At the Waldorf Astoria in New York City, President John F. Kennedy spoke to the American Newspaper Publishers Association.
It was April 27, 1961.
As you read this, bear in mind that journalists are today being laid off in great numbers and those that remain are seeing their wages shrink rapidly.
And if you want to put a fine point on your despair, try to imagine a modern president opening an important speech with such an elaborate, historically informed gag. The expansive vocabulary alone — “munificent,” “bequeath” — is enough to make me weep.
I appreciate very much your generous invitation to be here tonight.
You bear heavy responsibilities in these days and an article I read some time ago reminded me of how particularly heavy the burden of present day events bear upon your profession.
You may remember that in 1851 the New York Herald Tribune under the sponsorship and publishing of Horace Greeley employed as its London correspondent an obscure journalist by the name of Karl Marx.
We are told that foreign correspondent Marx, stone broke, and with a family ill and undernourished, constantly appealed to Greeley and managing editor Charles Dana for an increase in his munificent salary of $5 per instalment, a salary which he and Engels ungratefully labelled as the ‘lousiest petty bourgeois cheating.’
But when all his financial appeals were refused, Marx looked around for other means of livelihood and fame, eventually terminating his relationship with the Tribune and devoting his talents full time to the cause that would bequeath the world the seeds of Leninism, Stalinism, revolution, and the Cold War.
If only this capitalistic New York newspaper had treated him more kindly; if only Marx had remained a foreign correspondent, history might have been different. And I hope all publishers will bear this lesson in mind the next time they receive a poverty-stricken appeal for a small increase in the expense account from an obscure newspaper man.
I will be using this example from now on whenever I'm tempted to make a Hitler art school joke.
This is a lovely anecdote; thanks for sharing it!