From a segment broadcast on radio station WOR in New York on September 15.

announcer: Celebrating the bicentennial of the United States Constitution, this is A More Perfect Union: Prominent Americans Reflect on Our Constitution.

morehead kennedy: My name is Morehead Kennedy. In 1979, I was the acting head of the economic section at our embassy in Tehran, and I was held hostage for 444 days. You don’t appreciate what freedom is until you’ve been deprived of it.

When I came home my first instinctive reaction was to go shopping. I sort of sashayed around: maybe I was going to buy this and maybe I was going to buy that, but what I was exercising was purchasing power. The Constitution, we often forget, was designed to ensure that consumers could get a wide variety of things by breaking tariff barriers between the states. These are critical things we often take for granted. Until you’ve been deprived of them, you don’t know what they are.

announcer: A More Perfect Union, from WOR Radio 710.