JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters is a book by Catholic Worker theologian James W. Douglass that analyzes the presidency of John F. Kennedy, as well as the events surrounding his assassination.
In his research, Douglass conducted dozens of interviews, synthesized information from the vast assassination literature, and also made use of little-known writings on JFK's presidency and death.
[5] In a 2013 interview with The Georgia Straight newsletter, Douglass said that Merton's notion of the "Unspeakable" included "such realities as the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, the nuclear arms race, and these assassinations.
'"[4] As Merton writes in Raids on the Unspeakable, the void "gets into the language of public and official declarations ... and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss.
[7] Douglass spends a good portion of JFK and the Unspeakable recounting how Kennedy ended up in conflict with powerful forces in the intelligence, military, and corporate worlds.
The book begins by examining the Bay of Pigs Invasion as the Central Intelligence Agency's attempt to entrap the new president into a full-scale U.S. military assault on Cuba.
The book also revisits Kennedy's clashes with his military advisers, including over the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (ratified by the Senate in September 1963), his back-channel to Fidel Castro in 1963 via William Attwood in an attempt to normalize relations between the U.S. and Cuba, and his National Security Action Memorandum 263 (initiating withdrawal from Vietnam).
[3] For example, in his "Saigon and Chicago" chapter, he "cinematically" cuts between two concurrent sequences of events leading up to and culminating on the weekend of November 2, 1963: (1) the coup in Saigon that killed South Vietnamese President Ngô Đình Diệm and his brother Ngô Đình Nhu, and (2) a Chicago-based assassination plot against Kennedy that bore a striking resemblance to what transpired in Dallas three weeks later and was only thwarted at the last minute when the White House cancelled the President’s Chicago visit due to security concerns.
Douglass singles out Kennedy's June 1963 commencement address at American University as both the high point of his presidency and an act that sealed his fate.
"[13] He also gave the book a valuable bit of publicity during an appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher, which led to a sharp increase in sales.
[14] In 2011, James DiEugenio praised JFK and the Unspeakable as "a well organized, thoroughly documented, and felicitously composed piece of workmanship that is both comprehensible and easy to read.
[16] The Jesuit magazine America called it "a compelling book, a thoroughly researched account of Kennedy’s turn toward peace, the consequent assassination and its aftermath".
[17] Tom Roberts of National Catholic Reporter wrote in his review that Douglass postulates two theses at variance with conventional wisdom: The first is that John F. Kennedy, that quintessential cold warrior who seemingly couldn't wait to invade Cuba, who went to the brink of nuclear annihilation over missiles in our hemisphere and who rolled tanks to the Berlin Wall to face off with communist tanks on the other side, was actually undergoing a deep conversion to peacemaker during his brief tenure as president.