In March, he held a 67 percent to 27 percent polling advantage over the leading Republican challenger, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. Having successfully navigated the Cuban missile crisis, he began the year with a 70 percent approval rating. Kennedy were working on at the time they died.Įach has a powerful message to a future they wouldn’t live to see.Īs 1962 became 1963, President John F. The final chapter of my new book, “Undelivered,” which covers roughly 20 historically significant undelivered speeches, looks at the speeches that Pope Pius XI, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, and John F. Perhaps it’s because we never got to hear those words delivered in life that we hear them more clearly in death. Regardless of whether the speaker knew that death was near or not, we ascribe to those final statements a weight that we might not otherwise. Want to read more stories like this? POLITICO Weekend delivers gripping reads, smart analysis and a bit of high-minded fun every Friday. Of course, the reason we often take poetic license with last words is that people very rarely know what their last words will be, especially when death arrives unexpectedly. Although Thomas Jefferson’s last words were to his servants in the early-morning hours of July 4, 1826, and went unrecorded, and his last recorded words were to his physician, “No doctor, nothing more,” we instead focus on the fact that on the evening of July 3, Jefferson woke and asked with insistence, “Is it the Fourth?” It seems more appropriate that Jefferson’s last words ask about the independence movement he helped set in motion exactly 50 years earlier. We often search leaders’ last words for deeper meaning, a message to the ages. It was to have been a bold statement and a sharp warning, one that might have altered to contours of our national response to today’s violent, disassociated rhetoric - had he lived to deliver it. He planned to say that “We cannot expect that everyone, to use the phrase of a decade ago, will ‘talk sense to the American people.’ But we can hope that fewer people will listen to nonsense.” He also says that the demonstrators should not be denied the right to protest.In Dallas he was prepared to decry, “voices preaching doctrines wholly unrelated to reality,” which he feared could, “handicap this country’s security.” King asks if that is logical and then proceeds to show how it is not logical. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber.Ĭondemning the actions of the Civil Rights demonstrators is not logical or fair. We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Isn't this like condemning Jesus because his unique God-consciousness and never-ceasing devotion to God's will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? Isn't this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn't this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. This statement identifies the main idea of the passage: the police treat the demonstrators badly and often violently. King says, "I can't join you in your praise for the police department." I'm sorry that I can't join you in your praise for the police department.ĭr. I don't believe you would so quickly commend the policemen if you would observe their ugly and inhuman treatment of Negroes here in the city jail if you would watch them push and curse old Negro women and young Negro girls if you would see them slap and kick old Negro men and young Negro boys if you will observe them, as they did on two occasions, refuse to give us food because we wanted to sing our grace together. I don't believe you would have so warmly commended the police force if you had seen its angry violent dogs literally biting six unarmed, nonviolent Negroes. You warmly commended the Birmingham police force for keeping "order" and "preventing violence." But before closing I am impelled to mention one other point in your statement that troubled me profoundly.
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