"Harry Truman once said, 'There are 14 or 15 million Americans who have the resources to have representatives in Washington to protect their interests, and that the interests of the great mass of the other people - the 150 or 160 million - is the responsibility of the president of the United States, and I propose to fulfill it.'"
President John F. Kennedy
Thats pretty much true except now it is the Democrats that represent the most wealthy and they use government regs, racism, political cronyism and organized crime to keep the Middle Class down, parasitically feeding off its ability to produce wealth.
Of course, and I have no problem with most of that, but Nixon pushed it beyond LBJs intent and I suspect it was a Nixonian ploy to spoil the very thought of such programs in the minds of most Americans.
What JFK said and believed is presented here:
My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men.
Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.
Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.
A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.
The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.
A young man who does not have what it takes to perform military service is not likely to have what it takes to make a living. Today's military rejects include tomorrow's hard-core unemployed.
The best road to progress is freedom's road.
Israel was not created in order to disappear - Israel will endure and flourish. It is the child of hope and the home of the brave. It can neither be broken by adversity nor demoralized by success. It carries the shield of democracy and it honors the sword of freedom.
I look forward to a great future for America - a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose.
The tax on capital gains directly affects investment decisions, the mobility and flow of risk capital... the ease or difficulty experienced by new ventures in obtaining capital, and thereby the strength and potential for growth in the economy.
Tolerance implies no lack of commitment to one's own beliefs. Rather it condemns the oppression or persecution of others.
It is an unfortunate fact that we can secure peace only by preparing for war.
That kind of talking would get you banned from the Democratic Party and a rent-a-mob outside your office courtesy of Soros and his hired guns in a heart beat. Soros owns the Democratic Party and JFK would not have shared it with him for a second.
Thats what I thought; you just be trollin.
Government take over of businesses and shafting their shareholders, and taking over entire industries is socialism. It isnt the most extreme form of socialism but it is socialism and extreme for the American public's tastes.
Bullshit. They did not ban assault weapons at all. They banned scarey looking weapons that made them wet their panties.
Marketism = social Darwinism = fascism = communism?
Dude, find your meds, please.
As far as good old Harry S., I will let him speak for himself:
"Republicans approve of the American farmer, but they are willing to help him go broke. They stand four-square for the American home--but not for housing. They are strong for labor--but they are stronger for restricting labor's rights. They favor minimum wage--the smaller the minimum wage the better. They endorse educational opportunity for all--but they won't spend money for teachers or for schools. They approve of social security benefits-so much so that they took them away from almost a million people. They think modern medical care and hospitals are fine--for people who can afford them. They believe in international trade--so much so that they crippled our reciprocal trade program, and killed our International Wheat Agreement. They favor the admission of displaced persons--but only within shameful racial and religious limitations.They consider electrical power a great blessing--but only when the private power companies get their rake-off. They say TVA is wonderful--but we ought never to try it again. They condemn "cruelly high prices"--but fight to the death every effort to bring them down. They think American standard of living is a fine thing--so long as it doesn't spread to all the people. And they admire of Government of the United States so much that they would like to buy it."
President Harry S. Truman
That was true then and some of it is true now.
Today though it is the Dems that promise racial equality while meaning all races are equally poor and enslaved to the government.
The Dems say that they want to grow jobs and build industry but just cant seem to find the time as they grow government and build a monolythic state.
The Dems say they are for democracy but only as long as they can steal votes and engage in other kinds of fraud and to stop them is racist.
The Dems say that they are for freedom then jail people for thought crimes and cannot find anything wrong with Chavez.
The Republicans are scarey, true, but the Democrats are worse than the Black Plague.
You have built quite a straw man, but it is not based on liberal beliefs or intent. It is built on right wing projection and yes, POLARIZED thinking. It exposes the core of conservatism...FEAR, paranoia and insecurity.
I have to laugh at your attempt to define JFK's beliefs using out of context sentences. I have read or listened to almost every one of the speeches those sentences were taken from. And I know the context and message of those speeches. You really need to educate yourself before you try to discuss who Jack Kennedy was or wasn't with me.
"I look forward to a great future for America - a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose"
Let's add context to one of those sentences, because it is one of my favorite JFK speeches and it revealed to me why Jack Kennedy was not just a man of his time, but a man for all time. If you know Jack Kennedy's life story, you would know that much of his wisdom came from also being "one acquainted with the night."
Remarks at Amherst College, October 26, 1963 - John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum
"Privilege is here, and with privilege goes responsibility. And I think, as your president said, that it must be a source of satisfaction to you that this school's graduates have recognized it. I hope that the students who are here now will also recognize it in the future. Although Amherst has been in the forefront of extending aid to needy and talented students, private colleges, taken as a whole, draw 50 percent of their students from the wealthiest 10 percent of our Nation. And even State universities and other public institutions derive 25 percent of their students from this group. In March 1962, persons of 18 years or older who had not completed high school made up 46 percent of the total labor force, and such persons comprised 64 percent of those who were unemployed. And in 1958, the lowest fifth of the families in the United States had 4 1/2 percent of the total personal income, the highest fifth, 44 1/2 percent. There is inherited wealth in this country and also inherited poverty. And unless the graduates of this college and other colleges like it who are given a running start in life--unless they are willing to put back into our society, those talents, the broad sympathy, the understanding, the compassion--unless they are willing to put those qualities back into the service of the Great Republic, then obviously the presuppositions upon which our democracy are based are bound to be fallible.
The problems which this country now faces are staggering, both at home and abroad. We need the service, in the great sense, of every educated man or woman to find 10 million jobs in the next 2 1/2 years, to govern our relations--a country which lived in isolation for 150 years, and is now suddenly the leader of the free world--to govern our relations with over 100 countries, to govern those relations with success so that the balance of power remains strong on the side of freedom, to make it possible for Americans of all different races and creeds to live together in harmony, to make it possible for a world to exist in diversity and freedom. All this requires the best of all of us.
Therefore, I am proud to come to this college, whose graduates have recognized this obligation and to say to those who are now here that the need is endless, and I am confident that you will respond.
Robert Frost said:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
I hope that road will not be the less traveled by, and I hope your commitment to the Great Republic's interest in the years to come will be worthy of your long inheritance since your beginning.
This day devoted to the memory of Robert Frost offers an opportunity for reflection which is prized by politicians as well as by others, and even by poets, for Robert Frost was one of the granite figures of our time in America. He was supremely two things: an artist and an American. A nation reveals itself not only by the men it produces but also by the men it honors, the men it remembers.
In America, our heroes have customarily run to men of large accomplishments. But today this college and country honors a man whose contribution was not to our size but to our spirit, not to our political beliefs but to our insight, not to our self-esteem, but to our self- comprehension. In honoring Robert Frost, we therefore can pay honor to the deepest sources of our national strength. That strength takes many forms, and the most obvious forms are not always the most significant. The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the Nation's greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us.
Our national strength matters, but the spirit which informs and controls our strength matters just as much. This was the special significance of Robert Frost. He brought an unsparing instinct for reality to bear on the platitudes and pieties of society. His sense of the human tragedy fortified him against self-deception and easy consolation. "I have been" he wrote, "one acquainted with the night." And because he knew the midnight as well as the high noon, because he understood the ordeal as well as the triumph of the human spirit, he gave his age strength with which to overcome despair. At bottom, he held a deep faith in the spirit of man, and it is hardly an accident that Robert Frost coupled poetry and power, for he saw poetry as the means of saving power from itself. When power leads men towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truth which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment.
The artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state. The great artist is thus a solitary figure. He has, as Frost said, a lover's quarrel with the world. In pursuing his perceptions of reality, he must often sail against the currents of his time. This is not a popular role. If Robert Frost was much honored in his lifetime, it was because a good many preferred to ignore his darker truths. Yet in retrospect, we see how the artist's fidelity has strengthened the fibre of our national life.
If sometimes our great artist have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our Nation falls short of its highest potential. I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist.
If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth. And as Mr. MacLeish once remarked of poets, there is nothing worse for our trade than to be in style. In free society art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the spheres of polemic and ideology. Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society--in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation. And the nation which disdains the mission of art invites the fate of Robert Frost's hired man, the fate of having "nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope."
I look forward to a great future for America, a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose. I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our natural environment, which will preserve the great old American houses and squares and parks of our national past, and which will build handsome and balanced cities for our future.
I look forward to an America which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft. I look forward to an America which will steadily raise the standards of artistic accomplishment and which will steadily enlarge cultural opportunities for all of our citizens. And I look forward to an America which commands respect throughout the world not only for its strength but for its civilization as well. And I look forward to a world which will be safe not only for democracy and diversity but also for personal distinction.
Robert Frost was often skeptical about projects for human improvement, yet I do not think he would disdain this hope. As he wrote during the uncertain days of the Second War:
Take human nature altogether since time
began . . .
And it must be a little more in favor of
man,
Say a fraction of one percent at the very
least . . .
Our hold on this planet wouldn't have so
increased."
more...
The President and the Poet - John F. Kennedy at Amherst, October 26, 1963
