A particular JFK speech

[Michael Bailey]

first, in a continuing attempt to minimize not just the appearance of
churlishness on my part, but also the actual churlishness itself, let
me thank you for posting the link to the speech.

I really enjoyed reading it.

Now to return to my polite partial disagreement:

yeah, all that US imperialism stuff is true.

I learned a lot of it from underground papers as a teenager, and to
some extent in history classes.  However, I sort of forgot during
years as a mental patient (mostly out-), and other absorbing
experiences...like keeping a job and trying to find love and stuff...

didn't really tackle the literature again till 2003 when Bush
*unbelievably* invaded Iraq - sort of re-radicalized me to refresh why
this was indeed happening...

anyway: yes, in a sense the Cold War was trumped up.  but a lot of
people here took it seriously.

And things like the Hitler-Stalin pact, the tanks rolling into Hungary
(and later Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring), the Korean war,
well, all I'm sayin' is it takes 2 to tango...

but yeah, our military-industrial complex is and was so foul that even
poor Ike, a creature of it if ever there was one, lamented it!

In fact, that book JFK and the Unspeakable has (among other things)
some pretty good documentation - I thought - that the Joint Chiefs
were very seriously contemplating a first strike and broached it more
than once to Kennedy, and in fact that after he ko'd the idea,
groundwork was laid for his killing to be the incident that would
precipitate it.  (details in the book, which is excellent - this is a
book by a Catholic peace activist who researched it for a long time
and writes with a sober, intelligent style that I find exemplary...)

However, w/r/t this speech - I think that "secret societies" is
mentioned passim.
Maybe "for those who have ears to hear" - I won't venture to say.

He also mentioned golf at one point, but nobody thinks the speech is
about golf...   the topic sentence, so to speak, is the anecdote about
Marx and his publishers; the cleverness of it is still amusing 48
years later.

Maybe a Ted Sorensen effort?
I looked at the JFK presidential library site and there are 2 written
copies - one that was given to the press in advance and one that was
actually delivered.  The press copy lacks the Marx anecdote - could
that have been an ad lib?