In the early 1960s, President Kennedy’s administration launched one of the most successful censorship campaigns in U.S. history. The subjects of Kennedy’s ire were conservative radio broadcasters, who constantly attacked the administration’s policy proposals. Worried about his reelection chances, Kennedy instructed the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to target the offending broadcasters with tax audits and heightened regulatory scrutiny. Within a few years, this censorship campaign had driven conservative broadcasters off hundreds of radio stations; it would be more than a decade before the end of the Fairness Doctrine enabled the resurgence of political talk radio.

One of Robert Kennedy’s aides contacted the office of the commissioner of the IRS to ask about “four or five organizations generally considered to be right-wing” and whether they had been audited recently. A few weeks later, the Office of the Attorney General generated a list of 18 conservative groups and broadcasts, including Life Line, that they sent to the IRS’s audit division for “sample checks.” This launched what the IRS euphemistically called its “Ideological Origins Project.” Over the next two years, the Attorney General’s Office repeatedly requested updates on the progress of the audits; Robert Kennedy asked to be kept “personally advised” and requested an expedited ruling on the audit of Life Line. As a result of the audits, multiple Radio Right programs had their tax-exempt status suspended or even revoked, leading to precipitous drops in funding for the targeted broadcasters.