68. Memorandum From the Acting Director of the United States Information Agency (Wilson) to President Kennedy 1
Jamming of the Russian language version of your State of the Union Message2 showed an interesting and somewhat self-contradictory pattern.
The only section dealing with domestic affairs which was completely jammed was—significantly enough—the passage on agriculture. The first two paragraphs on equal rights were jammed, but the [Page 183] remainder, and all the subsequent passages dealing with social security, were clear.3
On foreign affairs, the statement of the basic U.S. goal, “a peaceful world community of free and independent states,” and our five basic sources of strength was completely jammed.
Your discussion of the military buildup and the United Nations were not jammed. The passages on the Alliance for Progress and Latin America, the Peace Corps, Food for Peace, and Laos were all blacked out, but the statement on Berlin was not.
Virtually all discussion of the Atlantic Community, the Common Market, and trade policy was jammed.
However, the restatement of basic policy in the closing paragraphs, a free community of nations, was not jammed.
The pattern was clearly deliberate since it was identical on five separate broadcasts.
- Source: Kennedy Library, President’s Office Files, Departments and Agencies Series, Box 91, USIA 1/62–6/62. No classification marking. A stamped notation indicates that it was received in the White House at 9:07 a.m. on January 15. Evelyn Lincoln sent a copy back to Wilson under a January 15 covering note, noting: “The President asked me to send you the enclosed copy of your memorandum with the suggestion that you give the marked paragraph to the press.” (Ibid.) An unsigned copy of Wilson’s memorandum is in the Kennedy Library, United States Information Agency Records (RG 306), Series 1, Records, 1961–1964, Box 1, Memoranda 1961–1964 [1 of 3].↩
- The President delivered the State of the Union message before a joint session of Congress on January 11. For the text of the message, see Public Papers: Kennedy, 1962, pp. 5–15.↩
- An unknown hand placed a bracket in the left-hand margin next to this paragraph. The bracketed paragraph is the one mentioned in Lincoln’s January 15 covering memorandum (see footnote 1, above).↩