Kennedy occasionally recorded his own reflections, possibly for memoirs he was said to have planned to write. After the November, 1963, coup that overthrew the government of Ngô Đình Diệm in South Vietnam, Kennedy recorded his own thoughts about the wire that was sent that suggested the coup – thoughts which show that he was upset by what he saw as faulty planning. "I feel that we must bear a good deal of responsibility for [the coup], beginning with our cable of early August in which we suggested the coup," he said. "In my judgment, that wire was badly drafted, it should never have been sent on a Saturday, I should not have given my consent to it without a roundtable conference in which [Secretary of Defense Robert] McNamara and [General Maxwell] Taylor [who both opposed the coup] could have presented their views. While we did redress that balance in later wires, that first wire encouraged Lodge along a course to which he was in any case inclined."
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
