of printing, of broadcasting, of the screen. It can be maintained only by promoting debate.'
For what we need now in this nation, more than atomic power, or airpower, or financial, industrial or even manpower, is brain power. The dinosaur was bigger and stronger than anyone else - he may even have been more pious - but he was also dumber. And look what happened to him.
I do not confuse brain power with word power. No age has ever been more prolific in words. But words are not enough. Missiles are not enough. Atoms are not enough. All of these may help us gain time to find a solution - but they are not a solution themselves.
What we need most of all is a constant flow of new ideas - a government and a nation and a press and a public opinion which respect new ideas and respect the people who have them. Our country has surmounted great crises in the past, not because of our wealth, not because of our rhetoric, not because we had longer cars and whiter iceboxes and bigger television screens than anyone else, but because our ideas were more compelling and more penetrating and wiser and more enduring. And perhaps more important, we encouraged all ideas - the unorthodox as well as the traditional.
I do not dare say that we have lost ground in the battle for civil liberties. On the contrary, during the lifetime of this organization - a comparatively brief period in the lifetime of our nation - tremendous strides ahead have been taken, but much more needs to be done. We must vote in the Senate during the coming week on whether to retain the present unworkable non-Communist affidavit requirements of the Taft-Hartley Act - or whether to achieve a balance of ridicule by applying it to employers as well as union officials. Still later this month we shall hold hearings on the bill which I have introduced with Senator clark to repeal the loyalty oath provision contained in last year's National Defense Education Act. Such an oath has no place in a program designed to encourage education. It is at variance with the declared purpose of the Act in which it appears; it acts as a barrier to prospective students; and it is distasteful, humiliating, and unworkable to those who must administer it.
I doubt if many of our high school graduates are members of the Communist party. If they are, at the tender age of seventeen, perhaps a college education will free them. To make all students sign, however, represents a significant victory for those who believe that only by imitating the totalitarians can we remain free and secure. I do not agree.
To cite still another example, I am hopeful that int he near future the Cogress will act upon the immigration measures which Senator Humphrey and I have proposed - in order to eliminate the discriminatory features that damage our image in the rest of the world - to keep alive this importanat part of the traditional American dream - and to encourage the reduction of barriers that hamper our information and understanding concerning the rest of the world.
There is much, much more to be done. There are still violent attacks upon the Supreme Court, th citadel of our liberties. We face new inroads on the public's right to know, new sacrifices to the twin fetishes of secrecy and security, new expansions instead of limitations on wiretapping. A man can still be deported, denied a passport, or fired frmo the Government without elementary due process. Churches, schools and synagogues are still being bombed, though I have worked closely with your chairman on legislation to end this problem; and the ideals of equal opportunity and equal education are yet to be realized. This is not only a problem in those areas where defiance of court orders and denials of equal rights are most blatant - it deserves our attention as well in our own cities and in our own lives, where more subtle pressures operate - in our neighborhoods and churches - in our newspapers and clubs - and in our own attitudes.
Moreover, there is much we must do to reshape our economic life, if the adhievement of equal education and equal opportunities is to mean anything. For even under fair employment practices, Negroes in a recession are likely to be the first fired and the last rehired - and the unemployement compensation they receive during the interval is beneath the standards of decent subsistence. Equal housing opportunities are of little avail if only slums are available - as they are to some fifteen million Americans today. Improved education is of little value for a Negro working in a job not covered by our minimum wage laws, and earning - as a field hand or service employee - considerably less than one dollar per hour. Action must be taken on all of these fronts - and I know that the members of your constituent organizations will be working with us on them.
A tired nation, said David Lloyd George, is always a Tory nation. And the United States today cannot afford to be either tired or Tory. For however difficult, however discouraging, however sensitive these issues must be - they must be faced.
In the words of Woodrow Wilson: 'We must neither run with the crowd nor deride it - but seek sober counsel for it - and for ourselves.'"
