Palm Springs, White Guilt, Homo Americanus

The Academy Awards recently announced inclusion thresholds for Best Picture category, and while promoting Palm Springs, Andy Samberg had a few key words to those who took issue with the very strict, very limiting, very much not doing the least parameters: "The Oscars thing, people having issues with that, it’s insane. The parameters, if you look at them closely, you could have the whitest cast in the history of cinema and still very easily meet them by just doing a few roles behind the camera. People that have problems with it can fuck off." Samberg and Milioti are wonderful and deserve a lot of credit for their commitment to their roles. The "trope" of two people who seemingly despise each other before magically falling in love has a long history. Consider Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant flinging vicious verbal barbs at one another in "His Girl Friday," all while being sucked into each others' orbit. The question is: "Who else could put up with either one of these people? They're perfect for each other." Falling in love is not what either Nyles or Sarah expected in their lives. After all, back in the real world, Nyles dated Misty, by all appearances a cheating nightmare (although Meredith Hagner is hilarious), and Sarah spends her time self-medicating and covering up her self-pity with a jaded exterior. 

"Palm Springs" is genuinely romantic, in a way that sadly feels old-fashioned (but isn't). People get bruised by past experiences in love, and they barricade themselves off from hurt. This becomes a habit, and the habit then becomes your personality. "Wait until the right person comes along" assumes that people stay as open and vulnerable as they were when they were young. But when you've been knocked around by life, love is not necessarily a 100% positive experience. Love comes with other painful things attached: regret, fear, mistrust. "Palm Springs" explores it all. Along with the screenplay, Palm Springs only manages to pull this off because of the undeniable chemistry shared between Samberg and Milioti. Their dynamics—Nyles’ silly sense of humor and Sarah’s robust cynicism— match for a fantastical love story. The duo is a delight together and manages to lean into both the comedic and dramatic elements that are required of them. Andy Samberg, known more for his comedy skills on SNL than dramatic acting chops, is at his very best here. Source: rogerebert.com

The 2021 Critics Choice Awards nominations announced on February 8 are topped by “Mank” with a leading of 12 bids, followed by the surging “Minari” at 10. “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” has eight nominations followed by “News of the World” with seven. “Nomadland,” “One Night in Miami,” “Promising Young Woman” and “The Trial of the Chicago 7”—each reaped six bids while “Sound of Metal” and “Tenet” have five. All of these titles save for “Sound of Metal” make up our predicted Top 10 nominees for Best Picture at the Oscars. “The Midnight Sky” and “The United States vs. Billie Holiday” have three bids, “The Personal History of David Copperfield” and “Pieces of a Woman” got two and in the one nomination category are: “Malcolm and Marie”, “Palm Springs”, “Soul” and “The Way Back”. Winners of the 2021 Critics Choice Awards will be revealed on March 7 during a live CW telecast. This is two days after Oscar nominations voting begins; whose roster of nominations will be revealed on March 15 and the 93rd Academy Awards are announced on April 25. Source: www.goldderby.com

The expression “White guilt,” along with hundreds of similarly ill-defined terms that have sprung up in the USA over the last fifty years, is just an embellished follow-up term of the now defunct Soviet-Speak, which likewise contained a myriad of similar surreal nouns and convoluted phrases, such as “domestic fascist terrorists,”  “antifascist struggle,” “economic self-management,” “peaceful  coexistence,” “interethnic  tolerance,” etc.  The Liberal System in the US and EU, along with its legal and academic apparatchiks, is now in the belated process of updating this old Bolshevik language. One must look firstly at the period starting with 1945 and after, a period which brought about not just a new political order, but also marked the beginning of the use of a new sanitized political vocabulary. Defeated Germany bore the brunt of the new notion of the political, although citizens in the victorious US and the UK swiftly followed suit with their own self-flagellating rhetoric. Words such as “colonialism,” “segregation,” “racial distancing,” “apartheid,” and “fascism,” soon became the metaphors for the absolute evil, with “fascism” now denoting pretty much anything to the right of center. Over the last seventy-five years, the West has embarked on a penitential passion play whose effects can be observed today in most media outlets. What is frequently overlooked, however, is that guilt-tripping Whites in the realm of politics has been unfolding hand in hand with a gradual criminalization of the White cultural heritage. The destructive role of the Frankfurt school and its mostly Jewish-Marxist scholars in instilling the concept of White guilt has been amply demonstrated, although the postwar brainwashing of Whites can by no means be attributed to Jewish scholars and activists only. I tried to summarize the history of intellectual purges in Europe, starting immediately after the end of World War, which gradually resulted in the growth of the language of guilt, leading subsequently to suicidal self-denial of millions of White students and politicians in Europe and the US. 

As I noted in Homo Americanus: "Particularly harsh was the Allied treatment of German teachers and academics. Since National- Socialist Germany had significant support among German teachers and university professors, it was to be expected that the US reeducational authorities would start screening German intellectuals, writers, journalists and film makers. Having destroyed dozens of major libraries in Germany, with millions of volumes gone up in flames, the American occupying powers resorted to improvising measures in order to give some semblance of normalcy to what later would become “the democratic Germany.” Likewise, French intellectual life from 1944–1950 was similarly depleted of hundreds of anticommunist and nationalist intellectuals suspected of fascist collaboration, with many becoming objects of public shaming. Dominique Venner: Of all professional categories, journalists and writers were hit the hardest. This underlines the ideological character of the conflict and the ensuing purges. The proportion of writers and journalists who were shot, imprisoned, and barred from their profession surpasses all other professional categories. Do we need to be reminded of the assassination of Albert Clément, Philippe Henriot, Robert Denoël, of the suicide of Drieu La Rochelle, of the death of Paul Allard in prison prior to court hearings and of the executions of Georges Suarez, Robert Brasillach, Jean Luchaire […] or the death sentence pronounced in absentia or a commuted prison sentence for Lucien Rebatet, Pierre-Antoine Cousteau, etc.?” From 1950–1990, Western intelligence agencies, with the USA at the helm, had to rely heavily on skills of prominent anti-communist and White nationalist academics and scientists in an effort to contain the perceived Soviet threat. 

Putting solely the blame on the liberal media and crypto-communist college professors for generating the culture of White guilt is only partially correct. In order to tentatively elicit a convincing answer regarding the pathology of White guilt one needs to raise some rhetorical questions about Christian teachings. Why are White Christian peoples, in contrast to other peoples of other races and other religions on Earth, more prone to altruism toward non-White out-groups? Why are guilt feelings practically nonexistent among non-White peoples? One answer to these questions may be found in Christian teachings that have made up an important pillar of Western civilization over the centuries. Over the last one hundred years, modern Liberal and Communist elites have aggressively promoted those same feeling of White guilt, albeit in their own atheistic, secular and “multicultural” modalities. Yet the fact remains that the Vatican, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, the German Bishops’ conference, along with all other Christian denominations in Europe and the US today are the loudest sponsors of non-White immigration to Europe and America, as well as the strongest advocates of White guilt. After the fall of Communism, the same messianic drive to punish those who defy modern Liberal and multicultural scholasticism found its loudest mouthpiece among US neocons and antifa inquisitors. The Jew St. Paul and later on the North African St. Augustin — judging by their own convulsive contrition — suggest that they suffered from bipolar disorder. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (7:18) may be the key to grasping the modern version of neurotic White self-haters put on display by prominent news anchors and humanities professors today: “And I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. I want to do what is right, but I can’t. I want to do what is good, but I don’t. I don’t want to do what is wrong, but I do it anyway.”

Guillaume Faye's criticism of the Western civilization as something that has evolved into a “system that kills peoples,’ his concept of ‘ethno-masochism,’ and his vision of technological progress as something that can be harnessed by nationalism rather than as something to be shunned or prevented. (Faye in this regard runs counter to more popular anti-technological positions adopted by Heidegger, Ellul, and Kaczynski.) A year later, Faye returned to speaking engagements and published Archeofuturism, his response to “the catastrophe of modernity” and an attempt to provide an alternative to traditionalism. Although somewhat welcomed back into the New Right fold in 1998, when he published his edgy The Colonisation of Europe: True Discourse on Immigration and Islam in 2000, Faye attracted considerable hostile media and political attention. Faye was clearly, however, a prophetic and perceptive thinker. He foresaw the gradual replacement of genuine political leaders with “regulators,” adding that the political decisions taken by states are therefore replaced by strategic choices made within the framework of various networks — those of large companies, banking organisations, public or private speculators, etc. All these separate strategies trigger a self-regulation mechanism that allows the System to work towards satisfying its own ends. Source: www.theoccidentalobserver.net

Imperialism, Junk Economics and Global Fracture

Financial takeover of industry, government and ideology:

Almost every economy is a mixed economy – public and private, financial, industrial and rent-seeking. Within these mixed economies the financial dynamics – debt growing by compound interest, attaching itself primarily to rent-extracting privileges, and therefore protecting them ideologically, politically and academically. These dynamics are different from those of industrial capitalism, and indeed undercut the industrial economy by diverting income from it to pay the financial sector and its rentier clients. One expression of this inherent antagonism is the time frame. Industrial capitalism requires long-term planning to develop a product, make a marketing plan, and undertake research and development to keep undercutting competitors. The basic dynamic is M-C-M’: capital (money, M) is invested in building factories and other means of production, and employing labor to sell its products (commodities, C) at a profit (M’). Finance capitalism abbreviates this to a M-M’, making money purely financially, by charging interest and making capital gains. The financial mode of “wealth creation” is measured by the valuations of real estate, stocks and bonds. This valuation was long based on capitalizing their flow of revenue (rents or profits) at the going rate of interest, but is now based almost entirely on capital gains as the major source of “total returns.” Stock prices have largely become independent from sales volume and profits, now that they are enhanced by corporations typically paying out some 92 percent of their revenue in dividends and stock buybacks.

Even more destructively, private capital has created a new process: M-debt-M’. One recent paper calculates that: “Over 40% of firms that make payouts also raise capital during the same year, resulting in 31% of aggregate share repurchases and dividends being externally financed, primarily with debt.” This has made the corporate sector financially fragile, above all the airline industry in the wake of the COVID-19 crises. While the subject deserves a more thorough discussion than can be elaborated here, the journalist Matt Stoller summarizes in popular terms the essential business plan of private equity: “financial engineers raise large amounts of money and borrow even more to buy firms and loot them. These kinds of private equity barons aren’t specialists who help finance useful products and services, they do cookie cutter deals targeting firms they believe have market power to raise prices, who can lay off workers or sell assets, and/or have some sort of legal loophole advantage. Often they will destroy the underlying business. The giants of the industry, from Blackstone to Apollo, are the children of 1980s junk bond king and fraudster Michael Milken. They are essentially are super-sized mobsters.” The classic description of this looting-for-profit practice process is the 1993 paper by George Akerloff and Paul Romer describing how “firms have an incentive to go broke for profit at society’s expense (to loot) instead of to go for broke (to gamble on success). Bankruptcy for profit will occur if poor accounting, lax regulation, or low penalties for abuse give owners an incentive to pay themselves more than their firms are worth and then default on their debt obligations.”

The fact that “paper gains” from stock prices can be wiped out when financial storms occur, makes financial capitalism less resilient than the industrial base of tangible capital investment that remains in place. The United States has painted its economy into a corner by de-industrializing, replacing tangible capital formation with “virtual wealth,” that is, financial claims on income and tangible assets. Since 2009, and especially since the Covid crisis of 2020, its economy has been suffering through what is called a K-shaped “recovery.” The stock and bond markets have reached all-time highs to benefit the wealthiest families, but the “real” economy of production and consumption, GDP and employment, has declined for the non-rentier sector, that is, the economy at large. How do we explain this disparity, if not by recognizing that different dynamics and laws of motion are at work? Gains in wealth increasingly take the form of a rising valuation of rentier financial and property claims on the real economy’s assets and income, headed by rent-extraction rights, not means of production. Finance capitalism of this sort can survive only by drawing in exponentially increasing gains from outside the system, either by central bank money creation (Quantitative Easing) or by financializing foreign economies, privatizing them to replace low-priced public infrastructure services with rent-seeking monopolies issuing bonds and stocks, largely financed by dollar-based credit seeking capital gains. All economic systems seek to internationalize themselves and extend their rule throughout the world. Today’s revived Cold War should be understood as a fight between what kind of economic system the world will have. Finance capitalism is fighting against nations that restrict its intrusive dynamics and sponsorship of privatization and dismantling of public regulatory power. Unlike industrial capitalism, the rentier aim is not to become a more productive economy by producing goods and selling them at a lower cost than competitors. Finance capitalism’s dynamics are globalist, seeking to use international organizations (the IMF, NATO, the World Bank and U.S.-designed trade and investment sanctions.) to overrule national governments that are not controlled by the rentier classes. The aim is to make all economies into finance-capitalist layers of hereditary privilege, imposing austerity anti-labor policies to squeeze a dollarized surplus. Industrial capitalism’s resistance to this international pressure is necessarily nationalist, because it needs state subsidy and laws to tax and regulate but it is losing the fight to finance capitalism, which is turning to be its nemesis just as industrial capitalism was the nemesis of post-feudal landlordship and predatory banking. Industrial capitalism requires state subsidy and infrastructure investment, along with regulatory and taxing power to check the incursion of finance capital. The resulting global conflict is between socialist capitalism (the natural evolution of industrial capitalism) and a pro-rentier fascism, a state-finance-capitalist reaction against socialism’s mobilization of state power to roll back the post-feudal rentier interests.

Underlying today’s rivalry felt by the United States against China is thus a clash of economic systems. The real conflict is not so much “America vs. China,” but finance capitalism vs. industrial “state” capitalism/socialism. At stake is whether “the state” will support financialization benefiting the rentier class or build up the industrial economy and overall prosperity. Apart from their time frame, the other major contrast between finance capitalism and industrial capitalism is the role of government. Industrial capitalism wants government to help “socialize the costs” by subsidizing infrastructure services. By lowering the cost of living (and hence the minimum wage), this leaves more profits to be privatized. Finance capitalism wants to pry these public utilities away from the public domain and make them privatized rent-yielding assets. That raises the economy’s cost structure – and thus is self-defeating from the vantage point of international competition among industrialists. That is why the lowest-cost and least financialized economies have overtaken the United States, headed by China. The way that Asia, Europe and the United States have reacted to the covid-19 crisis highlights the contrast. The pandemic has forced an estimated 70 percent of local neighborhood restaurants to close in the face of major rent and debt arrears. Renters, unemployed homeowners and commercial real estate investors, as we4ll as numerous consumer sectors are also facing evictions and homelessness, insolvency and foreclosure or distress sales as economic activity plunges. Less widely noted is how the pandemic has led the Federal Reserve to subsidize the polarization and monopolization of the U.S. economy by making credit available at only a fraction of 1 percent to banks, private equity funds and the nation’s largest corporations, helping them gobble up small and medium-sized businesses in distress. For a decade after the Obama bank-fraud bailout in 2009, the Fed described its purpose as being to keep the banking system liquid and avoid damage to its bondholders, stockholders and large depositors. The Fed infused the commercial banking system with enough lending power to support stock and bond prices. Liquidity was injected into the banking system by buying government securities. But after the covid virus hit in March 2020, the Fed began to buy corporate debt for the first time, including junk bonds. Former FDIC head Sheila Bair and Treasury economist Lawrence Goodman note, the Federal Reserve bought the bonds “of ‘fallen angels’ who sank to junk status during the pandemic” as a result of having indulged in over-leveraged borrowing to pay out dividends and buy their own shares. Bair and Goodman conclude that “there’s little evidence that the Fed’s corporate debt buy-up benefited society.” Just the opposite: The Fed’s actions “created a further unfair opportunity for large corporations to get even bigger by purchasing competitors with government-subsidized credit.”

The result, they accuse, is transforming the economy’s political shape. “The serial market bailouts by monetary authorities – first the banking system in 2008, and now the entire business world amid the pandemic” has been “a greater threat to destroy capitalism than Donald Trump.” The Fed’s “super-low interest rates have favored the equity of large companies over their smaller counterparts,” concentrating control of the economy in the hands of firms with the largest access to such credit. Smaller companies are “the primary source of job creation and innovation,” but do not have access to the almost free credit enjoyed by banks and their largest customers. As a result, the financial sector remains the mother of trusts, concentrating financial and corporate wealth by financing a gobbling-up of smaller companies as giant companies to monopolize the debt and bailout market. The result of this financialized “big fish eat little fish” concentration is a modern-day version of fascism’s Corporate State. Radhika Desai calls it “creditocracy,” rule by the institutions in control of credit. It is an economic system in which central banks take over economic policy from elected political bodies and the Treasury, thereby completing the process of privatizing economy-wide control. Source: unz.com

Since 1933, the economy has grown at an annual average rate of 4.6 percent under Democratic presidents and 2.4 percent under Republicans, according to a Times analysis. In more concrete terms: The average income of Americans would be more than double its current level if the economy had somehow grown at the Democratic rate for all of the past nine decades. If anything, that period (which is based on data availability) is too kind to Republicans, because it excludes the portion of the Great Depression that happened on Herbert Hoover’s watch. When Franklin D. Roosevelt first ran for president, in 1932, he did not have a fully coherent economic plan. He sometimes argued that reducing the deficit was the key to ending the Depression. Above all, though, he called for “bold, persistent experimentation.” As he explained: “Take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.” Over time, he and his advisers came to champion the ideas of John Maynard Keynes. In an economic downturn, when companies and households are caught in a vicious cycle of spending reductions, the government needs to step in. The Keynesian approach has shaped Democratic economic policy ever since. Despite being conservative, both Eisenhower and Nixon were nonetheless comfortable using government to help the economy when needed. The elder George Bush signed a tax increase that contributed to the deficit reduction that, in turn, fueled the 1990s boom. For the most part, however, Republican economic policy since 1980 has revolved around a single policy: large tax cuts, tilted heavily toward the affluent. There are situations in which tax cuts can lift economic growth, but they typically involve countries with very high tax rates. The United States has had fairly low tax rates for decades. The evidence now overwhelmingly suggests that recent tax cuts have had only a modest effect on the economy. G.D.P. grew at virtually the same rate after the 2017 Trump tax cut as before it. Source: nytimes.com

TV adaptation of The Great Gatsby, the Myth of Camelot, The Beautiful and Damned

The Great Gatsby is coming to television. A+E Studios and ITV Studios America are teaming with writer Michael Hirst for a big-budget TV series based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's iconic novel. A network is not yet involved as the co-producers plan on shopping the series to premium cable and streaming outlets. Envisioned as a closed-ended miniseries, for which Michael Hirst (Elizabeth, The Tudors) will pen the script and exec produce alongside Groundswell Productions' Michael London (Sideways, Milk). Fitzgerald's estate is also involved as Blake Hazard, a great-granddaughter of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and a trustee of the estate, will serve as a consulting producer. Sources say A+E Studios has had the rights to the iconic novel dating back to the 2000 TV movie that starred Paul Rudd as Nick Carraway, Toby Stephens as Jay Gatsby and Mira Sorvino as Daisy Buchanan. That telefilm was a co-production with BBC and aired stateside on A&E. The rights to the book, effective this year, are now open to the public domain. "I seem to have lived with Gatsby most of my life, reading it first as a schoolboy, later teaching it at Oxford in the 1970s then re-reading it periodically ever since," Hirst said. "As the critic Lionel Trilling once wrote: 'The Great Gatsby is still as fresh as when it first appeared, it has even gained in weight and relevance.' Today, as America seeks to reinvent itself once again, is the perfect moment to look with new eyes at this timeless story, to explore its famous and iconic characters through the modern lens of gender, race and class conflict.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's profoundly romantic vision does not prevent him examining and exposing the darker underbelly of the American experience, which is why the story speaks to both tragedy and hope, and why it continues to resonate today." Described as a reimagining, the series will dig deeper into the hidden lives of its characters through the modern lens of a fractured American dream while also capturing the full majesty of Fitzgerald's timeless vision. "I have long dreamt of a more diverse, inclusive version of Gatsby that better reflects the America we live in, one that might allow us all to see ourselves in Scott's wildly romantic text," Hazard said. "Michael brings a deep reverence for Scott's work to the project, but also a fearlessness about bringing such an iconic story to life in an accessible and fresh way. I'm delighted to be a part of the project. There are few stories in the pantheon of American literature that transcend time like The Great Gatsby. A+E Studios is privileged to bring this powerful, complex work to life with the blessing of Fitzgerald family member Blake Hazard. Michael stays true to Fitzgerald’s novel while building on that legacy with a modern vision that will be more reflective of America both then and now, including an enhanced exploration of the female characters. We are currently searching for a director and are excited to bring this out to the market." Gatsby has been adapted for the big screen multiple times, with takes in 1926 (toplined by Warner Baxter), 1949 (starring Alan Ladd and Betty Field), 1974 (starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow) and in 2013 (with Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan). Source: hollywoodreporter.com

A professor named Carlyle V. Thompson published a paper arguing that Jay Gatsby was an outsider of the American dream. Gatsby's origins as a bootlegger explain the thousands of speakeasies and craft cocktails bearing his name. But the novel never clearly divulges the source of his wealth. Gatsby represents the failed dream of an immigrant, he could represent Joe Kennedy, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and even Anna Delvey. American fiction is full of thinly veiled Gatsbys as Don Draper in Mad Men or Coleman Silk in The Human Stain. In 1915, Scott had written in his ledger: “If I couldn’t be perfect, I wouldn’t be anything”-which can be linked to his fragment from The Great Gatsby (now considered the great American novel but unfortunately rejected from the Modern Library in the early 1940s because of low sales): “Jay Gatsby of West Egg sprung from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God — and to this conception he was faithful to the end.” Edmund Wilson, Fitzgerald’s editor and ‘intellectual conscience’, completed the unfinished novel The Last Tycoon (1941) using Fitzgerald’s personal notes and drafts, and reckoned his Princeton friend as “a martyr, a sacrificial victim,” after his premature death (aged 44). Fitzgerald understood in the midst of the 1920s what most would only see in retrospect: that “the dead dream” will always fight on, as we try to touch the intangible, “struggling unhappily, yet undespairingly” towards what we keep losing. 

Part of our fascination with Fitzgerald involves his fall from grace, noted Arthur Krystal in The New Yorker in 2009. “The man who commanded between $3,000 and $4,000 for a short story as late as 1930 was forgotten by the reading public six years later; in 1936, his total book royalties amounted to just over $80. “My characters are all Scott Fitzgerald. Even the feminine characters,” the complex author reckoned. In the recent critical essay Understanding Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby (2014), Robert A. Albano clarifies: “Fitzgerald was able to incorporate the many sides of his own personality into the creation of The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald himself was a romantic who ignored the reality in order to achieve a goal which many would have thought to be impossible.” Source: www.highbrowmagazine.com/

One of Jackie Kennedy's favorite romantic novels was The Beautiful and Damned,  F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel. Reggie Nadelson, writing in The Independent, claimed, “In the end, Jackie liberated herself from the Kennedys and became the last real Kennedy—glamorous, desirable, mythic.” Author Norman Mailer, who had been both her friend and foe, delivered his assessment: “Jackie Kennedy Onassis was not merely a celebrity, but a legend; not a legend, but a myth—no, more than a myth: She is now a historic archetype, virtually a demiurge.” Back in her apartment, John Jr. opened a letter that she’d asked him not to read until after her burial. “My dear, beloved son: You are going to take your special place in history. I want to be looking down on you as you assume a future position of power, like your father. He attempted to make the world a better place. And Bobby was going to carry on in his footsteps. Now the burden will be on you. In my heart, I know you will succeed beyond your greatest dreams. It is with eternal love and pride in you that I send you on your way, which I know will be the road to glory. When your battles are over, and the burden passes from you, I know one thing that is good and true. you will be the greatest Kennedy of them all. Your mother, Jacqueline.” —Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis (2015) by Barbara Leaming

Marilyn Monroe was a virtual icon for Madonna. Marilyn had had an affair with John F. Kennedy, Sr. It seemed almost logical that Madonna should follow in her footsteps. The president wasn’t around to seduce any more, but his son, John F. Kennedy, Jr., was around—and in her words, “he looked smart and hot.” JFK Jr. went backstage to greet Madonna after her “Who’s That Girl?” performance in Madison Square Garden. Don Johnson, then at the peak of his Miami Vice fame on TV, was also there with flowers, but Madonna rejected him before walking away with the prize hunk of the night, JFK Jr. himself. The JFK Jr./Madonna sightings began in New York during the weeks leading up to Christmas of 1987. “Could it really be true?” the public asked, “that Madonna was actually dating the son of Marilyn Monroe’s former lover, his father, President John F. Kennedy?” The symbolism that MM, the blonde bombshell of the 50s had been replaced by another bombshell in the 80s, Madonna, wasn’t lost on the tabloids. Biographer Wendy Leigh claimed, “In her own mind, Madonna wasn’t just Marilyn emulated but Marilyn reincarnated, sent here to fulfill her psychic destiny. At every step, Madonna continued her consumption of the Marilyn mystique, but she craved something more. John F. Kennedy, Jr. was just the last step to finish off the deal—the ultimate Monroesque experience. Madonna realized that adding John F. Kennedy, Jr.’s scalp to her sexual belt would be another publicity coup.” In his biography of Madonna, Andrew Morton wrote: “Although JFK Jr. and Madonna were lovers for a brief period, the affair was not a success. John Junior was intimidated by Madonna’s reputation. Rather ruefully, she explained to friends after the end of her affair with Kennedy that he was just too nervous for them to click sexually. The chemistry certainly wasn’t there. ‘Some guys can handle the fame, others can’t,’ she sighed. “And he couldn’t.’” When Jackie heard of her son’s new main squeeze, she asked Ted Sorensen, “What designs does this volatile creature have on my son?” 

A photo taken on Monday January 11, 1994, by Paul Adao outside Jackie Kennedy's apartment, reveals that John Kennedy Jr had taken the decision of leaving behind his relationship with Daryl Hannah and introduce Carolyn Bessette to her mother for approval. It seems only John's ex-girlfriend Christina Haag had been given a previous seal of approval. In her memoir Coming to the Edge, Christina recalls her relationship with Jackie: "For years after that first weekend together, even when my romance with John was over, there would be a letter from Jackie now and then. On occasion, she would call—she’d seen me acting in a play or there was a book of hers she wanted me to have. It would arrive by messenger, and slipped inside the fresh pages would be an oblong cream card with the Doubleday anchor at the top: I thought you’d like this, love Jackie. The letters—on pale-blue stationery in blue pen, or lapis correspondence cards embossed with a white scallop (and one black-and-white postcard of Pierrot)—I kept tied with a red ribbon in a shoe box. The last arrived a month and a half before she died, before I flew back from Los Angeles to attend her funeral Mass at St. Ignatius Loyola—police barricades outside the baroque church and a slew of perfect white flowers blanketing her coffin. “I hope all goes well, Christina,” she had written  in her last letter in her artful, tender script. 

And whenever Jackie called—there would be her voice, more like music than speech, and I would feel an intense thrill, like the kind you get from a private crush you want always to keep secret. I remembered how she giggled when she ate ice cream in August and there was a windy ride one summer on Mr. Tempelsman’s boat. I was alone with Jackie on the back deck; we were on our way to pick up John, who was spearfishing off Aquinnah in Martha's Vineyard. The whole way, she told me stories, the ones I wanted to hear—not of the White House, but of her youth adventures, of the balls and parties she’d gone to in Newport and Southampton before she was married, when she was a girl in New York. Once Jackie and Mr. Tempelsman offered me a lift in their Lincoln Town Car, and when we passed the marquee for Speed-the-Plow, she lit up. Had I seen it? I hadn’t. The play, she said, was good, but Madonna was terrible on it. She drew out the last word and laughed. The tabloids had been rife with stories about them that spring, stories John scoffed at. “I think you should go,” Jackie said to me, like sharing a joke, “I think you should go next week—and have John take you. And then go backstage!” I remembered also how she always made a point of complimenting me—my hair or some detail of the clothes I wore. At first, because of who she was, it stunned me. But what may have been good manners or the desire to nurture confidence in a young woman became for me a lesson in acceptance and feminine grace. And I learned, in the end, to simply thank her. —Come to the Edge (2010) by Christina Haag

One morning, I replayed one of her phone message, listening once more to the glide of her voice. It was the first time we’d spoken since Christmas. Since I was no longer her son’s girlfriend, my intention was not to be too personal this time with Jackie, but if I expected some awkwardness, there was none with her. We just caught up and we spoke of other things. Then she explained to me why she had called. She told me John had met this PR young woman who worked in Calvin Klein, Carolyn Bessette. Jackie thought she was lovely and educated, and that she could see how much love Carolyn felt towards her son. Source: wattpad.com

Disunited Nations, The Kennedys in the World, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy project

Review of "Disunited Nations" by Peter Zeihan:  The coming end of American hegemony will be good for America, but disastrous for much of the world, according to this sweeping treatise on international relations. Zeihan (author of The Accidental Superpower), a geopolitical strategy consultant, predicts that a United States weary of foreign entanglements will stop enforcing the post-WWII global “order” in which it guaranteed the military security of allies, kept sea lanes open, and welcomed exports from developing countries. What follows, he contends, will be pervasive disorder, in which some nations flourish—including a rich, isolated United States—as others face political chaos, economic regression, war, and famine caused by the breakdown of global supply chains and international cooperation. Zeihan pegs his arguments to in-depth discussions of the geography and agricultural, economic, and demographic trends of major countries and their impact on regional rivalries. Some of his prognostications are convincing: China’s vulnerability to trade blockades means it will never be a global military power as many fear, he reasons. Zeihan integrates a wealth of information and data into lucid analyses written in an accessible tone, explaining why the kind of superpower of US is different from the “superpowers” of the past, like Ming Dynasty China, Achaemenid Persia, or the Roman Empire. Zeihan describes that the absence of an American global order would lead to geopolitical regionalization all across Eurasia along historical lines. This means that the powers that had traditionally been dominant in Europe, Middle East, and the Far East, would end up explicitly dominating those regions again, as well as being subject to the same internal and external challenges that they have always been plagued with (e.g. China and its cyclical civil wars; the Middle East returning to the Anatolia vs Iranian Plateau geopolitical paradigm; continental Europe being dominated by the Franco-German area; Russia returning to its previous “horde lands” dynamic, etc). It is precisely because of the American Order that these countries have been "protected" from their reoccurring historical problems. The United States of America is an expansionist power. The 19th Century was largely spent expanding from 13 colonies to a nation that extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In addition, from the late 19th Century to the first half of the twentieth, the US focused on building influence. Post World War II, the US expanded its influence in Europe, Asia and Africa. Then post-Cold War, this influence was expanded to key parts of the former Soviet Bloc. Zeihan assumes that the colonial era could be revived. However, the major lesson from Iraq was, you can't do old-fashioned colonialism in the 21st Century. Zeihan don't have positive predictions on South Europe, alluding these countries aren't stable enough since the begging of the 2000s. Source: www.publishersweekly.com

The Kennedys in the World (March 1, 2021) by Lawrence J. Haas (a former White House communications strategist and award-winning journalist, Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the American Foreign Policy Council, author of Harry Truman and Arthur Vandenberg: the Partnership That Created the Free World, which was named by The Wall Street Journal one of its top ten non-fiction books of 2016), offers us a rich, fascinating, and consequential story about JFK, Bobby, and Ted Kennedy. From an early age the brothers developed a deep understanding of the different peoples, cultures, and ideologies around the world; a keen appreciation for the challenges that such differences created for the United States; and a strong desire to reshape America’s response to them. From their childhoods in the first half of the twentieth century, the brothers were prodded by their demanding father, Joe Kennedy, and their distant mother Rose, to learn and care about the world. For more than six decades after World War II, the Kennedy brothers shaped the U.S. response to almost every major global challenge of their times: the Soviet Union and China, the Cold War and Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Chile, Nicaragua and El Salvador, Korea and Vietnam, South Africa and Northern Ireland. In their time, America was what it remains today—the world’s greatest power, with roles and responsibilities that stretch across the planet. Jack, Bobby, and Ted shared a tough-minded internationalism and a conviction that America belonged on the side of the oppressed and not the overlords, but each applied that legacy to different challenges in distinct ways. Now the torch has been passed to our generation and this book serves as a powerful reminder of who we are as Americans and who we can be. Source: amazon.com

There is to hoping to the publishing of at least a new book which will come to fruition, especially if Carolyn's friends are given a voice and its purpose will be to shed light on the real Carolyn Jeanne Bessette-Kennedy and his romance with John Kennedy Jr., shattering old rumors that have eclipsed Carolyn Bessette's real accomplishments and her humanity. Source: instagram.com

“European Perspectives”, JFK "Battling Wall Street", Ann Coulter's "High Crimes and Misdemeanors", JFK Jr vs Trump

In European Perspectives: Essays (2020), Dr. Alexander Jacob seeks to differentiate Jewish-derived Marxist socialism from the German-derived spiritual socialism. Although “a professed anti-Semite,” Marx had a “Jewish mentality” that manifested itself in a “materialistic view of life”. This is in contrast to what might be called the communitarian ethos of Werner Sombart’s German socialism and Oswald Spengler’s Prussian socialism. One useful feature of European Perspectives is its assessment of a number of important European thinkers: Werner Sombart, Oswald Spengler, Erik von Kuehnelt–Leddihn, Julius Evola, Theodor Adorno, Hans–Jürgen Syberberg, Max Weber, Hannah Arendt and Theodor Herzl. Sombart, one of Jacob’s favorite scholars, believed “that the modern system of commercial capitalism was due not mainly to English Protestantism as Max Weber had proclaimed but to Judaism.” Jacob is an admirer of Spengler’s Prussian socialism which does not seek to destroy capitalism. Early on, Spengler saw that “democracy, in general, is an unholy alliance of urban masses, cosmopolitan intellectuals, and finance capitalists. The masses themselves are manipulated by the latter two elements through their specific agencies: the press and the parties.” Jacob’s ideology synthesizes Kuehnelt-Leddihn and Evola’s beliefs. He accepts Evola’s criticism of Jewry and the bourgeoisie, but appears to reject his disparagement of Catholicism. Jacob concludes that Syberberg wanted to use “art as a redemptive influence on society,” while Adorno used it “as an instrument of revenge.” In the fourth essay Jacob shifts gears to examine two books, both written in 2011, that analyze the success of Western civilization: The Uniqueness of Western Civilization by Ricardo Duchesne and The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson. Duchesne’s thesis is that the West has always been different, more creative, than other civilizations. The source of this creativity is the “aristocratic egalitarianism” of Indo-European societies. This unique aristocratic egalitarianism was made possible by a political arrangement that provided “relative freedom and autonomy from centralised authority”. For Ferguson, the West’s greatness can be found in: “competition, science, property rights, medicine, the consumer society, and the work ethic”. Like Duchesne, Ferguson sees a lack of centralized power as a Western asset as opposed to the centralized bureaucracy of China. He believes property rights are closely associated with “the rule of law and representative government”. Ferguson is not, however, completely sanguine regarding the future of the Occident. He warns that the greatest threat to the West is “our own loss of faith in the civilization we inherited from our ancestors,” while Duchesne expresses similar concerns about the “nihilism, cultural relativism, and weariness” of the West.

To Jacob’s thinking, what Fukuyama considers 'the end of history' is Jewish “economic utopianism which manifested itself in the twentieth century as totalitarian Communism and was transformed in the new ‘promised land’ into totalitarian liberalism of the ‘American Dream’”. Jacob concludes that Fukuyama’s neo-conservatism illustrates “the incompatibility of the American system with genuinely European systems of political thought.” Jacob traces how the English, and later the Americans, deviated from traditional European values. In essence: the rise of Puritanism led to the English Civil War, the Revolution of 1688, the American Revolution, and the French Revolution. Puritans with their individualism and industry came to see “citizens as economic units of production not unlike those of the later Communist utopia of Marx”. Plus, according to Jacob, Puritanism has always been heavily influenced by Judaism. Then, increasingly during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Jews in America were able to transform the remnant of Puritanism into their own political/economic system. It was “the re-entry of the Jews into England during the Puritan revolution” that began the unraveling of European culture, with the end results that we see today. There is a desperate need for a new aristocracy in Western societies. At present we are ruled by elites who are hostile to the interests of Western peoples. Before an aristocracy can develop, we need to create a revolutionary cadre from which a new elite will emerge. The historical peoples of the West are now slated to become minorities in their own homelands. We need new elites to propagate a new ideology and that is a monumental task. Nothing could be more difficult, yet nothing less will do. Alexander Jacob obtained his doctorate in Intellectual History at the Pennsylvania State University. His publications include Nobilitas: A Study of European Aristocratic Philosophy from Ancient Greece to the early Twentieth Century (2000), and Richard Wagner on Tragedy, Christianity and the State (2019). Source: unz.com

As sociologist Donald Gibson explained in his fine book Battling Wall Street, President Kennedy never joined the Council on Foreign Relations; he did not join any secret societies at Harvard; he didn’t like working intelligence during World War II. He got transferred out to the South Pacific and served with a bunch of Joe Six Pack guys on what were close to suicide missions. As this author demonstrated in the second edition of Destiny Betrayed, both in the Senate and in the White House, Kennedy was opposed to much of what this Power Elite was doing abroad, especially in the Third World. After his death, the progress that he did make in the White House was largely reversed. As Gibson comments, Kennedy’s overall business program was really pro-production and nationally oriented. Kennedy’s tax proposal was also aimed at securing for the treasury billions of dollars “in income from interest and dividends going unreported and untaxed each year.” His proposal was to use an annual withholding tax, as with middle class income. For dividends, he proposed a higher rate of tax on families with incomes over $180,000 per year—almost two million today. He also proposed tax code alterations to prevent the wealthy from concealing income garnered through advantages like investing in holding companies. Kennedy felt that wealth should be acquired and used through productive investments that benefited society as whole. He was not in favor of profits accrued through financial speculation and inheritance. As Gibson notes, "Kennedy’s overall program was trying to guarantee that the search for profit would not end up destroying rather than creating economic prosperity for the country. In this he was very clear, consistent and coherent." Kennedy wanted to shift capital from non-productive to productive investments. He was specifically interested in expanding low cost energy production. The above program, combined with Kennedy’s policies overseas made the president rather unpopular with the corporate aristocracy. Kennedy had made himself a target for big business by his stand in the U.S. Steel case in 1962. As the late John Blair wrote about that conflict, it was “the most dramatic confrontation in history between a president and a corporate management.” (Blair, Economic Concentration) Beyond that, he then went even further in his priority of the public good over corporate greed. Kennedy stated that the "American people would find it hard to accept situation in which a tiny handful of steel executives, whose pursuit of private power and profit exceeds their sense of public responsibility, can show such utter contempt for the interests of 185,000,000 Americans." 

As Donald Gibson notes, one of the things that many of his critics were disturbed about was Kennedy’s willingness to loan what they called “easy money” for credit purposes. Which, of course, is what the Alliance for Progress was about: low interest or no interest loans for infrastructure and capital improvement. By 1962, Dillon seemed to have gone over to the side of Kennedy’s critics on this and other issues. For example, he was pressing for less government spending, except for defense expenditures. The Wall Street Journal, another consistent critic of Kennedy, wrote in 1963 that the activists in the administration, like Heller, had gained the upper hand over the conservatives like Dillon. (Wall Street Journal, 10/3/63, article by Philip Geyelin) The article said that Kennedy did not want to rely on monetary policy to cure a balance of payments problem. And, in fact, the president had come to think that such problems were too important to be left to bankers. He also did not agree with another of their notions, namely letting interest rates rise. (Hobart Rowen, The Free Enterprisers: Kennedy, Johnson and the Business Establishment) By 1963, there was a split within the administration over general economic policy. There was on one side the activist Kennedy group which included JFK, Heller, and Franklin Roosevelt Jr. of the Commerce Department. On the other side was Dillon, the Federal Reserve, and their outside backer David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan. As Gibson points out, and as I have tried to indicate here, the economic powers in America had been pushing for a globalist agenda even during Kennedy’s presidency. They wanted European colonialism to be replaced by American imperialism, which would allow American business entities to be shipped abroad. They also wanted old-fashioned tight-money monetarist rules in banking. Kennedy opposed both. Source: kennedysandking.com

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion; everyone is not entitled to his own facts. If a president’s “cutting corners or hoarding dirty little secrets” is enough to impeach him, as Nixon’s attorney general, Elliot Richardson, said, because “honesty is the best politics,” then Clinton’s bald-faced lies under oath in a citizen’s constitutional case against him would have to be enough. There are pretty clear rules and standards for what constitutes a “high Crime and Misdemeanor,” or an impeachable act. To paraphrase the current “just about sex” line, Watergate was about a two-bit breaking and entering. And unlike with Monica Lewinsky, it wasn’t committed by the president, but by people who worked for his campaign committee. The Philadelphia convention in 1787 adopted the impeachment remedy in the process of creating the first government in the history of the world that would have separated powers, checks and balances, and sharply limited powers. And, of course, no king. The reach and purposes of impeachment would be different in a constitutional republic. Personal misconduct took on a larger role in impeachments, for example, and policy disputes became irrelevant to impeachable conduct. Impeachments in Great Britain had been used as a weapon in the ongoing and turbulent power struggle between Parliament and the king. The only impeachment convictions ever rendered by the United States Senate were for the high crimes and misdemeanors of: Drunkenness and Senility; Incitement to Revolt and Rebellion Against the Nation; Bribery; Kickbacks and Tax Evasion; Tax Evasion; Conspiracy to Solicit a Bribe; and False Statements to a Grand Jury. But the American variations on impeachable crimes flow directly from the Constitution itself.  

In brief, Richard Nixon’s subversion consisted of: One invocation of presidential privilege, and zero criminal offenses. The worst that could be said of Nixon’s alleged “obstruction of justice” was that he thought the president had a right to fight a legal case, just like a private citizen might. If Nixon telling one lie, not under oath, constituted the creation of an “Imperial Presidency” demanding the president’s impeachment, what did Clinton create by telling repeated lies, not only to the public, but under oath? As Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey casually remarked of the president, “Clinton’s an unusually good liar. Unusually good. Do you realize that?” Nixon wanted one man investigated, and he wanted FBI information on that one man: Daniel Ellsberg, a former Pentagon official who was leaking national security secrets to the New York Times. If that was “unrelated to national security,” what are the implications for an FBI investigation of a public servant whose job Clinton’s friends wanted? In any event, like the IRS, J. Edgar Hoover also ignored him, which is why Nixon brought in the Plumbers to plug national security leaks, some of whom were later caught at the Watergate Hotel. Indeed, the famous “smoking gun” tape was the direct result of the fact that the FBI would not accede to the Nixon administration’s demands—as is discussed on the tape. Twenty-five years later the Clinton administration uses the IRS and the FBI—and this time these agencies are responsive—to persecute an innocuous public servant whose job Clinton’s people wanted. Nixon acted from defensiveness; Clinton acted from cupidity. 

At least Nixon tried to bend these agencies to his will to stop leaks of national security information; at least he tried to manipulate the agencies to protect his people rather than to attack his enemies; at least he was rebuffed; and at least President Kennedy had his sexual trysts in a consensual way with grown women. One realizes how low President Clinton brought our country when you start thinking 'Bring back the Watergate Plumbers!' Clinton's flacks have frequently made the preposterous claim that this whole mess was the Supreme Court’s fault for allowing the Paula Jones suit to proceed. It is as if somehow the Supreme Court had been holding back all this time, and by mere historical accident it all caught up with Clinton. When in fact, private civil lawsuits against presidents have always been allowed. But other presidents weren’t vulnerable to those lawsuits because other presidents weren’t such pigs. The case is that Nixon did not invoke his privilege in an investigation “about sex” he personally engaged or pressed upon an unwilling female. Nixon simply raised his privilege in an investigation about a third-rate burglary he hadn't committed. Clinton's whole presidency was a complete mockery of the American people. For the Clintons, it was all just a game. 29th President Warren Harding (whose extramarital affair with his secretary Nan Britton eroded his popularity) must be turning flips of delight in his grave to know that at least he wasn’t such a pervert like Clinton. No one has ever been caught like Clinton, in this tawdry combination of sexual perversion, witness tampering, and public perjury. Even the most frothing-at-the-mouth Nixon haters never really thought Nixon had himself committed perjury. There was a dignity about Nixon's conduct that is unimaginable for Clinton. As far as I am concerned, Clinton's degrading behaviour is the most complete ignominy in the American presidential history. —"High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton" (2002) by Ann Coulter 

“We finally got the authoritarian liberals have been talking about,” Ann Coulter told The Daily Beast about ex-president Donald Trump. “And I want to point out what a gigantic pussy he is. Who are these people still supporting Trump? I don’t understand why. Why are you doing this for Trump when he doesn’t give a crap about you? These poor, working-class Americans, hanging on by their fingernails! No, he didn’t have time for them. He held a rally and he encouraged them to march on the Capitol while he goes back to the White House to have a nice lunch because he’s a gigantic pussy. He always has other people doing his dirty work. He was this tough guy on The Apprentice. He couldn’t even fire his own attorney general. He sent Corey Lewandowski to do it." Coulter sputtered with rage as she vented about the ex-president. “I hate him,” she seethed. “Trump betrayed his own supporters at every turn,” Coulter added. “He turned over his presidency to Idiot Boy Jared. I hate him. He’s a betrayer. Yes, I knew he was a coarse vulgarian. Yes, I knew he was a huckster. I think we all did. But one thing there was no warning of was Jared and Ivanka. They ran this presidency and all they cared about was impressing Kim Kardashian and sucking up to Wall Street. After he was elected, we got the most gigantic bait-and-switch in history. That was a shocker.” Source: thedailybeast.com

John Kennedy Jr. (Speech to the American Society of Magazine editors, April 27, 1999): "I thought if I could parachute behind the enemy lines and join the journalistic profession, which has often attacked my family, then I could begin to let my perspective about journalism seep in  George magazine and maybe influence the presentation of politics." 

Carolyn Bessette photographed by Robert Curran in Miami, on March 21, 1998, at the wedding of Betsy Reisinger (pictured with Carolyn) with Kenan Siegel, John Kennedy Jr's good friends and Rugby teammate at Brown University. Carolyn and Betsy bonded over a passion for fashion and Carolyn helped Betsy shop for her wedding in Bal Harbour the night before. Betsy Reisinger: "Carolyn made me feel so special as she was so inclined to help me. Carolyn kept our photograph in a beautiful silver frame in her apartment with John at Tribeca. This framed picture was mailed to us in Miami after their fatal plane crash. I am so grateful to have this photo to remind me of Carolyn's kindness." In 2007, Donald Trump, interviewed by David Heymann, recalled his encounter with Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy: "I didn’t find Carolyn Bessette as beautiful as everyone else did. She had a great style and a good body, but she wasn’t my type. To John, she was beautiful. Many people considered her a great beauty. I constantly heard these rumors about them—they were having extramarital affairs or they were on the verge of divorce. Michael Bergin was an absolute sleazebag. I know other girls who dated him and said he was a fucking loser!" Kenan Siegel remembered the occasion (February 1997) when Donald Trump hit on Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy at Mar-a-Lago, the resort in Palm Beach County that was acquired in 1985 by Trump for $10 million. "Carolyn looked really embarrassed and said to John: 'that thug tried to flirt with me, can you imagine that?' John turned white as paper and threw a vitriolic glare in Trump's direction. John and Donald Trump were complete opposites, like water and oil. If they made a movie, they would be mortal enemies, the handsome guy with principles against the nasty bully. It would be like the old good guy versus the bad guy. Carolyn was so classy and Trump just looked like white trash with money. I think Trump actually was jealous of John's ability to attract classy women and of course of his historical and political legacy." —The Day John Died (2007) by Christopher Andersen

Joseph Kennedy Sr (The Patriarch), John Kennedy Jr (the sexiest and the sweetest Kennedy man)

On 17 December, 2012, David Nasaw (author of The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy) dismissed on Chicago Tonight (Chicago Public Television) the myth of Joe Kennedy's alleged bootlegging. In another interview with NPR, Nasaw explains with detail his complex subject: "Joseph P. Kennedy was a man of boundless talents, magnetic charm, relentless energy, and unbridled ambition. His life was punctuated by meteoric rises, catastrophic falls, and numerous rebirths, by cascading joys and blinding sorrows, and by a tragic ending which was Shakespearean in its pathos. An Irish Catholic from East Boston, Joe Kennedy was proud of his heritage but refused to be defined by it. He fought to open doors that were closed to him, then having forced his way inside, he refused to play by the rules. He spoke his mind — when he should not have. Too often, he let his fears speak for him. He was distrustful, often contemptuous of those in power — and did not disguise it. His anger and his hatreds were legendary, especially at those whom he believed had betrayed him. Joseph Kennedy had wanted to exert his influence in a positive way. His children entered public service with verve and single-mindedness because that was what he raised them to do. He told his children over and over again, 'I'm making all this money so you don't have to make money, so that you can go into public service. He impressed on them that those who are privileged with money, with education, with good looks, have to give something back to those who don't have those privileges, and he truly believed that," Nasaw tells NPR: "And all of these kids grew up knowing they were not going to go into business. They didn't want to go into business. They were going to do some sort of public service and, in the end, they did." 

"On graduation, he crossed to Cambridge and Harvard College, where he found himself for the first time in his life the odd man out. It was only when he graduates from Harvard that he begins to understand what it means to be an Irish Catholic from East Boston, whose father is a local ward leader. He wants to go into banking or finance. He cannot get a job. Cannot get an interview. His friends, who happen to be Protestant with the same degree that he has and not as good a head for numbers as he has, they have no problem getting jobs. So it's at that moment in 1912 that he realizes — really for the first time — that there are going to be a lot of doors closed to him, and only because he is Irish Catholic in Boston." By the time Joe Kennedy left college, he knew who he was: the smartest man in the room, the one who would come out ahead in every negotiation he entered into. His ambition was to secure a place in a major Boston bank or financial house, but such positions, he discovered on graduation from Harvard, were reserved for "proper Bostonians," not the sons of East Boston Irish Catholic ward leaders. He made the best of the situation by getting a civil service job as the youngest assistant bank examiner at age 25." 

"During the 1920s, Joe Kennedy was a major player in the nation's fastest growing industry, moving pictures, and one of the few Irish Catholics to own or run a studio. The Hollywood he encountered was not a dream factory. It was a town and an industry focused on raising funds to finance the transition to sound and organizing itself to repel attempts at censorship. Kennedy arrived as the head of a minor debt-ridden studio and positioned himself as a non-Jewish white knight who would rescue the industry from those who questioned its taste and its morals. He promised to apply a banker's good sense to making pictures: to cut production costs, raise studio profits, and boost share prices. His rise was meteoric, but after only a few years in the industry, he retired — with Gloria Swanson as his long time mistress and millions of dollars in stock options."

"Trusting no one, with no allegiance to any industry or firm or producer, he made a fortune in Hollywood by selling RKO to Howard Hughes and then in New York, buying and selling options, stocks, and bonds to the companies with which he was associated. A multimillionaire by the age of forty, his outlook on the world was transformed in the early years of the Depression from one of hopeful expectation to an almost unshakeable pessimism. His fears for the future of capitalism after the Depression deepened and prompted him to abandon the private sector in 1932 to campaign for Franklin Roosevelt's election as president. A conservative banker and stock trader with no experience in national politics, he was the odd man out on the campaign trail and, later, in New Deal Washington. Few government appointments have been as universally condemned as was President Roosevelt's choice of Joseph P. Kennedy, a Wall Street operator, to be the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934. And few were as universally acclaimed as Kennedy's was within months of his assuming his post. His years in Washington as chairman of the SEC, then chairman of the Maritime Commission, were marked by triumph, his reputation as a truth-telling nonpartisan with analytical approach enhanced to the point where he was prominently mentioned as a possible presidential candidate."

"Joe Kennedy was rewarded for his service in Washington with appointment as ambassador to the Court of St. James's. The first Irish American to be named to London, with no experience whatsoever to prepare him for the post, he was an outsider again, but this time he reveled in it. He returned to Washington in disgrace. He tried to be of service to his country after Pearl Harbor, but there was no place for him in the Roosevelt administration that he believed worthy of his talents.  In the postwar period, his pessimism became more corrosive still, as did his conviction that he had been right all along to oppose the war against the dictators. He stridently, proudly, renewed his calls for appeasement, this time of the Soviet Union, and for isolation from rather than engagement in the world outside the western hemisphere, and did all he could to provoke a "great debate" on the wisdom of fighting a cold war that, he feared, might turn hot at any moment. He took his role as the parent of nine seriously. He was an active, loving, attentive, sometimes intrusive father. He pushed his children forward, giving them good advice whether they solicited it or not, gently chided them to do better, and taught them that family was sacred." 

"Joe Kennedy raised his kids to be as confident and as stubborn as he was, and as relentlessly optimistic as he was pessimistic — and, for the most part, they were. One cannot help but admire a man who from such humble origins back to Dunganstown (Ireland) became so wealthy, powerful and politically influential. This most articulate, most dominant man, in December of 1961 — less than a year into his son's first term as president — has a massive stroke. They perform the last rites. Nobody thinks he'll last more than 24 hours; he lasts eight years. But during those eight years, he is unable to communicate through language. He can't write, he can't speak, though he seems to understand everything he's told. And it is during those eight years that he witnesses the assassinations—the violent deaths—of his second and his third sons. An unimaginable horror after another. And there's no way for him to express his feelings except to sob. And he cries and he suffers, but he knows it won't bring back those lost sons." Source: www.npr.org 

Robert T. Littell: John and I shared similarities that connected us quickly. My grandfather was an old-line WASP from Barrington Hills, Illinois, where he’d made his name and fortune in banking, the same than John's grandfather Joe Sr. We had both turbulent childhoods and emerged with the confidence of survivors. Neither of us could we really talk about our fathers’ deaths. We’d been raised by strong-willed mothers and brainy sisters. And we shared a belief in our own future greatness. My big Teflon-coated ego was an important part of our fast friendship. Irreverent and cocky, I believed that I was John’s equal or better. I can’t explain this and don’t defend it; it’s just the way I was then. And John liked it. We found our friendship easy. From the start, we were each other’s best audience. We each knew the other to be hilarious, brave, and brilliant. That’s one of the key conditions for male bonding—deep, unconditional admiration. Add a constant stream of well-intentioned jokes and you’ve got the recipe for a great friendship. 

On one hand, John was the only son of the most accomplished member of a very prominent, accomplished clan like the Kennedys were. John was also, without question, the media’s favorite Kennedy: the “sexiest” one, the one who never got in trouble. On the other hand, John was something of an outsider within the Kennedy family. Though very close to Anthony Radziwiłł, and close to several of his cousins, especially Bobby Kennedy Jr., Timmy Shriver and Willie Smith, John had a slightly strained relationship with the tight-knit crew as a whole. He’d been raised outside of their Massachusetts world, kept apart by his protective and New York–based mother. She saw to it that her children were as independent as she was. It wasn’t long after our game that Jackie took the decision of occupy her own home on Martha’s Vineyard—close to the family, but still separate. The Hyannis Port gang teased John not for lack of love but, in my opinion, out of envy. This didn’t bother him a bit. He had the best of two worlds and he knew it. He could be tough when someone trespassed his boundaries, but in essence he was a sweet, compassionate and generous friend.

When John had to introduce Carolyn officially to the Kennedy clan, I was convinced she was going to have difficulties in adjusting that tense, suffocating atmosphere in Hyannis Port. I know Ethel Kennedy and Eunice Shriver tried hard to implicate her in the family activities, but Carolyn was seen as this modern, non-traditional young woman who didn't conform to the typical Kennedy wife in many aspects. John was a monogamous and loyal guy. Frankly, his loyalty with his friends was the same than his loyalty with his girlfriends. I know first hand he had many skirts thrown at him, but with women he was quite innocent, he was very innocent on that level. He even had blocked Madonna's advances. John gave me a very funny account of himself and Madonna stuck in a hotel room in Chicago, saying to the Material Girl he hadn't brought condoms, that was the excuse he used to stiff her. On another occasion, he gave Melanie Griffith a fake phone number, for Christ sake! I suppose some journalists would have liked to paint John as more of a playboy, or more of a Kennedy or more mysterious, but frankly he was rather transparent and I believe he stuck to his vows with Carolyn. —The Men We Became: My Friendship with John F. Kennedy, Jr. (2004) by Robert T. Littell