Worth Watching

By Karen Tumulty | December 4, 2007 | +

Why we love C-SPAN: As Mitt Romney prepares to give his much-anticipated speech on religion, it’s worth spending 46 minutes watching this clip of JFK’s famous September 1960 appearance before the Houston Ministerial Association. The speech itself is eloquent and powerful, but more remarkable is the brutal question-and-answer session that follows. The ministers were, to put it mildly, a tough crowd, and they hit JFK with everything from “authoritative quotations from Catholic sources” that would seem to condone lying to protect the secrets of the church to obscure teachings of Pope Leo IX. JFK stood his ground and never lost his composure or his conviction, and by the end of it, the ministers are shown giving him a standing ovation.

I would love to hear your thoughts.

Trouble seeing video? Launch your RealPlayer program (it’s a free download) and select File > Open Location. Then paste this URL into the field:
rtsp://video.c-span.org/archive/c08/c08_110907_jkennedy2.rm

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