A particular JFK speech

[Paul Mackin]

On 12/17/2011 4:44 PM, Joseph Tracy wrote:
> For myself and my own memories of the time, what Kennedy was doing was proposing in this speech and much more clearly in his inaugural address was not so much precisely anti-communism but anti-secrecy, anti secret and unaccountable authority. He was leading the country away from McCarthyist paranoia toward a genuine confidence in the openness and resilience of America's devotion to civi liberties. It is a fine line he is walking  but he is saying sure, be strong,be prepared, be wary but we have to behave in accord with our values or we lose all that makes America worth defending.   For Nixon t was fight fire with fire. For Kennedy it was deprive fire of its fuel; again and again he spoke of that fuel being poverty and injustice and the deprivation of rights.
>
> Communism is gone except an an authoritarian party. But secrecy and lies seem to have found a welcome home.

What Kennedy was arguing for was the need for more self imposed 
restraint on the part of the American press when it came to publishing 
information that might be of use to the other side in the Cold War.

While there was reference in the speech to Soviet secret methods, the 
sense of the "secret societies" remark was that although we Americans 
find secret societies repugnant, meaning our own secret societies, still 
there is a valid and important need for keeping certain information 
secret in time of danger to the country.

I didn't pick up in the speech that home-grown secret societies were of 
much present concern.

In other words I didn't see the paranoia.

P

P

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> On Dec 17, 2011, at 12:51 AM, Ian Livingston wrote:
>
>> A JFK speech with which I was not familiar. It is ominous. He is
>> clearly not talking about the "Communist threat", or about "secret
>> societies", but he seems rather to be talking about a general
>> insurgence of cabalistic truth-destroyers emerging in all parts of the
>> globe--people who will use truth to tell lies--and he calls upon the
>> press to respond with caution to this insidious menace. He actually
>> sounds afraid, perhaps foreshadowing somewhat Nixon's later paranoia.
>> I guess TRP would have heard this speech, or heard about it.
>>
>> http://wakeup-world.com/2011/05/20/jfks-speech-on-secret-societies/
>>
>> -- 
>> "Less than any man have I  excuse for prejudice; and I feel for all
>> creeds the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the
>> trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments
>> of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates
>> than the simplest urchin in the streets." -- Will Durant
>