You can call this blog posting a "book review," if you'd like. It isn't, though, a full-on book review, but is more properly seen as my quick and very personal commentary on JFK And The Unspeakable, a 2008 book by James W. Douglass, which I have just finished reading. A picture from the cover of the book is presented above.
Wikipedia has a write-up on the book, and Douglass has written a follow-on book, too, Martyrs To The Unspeakable: The Assassinations Of JFK, Malcolm, Martin, And RFK, which was published in 2025. I have also read that second book. In fact, I read the second book first. I am recommending them both!
John C. McAdams, formerly an associate professor of political science at Marquette University, taught courses on American politics and public policy - and he taught a course on the John F. Kennedy assassination. His views are quoted in the Wikipedia write-up on Douglass's book that I have linked above. They are not very flattering. McAdams is quoted as follows:
As bad as Douglass's account of Kennedy's foreign policy is, his depiction of a plot to murder JFK is worse—unspeakably bad, in fact. To paraphrase Thomas Merton, Douglass's muse and inspiration, the bunk and nonsense Douglass recycles goes beyond the capacity of words to describe. He is utterly uncritical of any theory, any witness, and any factoid, as long as it implies conspiracy."
I do not agree with McAdams. I found both of Douglass's books quite believable and quite compelling. The second book, so recently published, essentially argues that the "security state" that Douglass credits with the assassination of JFK has continued in existence ever since, and is ultimately in charge of what we think of as our democratically-elected national government.
If Douglass's analyses of the assassinations of John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy are correct, there is no certainty, whatsoever, that our nation is, in fact, being governed by a system of democratic, citizen self-government.
As the Wikipedia write-up tells us, the titles to both of Douglass's books contain an allusion to Thomas Merton's 1966 book, Raids On The Unspeakable, which, according to Douglass, refers to "a kind of systemic evil that defies speech" (emphasis added).
Is our nation, in fact, in the inexorable grip of such an evil? Many who contemplate what is happening in our nation, today, and what is happening around the world, are, in fact, succumbing to a despair that can be traced back to some sense that current events, and our future, are in the grip of some terrible and nameless horror - some unspeakable evil - that truly is, somehow, beyond definition.
I choose not to succumb to any such despair, but I do want to say that evil is "real," just as the assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and RFK were all too "real," and which assassinations were grounded in evil realities which we have not confronted, and are perhaps afraid to confront, even in our most private thinking.
The idea that some ominous, and unspeakable, and evil force is driving us towards annihilation, towards the extinction of life on Earth (the exact terror that Douglass tells us that President Kennedy faced, and then acted to confront) can, in fact immobilize us. The antidote will be found as we find each other, and as we join hands in our determination to respond to the all-too-dire realities that are here and now, and that will face us in the future, and to remember that the world which we most immediately inhabit is, and will be, in the future, a world that we create, ourselves, by what we do - together!
At the top of each one of my blog postings, I present our situation, as I see it:
We live, simultaneously, in two different worlds. Ultimately, we live in the World of Nature, a world that we did not create and the world upon which all life depends. Most immediately, we inhabit a "human world" that we create ourselves. Because our human world is the result of our own choices and actions, we can say, quite properly, that we live, most immediately, in a “political world.”
We should honor and respect the World of Nature, the World That God Created, and we should never forget that its limits are real limits which bind us, and both demand and deserve our respect. Still..... it is just as important fully to understand how powerful our freedom is, because in the Human World, the world that we create, there is nothing that is impossible.
Some might say this is an odd, or even an uncalled-for reaction, but I found JFK And The Unspeakable to be a story that can help empower us - and that can fill us with courage - and not a story that must inevitably send us into a spiral of despair.
Image Credit:
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2834255-jfk-and-the-unspeakable
I've read "JFK And The Unspeakable" a couple of times over the years, an excellent account, that is, by the way, no longer available in the Santa Cruz Public Library (another of my pet peeves, missing library books). I've requested that the library acquire Douglass's most recent work, and replace the former.
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