The foibles of history

JFK once remarked* about the foibles of history:

" In 1851 the New York 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 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 the next time they receive a poverty-stricken appeal for a small increase in the expense account from an obscure newspaper"

The picture is of the grave of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery North London....one of the poshest cemeteries and one of the largest tomb stones I have ever seen.

1. * Address, "The President and the Press," Before The American Newspaper Publishers Association, 27 April 1961 just after the Bay of Pigs action against Communist Cuba

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