JFK and the Unspeakable

[Joseph Tracy]

Starting into Jim Douglas's book, JFK and the Unspeakable. I didn't know he was part of the Catholic worker movement and had written mostly as a Christian pacifist. So far the prose and organization of information is engaging and substantive. As he tracks Kennedy's confrontation with the Military and CIA he also follows the contemporaneous work of Thomas Merton to confront the immoral essence of nuclear military power( while being obedient to church authorities). The phrase ' the unspeakable' was used by Merton to describe  the mentality and unscrupulous behavior of those who have accustomed themselves to enormous power and will do anything to retain it.   
   Just the clarity with which he tracks the postwar rise of the national security state gives the book a rare quality. He is not trying to be inductive, but sets out his contention from the start, provides a timeline and begins to fill in the JFK timeline with asides to examine the parallel peace work of Thomas Merton. 
  Other works on the JFK assassination seem to get whelmed in competing theories, players, elaborate timelines, scientific issues, etc.   Douglas sets out to detail the motives of the CIA  and to elaborate how the CIA planned and covered up the assassination, as though he were a prosecutor making a case.

What gives the book an added power is the concept of what is unspeakable,and how even when overwhelming evidence points to a reality, there are realities that remain unspeakable. The article on holocaust film footage also deals with the phenomenon. Pynchon spends much of his energy as a writer bringing us into proximity to unspeakable parts of human experience. He backs us into it with jokes and wonders, coincidences and seedy lost souls, lists, and the inevitable force of history. But it is that feeling of scraping up against the raw madness that compels one to think and speak about the unthinkable and unspeakable.






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