[lbo-talk] JFK: It's Horace Greeley's Fault

Michael Hoover mhhoover at gmail.com
Tue Oct 10 08:43:15 PDT 2006


found below while going through kennedy's public papers, wonder which member of his staff fed him the not quite accurate story, marx didn't get paid for unprinted articles, moreover, the paper sometimes published his articles either as unsigned editorials or as "from our foreign correspondent" for which he received smaller payment...... mh

Address: "The President and the Press" Before the American Newspaper Publishers Association, New York City. April 27, 1961

...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 installment, a salary which he and Engels labeled 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 to 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 they next time they receive a poverty-stricken appeal for a small increase in the expense account from an obscure newspaperman...



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