speech writer for john f kennedy

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Who Wrote JFK’s Inaugural?

Does it matter.

I n my childhood imagination, John F. Kennedy slotted somewhere below DiMaggio and above De Niro in a loose ranking of latter-day American deities. When I was just a toddler, the late president left a lasting impression on me, literally, after I pulled a terracotta reproduction of Robert Berks’ iconic sculpture—weighing considerably less, thankfully, than the 3,000-pound original—down from a sideboard and onto my head. On my bedroom wall hung two plaques, one a list of “coincidences”—many trivial, some factually incorrect—between the political careers and assassinations of Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln. The other, also arguably incorrect, was a portrait of Kennedy embossed on black metal, staring out above his famous entreaty in all caps:

“ASK NOT WHAT YOUR COUNTRY CAN DO FOR YOU … ASK WHAT YOU CAN DO FOR YOUR COUNTRY.”              J.F.K.

It’s no secret that presidents often speak words they themselves did not write. When George Washington delivered the very first inaugural address, on Apr. 30, 1789, he was reading from a reworked draft composed by his friend and frequent ghostwriter James Madison. In 1861, with the country on the brink of civil war, Lincoln pitched his address to a restive South and planned to end on the crudely formed question, “Shall it be peace or sword?” That is, until his soon-to-be Secretary of State William Seward suggested a less combative, more poetic conjuring of “mystic chords” and “the better angel guardian angel of the nation,” which Lincoln then uncrossed and altered to “the better angels of our nature.” Small matter, perhaps. We don’t require that our politicians be great writers, after all, only effective communicators, and they in turn sometimes benefit from a misattribution in perpetuity of someone else’s eloquence.

In Kennedy’s case, the gift of rhetoric was owed largely to his longtime counsel and legislative aide, Ted Sorensen, who later became his principal speechwriter after the two developed a simpatico understanding of oratory. In his 1965 biography Kennedy , Sorensen wrote:

As the years went on, and I came to know what he thought on each subject as well as how he wished to say it, our style and standard became increasingly one. When the volume of both his speaking and my duties increased in the years before 1960, we tried repeatedly but unsuccessfully to find other wordsmiths who could write for him in the style to which he was accustomed. The style of those whom we tried may have been very good. It may have been superior. But it was not his.

Kennedy believed his inaugural address should “set a tone for the era about to begin,” an era in which he imagined foreign policy and global issues—not least the specter of nuclear annihilation—would be his chief concern. But while Sorensen may have been the only person who could reliably give voice to Kennedy’s ideas, the coming speech was too historic to entrust to merely one man. On Dec. 23, 1960, less than a month before Kennedy would stand on the East Portico of the Capitol to take the oath of office, Sorensen sent a block telegram to 10 men, soliciting “specific themes” and “language to articulate these themes whether it takes one page or ten pages.”

Although Sorensen was without question the chief architect of Kennedy’s inaugural, the final draft contained contributions or borrowings from, among others, the Old Testament, the New Testament, Lincoln, Kennedy rival and two-time Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson, Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and, we believe, Kennedy himself.

But an unequivocal puzzling out of exactly who wrote what is, with some exceptions, impossible. Late in his life, Sorensen, who died in 2010, admitted to destroying his own hand-written first draft of the speech at the request of Jacqueline Kennedy, who was deeply protective of her husband’s legacy. When pressed further, Sorensen was famously coy. If asked whether he wrote the speech’s most enduring line, for example, he would answer simply, “Ask not.” During an interview with Richard Tofel, author of Sounding the Trumpet: The Making of John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address , Sorensen seemed to suggest that preservation of the myth was more essential than any single truth about the man:

I recognize that I have some obligation to history, but all these years I have tried to make clear that President Kennedy was the principal author of all his speeches and articles. If I say otherwise, that diminishes him, and I don’t want to diminish him.

If Jacqueline Kennedy and Ted Sorensen were willing to tear up what may have been the only categorical proof of Sorensen’s primary authorship, President Kennedy—in an incident that can only be described as out-and-out deception—was willing to lie. On Jan. 16 and 17, 1961, at the Kennedy vacation compound in Palm Beach, Fla., Sorensen and JFK polished a near-final draft of the inaugural address and even typed it up on carbon paper. Later on the 17 th , the two flew back to Washington aboard Kennedy’s private plane, the Caroline , with Time correspondent Hugh Sidey, whose reporting on the president veered between the credulous and the hagiographic.

At some point during the flight, Kennedy began scribbling on a yellow legal pad in front of Sidey, as if working out just then his thoughts about the speech. What Kennedy in fact wrote was some of the precise language that had already been committed to typescript. During an interview with historian Thurston Clarke, author of Ask Not: The Inauguration of John F. Kennedy and the Speech that Changed America , Sidey recalled thinking, “My God! It’s three days before the inauguration, and he hasn’t progressed beyond a first draft?”

Not only had Kennedy progressed well beyond that, but he and Sorensen had nailed down what we know to be the penultimate version. Even worse, Kennedy later copied out by hand six or seven more pages—directly, one assumes, from the typewritten copy—and dated it “Jan 17, 1961.” After JFK’s assassination, the pages were displayed in what would become his presidential library and identified as an early draft.

There are a total of 51 sentences in the only text of the inaugural that now matters to the world, the speech as read on Jan. 20, 1961, though it can’t be said, without at least some conjecture, that Kennedy was the principal author of any one of them. I asked Tofel, who is now president of ProPublica, what it means that Kennedy may have been a mere messenger of what many Americans consider to be one of the most pivotal speeches of the 20 th century, second only to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream”:

Kennedy lives on in our history not because of, frankly, enormous accomplishment—he died, at the most generous, before he could accomplish a great deal—but because of his ability to articulate, I think, our most profound values and highest aspirations much better than anyone has before or since. And that is his. It is not Sorensen’s. It is not Galbraith’s. It is not Schlesinger’s. We are talking about him at great length here 50 years after his death, and I believe we are doing that because of the power of words. And in that sense they are his words.

Should Sorensen’s original draft or other lost fragments ever materialize, whatever they might say is surely no match for the shrine that history has erected and the symbolism that hung on the walls of my childhood bedroom. And in that sense, those words belong to me.

Read more in Slate on the 50 th anniversary of the JFK assassination.

Ted Sorensen on the Kennedy Style of Speech-Writing

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

In his final book, Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History (2008), Ted Sorensen offered a prediction:

"I have little doubt that, when my time comes, my obituary in the New York Times ( misspelling my last name once again) will be captioned: 'Theodore Sorenson, Kennedy Speechwriter.'"

On November 1, 2010, the Times got the spelling right: "Theodore C. Sorensen, 82, Kennedy Counselor, Dies." And though Sorensen did serve as ​a counselor and alter ego to John F. Kennedy from January 1953 to November 22, 1963, "Kennedy Speechwriter" was indeed his defining role.

A graduate of the University of Nebraska's law school, Sorensen arrived in Washington, D.C. "unbelievably green," as he later admitted. "I had no legislative experience, no political experience. I'd never written a speech . I'd hardly been out of Nebraska."

Nevertheless, Sorensen was soon called on to help write Senator Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize-winning book Profiles in Courage (1955). He went on to co-author some of the most memorable presidential speeches of the last century, including Kennedy's inaugural address , the "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, and the American University commencement address on peace.

Though most historians agree that Sorensen was the primary author of these eloquent and influential speeches, Sorensen himself maintained that Kennedy was the "true author." As he said to Robert Schlesinger, "If a man in a high office speaks words which convey his principles and policies and ideas and he's willing to stand behind them and take whatever blame or therefore credit go with them, [the speech is] his" ( White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters , 2008).

In Kennedy , a book published two years after the president's assassination, Sorensen spelled out some of the distinctive qualities of the "Kennedy style of speech-writing." You'd be hard-pressed to find a more sensible list of tips for speakers.

While our own orations may not be quite as momentous as a president's, many of Kennedy's rhetorical strategies are worth emulating, regardless of the occasion or the size of the audience . So the next time you address your colleagues or classmates from the front of the room, keep these principles in mind.

The Kennedy Style of Speech-Writing

The Kennedy style of speech-writing--our style, I am not reluctant to say, for he never pretended that he had time to prepare first drafts for all his speeches--evolved gradually over the years. . . . We were not conscious of following the elaborate techniques later ascribed to these speeches by literary analysts. Neither of us had any special training in composition, linguistics or semantics. Our chief criterion was always audience comprehension and comfort, and this meant: (1) short speeches, short clauses and short words, wherever possible; (2) a series of points or propositions in numbered or logical sequence wherever appropriate; and (3) the construction of sentences, phrases and paragraphs in such a manner as to simplify, clarify and emphasize. The test of a text was not how it appeared to the eye, but how it sounded to the ear. His best paragraphs, when read aloud, often had a cadence not unlike blank verse--indeed at times key words would rhyme . He was fond of alliterative sentences, not solely for reasons of rhetoric but to reinforce the audience's recollection of his reasoning. Sentences began, however incorrect some may have regarded it, with "And" or "But" whenever that simplified and shortened the text. His frequent use of dashes was of doubtful grammatical standing--but it simplified the delivery and even the publication of a speech in a manner no comma, parenthesis or semicolon could match. Words were regarded as tools of precision, to be chosen and applied with a craftsman's care to whatever the situation required. He liked to be exact. But if the situation required a certain vagueness, he would deliberately choose a word of varying interpretations rather than bury his imprecision in ponderous prose. For he disliked verbosity and pomposity in his own remarks as much as he disliked them in others. He wanted both his message and his language to be plain and unpretentious, but never patronizing. He wanted his major policy statements to be positive, specific and definite, avoiding the use of "suggest," "perhaps" and "possible alternatives for consideration." At the same time, his emphasis on a course of reason--rejecting the extremes of either side--helped produce the parallel construction and use of contrasts with which he later became identified. He had a weakness for one unnecessary phrase: "The harsh facts of the matter are . . ."--but with few other exceptions his sentences were lean and crisp. . . . He used little or no slang, dialect, legalistic terms, contractions, clichés, elaborate metaphors or ornate figures of speech. He refused to be folksy or to include any phrase or image he considered corny, tasteless or trite. He rarely used words he considered hackneyed: "humble," "dynamic," "glorious." He used none of the customary word fillers (e.g., "And I say to you that is a legitimate question and here is my answer"). And he did not hesitate to depart from strict rules of English usage when he thought adherence to them (e.g., "Our agenda are long") would grate on the listener's ear. No speech was more than 20 to 30 minutes in duration. They were all too short and too crowded with facts to permit any excess of generalities and sentimentalities. His texts wasted no words and his delivery wasted no time. (Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy . Harper & Row, 1965. Reprinted in 2009 as Kennedy: The Classic Biography )

To those who question the value of rhetoric, dismissing all political speeches as "mere words" or "style over substance," Sorensen had an answer. "Kennedy's rhetoric when he was president turned out to be a key to his success," he told an interviewer in 2008. "His 'mere words' about Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba helped resolve the worst crisis the world has ever known without the U.S. having to fire a shot."

Similarly, in a New York Times op-ed published two months before his death, Sorensen countered several "myths" about the Kennedy-Nixon debates, including the view that it was "style over substance, with Kennedy winning on delivery and looks." In the first debate, Sorensen argued, "there was far more substance and nuance than in what now passes for political debate in our increasingly commercialized, sound-bite Twitter-fied culture, in which extremist rhetoric requires presidents to respond to outrageous claims ."

To learn more about the rhetoric and oratory of John Kennedy and Ted Sorensen, have a look at Thurston Clarke's Ask Not: The Inauguration of John F. Kennedy and the Speech That Changed America, published by Henry Holt in 2004 and now available in a Penguin paperback.

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Milestone Documents

President John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address (1961)

Citation: Inaugural Address, Kennedy Draft, 01/17/1961; Papers of John F. Kennedy: President's Office Files, 01/20/1961-11/22/1963; John F. Kennedy Library; National Archives and Records Administration.

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On January 20, 1961, President John F. Kennedy delivered his inaugural address in which he announced that "we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty."

The inaugural ceremony is a defining moment in a president’s career — and no one knew this better than John F. Kennedy as he prepared for his own inauguration on January 20, 1961. He wanted his address to be short and clear, devoid of any partisan rhetoric and focused on foreign policy.

Kennedy began constructing his speech in late November, working from a speech file kept by his secretary and soliciting suggestions from friends and advisors. He wrote his thoughts in his nearly indecipherable longhand on a yellow legal pad.

While his colleagues submitted ideas, the speech was distinctly the work of Kennedy himself. Aides recounted that every sentence was worked, reworked, and reduced. The meticulously crafted piece of oratory dramatically announced a generational change in the White House. It called on the nation to combat "tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself" and urged American citizens to participate in public service.

The climax of the speech and its most memorable phrase – "Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country" – was honed down from a thought about sacrifice that Kennedy had long held in his mind and had expressed in various ways in campaign speeches.

Less than six weeks after his inauguration, on March 1, President Kennedy issued an executive order establishing the Peace Corps as a pilot program within the Department of State. He envisioned the Peace Corps as a pool of trained American volunteers who would go overseas to help foreign countries meet their needs for skilled manpower. Later that year, Congress passed the Peace Corps Act, making the program permanent.

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Vice President Johnson, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Chief Justice, President Eisenhower, Vice President Nixon, President Truman, Reverend Clergy, fellow citizens:

We observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom--symbolizing an end as well as a beginning--signifying renewal as well as change. For I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forbears prescribed nearly a century and three-quarters ago.

The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe--the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.

We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans--born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage--and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.

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.

This much we pledge--and more.

To those old allies whose cultural and spiritual origins we share, we pledge the loyalty of faithful friends. United there is little we cannot do in a host of cooperative ventures. Divided there is little we can do--for we dare not meet a powerful challenge at odds and split asunder.

To those new states whom we welcome to the ranks of the free, we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny. We shall not always expect to find them supporting our view. But we shall always hope to find them strongly supporting their own freedom--and to remember that, in the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.

To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required--not because the communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

To our sister republics south of our border, we offer a special pledge--to convert our good words into good deeds--in a new alliance for progress--to assist free men and free governments in casting off the chains of poverty. But this peaceful revolution of hope cannot become the prey of hostile powers. Let all our neighbors know that we shall join with them to oppose aggression or subversion anywhere in the Americas. And let every other power know that this Hemisphere intends to remain the master of its own house.

To that world assembly of sovereign states, the United Nations, our last best hope in an age where the instruments of war have far outpaced the instruments of peace, we renew our pledge of support--to prevent it from becoming merely a forum for invective--to strengthen its shield of the new and the weak--and to enlarge the area in which its writ may run.

Finally, to those nations who would make themselves our adversary, we offer not a pledge but a request: that both sides begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction.

We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.

But neither can two great and powerful groups of nations take comfort from our present course--both sides overburdened by the cost of modern weapons, both rightly alarmed by the steady spread of the deadly atom, yet both racing to alter that uncertain balance of terror that stays the hand of mankind's final war.

So let us begin anew--remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.

Let both sides explore what problems unite us instead of belaboring those problems which divide us.

Let both sides, for the first time, formulate serious and precise proposals for the inspection and control of arms--and bring the absolute power to destroy other nations under the absolute control of all nations.

Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths and encourage the arts and commerce.

Let both sides unite to heed in all corners of the earth the command of Isaiah--to "undo the heavy burdens . . . (and) let the oppressed go free."

And if a beachhead of cooperation may push back the jungle of suspicion, let both sides join in creating a new endeavor, not a new balance of power, but a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved.

All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.

In your hands, my fellow citizens, more than mine, will rest the final success or failure of our course. Since this country was founded, each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty. The graves of young Americans who answered the call to service surround the globe.

Now the trumpet summons us again--not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need--not as a call to battle, though embattled we are-- but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation"--a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.

Can we forge against these enemies a grand and global alliance, North and South, East and West, that can assure a more fruitful life for all mankind? Will you join in that historic effort?

In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility--I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it--and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.

And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country.

My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.

Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us here the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be our own.

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JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY, INAUGURAL ADDRESS (20 JANUARY 1961)

[1] Vice President Johnson, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Chief Justice, President Eisenhower, Vice President Nixon, President Truman, Reverend Clergy, fellow citizens:

[2] We observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom–symbolizing an end as well as a beginning–signifying renewal as well as change. For I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forbears prescribed nearly a century and three-quarters ago.

[3] The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe–the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.

[4] We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans–born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage–and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.

[5] 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.

[6] This much we pledge–and more.

[7] To those old allies whose cultural and spiritual origins we share, we pledge the loyalty of faithful friends. United there is little we cannot do in a host of cooperative ventures. Divided there is little we can do–for we dare not meet a powerful challenge at odds and split asunder.

[8] To those new states whom we welcome to the ranks of the free, we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny. We shall not always expect to find them supporting our view. But we shall always hope to find them strongly supporting their own freedom–and to remember that, in the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.

[9] To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required–not because the communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

[10] To our sister republics south of our border, we offer a special pledge–to convert our good words into good deeds–in a new alliance for progress–to assist free men and free governments in casting off the chains of poverty. But this peaceful revolution of hope cannot become the prey of hostile powers. Let all our neighbors know that we shall join with them to oppose aggression or subversion anywhere in the Americas. And let every other power know that this Hemisphere intends to remain the master of its own house.

[11] To that world assembly of sovereign states, the United Nations, our last best hope in an age where the instruments of war have far outpaced the instruments of peace, we renew our pledge of support–to prevent it from becoming merely a forum for invective–to strengthen its shield of the new and the weak–and to enlarge the area in which its writ may run.

[12] Finally, to those nations who would make themselves our adversary, we offer not a pledge but a request: that both sides begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction.

[13] We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.

[14] But neither can two great and powerful groups of nations take comfort from our present course–both sides overburdened by the cost of modern weapons, both rightly alarmed by the steady spread of the deadly atom, yet both racing to alter that uncertain balance of terror that stays the hand of mankind’s final war.

[15] So let us begin anew–remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.

[16] Let both sides explore what problems unite us instead of belaboring those problems which divide us.

[17] Let both sides, for the first time, formulate serious and precise proposals for the inspection and control of arms–and bring the absolute power to destroy other nations under the absolute control of all nations.

[18] Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths and encourage the arts and commerce.

[19] Let both sides unite to heed in all corners of the earth the command of Isaiah–to “undo the heavy burdens . . . (and) let the oppressed go free.”

[20] And if a beachhead of cooperation may push back the jungle of suspicion, let both sides join in creating a new endeavor, not a new balance of power, but a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved.

[21] All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.

[22] In your hands, my fellow citizens, more than mine, will rest the final success or failure of our course. Since this country was founded, each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty. The graves of young Americans who answered the call to service surround the globe.

[23] Now the trumpet summons us again–not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need–not as a call to battle, though embattled we are–but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, “rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation”–a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.

[24] Can we forge against these enemies a grand and global alliance, North and South, East and West, that can assure a more fruitful life for all mankind? Will you join in that historic effort?

[25] In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility–I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it–and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.

[26] And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you–ask what you can do for your country.

[27] My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.

[28] Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us here the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.

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Presidential Speeches

April 27, 1961: "president and the press" speech, about this speech.

John F. Kennedy

April 27, 1961

President Kennedy speaks at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City before the American Newspaper Publishers Association. Kennedy asks the press for their cooperation in fighting Communism by applying the same standards for publishing sensitive materials in the current Cold War that they would apply in an officially declared war.

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Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen:

I appreciate very much your generous invitation to be here tonight.

You bear heavy responsibilities these days and an article I read some time ago reminded me of how particularly heavily the burdens of present day events bear upon your profession.

You may remember that in 1851 the New York Herald Tribune, under the sponsorship and publishing of Horace Greeley, employed as its London correspondent an obscure journalist by the name of Karl Marx.

We are told that foreign correspondent Marx, stone broke, and with a family ill and undernourished, constantly appealed to Greeley and Managing Editor Charles Dana for an increase in his munificent salary of $5 per installment, a salary which he and Engels ungratefully labeled as the "lousiest petty bourgeois cheating."

But when all his financial appeals were refused, Marx looked around for other means of livelihood and fame, eventually terminating his relationship with the Tribune and devoting his talents full time to the cause that would bequeath to the world the seeds of Leninism, Stalinism, revolution and the Cold War.

If only this capitalistic New York newspaper had treated him more kindly; if only Marx had remained a foreign correspondent, history might have been different. And I hope all publishers will bear this lesson in mind the next time they receive a poverty-stricken appeal for a small increase in the expense account from an obscure newspaper.

I have selected as the title of my remarks tonight "The President and the Press." Some may suggest that this would be more naturally worded "The President Versus the Press." But those are not my sentiments tonight.

It is true, however, that when a well-known diplomat from another country demanded recently that our State Department repudiate certain newspaper attacks on his colleague, it was unnecessary for us to reply that this Administration was not responsible for the press, for the press had already made it clear that it was not responsible for this Administration.

Nevertheless, my purpose here tonight is not to deliver the usual assault on the so-called one-party press. On the contrary, in recent months I have rarely heard any complaints about political bias in the press except from a few Republicans. Nor is it my purpose tonight to discuss or defend the televising of Presidential press conferences. I think it is highly beneficial to have some 20 million Americans regularly sit in on these conferences to observe, if I may say so, the incisive, the intelligent and the courteous qualities displayed by your Washington correspondents.

Nor, finally, are these remarks intended to examine the proper degree of privacy which the press should allow to any President and his family.

If in the last few months your White House reporters and photographers have been attending church services with regularity, that has surely done them no harm.

On the other hand, I realize that your staff and wire service photographers may be complaining that they do not enjoy the same green privileges at the local golf courses which they once did.

It is true that my predecessor did not object as I do to pictures of one's golfing skill in action. But neither on the other hand did he ever bean a Secret Service man. My topic tonight is a more sober one of concern to publishers as well as editors.

I want to talk about our common responsibilities in the face of a common danger. The events of recent weeks may have helped to illuminate that challenge for some; but the dimensions of its threat have loomed large on the horizon for many years. Whatever our hopes may be for the future—for reducing this threat or living with it—there is no escaping either the gravity or the totality of its challenge to our survival and to our security—a challenge that confronts us in unaccustomed ways in every sphere of human activity.

This deadly challenge imposes upon our society two requirements of direct concern both to the press and to the President—two requirements that may seem almost contradictory in tone, but which must be reconciled and fulfilled if we are to meet this national peril. I refer, first, to the need for far greater public information; and, second, to the need for far greater official secrecy.

The very word "secrecy" is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment. That I do not intend to permit to the extent that it is in my control. And no official of my Administration, whether his rank is high or low, civilian or military, should interpret my words here tonight as an excuse to censor the news, to stifle dissent, to cover up our mistakes or to withhold from the press and the public the facts they deserve to know.

But I do ask every publisher, every editor, and every newsman in the nation to reexamine his own standards, and to recognize the nature of our country's peril. In time of war, the government and the press have customarily joined in an effort, based largely on self-discipline, to prevent unauthorized disclosures to the enemy. In time of "clear and present danger," the courts have held that even the privileged rights of the First Amendment must yield to the public's need for national security.

Today no war has been declared—and however fierce the struggle may be—it may never be declared in the traditional fashion. Our way of life is under attack. Those who make themselves our enemy are advancing around the globe. The survival of our friends is in danger. And yet no war has been declared, no borders have been crossed by marching troops, no missiles have been fired.

If the press is awaiting a declaration of war before it imposes the self-discipline of combat conditions, then I can only say that no war ever posed a greater threat to our security. If you are awaiting a finding of "clear and present danger," then I can only say that the danger has never been more clear and its presence has never been more imminent.

It requires a change in outlook, a change in tactics, a change in missions—by the government, by the people, by every businessman or labor leader, and by every newspaper. For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence—on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific, and political operations.

Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War, in short, with a war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match.

Nevertheless, every democracy recognizes the necessary restraints of national security—and the question remains whether those restraints need to be more strictly observed if we are to oppose this kind of attack as well as outright invasion.

For the facts of the matter are that this nation's foes have openly boasted of acquiring through our newspapers information they would otherwise hire agents to acquire through theft, bribery, or espionage; that details of this nation's covert preparations to counter the enemy's covert operations have been available to every newspaper reader, friend and foe alike; that the size, the strength, the location, and the nature of our forces and weapons, and our plans and strategy for their use, have all been pinpointed in the press and other news media to a degree sufficient to satisfy any foreign power; and that, in at least one case, the publication of details concerning a secret mechanism whereby satellites were followed required its alteration at the expense of considerable time and money.

The newspapers which printed these stories were loyal, patriotic, responsible, and well-meaning. Had we been engaged in open warfare, they undoubtedly would not have published such items. But in the absence of open warfare, they recognized only the tests of journalism and not the tests of national security. And my question tonight is whether additional tests should not now be adopted.

That question is for you alone to answer. No public official should answer it for you. No governmental plan should impose its restraints against your will. But I would be failing in my duty to the Nation, in considering all of the responsibilities that we now bear and all of the means at hand to meet those responsibilities, if I did not commend this problem to your attention, and urge its thoughtful consideration.

On many earlier occasions, I have said—and your newspapers have constantly said—that these are times that appeal to every citizen's sense of sacrifice and self-discipline. They call out to every citizen to weigh his rights and comforts against his obligations to the common good. I cannot now believe that those citizens who serve in the newspaper business consider themselves exempt from that appeal.

I have no intention of establishing a new Office of War Information to govern the flow of news. I am not suggesting any new forms of censorship or new types of security classifications. I have no easy answer to the dilemma that I have posed, and would not seek to impose it if I had one. But I am asking the members of the newspaper profession and the industry in this country to reexamine their own responsibilities, to consider the degree and the nature of the present danger, and to heed the duty of self-restraint which that danger imposes upon us all.

Every newspaper now asks itself, with respect to every story: "Is it news?" All I suggest is that you add the question: "Is it in the interest of the national security?" And I hope that every group in America—unions and businessmen and public officials at every level—will ask the same question of their endeavors, and subject their actions to this same exacting test.

And should the press of America consider and recommend the voluntary assumption of specific new steps or machinery, I can assure you that we will cooperate whole-heartedly with those recommendations.

Perhaps there will be no recommendations. Perhaps there is no answer to the dilemma faced by a free and open society in a cold and secret war. In times of peace, any discussion of this subject, and any action that results, are both painful and without precedent. But this is a time of peace and peril which knows no precedent in history.

It is the unprecedented nature of this challenge that also gives rise to your second obligation—an obligation which I share. And that is our obligation to inform and alert the American people—to make certain that they possess all the facts that they need, and understand them as well—the perils, the prospects, the purposes of our program, and the choices that we face.

No President should fear public scrutiny of his program. For from that scrutiny comes understanding; and from that understanding comes support or opposition. And both are necessary. I am not asking your newspapers to support the Administration, but I am asking your help in the tremendous task of informing and alerting the American people. For I have complete confidence in the response and dedication of our citizens whenever they are fully informed.

I not only could not stifle controversy among your readers—I welcome it. This Administration intends to be candid about its errors; for, as a wise man once said: "An error doesn't become a mistake until you refuse to correct it." We intend to accept full responsibility for our errors; and we expect you to point them out when we miss them.

Without debate, without criticism, no Administration and no country can succeed—and no republic can survive. That is why the Athenian law-maker Solon decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy. And that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment—the only business in America specifically protected by the Constitution—not primarily to amuse and entertain, not to emphasize the trivial and the sentimental, not to simply "give the public what it wants"—but to inform, to arouse, to reflect, to state our dangers and our opportunities, to indicate our crises and our choices, to lead, mold, educate, and sometimes even anger public opinion.

This means greater coverage and analysis of international news—for it is no longer far away and foreign but close at hand and local. It means greater attention to improved understanding of the news as well as improved transmission. And it means, finally, that government at all levels, must meet its obligation to provide you with the fullest possible information outside the narrowest limits of national security—and we intend to do it.

It was early in the Seventeenth Century that Francis Bacon remarked on three recent inventions already transforming the world: the compass, gunpowder, and the printing press. Now the links between the nations first forged by the compass have made us all citizens of the world, the hopes and threats of one becoming the hopes and threats of us all. In that one world's efforts to live together, the evolution of gunpowder to its ultimate limit has warned mankind of the terrible consequences of failure.

And so it is to the printing press—to the recorder of man's deeds, the keeper of his conscience, the courier of his news—that we look for strength and assistance, confident that with your help man will be what he was born to be: free and independent.

More John F. Kennedy speeches

“We choose to go to the Moon”

"We choose to go to the Moon", officially titled the address at Rice University on the nation's space effort, is a September 12, 1962, speech by United States President John F. Kennedy to further inform the public about his plan to land a man on the Moon before 1970.

President Pitzer, Mr. Vice President, Governor, Congressman Thomas, Senator Wiley, and Congressman Miller, Mr. Webb, Mr. Bell, scientists, distinguished guests, and ladies and gentlemen:

I appreciate your president having made me an honorary visiting professor, and I will assure you that my first lecture will be very brief.

I am delighted to be here, and I’m particularly delighted to be here on this occasion.

We meet at a college noted for knowledge, in a city noted for progress, in a state noted for strength, and we stand in need of all three, for we meet in an hour of change and challenge, in a decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and ignorance. The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds.

Despite the striking fact that most of the scientists that the world has ever known are alive and working today, despite the fact that this nation’s own scientific manpower is doubling every 12 years in a rate of growth more than three times that of our population as a whole, despite that, the vast stretches of the unknown and the unanswered and the unfinished still far outstrip our collective comprehension. 

No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the 50,000 years of man’s recorded history in a time span of but a half-century. Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover them. Then about 10 years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter. Only five years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. Christianity began less than two years ago. The printing press came this year, and then less than two months ago, during this whole 50-year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power. 

Newton explored the meaning of gravity. Last month electric lights and telephones and automobiles and airplanes became available. Only last week did we develop penicillin and television and nuclear power, and now if America’s new spacecraft succeeds in reaching Venus, we will have literally reached the stars before midnight tonight.

This is a breathtaking pace, and such a pace cannot help but create new ills as it dispels old, new ignorance, new problems, new dangers. Surely the opening vistas of space promise high costs and hardships, as well as high reward. 

So it is not surprising that some would have us stay where we are a little longer to rest, to wait. But this city of Houston, this State of Texas, this country of the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward — and so will space. 

William Bradford, speaking in 1630 of the founding of the Plymouth Bay Colony, said that all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage. 

If this capsule history of our progress teaches us anything, it is that man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and cannot be deterred. The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures of all time, and no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in the race for space. 

Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolutions, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it — we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding.

Yet the vows of this nation can only be fulfilled if we in this nation are first, and, therefore, we intend to be first. In short, our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world’s leading space-faring nation.

We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say the we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.

There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? 

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. 

It is for these reasons that I regard the decision last year to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear as among the most important decisions that will be made during my incumbency in the office of the presidency. 

In the last 24 hours, we have seen facilities now being created for the greatest and most complex exploration in man’s history. We have felt the ground shake and the air shattered by the testing of a Saturn C-1 booster rocket, many times as powerful as the Atlas which launched John Glenn, generating power equivalent to 10,000 automobiles with their accelerators on the floor. We have seen the site where five F-1 rocket engines, each one as powerful as all eight engines of the Saturn combined, will be clustered together to make the advanced Saturn missile, assembled in a new building to be built at Cape Canaveral as tall as a 48-story structure, as wide as a city block, and as long as two lengths of this field.

Within these last 19 months at least 45 satellites have circled the earth. Some 40 of them were “made in the United States of America,” and they were far more sophisticated and supplied far more knowledge to the people of the world than those of the Soviet Union.

The Mariner spacecraft now on its way to Venus is the most intricate instrument in the history of space science. The accuracy of that shot is comparable to firing a missile from Cape Canaveral and dropping it in this stadium between the 40-yard lines.

Transit satellites are helping our ships at sea to steer a safer course. Tiros satellites have given us unprecedented warnings of hurricanes and storms, and will do the same for forest fires and icebergs.

We have had our failures, but so have others, even if they do not admit them. And they may be less public.

To be sure, we are behind, and will be behind for some time in manned flight. But we do not intend to stay behind, and in this decade, we shall make up and move ahead.

The growth of our science and education will be enriched by new knowledge of our universe and environment, by new techniques of learning and mapping and observation, by new tools and computers for industry, medicine, the home as well as the school. Technical institutions, such as Rice, will reap the harvest of these gains.

And finally, the space effort itself, while still in its infancy, has already created a great number of new companies, and tens of thousands of new jobs. Space and related industries are generating new demands in investment and skilled personnel, and this city and this state, and this region, will share greatly in this growth. What was once the furthest outpost on the old frontier of the West will be the furthest outpost on the new frontier of science and space. Houston, your city of Houston, with its Manned Spacecraft Center, will become the heart of a large scientific and engineering community. During the next five years the National Aeronautics and Space Administration expects to double the number of scientists and engineers in this area, to increase its outlays for salaries and expenses to $60 million a year; to invest some $200 million in plant and laboratory facilities; and to direct or contract for new space efforts over $1 billion from this center in this city.

To be sure, all of this costs us all a good deal of money. This year’s space budget is three times what it was in January 1961, and it is greater than the space budget of the previous eight years combined. That budget now stands at $5,400,000 a year — a staggering sum, though somewhat less than we pay for cigarettes and cigars every year. Space expenditures will soon rise some more, from 40 cents per person per week to more than 50 cents a week for every man, woman and child in the United States, for we have given this program a high national priority — even though I realize that this is in some measure an act of faith and vision, for we do not now know what benefits await us. 

But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to Earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun — almost as hot as it is here today — and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out — then we must be bold. 

I’m the one who is doing all the work, so we just want you to stay cool for a minute. [laughter]

However, I think we’re going to do it, and I think that we must pay what needs to be paid. I don’t think we ought to waste any money, but I think we ought to do the job. And this will be done in the decade of the sixties. It may be done while some of you are still here at school at this college and university. It will be done during the term of office of some of the people who sit here on this platform. But it will be done. And it will be done before the end of this decade.

I am delighted that this university is playing a part in putting a man on the moon as part of a great national effort of the United States of America.

Many years ago, the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it? He said, “Because it is there.” 

Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked. 

18 episodes

The Speeches of President John F. Kennedy is a podcast series of the most memorable and historical speeches delivered by John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States. Each episode features a brief introduction by former Kennedy Library Curator Frank Rigg giving the historical context of each speech.

JFK Library and Museum - John F. Kennedy Speeches John F. Kennedy Presidential Library

• 4.3 • 49 Ratings
• OCT 26, 2012

JFK Address at Amherst College

Before an estimated crowd of 10,000 people, President Kennedy made clear the need for a nation to represent itself not only through its strength but also through its art.

• OCT 22, 2012

JFK Address on the Cuban Missile Crisis

JFK appeared on television to inform Americans of the recent Soviet military buildup in Cuba including the ongoing installation of offensive nuclear missiles, and informed the people of the US of the "quarantine" placed around Cuba by the Navy.

• SEP 12, 2012

JFK Address at Rice University

President Kennedy delivered a speech describing his goals for the nation’s space effort before a crowd of 35,000 people in the football stadium at Rice University in Houston, Texas.

• JUL 26, 2012

JFK Address on Nuclear Test Ban

In a television address announcing the nuclear test ban agreement, Kennedy claimed that a limited test ban “is safer by far for the United States than an unlimited nuclear arms race.”

• JUL 4, 2012

JFK Address at Independence Hall

At an Independence Day celebration in historic Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on July 4, 1962, President Kennedy delivered an address on the importance of the Declaration of Independence to contemporary Americans.

• JUN 28, 2012

JFK Address before Irish Parliament

Full of references to Irishmen who fought in the American War of Independence, President Kennedy championed the important role of small nations in the pursuit of world peace.

• © John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

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Senator Kennedy Addressing the Houston Ministerial Association

MORE ABOUT KENNEDY

• Kennedy’s Legacy

Read Senator Kennedy’s Speech at Greater Houston Ministerial Association

Video of the speech may be viewed on the Kennedy Library website.

“I believe in an America … where all men and all churches are treated as equal–where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice”

President-elect kennedy’s speech to the massachusetts legislature.

Read President-elect Kennedy’s Speech to the Massachusetts Legislature

“Our success or failure, in whatever office we may hold will be measured by the answers to four questions:

Are we truly men of courage are we truly men of judgment are we truly men of integrity are we truly men of dedication”, president kennedy’s inaugural address.

Read President Kennedy’s Speech at Inauguration

Video of the Inaugural Address may be viewed at the John F. Kennedy Library website

“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”

President kennedy’s speech at rice university.

Read President Kennedy’s Speech at Rice

Video of the speech may be viewed on the John F. Kennedy Library website

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win …”

President kennedy’s speech at vanderbilt university.

Read President Kennedy’s Speech at Vanderbilt University

Hear the speech on the John F. Kennedy Library website

“Liberty and learning will be and must be the touchstones of … any free University … They are almost inseparable … for liberty without learning is always in peril, and learning without liberty is always in vain.”

President kennedy’s speech at san diego state college.

Read President Kennedy’s Speech at San Diego State College

“No country can possibly move ahead, no free society can possibly be sustained, unless it has an educated citizenry whose qualities of mind and heart permit it to take part in the complicated and increasingly sophisticated decisions that pour not only upon the President and upon the Congress, but upon all the citizens who exercise the ultimate power. “

President kennedy’s address at american university.

Read President Kennedy’s Commencement Address at American University

Video of the speech may be viewed of the John F. Kennedy website

“What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children–not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women …”

President kennedy’s report to the american people on civil rights.

Read President Kennedy’s Report on Civil Rights

Video of the address many be viewed on the Kennedy Library website.

“It ought to be possible for American consumers of any color to receive equal service in places of public accommodation … and it ought to be possible for American citizens of any color to register to vote in a free election without interference or fear of reprisal.

We preach freedom … but are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to each other that this is the land of the free except for the negroes; that we have no second-class citizens except negroes …, we are confronted primarily with a moral issue …, next week i shall ask the congress of the united states … to make a commitment … to the proposition that race has no place in american life or law.”, president kennedy’s speech for dallas.

Read President Kennedy’s Speech for Dallas Trade Mart

“America’s leadership must be guided by the lights of learning and reason or else those who confuse rhetoric with reality and the plausible with the possible will gain the popular ascendancy with their seemingly swift and simple solutions to every world problem.”

Speechwriters.

Kennedy’s team of speechwriters included Ted Sorensen, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., and Richard Goodwin.  No president can write every word of his speeches.  Yet, to quote from Ted Sorensen, “John Kennedy was the true author of all of his speeches and writings.  They set forth his ideals and ideas, his decisions and policies, his knowledge of history and of politics.  He played a role in every major speech, selecting the subject matter and themes, arguments and conclusions..  More importantly, he alone was responsible for the decision that lay at the heart of every major speech … which reflected turning points in American history for which he was responsible.” 1

Notes: 1 Stephen Kennedy Smith and Douglas Brinkley, (Editors), JFK: A Vision for America, Harper Collins Publishers, New York. 2017. p 22.

Photo Credits:

Photo of Senator Kennedy and Audience Photo at Houston Ministerial Association, 1960. Courtesy of John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

Photo of John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. 2019. Courtesy of Louis Diamond.

President Kennedy at Inauguration., 1961. Courtesy of John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

Launch of John Glenn Spaceflight, February 20, 1962.  NASA.   Watch video of launch

Matador Missile.  Photo by U.S. Airforce. More than 1,000 Matador cruise missiles were produced and deployed between 1955 and 1961. The missile carried a conventional warhead or a nuclear warhead with a yield of 11-47 kilotons. For additional information see:  Brookings Institution information on Matador cruise missile

Photo of Peabody Library, Vanderbilt University. From Wikipedia: By Dansan4444 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21419527

Civil Rights March. Photographer Unknown.  Courtesy of Center for Jewish History, NYC @ Flickr Commons (www.flickr.com/people/36988361 @NO8

• International

Solar eclipse

Israel-Hamas war

RFK Jr. announces Nicole Shanahan as his VP pick

By Andrew Menezes and Isabelle D'Antonio, CNN

Democratic surrogates say RFK Jr. "is Donald Trump with a Kennedy name slapped on him"

From CNN's Donald Judd

The Democratic National Committee fired back Tuesday at Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after the independent presidential candidate named his running mate pick, with one surrogate telling reporters on a call that Kennedy “is Donald Trump with a Kennedy name slapped on him.” 

“There is absolutely no path for Kennedy to become president — and he knows that, that is why he picked a VP ... who can buy his way onto the ballot in a number of states,” Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow said, referring to vice presidential candidate Nicole Shanahan .

McMorrow warned Tuesday that misinformation espoused by Kennedy and Shanahan could sow mistrust in vaccine safety — a sentiment echoed by California Rep. Robert Garcia, who also joined the call.

“[Kennedy] is a person that is a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist, he is anti-vaccine, he is anti-science, he is anti-truth and does nothing but put out lies and misinformation that actually damages and hurts public health across this country,” Garcia said Tuesday. “And his vice-presidential pick essentially just doubles down on these anti-vaccine conspiracies, anti-health agenda."

In her remarks Tuesday in Oakland, California, Shanahan called for further research into “every possible cause of the chronic disease epidemic” while questioning the “cumulative impact” of prescriptions and vaccines on children’s health.

Surrogates on the Democratic call rebuffed the idea that Kennedy's selection of Shanahan, who in the past has donated to Democratic candidates , including President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, could be a sign that party donors or voters are seeking an alternative to Biden in November.

“I've not seen that on the Democratic side, and I think the enthusiasm, particularly among donors, continues to remain high,” Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. Austin Davis told CNN. “The only purpose of Robert Kennedy running is to be a spoiler. His goal is to take votes from President Biden to help elect Donald Trump, and we can't let it happen.”

Shanahan expresses skepticism about the effects of “pharmaceutical medicine"

From CNN's Aaron Pellish

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s vice presidential pick, Nicole Shanahan, cited finding a cure for autism and chronic diseases as important to her and detailed her personal experience with her daughter’s autism diagnosis. 

Shanahan also expressed skepticism about the effects of “pharmaceutical medicine,” while implicitly making the false suggestion that modern medicine, including vaccines, may contribute to rising rates of autism diagnoses. 

Speaking at a campaign event in Oakland, California, Shanahan spoke about her and Kennedy’s shared goal of eradicating chronic disease. 

“I got into it through my own journey of reproductive health followed by a steep learning curve for caring for my daughter, who has an autism diagnosis,” she said.

Shanahan called for further research into “every possible cause of the chronic disease epidemic” while questioning the “cumulative impact” of prescriptions and vaccines on children’s health. 

“Pharmaceutical medicine has its place, but no single safety study can assess the cumulative impact of one prescription on top of another prescription, and one shot on top of another shot on top of another shot throughout the course of childhood. We just don't do that study right now, and we ought to,” she said to resounding applause from the crowd.

Shanahan’s comments come as she joins the campaign led by Kennedy, a leading proponent of the discredited links between vaccines and autism.

Meanwhile: Biden and Harris team up for a rare joint appearance in North Carolina to take on GOP over health care

From CNN's Arlette Saenz and Tami Luhby

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris took on Republicans over health care  in North Carolina Tuesday, looking to press what they believe is a winning issue ahead of November’s election.

The stop in the North Carolina capital of Raleigh marked a rare joint appearance on the road by the duo, highlighting the emphasis they will place on health care in the general election clash against former President Donald Trump.

Biden’s advisers believed Tuesday’s visit would provide a stark contrast between the Democratic ticket’s vision for health care and reproductive rights and proposals put forth by Republicans. It took place on the heels of a  campaign push  slamming Trump for threatening to repeal the Affordable Care Act if he’s elected to a second term.

“Donald Trump and MAGA friends are nothing if not persistent. They’ve tried to repeal it 50 times, not a joke. Fifty times they’ve tried to repeal it. We stopped them every time now,” Biden told the Raleigh crowd Tuesday. “Kamala and I have come back to North Carolina to celebrate the ACA and to remind all of us, we can’t take anything for granted.”

The trip came as the Biden campaign is looking to North Carolina as a possible  pickup opportunity  in November’s election after he lost the state to Trump by just 1 point in 2020.  A Marist poll conducted this month  found no clear leader in the race, with Trump receiving 51% support to Biden’s 48% among registered voters. The survey had a margin of error of 3.6 percentage points.

Why Kennedy's vice presidential announcement is key to his ballot access efforts

By CNN's Aaron Pellish

Major-party presidential candidates typically announce their vice presidential nominees closer to their party’s nominating conventions in the summer.

But independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. moved early with his announcement of Nicole Shanahan as his running mate so his campaign can transition into the next phase of its ballot access efforts.

Kennedy has set a goal to qualify for the ballot in all 50 states and Washington, DC, but he is so far on the ballot only in Utah. His campaign has said it has gathered enough signatures to qualify for the ballot in New Hampshire, Nevada and Hawaii, while a super PAC backing his White House bid has said it has collected enough signatures to qualify Kennedy in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and South Carolina.

The Kennedy campaign said Tuesday it is “already actively collecting signatures in 17 states and is kicking off its petition gathering this week in 19 additional states that are open and require a vice presidential candidate.”

Shanahan said Tuesday she plans to “spend the next seven months” working to get Kennedy on “each and every ballot in this country,” highlighting the crucial role her selection will play in helping secure ballot access in more states.  

Kennedy's ballot access in Nevada, however, could be in jeopardy. An “error” made by a staffer at the Nevada secretary of state's office in communicating ballot access guidance could force the Kennedy campaign to start from square one. Read more here .

Meanwhile: Trump is selling Bibles for $59.99 as he faces growing legal bills

From CNN's Kate Sullivan

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was not the only presidential candidate with news for supporters Tuesday.

Former President Donald Trump urged his backers to buy a “God Bless the USA” Bible for $59.99 as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee faces mounting legal bills amid his third presidential run. 

Trump  posted a video  to his Truth Social platform in which he says he has partnered with singer Lee Greenwood — whose song “God Bless the USA” opens all of Trump’s rallies — to promote the Bible ahead of Easter this Sunday.

The Bible is advertised as “the only Bible endorsed by President Trump.”

The website  Trump links to says: “GodBlessTheUSABible.com is not owned, managed or controlled by Donald J. Trump, The Trump Organization, CIC Ventures LLC or any of their respective principals or affiliates.”

“GodBlessTheUSABible.com uses Donald J. Trump’s name, likeness and image under paid license from CIC Ventures LLC, which license may be terminated or revoked according to its terms,” the disclaimer continues.

The language is similar to what appears  on the website  for Trump’s recently announced sneakers.

As advertised, the Bibles will include copies of a “Handwritten chorus to 'God Bless The USA' by Lee Greenwood,” the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence and the Pledge of Allegiance.

Shanahan says she "didn't think much" of RFK at first but soon felt he offered "hope for our democracy"

Vice presidential candidate Nicole Shanahan, a former Democratic donor who contributed to President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, said she was initially not interested in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s candidacy until a friend prompted her to listen to his interviews. 

“As recently as a year ago, I didn't think much of Bobby Kennedy. I didn't think much of him, because I didn't know much,” Shanahan said. “But then a friend pulled me aside one day and said, ‘Nicole, please do me a favor. Just listen to one interview with Bobby Kennedy.'"

Shanahan said that after listening to multiple interviews, she began to feel “hope for our democracy,” noting that the feeling came for “the first time in a long time.” 

Shanahan also told the crowd she was officially “leaving the Democratic Party,” believing Democrats have “lost their way." She invited Democrats and Republicans alike who feel alienated to join “this movement to unify and heal America.” 

The vice presidential candidate also suggested that some conservative voters may feel the same way about the GOP as she does about her former party. 

“The Republican Party, like the Democratic, is letting them down because the actions of the party are diverting from the values that actually support individual freedom. ... If you are one of those disillusioned Republicans, I welcome you to join me, a disillusioned Democrat, here in this new movement to unify and heal America,” she said.

Shanahan shares details of growing up in Oakland in first remarks as VP candidate

Independent vice presidential candidate Nicole Shanahan outlined her background in remarks Tuesday introducing herself to voters supporting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign in Oakland, California. 

Shanahan, who grew up in Oakland, said that the city "will always have a special place in my heart,” before thanking her mother, who attended the event. 

Shanahan said her mother, who emigrated from China, worked different jobs in the Bay Area city to support their family and described her father as “plagued by substance abuse” and said he “struggled to keep a job.” 

“I think of him when I see the statistics of the millions of Americans who are addicted, depressed or suffering,” she said. “This is one of the epidemics of our time. It affects nearly every American family.”

Shanahan said her family relied on food stamps and government aid growing up, which informed her worldview after she became wealthy as an adult. Shanahan was previously married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin, one of the wealthiest men in the world. 

“As you probably know, I became very wealthy later on in life, but my roots in Oakland taught me many things I've never forgotten: that the purpose of wealth is to help those in need. That's what it's for, and ... I want to bring that back to politics too,” she added.

RFK Jr. campaign distributes "Kennedy/Shanahan" campaign signs at Oakland rally

As a video introducing Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s running mate, Nicole Shanahan , played to supporters in Oakland on Tuesday, the campaign crystallized the partnership by distributing “Kennedy/Shanahan” signs to the crowd.

Kennedy named Shanahan as his vice presidential pick Tuesday, introducing her as "my fellow lawyer, a brilliant scientist, technologist, a fierce warrior mom, Nicole Shanahan."

Shanahan's selection will accelerate Kennedy's attempts to gain ballot access in as many states as possible. She will also be tasked with broadening Kennedy's appeal and potentially helping to raise money for his big-spending campaign.

RFK Jr. says he will build a coalition of "homeless Democrats and homeless Republicans"

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. framed his independent presidential candidacy as an opportunity for voters who are dissatisfied with both Joe Biden and Donald Trump to vote “for someone” rather than “for the lesser of two evils.” 

“I want to talk about another obstacle that's even more important. It’s the obstacle of cynicism. It's the obstacle of fear. It's the deeply ingrained habit of voting for someone you have little passion for because he is the lesser of two evils. Because you are so afraid that the other guy will win,” Kennedy told supporters gathered for his vice presidential announcement in Oakland, California.

“Well, don't you want to vote for someone this time?” he added, receiving resounding applause from the crowd of hundreds.

Kennedy, who has picked Silicon Valley attorney and entrepreneur Nicole Shanahan as his running mate, rejected the notion that he was a “spoiler” for one candidate or the other, projecting confidence that he could defeat both Biden and Trump.

Kennedy said his path to victory involved him and his newly announced running mate working to unite the country. 

“They're trying to divide America, but Nicole and I will unite it, and that's our path to victory,” he said. “That's how we're gonna forge an unstoppable coalition of homeless Democrats and homeless Republicans.

“We've all had the advantage of seeing what President Trump and President Biden can do for our country. Do any of you want more of the same?" he asked.

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Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s Twisted Fantasy

Armed with paranoid conspiracy theories about America’s descent into chronic sickness, loneliness, and depression, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is clearly targeting disenchanted Democratic voters. The scion of a storied political family appears to be lost in a twisted fantasy in which he realizes his forebears’ idealistic dreams.

NEW YORK – Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., scion of one of America’s most storied political families, is running for president of the United States. But unlike his late uncles – President John F. Kennedy and Senator Ted Kennedy (who unsuccessfully ran for president in 1980) – or his late father, Senator Robert F. Kennedy (who was assassinated during his own presidential run), RFK Jr. is not campaigning as a Democrat. Instead, he is running as the head of a newly formed third party, We the People . Thus unfolds the latest chapter in the bizarre and increasingly dangerous deformation of contemporary American politics.

Many political commentators have taken Kennedy to task for launching a spoiler campaign that could peel disenchanted Democrats away from President Joe Biden and hand the White House to Donald Trump. According to a Siena College poll of voters in six battleground states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), more Democrats than Republicans (18% versus 16%) appear likely to back Kennedy. Little wonder the billionaire Republican megadonor Timothy Mellon has been bankrolling Kennedy’s super PAC (an ostensibly independent organization that can legally raise and spend unlimited sums on a candidate’s behalf).

Kennedy’s choice of running mate , Nicole Shanahan, a 38-year-old patent attorney and past supporter of Democratic causes and candidates, offers further evidence that Kennedy is targeting Democratic voters. Shanahan calls herself a disenchanted Democrat, and she has publicly invited like-minded others to jump onto the Kennedy bandwagon. As part of her 2023 divorce settlement with Google co-founder Sergey Brin, she reportedly sought more than $1 billion (a mere 1% of his estimated net worth). That sum would place her in an uncommonly advantageous position to help finance the complex and expensive effort to get Kennedy on the ballot in all 50 states.

Notwithstanding all the uncertainties Kennedy’s campaign has created, one thing is clear: populism is on the rise in both parties, from the left and the right. Both Trump and Kennedy have converged on classic populist themes, though with a few intriguing variations. For example, compare Trump’s 2017 inaugural address to Kennedy’s recent “state of the union” speech . Their central trope is identical: the loss and restoration of American greatness.

Trump’s grim narrative of America’s fall from greatness features “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones,” infrastructure that “has fallen into disrepair and decay,” with the “wealth of our middle class … ripped from their homes and distributed across the entire world,” and with “millions and millions of American workers left behind.” While Washington elites prosper, “the people have borne the cost.” Trump promises to reverse the decline by putting “America first.”

Kennedy, too, sees a landscape littered with carnage. But his narrative gives prominence to “chronic illness,” “depression,” “mental illness,” and “loneliness.” Like Trump, he complains of dilapidated infrastructure and a middle class that has been “hollowed out.” And like Trump, he blames the elites: “All the new wealth of the last generation has gone to the billionaires and to transnational corporations.” But, from Kennedy’s perspective, the greatest evil of all is that America has become “the sickest country on Earth.” His pledge is to ‘make America healthy again.’

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Kennedy’s emphasis on health reflects his public work as an environmental lawyer and, in recent years, as a staunch anti-vaccine crusader. He sees a cabal of sinister corporations and public officials conspiring to poison the environment and the body politic – one body at a time. At the height of the pandemic, he falsely claimed that the COVID-19 vaccines were “proven to have negative efficacy, causing people to be more prone to infection than doing nothing at all.” He reportedly even went so far as to assert that COVID-19 was “ethnically targeted” to spare “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.”

If Kennedy’s emphasis on healing suggests someone who has been through “recovery,” that is because he has. Following the trauma of losing both his father and his uncle to assassins’ bullets, Kennedy battled, and ultimately overcame, an addiction to heroin.

Like Kennedy, Shanahan also appears to be channeling personal affliction. She describes grappling with infertility, as well as the difficulties associated with raising her five-year-old daughter, Echo, who suffers from autism, which Shanahan says she spends 60% of her time researching. “Our children are not well,” Shanahan tells us . She firmly believes, despite numerous scientific studies disproving the claim, that vaccinating children has caused a steep rise in autism cases. She wants to stop pharmaceutical corporations from “contaminating” science and “capturing” regulatory agencies. Evincing a distinctly QAnon-style paranoia, she demands that they stop “guarding” the “mysteries” that “we can solve.”

No one seriously believes Kennedy can win the presidency. But there is good reason to believe he could tilt the balance toward Trump by luring Democrats (including younger voters like Shanahan), some independents, libertarians, and devotees of new-age healing, as well as aging idealists still inspired by the candidate’s father and uncles.

Armed with paranoid conspiracy theories about America’s descent into chronic sickness, loneliness, and depression, Kennedy has heedlessly spread lies about the putative dangers of life-saving vaccines while mouthing platitudes about resilience and healing. To all appearances, he remains caught in a twisted fantasy that he just might be the one who will realize his father’s idealistic dreams of a better America.

The likelier outcome is a waking nightmare: an illiberal America presided over by someone RFK Jr.’s forebears would consider the country’s most dangerous domestic foe.

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In RFK Jr.’s campaign against censorship, he made a false attack on Biden

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Statement: “President Biden is the first candidate in history, the first president in history, that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech ... to censor his opponent."

Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. accused President Joe Biden of being a greater "threat to democracy" than former President Donald Trump, arguing that Biden censored him.

"President Biden is the first candidate in history, the first president in history that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech or to censor his opponent," Kennedy said in an  April 1 interview  on CNN. 

Kennedy, who is running as an independent, referred to his lawsuit against the federal government in which he alleges the government censored his social media statements against vaccines. A judge granted Kennedy’s request for a preliminary injunction in the case, although it was stayed pending a ruling in another case.

Prep for the polls: See who is running for president and compare where they stand on key issues in our Voter Guide

Biden, Kennedy said on CNN, "started censoring — not just me — but 37 hours after he took the oath of office, he was censoring me. No president in the country has ever done that."

Kennedy then pivoted to a lawsuit two Republican-led states filed to challenge the federal government’s communications with social media companies. "The greatest threat to democracy is not somebody who questions election returns, but a president of the United States who uses the power of his office to force the social media companies … to censor his political critics," he said.

There are a few problems with Kennedy’s statement. 

First, he wasn’t Biden’s political opponent in January 2021, when a Biden administration official noticed Kennedy posting an anti-vaccine conspiracy theory and contacted Twitter. Kennedy didn’t declare his presidential run until April 2023.Second, history shows there have been other U.S. presidents who have taken far more extreme measures to silence political dissent. 

Third, the court cases that Kennedy alluded to remain pending; Kennedy can continue to freely make statements about vaccines. Experts told PolitiFact that the Biden administration’s efforts to get social media platforms to moderate false posts is not the same as censoring opponents.

We emailed the Kennedy campaign press team and received a response that our request for comment was under consideration.

Biden White House sought removal of COVID-19 misinformation

Kennedy wrote Jan. 22, 2021, on Twitter, that U.S. Baseball Hall of Famer  Hank Aaron died  as "part of a wave of suspicious deaths among elderly" following his COVID-19 vaccine.  Aaron , 86, died from unrelated natural causes, a medical examiner found.

A Biden White House official  emailed Twitter  on Jan. 23, 2021, and said, "Wondering if we can get moving on the process for having it removed ASAP." 

At the time,  social media companies , including Twitter, had developed policies to handle false or misleading claims about COVID-19. 

Kennedy’s post wasn’t removed; it is still live today. 

Instagram’s parent company disabled Kennedy’s personal Instagram account in  February 2021  for spreading false claims about COVID-19 and vaccines, but restored it after he launched his presidential bid more than two years later. His  Instagram account  has nearly 2 million followers.

Courts weighing censorship question 

Kennedy, along with his legal advocacy group Children’s Health Defense and a Louisiana resident  sued  the administration in 2023, arguing that the government worked to have tech companies suppress First Amendment-protected speech, including items that could make the public "hesitant" toward COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

The lawsuit states that a Biden spokesperson accused Kennedy of "producing 65% of anti-vaccine misinformation on social-media platforms."

The lawsuit is not only about COVID-19 posts or posts by Kennedy — it alleges that the government sought to suppress posts about the 2020 election and Hunter Biden’s laptop. The  lawsuit  says that "efforts by federal officers to induce social-media platforms to censor speech appear to have begun in 2020," which would have been under Trump, and criticizes actions by the Biden administration, which started in January 2021. 

Although Kennedy received a  preliminary injunction  in the case, that February ruling was stayed until the U.S. Supreme Court rules in a related case brought by Missouri and Louisiana. The states accuse the Biden administration of breaching the First Amendment by discussing content moderation with social media companies, suppressing conservatives’ content about COVID-19 and voting by mail.

The  Justice Department argued , "Social-media users have a First Amendment right to be free from governmental restrictions on their speech, but they have no First Amendment right to post content on private platforms that the platforms would prefer not to host." 

Experts poke holes in ‘censorship’ characterization, but look to courts

Sheri Berman, a political science professor at Barnard College at Columbia University, said Kennedy’s being among the people spreading false or dangerous information does not mean that the Biden administration "was attacking him, as an individual citizen or as a potential opponent of Biden."

Berman said it’s reasonable for citizens and candidates to debate how much social media moderation should exist. 

"However, general attempts to limit the spread of dangerous or false information about extremely sensitive and consequential topics — like elections results or the efficacy of vaccines during a pandemic — is not a threat to democracy," Berman said.

Thomas Healy, a law professor at Seton Hall Law School, said the Supreme Court will ultimately resolve the question of whether the Biden administration engaged in censorship.

"The federal government is entitled to use the bully pulpit to advance its policy goals, and most modern administrations have done so," Healy said. "Such communications would rise to the level of censorship only if the encouragement crossed the line into coercion, and that is a factual question."

Two lower courts ruled that the government likely did engage in coercion, but a majority of the Supreme Court  seemed skeptical  of that claim during March oral arguments.

"Even if the Supreme Court agrees with the lower courts that the Biden administration violated the First Amendment, its actions are a far cry from the punishment of political opponents we have seen at earlier moments in American history and that Donald Trump has promised to pursue if reelected," Healy said.

Past presidents took actions against the press

Whatever happens with the current court cases, history is clear about one thing: Past U.S. administrations have imposed far more extreme policies in response to government criticism. Four examples:

• President John Adams  in 1798 signed the  Sedition Act , which permitted the deportation, fine or imprisonment of anyone deemed a threat or who published "false, scandalous, or malicious writing" against the U.S. government.  Many newspaper editors who criticized Adams’ administration were prosecuted. The unpopular law contributed to Adams’ presidential election defeat in 1800, and the law expired. 

Steven Levitsky, a government professor at Harvard University, called Kennedy’s comparison baseless and "reckless." "In Adams' time," he said, "newspapers were virtually the ONLY form of expression." 

• President Woodrow Wilson  signed the  Sedition Act of 1918 , which made it a crime to write or publish "any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language" about the government or the war effort. Wilson’s Justice Department brought about 2,000 indictments under the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 and 1918, Healy, the Seton Hall law professor, said. One of the people jailed under the acts was Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party leader who ran for president against Wilson in 1912. Debs was arrested in 1918 after giving an antiwar speech and  convicted  of violating the Espionage Act of 1917. He ran for president in 1920 under the Socialist Party banner from a federal prison in Alabama and his prison sentence was later commuted. 

In 1917, Wilson issued  an executive order  creating the Records of the Committee on Public Information, which was a "a vast effort in propaganda," Boston University journalism professor Christopher Daly  wrote .

• The Justice Department in the late 1940s and 1950s under Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower prosecuted the Communist Party of America’s leaders under the Smith Act, which made it a crime to advocate for the U.S. government’s overthrow by violence or force, Healy said. "The evidence against them showed that they were mainly teaching the doctrines of Marx and Lenin; there was no evidence that they were taking concrete steps to initiate a violent overthrow," Healy said.
• President Abraham Lincoln  in May 1864 issued an  executive order  commanding Union Army Maj. Gen. John A. Dix to "arrest and imprison in any fort or military prison in your command the editors, proprietors, and publishers" of newspapers that printed a forged presidential proclamation calling for the drafting of 400,000 more troops. News accounts at the time said newspaper offices were seized and at least one proprietor was arrested.

Kennedy said "President Biden is the first candidate in history, the first president in history, that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech ... to censor his opponent."

There are several factual issues with the claim. Kennedy was referring to a Biden administration official emailing Twitter in January 2021, asking the platform to remove Kennedy’s false post about the COVID-19 vaccine causing Hank Aaron’s death.Kennedy didn’t announce his presidential candidacy for more than two years after that post, which remains live on X.

Kennedy has sued the administration over its communications with social media companies. And courts are weighing whether these communications amount to censorship.

But even if someone deems the Biden administration’s actions censorship, Kennedy is wrong about history. Presidents John Adams and Woodrow Wilson signed sedition legislation that made it a crime to criticize the federal government. Those laws led to the prosecution of political figures, including Eugene Debs, who ran for president. Their actions also targeted the free press.

We rate this statement False. 

PolitiFact copy chief Matthew Crowley and researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this fact-check.

RFK Jr. speaks candidly about his gravelly voice: ‘If I could sound better, I would’

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There was a time before the turn of the millennium when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gave a full-throated accounting of himself and the things he cared about. He recalls his voice then as “unusually strong,” so much so that he could fill large auditoriums with his words. No amplification needed.

The independent presidential candidate recounts those times somewhat wistfully, telling interviewers that he “can’t stand” the sound of his voice today — sometimes choked, halting and slightly tremulous.

The cause of RFK Jr.’s vocal distress? Spasmodic dysphonia, a rare neurological condition, in which an abnormality in the brain’s neural network results in involuntary spasms of the muscles that open or close the vocal cords.

My voice doesn’t really get tired. It just sounds terrible.

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“I feel sorry for the people who have to listen to me,” Kennedy said in a phone interview with The Times, his voice sounding as strained as it does in his public appearances. “My voice doesn’t really get tired. It just sounds terrible. But the injury is neurological, so actually the more I use the voice the stronger it tends to get.”

Since declaring his bid for the presidency a year ago, the 70-year-old environmental lawyer has discussed his frayed voice only on occasion, usually when asked by a reporter. He told The Times: “If I could sound better, I would.”

SD, as it’s sometimes known, affects about 50,000 people in North America, although that estimate may be off because of undiagnosed and misdiagnosed cases, according to Dysphonia International , a nonprofit that organizes support groups and helps fund research.

As with Kennedy, cases typically arise in midlife, though increased recognition of SD has led to more people being diagnosed at younger ages. The disorder, also known as laryngeal dystonia, hits women more often than men.

Internet searches for the condition have spiked, as Kennedy and his gravelly voice have become regular staples on the news. When Dysphonia International posted an article answering the query, “What is wrong with RFK Jr.’s voice?,” it got at least 10 times the traffic of other items.

Those with SD usually have healthy vocal cords. Because of this, and the fact that it makes some people sound like they are on the verge of tears, some doctors once believed that the croaking or breathy vocalizations were tied to psychological trauma. They often prescribed treatment by a psychotherapist.

But in the early 1980s, researchers, including Dr. Herbert Dedo of UC San Francisco, recognized that SD was a condition rooted in the brain.

Researchers have not been able to find the cause or causes of the disorder. There is speculation that a genetic predisposition might be set off by some event — physical or emotional — that triggers a change in neural networks.

Some who live with SD say the spasms came out of the blue, seemingly unconnected to other events, while others report that it followed an emotionally devastating personal setback, an injury accident or a severe infection.

Kennedy said he was teaching at Pace University School of Law in White Plains, N.Y., in 1996 when he said he first noticed a problem with his voice. He was 42 years old.

His campaigns for clean water and other causes in those days meant that he traveled the country, sometimes appearing in court, sometimes giving speeches. He lectured, of course, in his law school classes and even co-hosted a radio show. Asked if it was hard to hear his voice gradually devolve, Kennedy said: “I would say it was ironic, because I made my living on my voice.”

“For years people asked me if I had any trauma at that time,” he said. “My life was a series of traumas so … so there was nothing in particular that stood out.”

RFK Jr. names California tech lawyer Nicole Shanahan as his vice presidential choice

Kennedy, a long shot presidential candidate, announced his decision in Oakland, where Shanahan, 38, grew up.

March 26, 2024

Kennedy was just approaching his 10th birthday when his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated. At 14, his father was shot to death in Los Angeles, on the night he won California’s 1968 Democratic primary for president.

RFK Jr. also lost two younger brothers: David died at age 28 of a heroin overdose in 1984 and Michael died in 1997 in a skiing accident in Aspen, Colo., while on the slopes with family members, including then-43-year-old RFK Jr.

It was much more recently, and two decades after the speech disorder first cropped up, that Kennedy came up with a theory about a possible cause. Like many of his other highly controversial and oft-debunked pronouncements in recent years, it involved a familiar culprit — a vaccine.

Kennedy said that while he was preparing litigation against the makers of flu vaccines in 2016, his research led him to the written inserts that manufacturers package along with the medications. He said he saw spasmodic dysphonia on a long list of possible side effects. “That was the first I ever realized that,” he said.

Although he acknowledged there is no proof of a connection between the flu vaccines he once received annually and SD, he told The Times he continues to view the flu vaccine as “at least a potential culprit.”

RFK Jr.’s campaign is celebrating Cesar Chavez Day. The labor icon’s family is not having it

Relatives of Cesar Chavez decry the Kennedy campaign’s use of the late labor icon’s image. The candidate’s father, RFK, was an ally of the farmworkers union Chavez co-founded.

March 29, 2024

Kennedy said he no longer has the flu vaccine paperwork that triggered his suspicion, but his campaign forwarded a written disclosure for a later flu vaccine. The 24-page document lists commonly recognized adverse reactions, including pain, swelling, muscle aches and fever.

It also lists dozens of other less common reactions that users said they experienced. “Dysphonia” is on the list, though the paperwork adds that “it is not always possible to reliably estimate their frequency or establish a causal relationship to the vaccine.”

Public health experts have previously slammed Kennedy and his anti-vaccine group, Children’s Health Defense, for advancing unsubstantiated claims, including that vaccines cause autism and that COVID-19 vaccines caused a spike of sudden deaths among healthy young people.

Dr. Timothy Brewer, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at UCLA, said an additional study cited by the Kennedy campaign to The Times referred to reported adverse reactions that were both unverified and extremely rare.

“We shouldn’t minimize risks or overstate them,” Brewer said. “With these influenza vaccines there are real benefits that so far outweigh the potential harm cited here that it’s not worth considering those types of reactions further.”

Anyone with concerns about influenza vaccine side effects should consult their physician, he said.

So what does research suggest about SD?

“We just don’t know what brings it on,” said Dr. Michael Johns, director of the USC Voice Center and an authority on spasmodic dysphonia. “Intubation, emotional trauma, physical trauma, infections and vaccinations are all things that are incredibly common. And it’s very hard to pin causation on something that is so common when this is a condition that is so rare.”

No two SD sufferers sound the same. For some, spasms push the vocal cords too far apart, creating breathy and nearly inaudible speech. For others, like Kennedy, the larynx muscles push the vocal cords closer together, creating a strained or strangled delivery.

“I would say it was a very, very slow progression,” Kennedy said last week. “I think my voice was getting worse and worse.”

There were times when mornings were especially difficult.

“When I opened my mouth, I would have no idea what would come out, if anything,” he said.

One of the most common treatments for the disorder is injecting Botox into the muscles that bring the vocal cords together.

Kennedy said he received Botox injections every three or four months for about 10 years. But he called the treatment “not a good fit for me,” because he was “super sensitive to the Botox.” He recalled losing his voice entirely after the injections, before it would return, somewhat smoother, in the days that followed.

Looking for a surgical solution, Kennedy traveled to Japan in May, 2022. Surgeons in Kyoto implanted a titanium bridge between his vocal cords (also known as vocal folds) to keep them from pressing together.

He told a YouTube interviewer last year that his voice was getting “better and better,” an improvement he credited to the surgery and to alternative therapies, including chiropractic care.

The procedure has not been approved by regulators in the U.S.

Johns cautioned that titanium bridge surgeries haven’t been consistently effective or durable, with some reports of the devices fracturing, despite being implanted by reputable doctors. He suggested that the more promising avenue for future breakthroughs will be in treating the “primary condition, which is in the brain.”

Researchers are now trying to find the locations in the brain that send faulty signals to the larynx. Once those neural centers are located, doctors might use deep brain stimulation — like a pacemaker for the brain — to block the abnormal signals that cause vocal spasms. (Deep brain stimulation is already used to treat patients with Parkinson’s disease and other afflictions.)

Column: Trump’s vice presidential show and Kennedy’s kamikaze mission

The ex-president tends to think aloud and let us in on his deliberations. But his choice of a vice presidential running mate remains a mystery, like Kennedy’s path to victory.

April 4, 2024

Long and grueling presidential campaigns have stolen the voice of many candidates. But Kennedy said he is not concerned, since his condition is based on a neural disturbance, not one in his voice box.

“Actually, the more I use the voice, the stronger it tends to get,” he said. “It warms up when I speak.”

Kennedy was asked if the loss of his full voice felt particularly frustrating, given his family’s legacy of ringing oratory. He replied, his voice still raspy, “Like I said, it’s ironic.”

More to Read

Column: It’s not just RFK Jr.: Biden faces serious danger from third-party candidates

April 8, 2024

Goldberg: Voters wishing for an alternative to Trump and Biden got one. Unfortunately, it’s RFK Jr.

April 2, 2024

Letters to the Editor: What RFK Jr.’s vice presidential pick says about his candidacy

March 31, 2024

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James Rainey has covered multiple presidential elections, the media and the environment, mostly at the Los Angeles Times, which he first joined in 1984. He was part of Times teams that won three Pulitzer Prizes.

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Democrats, and some Republicans, worry that RFK Jr. will be 'spoiler' in November election

by MATTHEW GALKA and JACKSON SINNENBERG | The National Desk

WASHINGTON (TND) — While President Joe Biden has begun to pull ahead of former President Donald Trump in head-to-head polling, surveys that include independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. throw the count off balance.

A Morning Consult poll released Monday showed Biden 2 points ahead of his predecessor (splitting the vote 44-42) and a Quinnipiac poll from March 27 put Biden 3 points up (48-45). However that same Quinnipiac poll, and a Trafalgar Group poll from Tuesday, both show the sitting president losing in November when third-party candidates are considered as well, especially leading independent RFK Jr.

In fact, the RealClearPolitics polling average has Trump leading Biden by an average of 3.5 points in a hypothetical matchup that also includes Kennedy, Dr. Cornel West and Jill Stein.

While Kennedy initially ran in the Democratic primary -- following in the footsteps of his uncles President John F. Kennedy and Ted Kennedy as well as his father RFK senior -- he switched to an independent run and has since been using his platform to criticize Biden, who he argues is a greater threat to American liberal democracy than Trump.

President Biden is a much worse threat to democracy," the candidate said on CNN Monday night. "President Biden is the first president in history that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech.

Kennedy's primary argument revolves around the claim shared by many conservatives that the Biden administration worked with social media companies like Twitter and Meta to censor vaccine-and-COVID-skeptic voices as the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines rolled out in 2021. The Biden administration has defended its relationships with the companies, arguing about the necessity to fight disinformation, while reporters and analysts have noted the communiques were requests from the White House and not orders that the companies were required, or even did follow (The National Desk reported extensively on debunking these claims during "The Twitter Files").

Kennedy himself was temporarily banned from the Meta-owned Instagram in 2021 for sharing debunked theories about the COVID vaccines, which may be fueling his arguments about "free speech" on the campaign trail. However, Kennedy has been kept at arm's length by the party his family helped build due to his history of vaccine skepticism, going back before COVID times, despite his longtime commitment to prominent Democratic stances like environmentalism, being anti-war, and anti-big business.

"If he’s also taking votes on their cardinal issue - democracy, free speech - that’s an additional threat to the Democrats," Dr. Richard Vatz, professor emeritus at Towson University's Department of Instructional Leadership and Professional Development, said of Kennedy in an interview with The National Desk.

However, his talk on the environment and corporate greed is pulling in some young progressives, who have become increasingly disillusioned with Biden over his continued support for Israel in the wake of its war in Gaza. An Ipsos poll published on March 22 found that Kennedy led among Gen Z and Gen X voters, ahead of their overall share of the population, and among people making less than $50,000 a year. However, Biden led both Kennedy and Trump with registered voters.

That is a concern echoed by staunch Democrats in Kennedy's own family -- like his sister, Rory, who is concerned her brother is handing Trump the keys to the White House for a second round -- and longtime Democratic strategist James Carville, who said in a televised speech at Politicon Sunday that the Democrats are "not just shedding" young voters but "they're leaving in droves.

Polling has yet to catch up with the impact Kennedy's new running mate , 38-year-old lawyer and philanthropist Nicole Shanahan, has on his emerging voting base. The Daily Show interviewed RFK Jr. supporters outside the Oakland rally where he introduced Shanahan and reactions were mixed, with one even calling the appointment "depressing."

Kennedy is also fundraising strongly off of donors who have also contributed to Trump, raising growing concerns amongst the former president's power base as he seeks cash to help offset campaign spending on his legal bills.

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Robert F Kennedy campaign calls January 6 rioters ‘activists’ in email

Independent US presidential candidate’s team later said statement in its fundraising email ‘was an error’ not reflective of his views

A spokesperson for the independent US presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr said a passage in a fundraising email that called January 6 prisoners “activists … stripped of their constitutional liberties” was the result of an error by an outside contractor.

“That statement was an error that does not reflect Mr Kennedy’s views,” the spokesperson, Stefanie Spear, told NBC News , which first reported the fundraising email. “It was inserted by a new marketing contractor and slipped through the normal approval process.”

The email, sent by Team Kennedy, asked for “help … call[ing] out the illiberal actions of our very own government”.

It also said: “This is the reality that every American citizen faces – from Ed Snowden to Julian Assange to the J6 activists sitting in a Washington DC jail cell stripped of their constitutional liberties.”

Snowden, who leaked information about National Security Agency surveillance to outlets including the Guardian, has lived in Russia for 10 years. Assange founded WikiLeaks, which leaked US national security information, also to outlets including the Guardian. Jailed in the UK since April 2019, he is fighting extradition to the US.

On 6 January 2021, Congress was attacked by a mob Donald Trump told to “fight like hell” to block certification of his election defeat by Joe Biden, in support of Trump’s electoral fraud lie. Nine deaths are now linked to the riot, including law enforcement suicides. More than 1,300 arrests have been made and nearly a thousand convictions secured, some for seditious conspiracy.

Trump was impeached for inciting an insurrection, but acquitted when enough Senate Republicans stayed loyal. As the presumptive GOP nominee for president this year, he has called January 6 prisoners “hostages” and “unbelievable patriots” and featured at rallies a rendition of the national anthem by some held in a Washington jail.

Trump has said that if re-elected, he will “free the January 6 hostages being wrongfully imprisoned”.

An attorney by training, Kennedy, 70, is the son of a US attorney general, Robert F Kennedy, and nephew of a former president, John F Kennedy. Though his independent campaign is unlikely to win the White House, he has polled strongly. If elected, he has said , he will pardon Snowden and Assange and “look at individual cases” regarding January 6.

Kennedy has also said Biden presents “a much worse threat to democracy” than Trump, because of supposed suppression of free speech regarding the coronavirus pandemic – a comment Kennedy, a prominent vaccine skeptic and Covid conspiracy theorist , then claimed was deceptively edited.

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On Thursday, reporting the Team Kennedy email that called January 6 prisoners “activists”, NBC detailed how just 15 such Trump supporters are being held without having been convicted.

“Most of them are credibly accused of violence against law enforcement officials,” NBC said .

Examples included two prisoners who have killed people, one “charged with setting off an explosive in a tunnel full of police officers” during the Capitol attack and one “charged with conspiring to kill the FBI employees who worked on his case, a plot that allegedly unfolded after his initial pretrial release”.

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Election Updates: Trump fund-raiser yields more than $50.5 million, campaign says.

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Michael Gold

John Paulson, the hedge fund manager hosting a fund-raising dinner tonight for Donald Trump in Palm Beach, Fla., said in a statement that the dinner had raised “over $43 million so far” from “a broad spectrum of donors.”

On his social media site, Donald Trump, who faces 88 felony charges in four criminal cases, once again likened himself to Nelson Mandela, who spent more than two decades in prison in South Africa as he fought apartheid. Trump, who made the comparison last year in New Hampshire, frequently labels the cases against him a politically motivated effort to keep him from taking back the White House.

Neil Vigdor

Authorities in Vermont have opened an arson investigation into a Friday morning fire outside the Burlington office of Senator Bernie Sanders, who was not there at the time. They said that they were searching for a man who sprayed an “apparent accelerant” on the entrance door to the third-floor office, which sustained water damage from the sprinkler system.

Donald Trump is set to attend a major fund-raiser tonight in Palm Beach, Fla., that he and his campaign hope will help them close a major cash gap they face against the Biden campaign. The event, hosted by a hedge fund billionaire, is expected to raise more than $30 million, according to two people involved in the planning.

Chris Cameron

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign again sought to clean up the candidate’s statements about the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, retracting a false claim made on Friday that the rioters “carried no weapons” while leaving in place other false claims that downplayed the attack’s severity. It was the second day in a row that the Kennedy campaign had to retract a statement addressing the riot.

Reporting from Palm Beach, Fla.

Trump fund-raiser rakes in more than $50.5 million, campaign says.

For several hours on Saturday evening, drivers on a typically scenic stretch of Palm Beach, Fla., had their views of the coast obscured by a line of luxury vehicles whose owners were mingling inside a mansion across the road.

The shoreline-blocking Range Rovers, Aston Martins and Bentleys hinted at the deep-pocketed donors attending a fund-raising dinner for former President Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign, which it and the Republican National Committee said had raised more than $50.5 million.

The event, hosted by the billionaire John Paulson at his home, followed a concerted push by the Trump campaign to address a longstanding financial disparity with President Biden and Democrats as both parties gear up for the general election.

The reported total, which cannot be independently verified ahead of campaign finance filings in the coming months, is nearly double the $26 million that President Biden’s campaign said it raised last month at a celebrity-studded event at Radio City Music Hall in New York City.

Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, senior advisers to the former president who are effectively his campaign managers, said in a statement that the total made it “clearer than ever that we have the message, the operation and the money to propel President Trump to victory on November 5.”

Mr. Trump’s event, just down the road from his home at Mar-a-Lago, was in some ways a less flashy affair than its Democratic antecedent, one that traded Hollywood star power and New York City energy for a warmer clime, an abundance of palm trees and the manicured lawns typical of an island refuge for the moneyed elite.

But expectations ahead of the dinner were high, with Mr. Paulson and Trump campaign advisers vowing to outdo the Biden event. An invitation obtained by The New York Times suggested a contribution of $814,600 or the comparatively more modest $250,000.

The money raised, according to the invitation, will be directed to the Trump 47 Committee, a shared fund-raising agreement among the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee and roughly 40 state parties. Such joint accounts can take in checks of as much as $814,600.

Mr. Trump, who has long had a penchant for superlatives, had predicted on his social media site, Truth Social, that the dinner would be the “biggest night in Fund Raising of ALL TIME!!!”

The former president arrived shortly before 7 p.m. with his wife, Melania Trump, who has made sparse appearances at political events during her husband’s third presidential campaign. “This has been some incredible evening before it even starts,” Mr. Trump said before posing for a photo with Mr. Paulson and entering the house.

Around 100 people were expected to attend the dinner, with a number of billionaires on the guest list.

Among the event’s co-chairs were familiar megadonors and Trump allies, including Rebekah Mercer, a major donor to Mr. Trump in 2016; Linda McMahon, a former Trump cabinet official; and Robert Bigelow, who backed Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in the Republican primary but in February donated $5 million to Mr. Trump’s super PAC.

Not all of those who wrote checks opted to attend. John Catsimatidis, a New York grocery store chain owner with a long history with Mr. Trump, was a co-chair of the event but said other commitments kept him from being present.

Under the shared fund-raising agreement, the first $6,600 of any contribution will go to Mr. Trump’s campaign. The next $5,000 will go to his Save America PAC, the political account he has used to pay his legal bills. (That amount is the maximum contribution allowed to Save America under federal rules.) The R.N.C. will get the next $413,000, and then will come dozens of state parties.

Mr. Trump and his team have effectively taken over the R.N.C., installing new leadership, pushing through layoffs and restructuring the national party’s operations to align it more closely with the campaign.

Fund-raising has been a major focus of the overhaul, particularly as Mr. Biden and Democrats have banked cash and built a significant financial advantage over the last several months.

The Biden campaign said earlier on Saturday that it, the Democratic Party and affiliated committees had raised more than $90 million in March, and that together they had $192 million on hand going into April. The Trump campaign said it and the Republican National Committee had raised $65.6 million in March, the former president’s best fund-raising month so far, and that they, along with their shared accounts, had $93.1 million on hand.

Mr. Biden’s campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, said in a statement that the Democratic fund-raising numbers stood in “stark contrast to Trump’s cash-strapped operation.”

Mr. Biden’s totals were helped in part by the glamorous event in front of 5,000 donors at the storied Radio City Music Hall. Mr. Biden and two of his Democratic predecessors, former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, were interviewed by the late-night host and comedian Stephen Colbert.

A number of musical guests, including Queen Latifah, Lizzo and Lea Michele, entertained the crowd.

The special guests billed on the invitation for the Trump fund-raiser were three of his former primary rivals who have since become campaign surrogates and joined him on the trail: Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota and Vivek Ramaswamy, the tech entrepreneur.

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.

Republican in charge of Ohio elections warns Biden could miss ballot deadline.

The Ohio secretary of state’s office, which is led by Frank LaRose, a Republican, said in a letter on Friday that President Biden could be left off the state’s ballot in November because Democrats were not scheduled to nominate him at their national convention until after the state’s certification deadline.

The letter was sent to Liz Walters, the chairwoman of the state’s Democratic Party, informing her that political parties must certify their presidential nominees at least 90 days before the general election under a state law that has been in effect since 2014.

That sets a deadline of Aug. 7, but the letter, which was signed by Mr. LaRose’s chief legal counsel, Paul Disantis, pointed out that the earliest that Democrats could formally nominate Mr. Biden for a second term would be on Aug. 19, when the party’s national convention will begin in Chicago.

“Therefore,” Mr. Disantis wrote, “pending further clarification, I am left to conclude that the Democratic National Committee must either move up its nominating convention or the Ohio General Assembly must act by May 9, 2024 (90 days prior to a new law’s effective date) to create an exception to this statutory requirement.”

The New York Times obtained a copy of the letter, which was first reported by ABC News .

Matt Keyes, a spokesman for the Ohio Democratic Party, said in an email on Saturday that the party was looking into the matter.

Obtaining an exception to the requirement could be difficult because Republicans control the state’s House, Senate and governor’s office.

The Biden campaign expressed confidence on Saturday that it would gain access to the ballot in Ohio, a traditional battleground state that has leaned Republican in recent elections. Former President Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, carried the state in 2016 against Hillary Clinton, as well as in 2020, when he lost to Mr. Biden.

“We’re monitoring the situation in Ohio, and we’re confident that Joe Biden will be on the ballot in all 50 states,” Josh Marcus-Blank, a Biden campaign spokesman, said in a statement on Saturday.

The Democratic National Committee did not immediately comment about the matter.

A spokeswoman for Mr. LaRose, who finished third in last month’s Republican primary for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, did not respond to a request for comment.

Nicholas Nehamas

Reporting from Washington

Biden reports major cash haul in March as Trump looks to catch up.

President Biden continued to build on his commanding financial advantage over former President Donald J. Trump, raising more than $90 million in March together with the Democratic Party and affiliated committees, his campaign said.

Mr. Biden, the party and their shared accounts now have $192 million on hand going into April, according to his campaign — more than double what Mr. Trump reported in his coffers this week. Since Mr. Biden began his re-election bid, 1.6 million Americans have donated money to him, his campaign said, reflecting a broad base of financial support.

These are “real investments that real Americans are making into this campaign,” said Rufus Gifford, the Biden campaign’s finance chair.

Mr. Gifford suggested that the campaign’s fund-raising strength was more important than polls that have consistently showed Mr. Biden trailing Mr. Trump.

“You can’t lie about the numbers,” Mr. Gifford said. “They’re not theoretical. It’s not a random poll that is just one moment in time.”

The president’s numbers were fueled by a $26 million haul from a fund-raiser at Radio City Music Hall in New York City that featured former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton . His campaign also said he raised $10 million in the 24 hours after his State of the Union address on March 7.

Mr. Trump has increased the pace of his own fund-raising, hosting wealthy donors at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla. His campaign said it and the Republican National Committee raised $65.6 million in March, Mr. Trump’s best fund-raising month so far. Trump campaign aides say they plan to out-raise Mr. Biden’s three-president bash with a major fund-raiser of their own on Saturday in Palm Beach.

But Mr. Biden’s prodigious March may take some of the wind out of Mr. Trump’s sails.

“We’ve got all the momentum now, and I think you’re going to continue to see it,” said Jeffrey Katzenberg, a co-chair of the Biden campaign. “These are spectacular outcomes for the campaign and a vote of confidence for the president and vice president.”

Of course, having the most money does not guarantee victory. And there are signs that Mr. Trump may continue to up his fund-raising.

March was the first month that Mr. Trump, now his party’s presumptive nominee, started to raise money in joint accounts with the R.N.C. Those accounts can accept far larger donations than Mr. Trump was allowed to in the primary.

Mr. Trump, the R.N.C. and their shared accounts roughly doubled their available cash on hand going into April. That figure now stands at $93.1 million, although it is still far less than Mr. Biden and the Democrats.

Shane Goldmacher and Reid J. Epstein contributed reporting.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. backtracks again on Jan. 6 claims.

For the second time in just over 24 hours, the independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has backpedaled after making claims that sympathized with the rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

After falsely asserting in a statement on Friday that the “protesters carried no weapons” during the attack, Mr. Kennedy issued a retraction on his campaign website later in the day acknowledging that he had been wrong.

“My understanding that none of the Jan. 6 rioters who invaded the Capitol were carrying firearms was incorrect,” he said. “Several have been convicted of carrying firearms into the Capitol building. Others assaulted Capitol Police with pepper spray, bludgeons and other makeshift weapons.”

Mr. Kennedy had been sowing doubt about whether the Capitol attack — which occurred while Congress was certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election — was a “true insurrection.” In his retraction, he sought to further clean up his earlier statements.

“This behavior is inexcusable,” he said of the violence. “I have never minimized or dismissed the seriousness of the riot or any crime committed on that day.”

Mr. Kennedy’s campaign put itself in a similar predicament on Thursday, when an email to supporters suggested that the Jan. 6 defendants were political prisoners and compared them to Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, and Edward J. Snowden, the former intelligence contractor who leaked details about U.S. surveillance programs. The email called for the release of Mr. Assange, who has been in prison in Britain while fighting his extradition to the United States.

“The Brits want to make sure our government doesn’t kill Assange,” the email said. “This is the reality that every American Citizen faces – from Ed Snowden, to Julian Assange to the J6 activists sitting in a Washington DC jail cell stripped of their Constitutional liberties.”

Later on Thursday, the campaign distanced itself from the comparison, saying in a statement that it was an “error” and did not reflect Mr. Kennedy’s views.

“It was inserted by a new marketing contractor and slipped through the normal approval process,” the campaign said. “The campaign has terminated its contract with this vendor.”

When asked on Saturday about its repeated backtracking in recent days, the campaign did not offer further comment.

Mr. Kennedy’s candidacy has unnerved Democrats and spawned fears that he could play spoiler to President Biden.

Mr. Kennedy is an environmental lawyer who has become better known for his anti-vaccine activism and his promotion of conspiracy theories . He joined the race last spring as a challenger for the Democratic nomination against Mr. Biden, but he abandoned the long-shot path in the fall to run as an independent .

Rebecca Davis O’Brien and Christopher Cameron contributed reporting.

Jesus Jiménez

A man started a fire outside Bernie Sanders’s Vermont office, the police say.

The authorities in Vermont said they were searching for a man who started a fire outside Senator Bernie Sanders’s office in Burlington on Friday morning.

The unidentified man walked into the vestibule of Senator Sanders’s office and sprayed an “apparent accelerant” on the entrance door to the third-floor office, before lighting the accelerant and fleeing, the Burlington Police Department said in a statement. It was unclear exactly what the man sprayed on the door.

“A significant fire engulfed the door and part of the vestibule,” which prevented staff members who were working inside the office from exiting, the Police Department said.

The building’s sprinkler system activated, which mostly put out the fire before firefighters arrived around 10:45 a.m., the Police Department said.

The Burlington Fire Department said that the door to the senator’s office “sustained moderate” damage from the fire, and that the third floor of the building and the floors below it also had water damage.

No injuries were reported. Senator Sanders, independent of Vermont, was not at the office at the time of the fire, his office said in a statement.

Investigators with the Vermont State Police determined that the fire was an act of arson. The authorities had not concluded a motive.

The Police Department released a photo from surveillance footage of the man who started the fire. In the photo, he is wearing a black jacket, dark-colored pants, white sneakers and an orange beanie.

Kathryn Van Haste, the Vermont state director for Senator Sanders, said in a statement, “We are grateful to the Burlington Fire and Police Departments who responded immediately today to a fire incident that took place in our office building.”

The United States Capitol Police and the Senate sergeant-at-arms were working with local authorities in Burlington investigating the fire, Ms. Van Haste said.

Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak of Burlington said in a statement that she was “relieved to hear that everyone made it out safely.”

Trump is holding court at a high-dollar fund-raiser tonight.

Former President Donald J. Trump is attending a high-dollar fund-raising dinner in Palm Beach, Fla., on Saturday night hosted by John Paulson, a hedge-fund billionaire who was one of the first people on Wall Street to back Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016.

The dinner is expected to raise at least $25 million for a new joint fund-raising account for Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign, the Republican National Committee and roughly 40 state parties. Some top donors have voiced concerns about paying into that account, fearing that their contributions could be used to pay the former president’s legal fees in light of the dozens of felony counts he faces in four separate criminal cases.

President Biden, who has spent much of the week working to rein in the humanitarian crisis in Gaza , continues to hold a commanding financial advantage over Mr. Trump. The president and the Democrats now have $192 million on hand going into April — more than double what Mr. Trump reported in his coffers this week.

Tonight’s extravagant fund-raiser — with individual tickets selling for up to $814,600 — is just one piece of Mr. Trump’s efforts to try to catch the president in the money race even as many polls show Mr. Trump leading Mr. Biden in key battleground states.

Big donors are signing checks at what feels like a turning point in the presidential race. Both major candidates have clinched their parties’ nominations, and the field of third-party and independent candidates is shaping up now that No Labels, the centrist organization that had hoped to field its own ticket, has officially abandoned its efforts .

Chief among those candidates is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who gained political prominence from his promotion of vaccine misinformation and conspiracy theories about the government. Mr. Kennedy typically polls in the midteens when surveys include him, but he is backed by a well-funded super PAC and recently took on a running mate with access to a Silicon Valley fortune .

Mr. Biden will be back on the campaign trail on Monday, traveling to Madison, Wis., to speak about student loan debt .

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RFK Jr. has repeatedly dismissed severity of the Jan. 6 attack: 'What's the worst thing that could happen?'

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has repeatedly dismissed the severity of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the U.S. Capitol over the last year, based on a series of interviews reviewed by NBC News. 

“What’s the worst thing that could happen? Right?” Kennedy asked in October on the Aubrey Marcus Podcast . “I mean, we have an entire military, Pentagon, a few blocks away.”

“Then, you know, put the ones who broke the law in jail and let’s move on,” he added. 

On Jan. 6, 2021, it took the National Guard more than three hours to respond to the crisis. In that time, more than 140 police officers were injured during the attack and five officers involved ultimately lost their lives in the months after. Members of Congress and then-Vice President Mike Pence were also evacuated from the House chamber, and the certification of the 2020 election was effectively delayed.  

Kennedy's campaign released a lengthy statement Friday afternoon in which he said that Jan. 6 "is one of the most polarizing topics on the political landscape. I am listening to people of diverse viewpoints on it in order to make sense of the event and what followed. I want to hear every side."

Kennedy's statement said that while it's "clear" that many people broke the law on Jan. 6, "I am concerned about the possibility that political objectives motivated the vigor of the prosecution of the J6 defendants, their long sentences, and their harsh treatment." He added that if elected president he will "appoint a special counsel — an individual respected by all sides — to investigate whether prosecutorial discretion was abused for political ends in this case."

In an interview last month on Fox News, Kennedy said that if elected president, he would “look at individual cases” when asked about potentially pardoning Jan. 6 rioters.

Last spring, Kennedy bemoaned Democrats’ “obsession” with the Jan. 6 attack. 

“To me, it’s much more serious if we’re starting to censor free speech. You can rebuild a Capitol,” Kennedy said on another podcast, The Jimmy Dore Show . 

On Thursday, as first reported by NBC News, Kennedy’s campaign walked back a fundraising email to supporters that referred to Jan. 6 defendants as “activists” who have been “stripped of their Constitutional liberties,” echoing Trump’s rhetoric about the 2021 riot.

Kennedy spokesperson Stephanie Spear later said the language was an “error.”

“That statement was an error that does not reflect Mr. Kennedy’s views. It was inserted by a new marketing contractor and slipped through the normal approval process,” she said.

Kennedy has also suggested that Biden is a greater threat to democracy than Trump, seemingly dismissing the consequences of the Republican’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss. His comments are based his contention that the Biden administration is unlawfully trying to pressure social media companies to remove certain content online. 

“What’s more dangerous? That or the president of the United States, who is instructing social media sites to censor his opponents?” Kennedy also said in his October interview. The former Democrat-turned independent candidate appeared to be referring to a case before the Supreme Court that could affect the level of contact between government officials and social media companies regarding content removal.

“I can make the argument that President Biden is the much worse threat to democracy , and the reason for that is President Biden is the first candidate in history, the first president in history, that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech ... to censor his opponent,” Kennedy said recently in an interview on CNN . 

Kennedy, a prominent anti-vaccine activist, has used social media to spread misinformation related to vaccines and Covid. In 2022, the Children’s Health Defense group, an anti-vaccine group led by Kennedy, was kicked off Instagram and Facebook, both owned by Meta, for such misinformation. 

In another instance, Kennedy, in a September interview with PragerU , suggested that he was “at least equally worried” about social media censorship as a physical assault on democracy like the Jan. 6 attack.

When asked in the exchange if he thought that the attack was an insurrection, Kennedy responded: “You know, I don’t know. I’ve seen all kinds of … contrary evidence, and I don’t — I have not, again, drilled down on it.”

Vaughn Hillyard is a correspondent for NBC News. 

Historic Speeches

Televised address to the nation on civil rights.

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About Historic Speech

Accession Number:  TNC:262 (excerpt)

Digital Identifier:  TNC-262-EX

Title:  Excerpt from a Report to the American People on Civil Rights, 11 June 1963

Date(s) of Materials:  11 June 1963

Description:  CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System) motion picture excerpt of President John F. Kennedy's full radio and television report to the American people on civil rights. See "Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1963: Item 237." In his speech the President responds to the threats of violence and obstruction on the University of Alabama campus following desegregation attempts, explaining that the United States was founded on the principle that all men are created equal and thus, all American students are entitled to attend public educational institutions, regardless of race. He also discusses how discrimination affects education, public safety, and international relations, noting that the country cannot preach freedom internationally while ignoring it domestically. The President asks Congress to enact legislation protecting all Americans' voting rights, legal standing, educational opportunities, and access to public facilities, but recognizes that legislation alone cannot solve the country's problems concerning race relations. Copyright restrictions apply.

Copyright Status:  © Columbia Broadcasting System. Non-exclusive licensing rights held by the JFK Library Foundation.

Physical Description:  1 film reel (black-and-white; sound; 16 mm; 1081 feet; 14 minutes)

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How Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Could Doom Joe Biden

A cross the street from the famed Mexican marketplace on Los Angeles’ Olvera Street, with steaming tacos and an all-female mariachi band playing the renowned “Cielito Lindo” for the crowd on Cesar Chavez Day, the event had all the trappings of a Democratic candidate’s GOTV rally. But with a bishop, a former Border Patrol supervisor and an anti-vaccine mandate Latino sheriff speaking as well, it could have just as easily been a Republican rally.

Neither was true. Saturday marked third-party candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s relaunch of “Viva Kennedy,” his Hispanic outreach program that harkens back to the first ever Latino vote campaign launched by Kennedy’s uncle, John F. Kennedy, during the 1960 presidential race.

To date, Kennedy is officially on the November ballot in just one state: Utah. But his campaign and an allied super PAC, American Values 2024, announced in the last month they have collected more than enough signatures to make the ballot in the critical Southwestern battlegrounds of Arizona and Nevada, where roughly one in five voters are Latino.

Those signatures are still subject to challenge, but if Kennedy does appear on the ballot, it could create dire complications for the Biden campaign. Latino Democrats are now taking the threat of Kennedy’s campaign deadly seriously after national and state leaders were briefed on a previously unreported poll in mid-February by Democratic group Equis Research, which showed Kennedy performing surprisingly well among Latino voters in a dozen battleground states, effectively splintering Biden’s Hispanic coalition from 2020, when he garnered 59 percent Hispanic support.

Kennedy’s popularity appears to be a function of name recognition and a general lack of enthusiasm for President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, not to mention voters brushing their views onto the somewhat empty canvas of his candidacy. The poll of 2,010 registered Latino voters found Kennedy winning one in five young Latino voters, and also reported him capturing a sizable 17 percent Latino support in Arizona and an even more robust 21 percent in Nevada— the highest number among the battleground states polled. The drag on Biden’s Latino support was so great in the survey that Trump was winning among Hispanics overall in 12 battleground states, 41 percent to Biden’s 34 percent.

If those numbers held in November, it would represent a seismic break in the Democratic coalition and a remaking of the electoral map, leading Democrats to likely lose Nevada and Arizona. In the wake of Trump’s 2020 gains with Hispanics from South Florida to the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas, and even in parts of New Jersey and California, Democrats could still rest easy because the entire Southwest held. But if Nevada and Arizona fall to Trump as a result of erosion in the Latino vote, it would mean Biden is likely suffering similar losses across the country, presaging an election loss.

“Kennedy is a golden name in Democratic politics and any support he derives comes almost totally at the expense of Biden,” Fernand Amandi, Obama’s Hispanic pollster for both of his campaigns, told POLITICO Magazine .

It’s hard to overstate just how small Biden’s margin for error is in either Arizona or Nevada. In 2020, when Biden became the first Democrat to turn Arizona blue since Bill Clinton in 1996, he won the state by less than 11,000 votes. In neighboring Nevada, his cushion was 34,000 votes, just 2.4 percentage points, and the state has continued to move toward Republicans since. The GOP knocked off Steve Sisolak in the midterms — the only incumbent Democratic governor to lose in 2022 — and came within 8,000 votes of doing the same to Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, the first Latina senator.

Nationally, those close to the Biden campaign wave away Kennedy’s possible impact and say they don’t believe the 70-year-old former environmental lawyer and son of former New York Democratic Sen. Robert Kennedy will get more than 1 percent of the vote. Yet even if he doesn’t, that’s still enough to alter the outcome — using the 2020 vote totals, 1 percent would still triple Biden’s winning margin four years ago.

“It’s a big threat to them if Kennedy gets on the ballot in these two states. He would be pulling more from Biden,” said Mike Noble, the founder of Arizona-based polling firm Noble Predictive Insights, which does polling in both states. “That road to 270 [Electoral College votes] runs through the Southwest, and for them to dismiss him is silly.”

A disproportionately younger Latino electorate made its presence felt in 2020, and the Brookings Institution later identified Nevada and Arizona — where young Latinos make up 40 percent of all newly eligible voters — as swing states "where Latino youth participation in the 2020 election was decisive."

But while Latinos were largely responsible for Biden sweeping the Southwest four years ago, the 2024 election has been marked by an encroaching sense of fear among Democrats due to Biden’s lack of popularity and enduring soft support among Hispanics thus far.

As Latinos window shop for November, some are finding Kennedy. Active Facebook groups have sprung up in support of the Democrat-turned-independent, some led by campaign staff, others organically, with two top national groups having a combined 31,000 members. Smaller state groups have popped up too in Arizona and Nevada, where they discuss topics like Kennedy’s vice presidential pick, Silicon Valley attorney and entrepreneur Nicole Shanahan, and ballot access strategy.

Several of Kennedy’s young Latino supporters in these groups seemed less driven by a family legacy forged in the 1960s, and more by a feeling of being lost in a two-party system they don’t see serving them, particularly around health care.

A former Obama voter, Ismael Brandon Hernandez is a 29-year-old, Mexican American Army veteran who lives in Peoria, Arizona. He left the military in 2017 after four years, with a traumatic brain injury, and has since had two failed back surgeries. He’s had a bad experience with the Veteran Affairs hospital system and is frustrated by how expensive his parent’s medical bills are, which means Obamacare also draws his ire. In his estimation, Trump’s tax law made the VA even worse.

Kennedy’s call to revamp health care in America towards chronic diseases and to make Americans healthier in general gives Hernandez hope.

“He encourages me to vote for him and makes me so interested and more serious about my country,” he said. “I’ve abandoned the state of our current democracy, I don’t support Republicans or Democrats, I’m all for independents.”

There’s no mistaking another source of support for Kennedy, the kind that can be a benefit to newcomers to the spotlight of the national political stage. Like Obama in 2008, or even Trump in 2016, voters can sometimes stamp their own stances and hopes and dreams onto candidates whose images are not quite filled in yet.

Lexi Shay Gonzales, 27, who runs a construction cleaning company and a production company, and lives in East Mesa, Arizona, said she believed that with his environmental record, Kennedy could help solve her state’s water issues.

But when asked about his ideas for fixing water issues in Arizona in an interview with POLITICO Magazine , however, Kennedy simply said it was an issue he’d “love to hear any suggestions with.”

“In my head, I think he could be the next step to making America great again,” Gonzales said, adding that frustration over health care was a driver of her support of Kennedy.

There would appear to be a disconnect between Kennedy’s promises to promote America’s health while being staunchly anti-vaccine. But that isn’t an issue for Gonzales, who said she herself is “50/50” on vaccines, did not get vaccinated during the pandemic and believes some vaccines are needed, but others aren’t necessary.

The Biden campaign and White House allies contend that RFK Jr.’s numbers will never be better than they are now and say that as Latinos learn about him and his fringe positions — including his anti-vaccine views — they will no longer support him.

Matt Barreto, a pollster and consultant who has worked with the White House and the Biden campaign, said third-party support is already baked into the election calculus in swing states — meaning each previous election had third-party candidates who drew a very small percentage of support.

“He has an extremely low probability of getting more than 1 percent in any of these states on Election Day,” Barreto said. “Right now, he’s an idea, not an actual real candidate, and as the campaign progresses and he becomes a candidate, his numbers will go down.”

Barreto added that Kennedy “doesn’t have any stronger appeal with Latinos” than he has overall, or any connection with the Latino community “aside from the Kennedy name.”

Even so, Democrats — some driven by data they’re seeing like the Equis poll — are now acting as if they need Kennedy out of the picture to have a fighting chance against Trump in what is expected to be an exceptionally close election decided by a small universe of states.

In the wake of February’s Equis Research poll, the national Democratic group Latino Victory Fund told POLITICO Magazine it plans to raise “millions of dollars” for a public education campaign that says “a third-party vote is a vote for Trump.”

Sindy Benavides, the group’s president and CEO, said it is still having internal discussions on what direction the effort will take, with the group said to be conducting polling and focus groups to decide if Kennedy is enough of a threat to warrant being explicitly named in the campaign.

The DNC, which brought on muscle to deal with the RFK Jr. challenge, said spring is always a third-party candidate’s high-water mark, and there’s a reason one of Trump’s top donors — Timothy Mellon — has thus far given Kennedy’s allied super PAC $15 million. It also similarly called Kennedy a “spoiler” candidate in a Spanish-language ad in a major Hispanic outlet, La Opinión , which was sold at Union Hall where the Viva Kennedy event was held on Saturday.

“If Kennedy makes it on the ballot in these states — and that's a big if — we're going to make sure voters know how extreme his policies are and that MAGA megadonors are bankrolling his spoiler campaign to be a stalking horse for Donald Trump," said Lis Smith, a Democratic strategist consulting for the DNC.

Noah Herrera, a 55-year-old in the Las Vegas real estate industry, is the kind of voter Democrats worry about losing to Kennedy. A 2020 Biden supporter, he is now the vice chair of the Coalition of Independent Nevadans, a nonpartisan group designed to provide a neutral platform to nonpartisan voters to participate in the political process. He said he voted for Obama and Trump before Biden but is now open to Kennedy’s candidacy.

“My father came as an illegal alien and was deported two times before coming back legally. I could be a Kennedy Democrat or a Reagan Republican,” he said. “I’m a guy in the middle, I own businesses, pay taxes, am socially responsible and fiscally conservative.”

The fanfare surrounding the relaunch of Viva Kennedy, the effort conceived by his uncle in the 1960 campaign to activate Mexican American voters, is a testament to Kennedy’s intent to reach out to disaffected Latino voters.

The Latino engagement effort formally launched on March 30, and it drew heavily on the memory of Cesar Chavez, who died in 1993. Kennedy’s Spanish-language website was unveiled one day before the birthday of the iconic United Farm Workers labor leader who had a friendship and unique political alliance with the candidate’s father, Robert F. Kennedy.

Kennedy Jr. recalled his own friendship with Chavez, their work together on fighting pesticides, and serving as a pallbearer at Chavez’s funeral.

“We’re going to campaign very aggressively for the Latino vote,” he said in the POLITICO Magazine interview. “I have a long history as an advocate of Latino issues and on environmental justice issues.”

Susie Garcia, the director of Las Colibrí, an all-female mariachi ensemble that specializes in educational programming and performed at the Viva Kennedy launch, exemplified how more than half a century later, the Kennedy family history with Chavez still has allure.

“The draw for us is Cesar Chavez, knowing the Kennedys were close to Chavez and supportive of each other,” she said.

“An event like this is promoting positivity and strength in our community,” she continued, adding that the Kennedy campaign explained to her that the event was also for voter registration. “We’re Mexican American, we have Mexican roots, but we’re American. Knowing American history, we’re proud to be considered, it’s a chance for our voices to literally be heard. If Kennedy, or any political party, is putting Mexican culture on a platform to secure that vote, we’re supportive.”

Yet anger from the Chavez family boiled over ahead of the event, rooted in resentment of Kennedy’s efforts to tie his campaign to the late labor leader. Chavez family members endorsed Biden on the eve of the Viva Kennedy launch in an attempt to diminish the event, in part because they believe Chavez had far different views on immigration than Kennedy.

The candidate insists otherwise.

“Where I am with immigration is exactly where Cesar Chavez was,” Kennedy told POLITICO Magazine . “Making sure immigrants who came across were legal — he saw illegal immigration as a big issue in the last decade of his life.”

Andres Chavez, executive director of the National Chavez Center, the arm of the Cesar Chavez Foundation dedicated to preserving and educating people on his grandfather’s legacy, said his family believes Kennedy is just “wrong” when it comes to Chavez.

“He’s wrong on issues of the vaccine and has it wrong on my tata Cesar’s legacy,” Chavez said. “We can say with full confidence that my tata Cesar would not vote for Kennedy Jr. after Latinos and farm workers bore the brunt of Covid.”

Andres Chavez noted that while Trump and Kennedy were spreading lies and misinformation about vaccines, he worked at a vaccine immunization clinic in 2021 at Forty Acres, the home of the farm worker movement, where First Lady Jill Biden handed out immunization cards to farm workers, and California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom and Dolores Huerta, a co-founder of the United Farm Worker movement, made appearances.

In a brushback statement to Kennedy, the UFW made it clear that it is no longer in lockstep with its one-time ally.

“The United Farm Workers will always appreciate the support, friendship and leadership that generations of the Kennedy family have offered the farm worker movement,” spokesperson Antonio De Loera-Brust said. “The UFW proudly endorses President Biden for re-election in 2024. The president has consistently fought for farm worker rights, including by ensuring farm workers had equitable access to the Covid-19 vaccine.”

In Nevada, the alarm bells have not yet started ringing over the threat posed by Kennedy’s candidacy. The influential Culinary Workers Union Local 226, the state powerhouse that knows how to win elections behind working-class room cleaners and cooks going door-to-door, said not only are they unaware of Kennedy’s presence in the state, they also aren’t worried because it’s still early in the campaign.

The union is fresh off winning a contract fight that averted a massive strike and delivered a nearly 30 percent salary increase in its contract, with workers who were making $28 an hour now set to make $37. The union also secured concessions on technology use and AI protections, as well as workload reductions, and daily room cleaning requirements, which they say was won with Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris behind them the entire way. Harris, who has emerged as a key surrogate for the Biden campaign to Latino voters, joined the union at their Las Vegas hall to celebrate on Jan. 3.

Asked about the prospect of attacking Kennedy on their behalf, Ted Pappageorge, the union’s leader, stressed that the election will be between Trump and Biden, and what’s on the minds of working-class voters. But the union noted it is open to modifying its approach should Kennedy become a problem in its eyes.

The Biden campaign’s efforts are already underway, with a mix of old and new strategies, led by campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez, herself the granddaughter of Cesar Chavez.

The campaign spent resources on Spanglish ads, based on research and findings that it resonates more with younger Latinos. A new $30 million, six-week paid media investment for the spring will target Hispanic media, radio and high-index Latino viewership streaming platforms, like Hulu. And the campaign has drawn from its most precious resource — the time of the president and vice president.

In recent weeks, Harris has been on Univision radio in Phoenix, accepted Voto Latino’s endorsement in Las Vegas the next day, and traveled to Puerto Rico. Biden made a swing through Nevada and Arizona on March 19, launching the campaign’s Latino outreach program, “Latinos Con Biden-Harris,” in person in Phoenix, ahead of a major Univision network interview at the White House Thursday.

Leo Murrieta, the Nevada director for Make the Road Action, a progressive activist group, has helped turn out Latino voters in Las Vegas for 16 years. He said he is particularly stung by Kennedy’s anti-vaccine stances, knowing “what Covid cost Latinos and immigrants, our gente , our barrios wiped clean by deaths and disease.”

“This white, privileged fool is talking about vaccines killing people — no, the virus killed people,” he said.

Still, he stressed, Biden must understand that in Nevada, the “biggest pain point is affordability,” which ranges from the cost of housing to grocery bills, which in November ranked as the second-highest in the United States.

“Hardworking Latinos can’t afford staples like tortillas, leche y huevos ,” he said.

Despite the work the Biden campaign is doing, he described a messaging void “where all we hear is folks from the right saying things are more expensive” on platforms like WhatsApp, Youtube, Facebook, Telemundo and Univision.

Kennedy’s opening, Murrieta said, exists because the Democratic Party “has not done a good enough job keeping Latino voters in the fold,” which has led them to drift towards independent candidates or nonpartisan options. While he stressed that it doesn’t mean they are moving to support Republicans, he said in Nevada they can also vote “none of the above.”

If Kennedy seriously engages Latinos, Biden will be put “in a tough spot,” Murrieta said.

“They need to step it up. They may dismiss this RFK lunatic, but he poses a threat, and they’re on thin ice.”

The uncertainty of the situation makes it dangerous, said Amandi, the former Obama pollster.

“Third-party candidates are Russian roulette politics,” he said. “You have no idea where the game is going to go, and it may end up killing you.”