A particular JFK speech

[Joseph Tracy]

On Dec 19, 2011, at 1:04 AM, Michael Bailey wrote:

> 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.
Certainly more real than Islamo-Fascism or world wide terror but with no distinctions between real threats from nuclear warheads and Reagan's proposal that Nicaragua might be the launching pad for armed guerillas who would presumably sneak through Guatemala and Mexico and take us by surprise. And who knows what those commie nuns in El Salvador were really up to.
> 
> 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,
This is also touched on by MacNamara in the Morris Film
> 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?