Welcome to Words Matter with Katie Barlow and Joe Lockhart.

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the

political bands which have connected them with another.

It was with those words written by a 33-year-old Thomas Jefferson in the spring of 1776 that

the American experiment began.

The Declaration of Independence set forth America's mission statement.

Like all mission statements, the words represented not what we were, but what we aspired to

be.

In fact, the author himself, while a gifted writer, was a deeply flawed human being.

Who, like his country, did not embody the ideas and ideal of that document?

For more than 240 years, the story of America has been the struggle between those who want

to move us closer to the words of our mission statement and those who want to stop them.

It is often forgotten, but the Declaration itself was intended to be spoken.

In 2004, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library released a previously unknown 1957 recording

of then-Senator Kennedy, reading the Declaration of Independence in New York, on July 4.

So this week, to honor Independence Day and to remind ourselves that as a country, we must

continue the struggle to turn America's founding words into reality, we give John F. Kennedy

reading the Declaration of Independence the final word.

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the

political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers

of the Earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's

God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should

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