fter his crisis over the death of Casey Peterson in July, after A his recovery from that crisis, and after he made the quantum leap in understanding how to draw value from his legal pads, Kennedy felt he was finally in position to make a difference. For the past month he had been receiving tiny but meaningful bits of information, more like clues than anything else, from his pads. The clues had not given him insight enough to set broad policy, not yet, but they had prevented him from mis-stepping. In instances where, at a time before his pads, he might have been caught off guard and delivered a poor response to a confrontation, he often found the perfect response ready on his tongue. So appropriate were some responses that often the issue at hand was laid to rest then and there.
There were also times when Kennedy’s clues enabled him to speak a few simple words to the right person, and that brief encounter would project itself forward into a small, but integral piece of the shining future vision Kennedy had glimpsed that day in Dallas.
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A perfect example is the case of Professor Ollie Kast, a brilliant, but unknown, expert in human languages.
The professor lived and worked in D.C., and often ate his lunch in a park near the Capitol. On one blustery day in the fall of 1965, as he sat alone on his favorite bench, eating his lunch, he looked up as he noticed two men approaching at a casual pace. From their demeanor he recognized them as US Secret Service, and sure enough, fifty yards behind was another small group of agents. In their midst was JFK. Ollie had caught sight of JFK twice before in the parks around the Capitol, so this wasn’t unusual. Still, he could mention it to his classes this afternoon, a small bit of name-dropping that might capture his students’ attention and hold it a few minutes longer than otherwise would have been possible.
As JFK drew abreast of him and looked his way, Ollie smiled and raised his hand in a friendly wave, whereupon he heard JFK
say, “Excuse me, gentlemen,” as he broke ranks and hustled over to Ollie’s bench, plopped himself down right beside Ollie and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Would it be possible,” Kennedy asked of the wide-eyed Ollie, “to invent a simple, quickly learned language of fifty words, and if so, would it be possible to persuade the peoples of the earth to learn to speak that language?” Kennedy turned his head toward Ollie, waiting for an answer.
Ollie was speechless for a few seconds, thinking how odd it was that JFK should know him, or of him, an obscure professor of languages. Next, he thought of the envy it would instill in his colleagues when he nonchalantly mentioned that the President of the United States had interrupted his walk to ask Ollie a question. He almost forgot to answer, but finally responded, “Yes, certainly, one could invent such a language. I don’t know how one would entice people to learn it. There are over twenty alphabets. Choose one, and you’re slighting the others. Could invent a new alphabet. Again, getting people to learn it? Can’t see how.”
“OK. I guess it’s impossible, then,” Kennedy said, standing up.
“Just out of curiosity, if you were to invent it, what would you call this new language?”
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“Well… uh… Earth… Talk, I suppose,” Ollie replied, tenta-tively.
“ET,” Kennedy said. “I like it. Pity it’s impossible. Pardon the interruption.” Then he turned, rejoined his agents, and they left.
Impossible, Ollie thought? Well…
Ollie sat on his bench, staring after the group until they were out of sight. Peculiar, most peculiar, he thought. He realized the questions Kennedy asked him would make no sense whatsoever if he repeated the conversation to his friends. They might even think him a bit muddle-headed for having fabricated the story. A shame, really, he thought. A perfectly good brush with fame, and it would have to go unheralded. Ah well, such is life.
Earth Talk. A new language. Hm. He wondered why he’d never thought of that before. But then, maybe he had. In fact, it seemed now that he had often thought of just that very thing. He’d been thinking of it all his life, like a thread that connected his past to his present. Now that the language had a name, Ollie knew it would be difficult to stop thinking about it.
He began the following Saturday morning. He chose his fifty words, using the standard Latin alphabet. Those fifty words used only fifteen unique letters, so those fifteen became his alphabet. He slightly altered the shape of each letter, adding a single straight or bent line, by referencing those letters to corresponding letters in three other common alphabets. When finished, the original Latin base form of each letter was still recognizable, and users of the other three alphabets would notice familiarity. Earth Talk contained no personal pronouns. The widely recognized minus (-) and plus (+) symbols showed simple tense, creating two additional versions of each word, without adding to the original fifty.
Ollie thought two persons speaking his fifty-word ET could communicate in the basic needs of interaction. He worked for two years with a few volunteers from his classes. With their help, he added seven additional words which they all agreed were necessary.
With demonstrated success, he built the concept into an elective class. Then he did a clever thing.
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Ollie identified U.S. corporations with foreign connections. After three years of coaxing he secured agreements with four small companies, and their foreign counterparts, all of whom needed to interact with each other daily. Twenty-seven volunteer employees learned the language, printed on a single sheet of paper. He incentivized management and employees by telling them that if the project were successful, they would become the core inner circle arbiters of changes and additions to a common world language.
It started slowly, but Ollie checked in often, reporting on participant progress. In eighteen months, seventy percent of volunteers reported they could conduct a substantial part of oral communications between participants with ET. They began making suggestions for additional words. Copied versions of the single sheet of paper containing ET soon began to make their way into other companies, schools, even the military.
In 1967, Ollie learned of ten new words that had come into common use among users of ET. He reissued version two, now with 67 words. V2 was well received by the estimated one hundred thousand people worldwide who used ET. Ollie continued to add a handful of words every year, until 1985, when he issued what he called the last version. The universal language was completed, he declared. With two hundred fifty words, ET contained all the words anyone would ever need to meet basic personal, business, medical, social and emergency needs.
Ollie died that fall of 1985. He was right, though. Twenty years old, ET was gaining speakers around the world, especially in younger populations such as universities and the military. Users relied upon ET to provide them with the basic means of communication.
It would’ve been nice as a gesture of homage to old Ollie if ET
stayed forever as Ollie left it. However, like everything else in the human social experience, languages evolve. It can happen extem-poraneously, or it can be with guidance. In this case, it was with guidance. By the late 1980s, language experts and other learned in-202
dividuals recognized that for the first time in Earth’s history the opportunity existed that everyone on Earth could soon share in a common language, one accepted willingly, not forced upon anyone.
Soon, anyone could go anywhere, no matter how foreign or remote the place may be, no matter how bizarre the culture may seem, and be able to communicate. Even more important, no one who spoke ET felt inferior. No one felt resentful at having to use the language, nor resentful of another who used it. Such a simple thing, but how often has failure to communicate resulted in hatred, or war?
Therefore, some visionaries thought, while ET may have started out with the simple goal of uniting the people of the earth with a means of basic communication, why let it stagnate there?
Once everyone, everywhere, accepted ET, why not take steps to introduce more complexity into the language? Why not allow the language to evolve into one that, like any other, allows people to express even the most complicated emotions, ideas and concepts?
There was no reason not to, of course. If Ollie had still been around, he’d agree. When the Global Rainfall and Energy Operations Center began operations in 2017, an observing system control operator on the far side of the earth could call the GREOC and say,
“Hey, what the hell’s going on?” and be understood, as would the reply from the GREOC operator. All because of Ollie, (not to down-play the influence of his chance encounter in the park, of course).
By October 1965, Kennedy realized that if his luck, and guidance from his pads, held, he would soon need help, and a more formal platform from which to launch his plans. He created his foundation in mid-October 1965. He did it quietly, and it remained a nonissue for a few months.
Kennedy endowed his foundation with every penny of family money of which he had personal control. Those Kennedys who controlled the rest of it happily threw in with him once he spoke with each of them personally. It was the same with all the other entrenched, closely guarded coffers of old money upon which Kennedy set his sights. He knew what to say to each. Word was, if you 203
saw him coming, you might just as well meet him at the door and hand him the keys to the family vault.
He named it the CASE Foundation, with the somewhat cryptic slogan “PLANT A SEED,” but he declined to say what meaning the word CASE represented. While the implication was that the four letters represented four separate words, it could also represent the simple word or name the four letters spelled. Only Jackie and Ken thought they knew why the president named his foundation as he did, and though he had not asked them to keep it confidential, they both assumed they should, happy to be the only ones who shared the secret.
However, inquiring minds wanted to know, so the naming of his foundation became a question he was asked about many times.
Kennedy always had an answer, of sorts. “Oh, gosh,” he said, the first time someone asked the question publicly, knitting his brow and pressing the fingers of his right hand to his forehead, “I can’t remember. It’ll come to me. I’ll get back to you.”
The next time it was, “Oh, I wrote it down, wait…” then started patting his pockets, saying, “Where did I put it. Ah, I’ll find it, and get back to you.”
The third time, before pointing to the next questioner, he said,
“Come on, you’ve figured that out by now, haven’t you?”
One clever reporter, in the fall of 1966, discovered Kennedy had offered a different response to each inquiry regarding the name of his foundation, and he published an article about it in the Op-Ed section of the New York Times. That brought the issue to national prominence, resulting in a full court press by reporters and the public, all of whom wanted to learn the secret. As the years rolled on and his popularity soared, it became a good natured point of contention that was always certain to result in laughter, when someone asked the question at the end of an interview, and once again JFK
came up with a unique, “dog ate my homework” style of answer.
On October 15, 1965, when the CASE was created, three years, three months, five days remained of his Presidency.
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