"Don't join the book burners" by Dwight Eisenhower

In a speech at the Dartmouth College Commencement on June 14, 1953, then President Eisenhower spoke about efforts by people like Sen. Joe McCarthy to ban books.  In his speech Ike stated, “Don’t think you’re going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed.”

He noted that you can’t defeat communism unless you know what it is.  He went on  “And we have got to fight it with something better, not try to conceal the thinking of our own people.  They are part of America.  And even if they think ideas that are contrary to ours, their right to say them, their right to record them, and their right to have them at places where they’re accessible to others is unquestioned, or it’s not America.”