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Author
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Topic: President Kennedy's Speech
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remind
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 6289
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posted 28 December 2006 10:31 AM
Over the years, there has been 1 consistent sound bite from a President Kennedy speech. It is: quote:
...over the next decade we will go to the moon and do the other thing
What is the "other thing" to which he is speaking of? Does anyone know? [ 28 December 2006: Message edited by: remind ]
From: "watching the tide roll away" | Registered: Jun 2004
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josh
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 2938
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posted 28 December 2006 10:43 AM
quote:
Originally posted by remind:
Over the years, there has been 1 consistent sound bite from a President Kennedy speech. It is: What is the "other thing" to which he is speaking of? Does anyone know? [ 28 December 2006: Message edited by: remind ]
I always thought the one consistent soundbite was, "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." As for the other line, the reference was to other things. Probably what preceded his discussion of going to the moon. quote:
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
http://www1.jsc.nasa.gov/er/seh/ricetalk.htm
From: the twilight zone between the U.S. and Canada | Registered: Aug 2002
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DavidMR
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 13478
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posted 30 December 2006 01:07 PM
quote:
Originally posted by Malcolm French, APR:
I believe the reference was to "send a man to the moon and bring him safely home again." It was, I think, his inaugural, or possibly a State of the Union. The complete text shouldn't be that hard to find.But thye other thing was to bring him safely home again or words to that effect.
I don't think so, Malcolm. I believe it's a more general reference to the other many and varied challenges of "The New Frontier", from the Peace Corps to standing firm in Berlin. It is, I think, an understated generalization of the "ask not what your country can do for you" theme, but the excerpt above is not from the inaugural, it's some time later. I would have to get out either A Thousand Days or Kennedy and start looking it up, and I just don't have the time right at the moment.
From: Greater Vancouver | Registered: Nov 2006
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DavidMR
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 13478
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posted 31 December 2006 11:41 AM
Here is another link, this time to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library:Address at Rice University on the Nation's Space Effort - Sept 12, 1962 Two paragraphs prior to the "not because they are easy, but because they are hard" passage comes this paragraph: "Yet the vows of this Nation can only be fulfilled if we in this Nation are first, and, therefore, we intend to be first. In short, our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world's leading space-faring nation." While I have to concede that the emphasis in this speech is on the space program, including its costs, and on science and technology and industrial achievement that comes with it, there is a reference to the wider concerns about peace and security that made up the New Frontier. There is no reference to this speech in Schlesinger's Thousand Days. It is discussed on page 528 of Sorenson's Kennedy, where it is said to be "his most notable address on the subject" of the space program. Later it states "Kennedy's accelerated space program also served as a useful aid to American foeign policy" and recounts international cooperation in satellite intelligence on weather and the like. [ 31 December 2006: Message edited by: DavidMR ]
From: Greater Vancouver | Registered: Nov 2006
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