Fredrik Logevall's JFK, JFK Jr "Forever Young"

The first of a two-volume set, Fredrik Logevall’s “JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century“ aims to give the clearest picture yet available of the 35th president set against the historical, political, and cultural context of a pivotal age. The book begins with great-grandfather Patrick Kennedy’s arrival in Boston during the Irish potato famine and runs through Jack’s childhood, studies at Harvard, and military duty, and finally his rise in politics in 1956, when he almost became the Democrats’ vice presidential pick. FREDRIK LOGEVALL: I guess the conceit of the book is that I can tell two stories together: the story of John F. Kennedy’s rise and the story of America’s rise. I believe we can better understand the first half of the so-called American Century through the lens of Kennedy’s life. One thing that people have underplayed is the degree to which he was a serious student of democracy and world affairs at an earlier point than we imagine. We tend to think of him as a callow playboy, not serious about public policy or his career until quite late, until he runs for Congress in 1946, and maybe not even then. But you can look at the papers he wrote as an undergraduate at Harvard, some of which are available, and you can look at his senior thesis which became a best-selling book “Why England Slept” and see a young man already thinking deeply and in sustained fashion about important issues. A second finding is that the young Jack Kennedy was in important respects his own master. Though his father was a towering force in his life, Jack proved willing, to a degree I did not expect, to chart his own course. The Harvard years are interesting in this regard: In 1939‒40, as World War II began and debate raged in the U.S. about how to respond, Jack showed himself willing in a way his older brother, Joe Jr., never was to separate himself from his father. Long before Pearl Harbor, Jack had become an interventionist while his father adhered throughout to a staunch isolationist position. Later, during his political campaigns, Jack always kept the key decision-making role for himself, notwithstanding the common misconception that his father called the shots.

Bobby Kennedy greatly admired his brother, and Jack could see Bobby’s intelligence, loyalty and good cheer. Then in 1952 Bobby, all of 26 at the time, came aboard to take charge of Jack’s floundering Senate campaign against Henry Cabot Lodge and helped to turn the thing around. Jack could now see just how important Bobby could be to his career. Jack Kennedy was quite a complex character. He did have his playboy side, but some of his war actions can be called heroic. There is a seriousness of purpose which you see in his letters home from the South Pacific, and more dramatically in the actions he took to help save his crew after his boat, the PT-109, was rammed by a Japanese destroyer. Was there heroism there? I believe so. The efforts he made in the succeeding days to try to save his crew were really quite extraordinary. We might note here as well that he came back from the war, as many of the servicemen did, with a seriousness of purpose evinced to some degree before but deepened as a result of seeing combat. He was convinced that the U.S. would need to play a leading role in world affairs, even as he also had a skepticism about the use of the military’s power that he would carry with him for the rest of his days. Despite his womanizing–highly exaggerated, keep in mind that Kennedy was in pain most of his life suffering from Addison's Disease, back ailments and other maladies–there are paradoxes here, among them the fact that his administration took important progressive steps, establishing, for example, the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, with Eleanor Roosevelt as chairwoman. In 1962, at the urging of the commission, Kennedy ordered federal agencies to cease sex discrimination in hiring. GAZETTE: In the second volume you’ll have to unravel the mystery around the assassination. Do you have a sense of how you will approach that? 

LOGEVALL: There is certainly a fascination, and it shows few signs of fading. It is a vexing issue to any biographer of JFK, and it has spawned a whole cottage industry of its own. I haven’t yet written Volume 2 so I haven’t fully decided how I will proceed on this. But certainly I will talk about Lee Harvey Oswald’s background, and will give the reader a full sense of how it all culminated in this terrible moment. And I think I will owe the reader my assessment of what I believe happened. So I will provide it. I don’t think I will get heavily into the deliberations of the Warren Commission or the various conspiracy theories that have sprouted up over the years. That’s another book, not to mention a potential morass. Oswald’s associations and meetings in the weeks leading up to the assassination are worthy of investigation, however, and have been examined in recent studies. I will delve into that material and be interested to see what I find. Source: news.harvard.edu

On February 3, 1971, President Nixon invited Jackie Kennedy and her children to the White House for a private dinner with him and his family. It was their first visit back since the days after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. They were together for a bit more than two hours, including a visit to the Oval Office. At one point during the dinner, John Jr. spilled a glass of milk into Nixon’s lap, who reportedly “reacted graciously.” In his thank-you note to the president the next day, John Jr. thanked him and the First Lady for showing him the White House again. “I don’t think I could remember much about the White House,” he wrote Nixon. “I remember that once I sat on Lincoln’s bed and wished for something important to come true.”

“Greetings from Planet Ocean” by John F Kennedy Jr., postmarked from Koror, Republic of Palau, August 9, 1993: "Dear Kevin, Jim B., I feel a little guilty writing this while N.Y.C. shimmers in the summer heat and Rick Costello prowls the halls. But its pretty bitchin and I thought you should know. I'm in Palau in the South Pacific scuba diving and exploring the battlefields of WWII. Lots of Japanese but I watch my back. One whole week here and I haven't killed one. Only kidding Kevin. I'll let you be the first. Then on to Vietnam. Please tell all who ask that. I've decided to become a flight attendant. See ya. John" This postcard was from the trip he took with Daryl Hannah to Koror Island after he quit his D.A. job.

     

Jimmy McElligott worked as a legal clerk at the Supreme Courthouse in NYC and knew John Kennedy Jr. as an assistant D.A.: "Despite all his notoriety and fame, John was a down to earth guy who truly cared about his friends. We spent many days and weeks handling hundreds of cases together and we always started each day having coffee in my office after his bike ride to work. Every day there would be girls hanging outside the courtroom when they knew he was in there with me. I'd have to sneak him out the back hallway half the time. He had a group of girls who stalked him, but he was never rude to them. He was always a gentleman and made time to talk to everyone, he was that nice. Funny story, one day we were on trial and he forgot his suit. Turns out this was the day he had to give the summation to the jury. He came into the jury room in sweats and a T-shirt with a borrowed suit. He went into the bathroom like Clark Kent and came out in this suit that's a size too small with pants that were 4 inches too short. I asked him "WTF are you wearing?" He responded: "I forgot my suit so I borrowed this from Kevin" (his office mate Kevin Hynes). I said: "well, you better stand behind the prosecution table so the jury can't see those flood pants that you're wearing." He laughed and assured me that he would be fine. Daryl Hannah was his girlfriend at the time and she was there in the audience for support. John and I last saw each other at his farewell party at Forlini's restaurant in August of 1993."

Ron Fitzgerald in a recent review about HBO's Perry Mason on TVLine: "What was even more appealing about Perry Mason to me was that Kevin J Hynes was not only a co-executive producer, but wrote several of the episodes' scripts. After John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr.'s death on July 16, 1999, in early 2001 I was discussing the representation of a memoir about John that was being written by Kevin J. Hynes. Kevin was a dear friend of John and worked with him in the D.A.’s office in NYC. Kevin was waiting for JFK Jr. at the airport on Martha’s Vineyard to drive John, Carolyn and Lauren to the Kennedy's compound. Kevin Hynes attended John's memorial and was one of the funeral pallbearers, since Caroline Kennedy appointed him to help honor John's memory. Sadly, Kevin got a backlash when he came out with a proposal for a memoir about John in February 2003. Apparently the book proposal was shelved. Kevin said that the media widely exaggerated the 'conspiratory' contents of his proposal and ultimately all the backlash he received made him cancel the project."

"Dear Young Kevin and Beth, I have a year but I know you two will give me a little slack. I send this on with great affection and trust it will go well with Larchmont-Gothic. Hope you dig it. Love John + Carolyn" This letter was enclosed with a gift to Kevin and Beth (Kevin's wife). Beth Hynes also was friendly with Sasha Chermayeff, one of John's best friends. At Andover, they had become fast—and lifelong—friends. They shared three classes together at Phillips Academy their first year. They talked about their families, and they immediately clicked. She recalled how they were once dancing around in the dorm and he started talking about how uninformed women seemed to be about their sexual power over men. “He said, ‘God, women have no clue that they’re driving men completely crazy, being such naturally sexy creatures,’ and stuff like that,” she said. Sasha also remembered that John was getting “pissed” at her for being so naïve about how her innocent-seeming flirting was affecting other guys at Andover. He was being protective the way an older brother would be to a younger sister. She and John were never a couple but there was one moment, during the fall of their first semester at Andover, when it might have happened. 

They were in the old part of the stately Oliver Wendell Holmes Library in an area where books had been removed from the shelves. They decided to climb onto the shelving and lie down and they started making out. The next day, Sasha remembered, they got into “kind of an argument” about what had happened “and then we were both like, ‘Okay fine, we would just go back to where we were before, we're just friends,’ and we just stayed there.” Professor of History Edward Hill recalled: "John didn't like to talk about his father's assassination, which I learned for the first time at Andover, on the steps on Samuel Phillips Hall, leafing through the pages of The Best of Life with John and Sasha when we hit the inevitable assassination chapter. And John almost tore the pages out of the book he flipped through them so—just quick. Then suddenly we’re on, like, the moon landing. He didn’t even look at those pictures.” Hill said he always believed that John’s closest friends “all seem to have come from the Land of Misfit Toys”; this was the “interesting dichotomy” in John’s personality. 

“I think John understood and believed, as I did, that he would and should be the president of the United States, that he was born to it,” Hill said. “Everything about his personality and his life made it appropriate, due to his commitment to do the right thing. It was all there.” John started dating Jenny Christian, an Andover senior from Englewood, New Jersey. Her father was a doctor. Jenny and her older sister Vicky were legendary at Andover for their combination of beauty and intelligence. On January 5, 1979, John applied to Brown University. He matter-of-factly listed his father as deceased, with a former occupation listed simply as “government.” He indicated on the form that he was interested chiefly in studying political science, international relations, and American civilization, and also that he had an interest in studying the dramatic arts. Without guile or irony, he wrote that his “academic interest” had always leaned toward “conceptual studies.” Although Daryl Hannah had been his "full-time girlfriend" John distanced from the actress shortly after his mother's death, taking on an exclusive relationship with Carolyn Bessette. Sasha Chermayeff was struck by Carolyn’s beauty and magnetism, among other qualities. “Carolyn was hilarious,” Sasha said. “She was often sarcastic without being mean. She was a nice girl, but she also had a rebellious streak. She was very funny, and a great listener. You cannot tell in photographs how beautiful she was in real life. I never saw a picture of her that did her justice. John was totally smitten in Carolyn’s company. I think Carolyn was the only woman who could make him happy and on the flipside the only one who could hurt him.”

Ron Fitzgerald: I would've read Kevin's book, because unlike other writers, Kevin Hynes was close to both John Kennedy and Carolyn Bessette. Kevin said he got to know Carolyn really well. Kevin's book had the working title “Forever Young,” in collaboration with People magazine staffer Johnny Dodd. Its controversial contents stirred up resentments among Kennedy’s other friends. It promised to chronicle the women of his life–from Daryl Hannah to Carolyn Bessette–the George magazine contretemps, his political ambitions and a spurned invitation to join Bill Clinton’s Justice Department. Kevin Hynes, the son of Brooklyn District Attorney Charles “Joe” Hynes, became an assistant district attorney in Westchester County. He struck up a friendship with Kennedy when both started their careers as assistant district attorneys in Manhattan on the same day in 1989. Said one Kennedy friend who is still close to the family, “It was a reprehensible proposal. He’s nakedly trying to cash in on his friendship with John. The family was not happy.” Hynes reveals he was waiting for Kennedy on Martha’s Vineyard the day the plane carrying Kennedy, his wife and sister-in-law Lauren Bessette plunged into the ocean on July 16, 1999. The morning after the disappearance, Hynes reported he received a beeper message from JFK’s apartment. Briefly, hope soared that JFK Jr. was somehow still alive. “John is beeping me!” Hynes recalls screaming to his wife. Alas, it turned out to be Kennedy’s Girl Friday, RoseMarie Terenzio, calling from inside Kennedy’s TriBeCa apartment. Several of Bessette’s friends – who apparently had keys – also showed up inside the apartment, supposedly to get rid of the pot or drugs. Kevin Hynes' failed project was not the first Kennedy book proposal to stir controversy. Former George magazine Executive Editor Richard Blow was also opposed by some of Kennedy's friends. Agent Peter Miller, who was handling the Hynes proposal, said: “The Forever Young book business is dead right now, and we’re not pursuing it. Whoever gave you that proposal is a despicable person.” A call to Hynes office was not returned by presstime. Source: medium.com

Laurence Leamer (author of The Kennedy Men and Sons of Camelot) interviewed on FOX, 2004: John Kennedy Jr was very serious about running for the Senate. In fact, he'd talked to Roger Ailes (FOX CEO) about his political plans. And Roger Ailes, who's a great political expert, said that he thought that John had a big chance of becoming senator in New York. So he was hoping to run for it. But he was very upset with Hillary Clinton. Despite the Kennedy myth, I don't think John Kennedy Jr was so liberal. I think so many people associated him to be so far in leaning to the left. But he was a centrist Democrat, and he wanted to do his campaign the right way. When his cousin, Patrick Kennedy, ran for the state legislature in Rhode Island when he was 21 years old, all of the Kennedy money came there to get this young man into office. On election day, John was there at one of the polling places and a photographer took some Polaroids of his cousin. An incumbent came in and John went up to him and said, "You know, this is not the way this should be done. This is not the way you should win an election." So John wanted to wait until he was ready to win an election because he really cared about doing the right way and was going to come out and ask for people's votes in the right way. John was sharp as a tack and not easily fooled. He had his father’s gift of being able to ask just the right questions. There were some early polls which indicated he would have done quite well had he run. Actually John was ahead of Hillary, but he was just too much of a gentleman. In fact, that was one of his problems. He just was too nice. I mean Hillary came in, she was the carpetbagger. He should have gone into that race and would have won. But today, you aren't going to win an election because you're a Kennedy. In fact, you know, in the last couple of elections, the young Kennedys have lost the Senate. They all have lost. So the Kennedy name is not enough anymore, that's for sure. Why are we still so fascinated with the Kennedys themselves? Because the drama is just so overwhelming. It's the ultimate immigrant drama. It's the American story to the Ninth degree. The promise they had when we think of JFK. And he was a symbol, we remember when JFK died and then there was such closure with his son dying so young and promising. It really was the beginning of Camelot with JFK and Jackie. What we have witnessed it's essentially the end of that romantic idea with the death of John Jr. Source: www.foxnews.com/category/interviews

NADSP John F Kennedy Jr. Awards

“It does not take a majority to prevail… but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.” —Samuel Adams 

“People said I should accept the world. Bullshit! I don't accept the world.” ―Political activist Richard M. Stallman

Gerald Celente (The Trends Research Institute, November 2019): By the time I met Governor John Connally, I had lost my naiveté and harbored deep doubts about government. And my disdain for most politicians was growing. It was not just what Connally said that moved me, but the authority and gravity of the way he said it. He was my epiphany. We all went up to his suite and had a couple of drinks, a few snacks and some small talk. Hooker was trying to sign Connally onto the Board of Directors for a chain of steak houses he wanted to develop. Caddell, a Washington pollster, and Connally traded tales of political days gone by. I half listened and said nothing. My brain was back in the hotel lobby replaying Connally’s statement: “If the American people knew what was going on in this government, there’d be a revolution.” That line reinforced my political atheism. —The JFK files: What Governor Connally told Gerald Celente (2019)

John F. Kennedy Jr rode his bike through the streets of Manhattan, played softball and Frisbee in Central Park, and sometimes made grand entrances at black-tie galas. But John F. Kennedy Jr. also worked hard--quietly but very intensively, his associates say--with several charity groups that have donated millions of dollars and helped thousands of people in the city to make their own. In 1988, Kennedy Jr. formed Reaching Up, an organization to improve care for the mentally handicapped. Three years later, he joined the board of the Robin Hood Foundation, a group that gives more than $1 million a month to programs to help the city's impoverished people, especially children. "This was no resume-builder for him," Peter Kiernan, Robin Hood's chairman, said: "This was not a subtle, slight involvement. He was completely engaged. He was a full partner. Quite often, he kept us focused on our mission when we started to drift away." For some of the group's causes, including a school in Harlem for the disfavored classes, Kennedy was the one who initiated the contact and encouraged the board to act. "He came to every board meeting, went to look at every place we invested in," Kiernan said. "When we went to a school, he'd talk with the strategic-planning people, and John was very good, very adept at that. But he'd also plunge right in there with the schoolchildren, visiting them frequently `Hey, kids, what's going on.' He'd get into conversations with them and play with them, sometimes bringing them all to ice skating at Rockefeller Center. So we certainly lost a great man here." Reaching Up grew out of the Kennedy family's longstanding charity work with the mentally disabled, which began as a tribute to his father's sister, Rosemary, who had been institutionalized for many years. "John spent about a year investigating how to get involved in this," said Bill Ebenstein, the executive director of Reaching Up. "And he realized the best way to support people with disabilities was to support the workers who provided services for them, by creating a program for them in higher education and helping them pay for it." Barbara Anselm, now the director of an adult day care program for United Cerebral Palsy in Brooklyn, was a caseworker and advocate for the handicapped and mentally ill in 1991, when Kennedy awarded her a funds grant, one of the first. "It helped me pay the tuition so I could go to classes at night," Anselm recalled. "I met John Kennedy. He told me he had selected my application himself. It was nice to know -- it encouraged me to know -- that people of that stature were supporting me." Before Reaching Up, Ebenstein said, people like Anselm had few professional prospects. "These were people with low-wage jobs, poverty jobs really," he said. "There was no career ladder." 

Politicians were talking then about `quality health care,' but John realized you could never build a quality system of services unless you had quality jobs for the front-line workers." So, John Kennedy Jr. funded -- and persuaded professionals in a variety of fields to develop -- a series of courses on disabilities at the City University of New York, especially its East Side Manhattan branch at Hunter College. "He'd bring public and private entities together to work out how to do this: city and state agencies, the public universities, the hospital workers' unions," Ebenstein said. "He could hold a coalition like this together. He led these meetings, visited all the places, knew all the executive directors." Ebenstein was unsure whether the organization can continue without Kennedy. "Keeping these entities together -- you've got all this infighting and politics -- you need someone who can transcend that," he said. "I'm hoping we can keep doing it, but I don't know." Kennedy played down his involvement in these areas. David Saltzman, who is executive director of the Robin Hood Foundation and went to Brown University with Kennedy in the 1980s, declined to talk specifically about his role in the organization. "He was a friend of mine," Saltzman said. "He asked me to respect his privacy, and I'm going to continue doing that." Ebenstein made the same point: "He did not seek publicity. We'd win an award, and I'd say, `Can't we put out a news release?' He'd say, `No, stop that.' He feared people would just focus on him and miss the substance of what he was doing." Source: nadsp.org/jfkjr-award-2020/

In the past when someone had upset her, Caroline Kennedy simply cut them off of her life. The handwritten thank-you cards for which she was famous stopped, her phone was suddenly blocked, and she rarely forgave anyone who had crossed her. She fell out with her sister-in-law Carolyn Bessette during a party at her Park Avenue apartment when she discovered Carolyn had posed outside for the photographers while holding three-year-old Jack. And she was furious when her brother John sided with his wife. Although gossip was Caroline was not very fond of Carolyn Bessette, it was not comparable with the contempt John felt towards his brother-in-law Edwin Schlossberg. John's good friend Sasha Chermayeff recalled: "John thought Caroline's husband was a jerk. He mocked him and called him 'Edwina.' One day I heard fuming about him: 'I hate that jerk. I don't know what my sister saw in him.´" Their relationship became so strained that at one stage, when they were auctioning off their late mother Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s effects, John and Caroline only communicated through their lawyers. Chermayeff remarks: "When her brother wanted to run for the Senate, Caroline needled John saying his wife Carolyn's erratic behaviour would destroy any chances he had. Caroline even told him: "They'll shoot you, just like they shot our father and uncle." One of their most serious blow-ups occurred in the fall of 1998. RoseMarie Terenzio received a phone call from HBO, revealing that Edwin Schlossberg sought to be an executive producer of a documentary about the assassination of the President Kennedy and Schlossberg had suggested John as narrator. 

John exploded, Terenzio recalls, "John could not believe that Ed was so dumb, or Caroline so clueless, as to get involved in such a controversial project. I had not never seen John so mad as that day." What infuriated John most was that Ed was crossing the line by thinking that because he had married a Kennedy, he was one of them. "Who the fuck is that guy to say me how to honor my father's legacy?" he shouted to Caroline on the phone: "You would never be doing this if Mom were alive," he bellowed before slamming the receiver. John stewed for weeks before he decided to tackle the problem head-on by summoning Caroline and Ed into his office. Although Schlossberg sat at the head of the conference table, John refused to even look at his brother-in-law or acknowledge his presence. According to his assistant RoseMarie Terenzio, John looked directly to his sister, admonishing her for entertaining such an idea: "Your husband will not interfere in my relationship with my father's legacy. Is that clear, is that understood?" John’s sudden death at the age of 38 hit Caroline Kennedy hard and left a massive void in her life. 

From then on, Caroline distanced herself from the Kennedy clan – and refused to spend time at the family compound in Hyannis Port, Cape Cod. Since the late 70's, Caroline Kennedy's husband, Edwin Schlossberg had been designing museum and game park exhibits. For a ''learning environment'' at the Brooklyn Children's Museum, he created exhibits as a playground based on the structure of a molecule. For the now-shuttered Macomber Farm, run by the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, he developed games that simulated the gait, vision and social interactions of farm animals. In one, visitors pulled a Conestoga wagon to learn the meaning of horsepower. At the time, Mr. Schlossberg only thought up exhibits to be built by others. ''He had inspiration,'' Mr. Pockell recalled, ''but the execution and mechanics didn't interest him as much.'' Brent Saville, a designer now based in Los Angeles, made the exhibits at the Brooklyn Children's Museum. Mr. Schlossberg's plan was ''sort of wispy,'' he recalled. ''Nobody understood what it meant.'' —The Day John Died (2007) by Christopher Andersen

Teri Norris (Amazon Reviews): According to the unreliable memoir The Other Man, Carolyn Bessette spent Christmas 1994 with Michael Bergin. It's very possible he took that story and fast forwarded it to fit the narrative of CBK being an attached friend after their break-up. In reality she spent Christmas 1996, 1997, and 1998 all with her husband John Kennedy and also with the Radziwills on Vero Beach. None with Bergin. So basically he twisted the truth, yes he spent one Christmas with Carolyn but only during their dating years, notice how he never mentions explicitly any dates/years in his book, he leaves it up to the reader. It's a mish mash of stories with no orderly timeline. Bergin, not the most articulate person (self-confessed, not my criticism), states that Carolyn was even less communicative within the context of their relationship, other than sexually. From the start to finish in this book, Carolyn is hardly ever portrayed (by him) as actually talking to him, in fact, quite the contrary. Time and time again, she refuses to talk to him, even when he tries to share personal experiences. How could he humanize Carolyn if one of the basic elements of human contact, communication, is totally missing? When one considers that the time frame of this book was between 1993-1998, it seems obvious that either Michael Bergin read too much into this relationship or that Carolyn was neurotic beyond belief. Either can be true, but if you've been involved with someone over a period of 5 years (on/off) and you know them not much better than you did when you met, perhaps there's more than a little delusion involved on someone's part. In short, this guy really didn't know Carolyn Bessette... she never let him in her inner thoughts. Her reasons for keeping him emotionally isolated in this relationship are anyone's guess, but since he's writing the book, he should be able to give us the answers. But he can't and that the book's main failing. Bergin constantly refers to himself as "the other man" and yet he continues (obviously) pining for her to this day (his wife and two kids aside). Why, one wonders, as they read this book?! The one feeling you walk away with is that he was simply a friend with benefits to her, to put it kindly... a situation that firmly held until their breakup. Bergin has done nothing more than highlight (and rehash) Carolyn's personal quirks without shedding any light on why she behaved this way. One can easily conclude he didn't simply couldn't because he never got to know the real Carolyn. Bergin doesn't seem to realize that either. What we can see is that Carolyn Bessette was not interested in Michael Bergin, and we can easily understand why she chose someone else to share her life with, especially if that person was John Kennedy Jr. Sadly, this book is a testament to the saying that "silence is golden". Source: www.amazon.com

The history of Joseph Kennedy's bootlegger past was an invention of Samuel Halpern from the CIA, who worked with the Warren Commission in the investigation of JFK's assassination. Gerald Posner is a proven fraud who literally got away with fabricating interviews. He once claimed that he got to interview Dr. Humes and Dr. Boswell, and that they said there was an entry wound on the top of the head, contrary to their previous statements that this wound existed on the base of the head. A real researcher named Dr. Gary Aguilar contacted both of them, Dr. Humes denied telling him he changed his mind about the location of the wound, and Dr. Boswell denied ever talking to Posner. Gerald Posner also claimed to interview James Tague, the passerby man who reported being hit by a small piece of debris. Real researcher Harold Weisberg contacted James Tague, who later became a personal friend of Weisberg, and he denied ever talking to Posner. Fabricating sources is the most serious offense in writing so Case Closed is indefensible. It can be noticed that the hole in Kennedy's back in this demonstration is anatomically was lower than the hole in his throat, indicating that a bullet from the Sixth Floor could not have entered the back and exited the throat. The debate over the anatomical location of Kennedy's back wound falls into three camps: The C7s, the T1s, and the T3s. The C7s and T1s debate over whether the official autopsy photographs show the hole in the skin of the back to be slightly anatomically higher or lower than the throat wound below the Adam's apple. The JFK autopsy photographs are notoriously confusing and open to interpretation, so it can be difficult to differentiate the top of the shoulder from an area just below the shoulder line. The T3 photo probably was altered because the hole in the skin is shown to be higher than the holes in Kennedy's suit jacket and shirt, and the pictures of Kennedy just before the shooting support the notion that such a peculiar fold in Kennedy's clothing at the time of the back shot is highly unlikely or impossible. The T3 photos show the back wound, where a shot unquestionably could not have exited the throat. Source:educationforum.ipbhost.com

Politics and Plagiarism, JFK Elusive Hero

In an address to the California State Democratic Convention on February 3, 1987, Mr. Joe Biden said that "every generation of Americans has been called" to a test of devotion to democracy; John F. Kennedy used the same phrase about national loyalty in his presidential inaugural address in 1961. Other times, Biden uses longer passages almost verbatim. Senator Biden has credited Robert F. Kennedy as "the man I think I admire more than anyone in American politics." But Biden hasn't always given him credit for the words he used first. When Senator Kennedy ran for president in 1968, he spoke in Des Moines and again at the University of Kansas about the measure of a nation."The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play," Senator Kennedy said. '' It does not include the beauty of our poetry, or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate, or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, nor our wisdom nor our devotion to our country.It measures everything, in short, except what makes life worth living, and it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud to be Americans. '' In the California convention speech, Senator Biden spoke about "the ultimate moral test of what this country is," and denounced what he saw as the new materialism of society. "We cannot measure the health of our children, the quality of their education, the joy of their play," he said. after opening his speech stating that he wanted to tell the audience "what I have in mind". It does not measure the beauty of our poetry, the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate, the integrity of our public officials. Neither our wit nor our wisdom, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country count,'' Biden continued to applause. "That end result can tell us everything about our lives except what makes life worth living, and it can tell us everything about America except what makes us proud to be Americans." Fordham's speech recalled that in the same speech, Senator Biden warned against the danger of hopelessness, against the idea that there is little one person can do to affect events. ' Well, few of us have the greatness to modify history itself, '' Biden said. "But each of us can act to affect a small part of the events, and in the totality of these acts the history of this generation will be written." The Biden campaign, in a direct mail fundraising effort, recently aired a partial tape of the California speech that included the quote from "greatness to bend history." 

This memorable subject had been offered by Robert Kennedy in a speech at Fordham University in June 1967. "Few will have the greatness to bend history," Kennedy said at the time. "But each of us can work to change a small part of the events, and in the total of all those acts the history of this generation will be written." The Biden echo of Kennedy was noticed, with surprise, by many regular Democrats in the California convention audience. It was also noticed in other parts of the country by some who watched Biden's performance live on the cable television network C-SPAN. At the White House, N. Jeffrey Lord, associate director of the political affairs office, watched as Senator Biden spoke.A devoted admirer of Robert Kennedy in his youth who keeps a copy of Jamie Wyeth's portrait of John Kennedy in his Reagan White House office, Lord had recently heard a commemorative record of Robert Kennedy's speeches. As Senator Biden spoke, Lord suddenly found himself reciting the words along with him. "I was finishing sentences before him," said Lord, who called The New York Times to point out the similarities. I wanted to hear because Biden had such a reputation as a great speaker that I wanted to hear him. But suddenly I realized that the speech was not Joe Biden, it was Robert Kennedy. He was repeating the exact language, without attributing it. I was really mad. I wanted to hear because Biden had such a reputation as a great speaker that I wanted to hear him. But suddenly I realized that the speech was not Joe Biden, it was Robert Kennedy. He was repeating the exact language, without attributing it. I was really mad.''

JFK was terribly sensitive to the criticism Ms. Kennedy received after her White House tour. He was terribly upset about it because she tried so hard and thought she had done a good job. He thought the criticism (I think it was David Wise of the Herald Tribune) he gave him was very unfair. JFK once gave his definition of happiness which, he said, was ancient Greek philosophy "the full use of all its powers in the line of excellence." I think he always tried to keep his definition up. 

Deep Politics and the Death of JFK by Peter Dale Scott was published in 1993 by the University of California Press. Bruce Cumings, Gaeton Fonzi, and Oliver Stone provided promotional reviews of the book. Kirkus Reviews called the book an "astonishingly well-researched and intelligent insight not only into the assassination of JFK but also into the rising forces that undermine American democracy." Kirkus' review also described the book as a "sort of Rosetta stone to unlock the deepest darkness of American politics." According to Publisher Weekly, "the book's most useful feature is a careful discussion of how US policy in Vietnam abruptly changed after Kennedy's death."In 2013, former Salon editor-in-chief David Talbot included Deep Politics in his list of the seven "best books on the subject", describing the work as a "masterpiece of how operate the high rankings of power."

JFK's adviser Kenneth P. O'Donnell could somehow go into the official record after the 1976 National Enquirer exposition of the Meyer-Kennedy affair and defend the brilliant Camelot myth in his attempt to deny that there had been any a romance between Mary Pinchot Meyer and President Kennedy; However, just a year later, shortly before her death, she confides to author Leo Damore some of the intimate details of their relationship. In the same way that O'Donnell never spoke publicly about how the FBI had discounted his testimony that the presidential motorcade in Dallas was leading into an ambush where at least two shots had come "from behind the fence on the grassy knoll", O'Donnell confirmed twenty-five years later to the Speaker of the House, Tip O'Neill, in his 1987 memoir The Man of the House. Both Leo Damore and his attorney James H. Smith worked on one of O'Donnell's Massachusetts gubernatorial campaigns, where the three had become good friends. The JFK administration acknowledged that it was trying to get out of Vietnam, including Roger Hilsman of the State Department and Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense, who said that was the case. Also adding the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Max Taylor, Advisor Ted Sorensen and assistants Dave Powers and Ken O'Donnell.All of these men said that Kennedy would never have entered Vietnam with combat troops and direct US military intervention. Smith worked on one of O'Donnell's Massachusetts gubernatorial campaigns, where the three had become good friends. The JFK administration acknowledged that it was trying to get out of Vietnam, including Roger Hilsman of the State Department and Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense, who said that was the case. Also adding the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Max Taylor, Advisor Ted Sorensen and assistants Dave Powers and Ken O'Donnell. All of these men said Kennedy would never have entered Vietnam with direct US military intervention and combat troops. Smith worked on one of O'Donnell's Massachusetts gubernatorial campaigns, where the three had become good friends. The JFK administration acknowledged that it was trying to get out of Vietnam, including Roger Hilsman of the State Department and Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense, who said that was the case. Also adding the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Max Taylor, Advisor Ted Sorensen and assistants Dave Powers and Ken O'Donnell. All of these men said Kennedy would never have entered Vietnam with direct US military intervention and combat troops. Also adding the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Max Taylor, Advisor Ted Sorensen and assistants Dave Powers and Ken O'Donnell. All of these men said Kennedy would never have entered Vietnam with direct US military intervention and combat troops. Also adding the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Max Taylor, Advisor Ted Sorensen and assistants Dave Powers and Ken O'Donnell. All of these men said Kennedy would never have entered Vietnam with direct US military intervention and combat troops. 

In John Kennedy: Elusive Hero, Chris Matthews does a good job of describing Kennedy's famous military service and rescue mission at PT 109. He also makes helpful sketches of Kennedy's early runs for the House of Representatives and Senate. The book is also apt on the 1960 Democratic presidential primaries and the 1960 convention. But here the trouble begins. If one looks at the footnotes and reads Matthews's own comments on the subject, one of the sources for his favorite books is Herbert Parmet's two-volume biography of Kennedy, which first appeared in 1982. I have been familiar with these books since I used them to write my first book, Destiny Betrayed. Parmet is a conventional historian in the manner and method of, say, David McCullough and the late Stephen Ambrose. He is not the type of man to push boundaries or forge a new frontier for others to follow. And with Kennedy, that's necessary since a lot of the things he was doing were quite unconventional. Let me name just four books that go further and forge a new frontier: JFK Ordeal in Africa, The Kennedy Tapes, Battling Wall Street, and JFK and Vietnam.What is particularly surprising is that Matthews writes that one of the things that attracted him to Kennedy and made him write this book was JFK's handling of the Missile Crisis. 

But then why ignore The Kennedy Tapes? Since it is, from the American side, the most complete chronicle of the crisis that we have today. It is made up of actual transcribed tapes that were recorded during those dangerous thirteen days when the world was on the brink of nuclear war. Any true historian always consults the primary sources recorded during the actual event as his baseline. Matthews' curious choice in historiography tells us something negative about his book. Take, for example, Kennedy's constant refusal to send combat troops to Vietnam. This 1961 decision was made despite the fact that almost all of his advisers urged Kennedy to do just that. (John Newman, JFK and Vietnam). It is a choice that Kennedy never doubted while in office. However, President Lyndon Johnson revoked it in early 1965, just 14 months after Kennedy's assassination. And Johnson's decision was backed by former President Dwight Eisenhower. (Gordon Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster) Now, any rather curious biographer would want to delve into this question. I mean, why did Kennedy steadfastly refuse to do what both his predecessor and his successor had no qualms about doing? Matthews elaborates or explains little.

The reason for Kennedy's faith in Edmund Gullion was related to the fact that he had explained to the young Kennedy that France could not win in Vietnam because they had no one who could match Ho Chi Minh's nationalist appeal. So when Kennedy returned to America, he expressed these ideas in a speech he gave in November 1951: "This is an area of ​​human conflict between civilizations struggling to be born and those desperately trying to retain what they have had for so long. Matthews completely omits the 1961 debates in the White House on the commitment of American troops to Vietnam, an omission that is a great feat in itself. As Gordon Goldstein points out, Kennedy's advisers mentioned it no less than nine times. Each time, Kennedy turned him down. (Lessons in Disasters, pp. 52-60) Now, another important incident to explain Kennedy's later policy on Vietnam is his reaction to Operation Vulture of 1954. This was the plan drawn up by President Eisenhower, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, CIA Director Allen Dulles, and Vice President Richard Nixon to relieve the doomed French garrison surrounded by Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu. The plan was to fly more than 150 US air sorties, culminating in the use of three tactical atomic weapons.When news of this mission broke, Senator Kennedy stood up and directly challenged the Secretary of State. He wanted to know how "Dulles' new policy and its reliance on the threat of atomic retaliation in these areas of guerrilla warfare will fare." Operation Vulture was canceled, but Eisenhower established a coalition of anti-communist states in the area called SEATO. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles then used this front to have the United States represented at the Geneva Conference that planned the future of Vietnam. This plan sealed future US involvement there. 

As Kennedy's national security adviser McGeorge Bundy wrote, before he died, Kennedy never viewed Vietnam, as Munich was, as an East-West test of the balance of power. On July 2, 1957, Kennedy took the Senate floor to deliver what the New York Times called the next day "the most comprehensive indictment of Western policy toward Algeria ever made by an American in public office." It was a blunt and ruthless indictment of the French refusal to acknowledge that it was repeating Vietnam's mistakes only three years later, except this time in North Africa. Again he was trying to hold on to a Third World colony, in a civil war that he could not win as it was not fought on conventional terms.But in addition, Kennedy also attacked the Eisenhower administration for not being a true friend of France. Because a true friend would have accompanied France to the negotiating table before she was forced out. (The entire speech is contained in The Strategy of Peace, edited by Allan Nevins.) The White House was not happy. Nixon called the speech a political move to embarrass the administration. He further added that "Ike and his staff held a full-blown policy meeting to pool their ideas on the why's underlying Kennedy's harmful fishing in troubled waters." (Mahoney, p. 29) Kennedy's speech was also directly attacked by both Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles. How does Matthews characterize this powerful and profound speech? 

He calls it Kennedy's "first bow to the Democratic left, a stoplight that indicates he shared the more sophisticated attitudes of liberals." Again, compared to the expedient adduced, this is absurd. By then, Kennedy had been making these kinds of statements about imperialism for six years. But also, for many liberals, what Kennedy said was too inflammatory even for them. For, as Mahoney points out, when Kennedy made one of these speeches on the subject of the liberation of the Third World for Adlai Stevenson's presidential campaign in 1956, the candidate's office telegraphed him to "make no further statements in any way associated with the bell". Clearly, Matthews had an agenda, which was made quite clear in his previous book, Kennedy and Nixon. And it continues here, in a slightly more disguised way. Matthews wants the reader to believe that JFK was not all that it is believed to be, that it was actually a classic Cold Warrior that was not that different from Nixon. This, of course, has been the message of most of the establishment and mainstream media since about the time of Oliver Stone's JFK film. in 1991. As shown above, the problem is that one can only make that argument by distorting things or omitting them altogether. And Matthews is consistently rigorous in omitting key points.Matthews omits why Kennedy took the unprecedented step of ending the entire top tier of the CIA. By the time of the firings, in late 1961, Kennedy had read the CIA's own internal report on the Cuba debacle, written by Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick. He also read one that he commissioned from General Maxwell Taylor. They were both quite tough on the CIA planning and executing the unfortunate operation.

In fact, the Kirkpatrick report states that the CIA's excuse for failure, that Kennedy canceled the D-Day airstrikes, which, unsurprisingly, Matthews uses against Kennedy here, was not tenable. In fact, these strikes were contingent on the establishment of a beachhead, something that did not happen. (Peter Kornbluh, Bay of Pigs Declassified, pp. 127-28) But as Kirkpatrick pointed out, this question about the D-Day airstrikes is really a distraction from the real point. He wrote: "It is essential to keep in mind that the invasion was doomed in advance, that an initially successful landing of 1,500 men would eventually have been crushed by Castro's combined military resources strengthened by military personnel provided by the Soviet bloc." Kirkpatrick goes on to estimate the combined size of all Castro's forces at more than 200,000 men, plus Soviet armor and tanks. So the question is, did the CIA really think the invasion would be successful? Or did they have a hidden agenda? Many years later, scholar Lucien Vandenbroucke shed light on this key question in an important Diplomatic History article (1984), after discovering, among Allen Dulles papers in the Princeton Library, coffee stained notes made by Dulles. The notes were the remains of an article the Director was going to write about the Bay of Pigs. In them, Dulles confessed that he and other CIA officials led Kennedy to a plan that they knew violated the rules of engagement previously announced by the president, that is, there would be no direct intervention by US forces.Although Dulles understood that this restriction condemned the plan, he went ahead with it anyway, tricking Kennedy into telling him that it would work on its own, since a similar CIA plan had succeeded in Guatemala in 1954. Dulles admitted in these notes that what they were What he really hoped was that the emerging "realities of the situation" would force Kennedy to violate his own promise. Or, as Dulles wrote, "We felt that when things went wrong, when the crisis came true, any action necessary for success would be empowered rather than allowing the company to fail." It puzzles me how Matthews missed this crucial article by perhaps the most important participant in the disaster.

But there is an even more striking omission when it comes to Kennedy's policy toward Cuba. After the conclusion of the Missile Crisis in October 1962, Kennedy made a promise of "no invasion of the island" to the Russians. He then altered his policy toward Cuba significantly. In fact, as declassified documents reveal, in the last half of 1963 there were five raids in total. But more importantly, Kennedy decided to open a secondary channel of communication with Fidel Castro. This continued for 11 months, until the Kennedy assassination. It was hosted for Kennedy by ABC reporter Lisa Howard, diplomat William Attwood, and French journalist Jean Daniel. The problem was that both the CIA and the Cuban exiles found out about them and tried to hinder them. In fact, one of the exiles, José Miro Cardona affirmed that, "The fight for Cuba was in the process of being liquidated." However, inexplicably and unbeknownst to Kennedy, the CIA initiated another assassination attempt on Castro. This time using the disgruntled Cuban diplomat Rolando Cubela. Negotiations continued and Castro expressed his willingness to negotiate his most valuable token: Russian influence in Cuba, which even extended to Soviet personnel and military equipment. When Kennedy realized this, he sent diplomat Attwood to contact Carlos Lechuga, Cuba's ambassador to the United Nations.On November 19, 1963, when Castro received this message, he suggested that Attwood fly to Cuba via Mexico. Castro said that "Suddenly, a president arrives at the place who tries to support the interest of another class." The CIA initiated another assassination attempt on Castro. This time using the disgruntled Cuban diplomat Rolando Cubela. Negotiations continued and Castro expressed his willingness to negotiate his most valuable token: Russian influence in Cuba, which even extended to Soviet personnel and military equipment. When Kennedy realized this, he sent diplomat Attwood to contact Carlos Lechuga, Cuba's ambassador to the United Nations.On November 19, 1963, when Castro received this message, he suggested that Attwood fly to Cuba via Mexico. Castro said that "Suddenly, a president arrives at the place who tries to support the interest of another class."

He added that "Kennedy would now go down in history as the greatest president since Lincoln." Three days later, Castro and Daniel received the news that Kennedy was dead. Castro was heartbroken. He repeated three times: "This is bad news." Then he declared: “Everything has changed. Everything is going to change". And he did. By December 17, Attwood was clear that President Johnson had no interest in continuing the talks. Attwood later wrote: “I have no doubts. If there hadn't been an assassination, we probably would have entered into negotiations aimed at normalizing relations with Cuba. A historic diplomatic opportunity had been overlooked.

“It is not necessary to manipulate Time magazine, for example, because there are people from the Central Intelligence Agency at the managerial level. The Agency's relationship with The New York Times was by far the most valuable among newspapers. It was general policy of the Times to provide assistance to the CIA whenever possible ”- William B. Bader, former CIA intelligence officer, briefing members of the Senate Intelligence Committee for The CIA and the Media, by Carl Bernstein. "The Central Intelligence Agency owns all the important people in the mainstream media." –William Colby, former CIA director, quoted by Dave Mcgowan, Derailing Democracy.

Donald Jeffries (January 5, 2012): Jim DiEugenio does an excellent job of exposing this fluffy part of McHistory (Elusive Hero, Kennedy & Nixon) by Chris Matthews, a typical media "journalist." JFK's legacy has been twisted for decades, at least since the days of Judith Campbell Exner, with her lurid and incredible accusations. What Matthews and his ilk are still desperately trying to avoid is an honest assessment of the JFK presidency, which would naturally include an actual investigation into his death, which remains a source of great interest to many of us. If JFK's life can lose its meaning, then his death also becomes insignificant.If he can be painted as a reckless and immoral man, then the inference is that his death was not really so tragic, it did not alter the course of history. This poisonous message has been carried relentlessly for at least twenty years now, by "journalists" like Matthews. JFK was different. He was trying real renovations. Our story would have been very different if he had lived. And his murder was undoubtedly the result of a powerful conspiracy. Source: consortiumnews.com

“The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people and further away from a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron”. – H. L. Mencken (Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920) 

JFK Jr: "Hatred, I really think it's hatred which lies in the heart of the establishment. They love money and power. But hatred is the driving force. And I don't really know what the hatred is about. I don't think they have had a hard life in any way, but they possibly want to make life hard for others. They feel a deep, crazy hatred most of the time. Maybe some people are just like that."

Holding On to Reality: The Nature of Information (Albert Borgmann and Samuel Fleischacker)

In 1964 public opinion surveys indicated that over 75 percent of the American people trusted the government to do the right thing most of the time. The consensus was that the federal government under the leadership of the Democratic Party had ended the Great Depression, won the Second World War, and was managing an economy in which nearly everyone got pay raises every year that beat inflation. By 1980, only 25 percent of the American people trusted the government to do the right thing most of the time. Information can illuminate, transform, or displace reality. Without information about reality, without reports and records, the reach of experience quickly trails off into the shadows of ignorance and forgetfulness. Plato was among those early philosophers who tried to subordinate contingency to structure. In the Timaeus, Plato tried to build up the world of direct experience from the regular solids that in turn, he thought, were constructed from two kinds of triangles. The things and processes of the visible world he explained as compounds and transformations of the elementary particles. The word real has many meanings. In its widest sense, everything that can be thought, perceived, or felt is real. If it were not, it would be nothing to us. But real and reality also convey the more particular meaning of presence and validity. Just as the decline of courage was noticed and mourned early in the modern period and forever after, so the waning of reality as commanding and engaging presence has been documented and was deplored already in post–Civil War America. At times the commodification of reality is so subversive and complete today that actual reality seems to have slipped irretrievably from our grasp. Consider the “reality” television shows. They promise to put us back in touch with reality. But the commodifying eye of the television camera turns every reality into a commodity. What’s left are bursts of hunger for reality. 

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in the face of fascism and communism, called for a Second Bill of Rights to secure such basic dignity for all. But the myth of rugged individualism first and the anesthetic effect of technological comfort later made us the least compassionate among peer societies. If dignity lends or ought to lend substance to equality, what are the grounds of dignity? What entitles us to take a high-minded view of ourselves? Each of us is entitled to self-determination. The new world was seen as the land of freedom and challenge where people could escape the bonds of poverty and oppression and make something of themselves. The classic work of Kant’s moral philosophy is his Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals of 1785 revealed the moral skeleton that has given modern ethics its cardinal shape. Here we find the moral norms of equality, dignity, and liberty. Kant articulated them as commands. The norm of equality he spelled out as the celebrated categorical, that is, unconditional, imperative: Act only according to that maxim whereby you can want at the samet ime that it becomes a universal law. Kant was convinced, put scholarly ethics on a solid footing, and thus put an end to “the disgusting mish-mash of cobbled-together observations and semi-intelligent principles” that, as Kant saw it, dominated the popular writings on ethics of his time. Kant, in fact, was inclined to set the ordinary person’s moral sense above that of the philosophers since “it may hope to hit the mark as well as any philosopher may assure himself he will, indeed may here be almost more certain than the latter because he has no other principle than it has; his judgment, however, can be confused and deflected from the right direction by a lot of inappropriate and irrelevant considerations.” And here too he was in agreement with Jefferson: “State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.” Jefferson was a statesman, architect, musician, horseman, naturalist, historian, and plantation owner. He was a loving husband, though widowed early, and a devoted father if not such to all his children. He traveled widely in the United States and in Europe. Philosophers like to hold forth on the influence of Kant, but what actual impact he had on German and Western culture is one of the great sociological unknowns. There is no doubt, however, that Jefferson had a strong hand in shaping the beginning of the United States, its geographical extent, its educational system, its architecture,and, to sum it up, its culture. But both were men of the Enlightenment and were profoundly attuned to the rational and egalitarian spirit of their time. Reason was for both of them the source of light. It figured prominently in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and The Critique of Practical Reason (1787). “ ‘Dare to use your own reason!’—that is the motto of the Enlightenment,” Kant said in his essay “What Is Enlightenment?” (1784). 

In his new book, Samuel Fleischacker delves into the work of Adam Smith to draw out an understanding of empathy that respects both personal difference and shared humanity. David Hume had understood empathy (what he and Smith called “sympathy”—the word “empathy” wasn’t invented until after their time) as my feeling whatever you feel. Smith understands it as my feeling what I think I would feel if I were you, in your situation. Hume’s empathy is a kind of contagious feeling—I “catch” your feelings, whether of sadness or of joy, whether I want to do that or not. Smith’s empathy requires more action on our part and depends on imagination. I try to show that Smith’s kind of empathy is deeper and more important to morality. Smith is extremely famous, but I think he is vastly different from the popular image of Smith—the supposed defender of a ruthless capitalism—and indeed is someone who can help us work against the selfishness that is rampant in our modern world. I also think he is a thoughtful, nuanced theorist of empathy who avoids the simplifications of those who imagine that sharing feelings with other people will solve all our moral problems. He’s a wonderfully sensible figure to bring to our modern moral debates. Samuel Fleischacker is LAS Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Source: pressblog.uchicago.edu

The Paranoid Style in American Politics, JFK

In The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (1948), historian Richard Hofstadter argues that, sectionalist conflicts aside, American politics has been characterized by a 'shared belief in the rights of property, the philosophy of economic individualism, and the value of competition' that runs across the political spectrum. The Library of America is now ensuring that Hofstadter's legacy at least will be preserved by collecting his work from the mid-1940s to 1970 in a three-volume series edited by Princeton historian Sean Wilentz. The first of these surveys Hofstader's middle period, from 1956 to 1965, during which he published some of his most famous work and was at the height of his reputation as a public intellectual along with the likes of Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, and Daniel Bell. The book presents two complete works, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) and The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964), along with a decade's worth of previously uncollected essays, including several appearing for the first time. It is a volume that is timely in tracing the history of ideas and cultural currents that continue to be alive and well in American society today. Published in 1963, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life seeks to trace the hostility toward the intellect and intellectuals in American culture dating back to its roots. It is conceived as what Michel Foucault would term 'a history of the present', a genealogy of the ideas that explains current circumstances. Hofstadter writes: 'Men and women living under conditions of poverty and exacting toil, facing the hazards of Indian raids, fevers, and agues, and raised on whiskey and brawling, could not afford education and culture; and they found it easier to reject what they could not have than to admit the lack of it as a deficiency in themselves.'

Similarly to the early Puritans, the generation that founded the American republic were learned men who formed a patrician elite. And as Hofstadter wryly notes: 'It is ironic that the United States should have been founded by intellectuals; for throughout most of our political history, the intellectual has been for the most part either an outsider, a servant, or a scapegoat.' But the patrician elite soon fell out among one another, opening the door for factionalism. The first victim of attempted political assassination was Thomas Jefferson at the hands of the Federalists. He was attacked for being a 'philosopher' given to 'abstract theories' who lacked the character to lead; worse, he was a Francophile and a Deist. Anti-intellectualism became firmly embedded in American politics with the rise of Andrew Jackson in the 1820s, which twice pitted the 'natural genius' of 'Old Hickory' against the patrician intellectualism of John Quincy Adams. Jackson won a plurality of votes in 1824, but not enough electoral votes to secure the Presidency. Jackson had appealed by proposing a series of national initiatives for educational and scientific improvement that even his own Cabinet at times would not support. 

Four years later, Andrew Jackson beat Adams in a landslide with his supporters founding the modern Democratic Party in the process. As president, Jackson sought to advance the rights of the "common man" against a "corrupt aristocracy" and to preserve the Union. Born in the colonial Carolinas to a Scotch-Irish family in the decade before the American Revolutionary War, Jackson became a frontier lawyer. In 1816, the Second Bank of the United States was chartered by President James Madison to restore the United States economy devastated by the War of 1812. Jackson believed that the Bank was a fundamentally corrupt monopoly. Its stock was mostly held by foreigners, he insisted, and it exerted an unfair amount of control over the political system. Jackson used the issue to promote his democratic values, believing the Bank was being run exclusively for the wealthy. Jackson stated the Bank made "the rich richer and the potent more powerful." He accused it of making loans with the intent of influencing elections. In his address to Congress in 1830, Jackson called for a substitute for the Bank that would have no private stockholders and no ability to lend or purchase land. Its only power would be to issue bills of exchange.The address touched off fiery debate in the Senate. On July 4, 1832, Jackson declared, "The Bank, Mr. Van Buren, is trying to kill me. But I will kill it." A clear purveyor of anti-intellectualism has been the business class, whose proprietary interests in property and profit have facilitated consensus in American politics going back to the Founding Fathers, as Hofstadter argued in The American Political Tradition. 

Through what Hofstadter terms 'the practical culture', the business class, particularly since the onset of the industrial age, has bent the intellect toward strictly technological, materialistic, and above all utilitarian ends. The need for technical training becomes more pronounced toward the end of the 19th century with the rise of large-scale bureaucracies, which resulted in the creation of business schools to instruct in the principles of management, finance, and other aspects of the commercial enterprise. Alongside it, interestingly, grew the whole field of self-help to promulgate development of personal characteristics necessary for success, a secularization of the evangelical spirit epitomized in the exhortations of Norman Vincent Peale. Rather than serve as a bulwark against this trend, American higher education has participated in the leveling down of the intellectualism. Part of the dilemma has been the need to balance unencumbered intellectual inquiry with access to the knowledge necessary to sustain a functioning democracy. The democratization of higher education has been well-suited to the anti-intellectual and utilitarian impulses within American culture. However, here Hofstadter is not arguing against the democratization of education so much as attempting to open it up to the embrace of more 'playfulness', as he terms it in the book's introduction, in the sense of being amenable to 'the quest for new uncertainties' and equipped with the ability and the desire to turn 'answers into questions'. 

The anti-intellectualism of American culture provides the fertile ground in which the subject of Hofstadter's follow-up book has taken root and flourished. The Paranoid Style in American Politics is a collection of essays, written over a 14-year period, once again in the shadow of McCarthyism but this time imbued with a new sense of urgency in response to the rise of the far right in American politics as embodied by the ascension of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater to the Presidential candidacy of the Republican Party in 1964. The collection is divided into two parts, the first dealing with the American right and the second with other considerations of the modern era. Part I still reads as a Foucauldian history of the present. The title essay started out as a lecture given at Oxford University in November 1963, the day before President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, and it was published in abridged form in that month's issue of Harper's Magazine. As if he were writing of the present moment, Hofstadter begins by observing that: 'Although American political life has rarely been touched by the most acute varieties of class conflict, it has served as an arena for uncommonly angry minds. Today this fact is most evident on the extreme right wing, which has shown how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority.' It must be noted that the paranoid style is not necessarily a function of the right or the left—as Hofstadter notes, the Moscow Trials of the Great Purge of 1938-1939 under Joseph Stalin were steeped in the paranoid style of an abstruse ideological construct.

Among the early purveyors of the paranoid style was Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor of the telegraph, whose 1835 screed Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States railed against 'the popes and the despots'. Hofstadter began mapping out the paranoid style in the mid-1950s, represented in the collection by the 1954 essay 'The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt'. Hofstadter picks up the term 'pseudo-conservative' from the 1950 book The Authoritarian Personality (1950) by Frankfurt School critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno and his associates written while he was living in exile in California after the Second World War. Hofstader's argument is that pseudo-conservatism is a product of the rootlessness and heterogeneity of modern life and the striving for status and identity that it engenders. Like the members of the Tea Party surveyed in sociologist Arlie Russell Hocschild's 2016 book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, 'The pseudo-conservative always imagines himself to be dominated and imposed upon because he feels that he is not really dominant, and knows of no other way of interpreting his position.' Pseudo-conservatism gets updated in the 1965 essay 'Pseudo-Conservatism Revisited', the writing of which was prompted in large part by the Goldwater Presidential campaign. Here Hofstadter notes that the far right has grown in organization and influence, a statement that resonates today. The conclusion Hofstadter makes is that the success of Goldwater and the pseudo-conservatism he represents is not an accidental effect of moderate Republican ineptitude, but the result of an organized effort within the party. 

And as if speaking of President Donald Trump, Hofstadter observes of Barry Goldwater: 'How are we to explain the character of a 'conservative' whose whole political life has been spent urging a sharp break with the past, whose great moment as a party leader was marked by a repudiation of our traditional political ways, whose followers were so notable for their destructive and divisive energies, and whose public reputation was marked not by standpattism or excessive caution but with wayward impulse and recklessness?' From an electoral campaign perspective, the plan didn't work. Goldwater lost to Lyndon B. Johnson, carrying only five states in the Deep South and his own state of Arizona, in the largest landslide since James Monroe defeated John Quincy Adams in 1820. But as Hofstadter notes, the Goldwater faithful and their pseudo-conservative fellow travelers were apparently satisfied in having established themselves as a force to be reckoned within American politics in their ability to attain leadership of the party from a minority position. As Hofstadter predicted, the far right, in its obstructionism, creating 'a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible'. In his collection of essays in 1965, Hofstadter cites the sociologist C. Wright Mills who defined the power elite 'throwing its preponderant weight on the side of responsibility'. Hofstadter closes the essay with a charge to the 'moderates' of the Republican Party to regain the political center in order to establish a position within the broader consensus of the American public. Hofstadter died of leukemia in 1970 at the age of 54 and did not live long enough to see that the pseudo-conservatism continued to gain force in American politics despite its minority position. Rather than move toward the center, the Republican Party has doubled down on pseudo-conservatism, using racial politics, gerrymandering, and the unequal representation of the Electoral College to win elections, with the last two Republicans attaining the Presidency doing so while losing the popular vote.

Hofstadter greatly appreciated the French aristocrat Tocqueville of whom it is said wrote the best book on democracy, which is also the best book about America. The final essay, written around 1962 and previously unpublished, is a personal note of Hofstadter's on his origins and evolution as an historian and a thinker, and makes the case for history as a literary practice and not just a recitation of facts. And indeed, Hofstadter is a master stylist. The entire volume from the Library of America is assiduously annotated by Robert Sean Wilentz, a formidable historian in his own right, with notes on persons, events, and references that may not be well known to contemporary readers. In the 50 years since his premature death, Hofstadter has come in for criticism from the right and the left. It can be argued that his notions of the American body politic didn't acknowledge what we now call 'intersectionality', or that some of his interpretations of the facts don't hold up to present-day scrutiny. But in the main, Hofstadter's contribution to our understanding of America's past and its relevance to the present still command attention. The current volume from the Library of America is a testament to its power. The subsequent volumes in development, one of which will include the full text of The American Political Tradition, promise to reaffirm his enduring legacy. Source: www.popmatters.com     

Oliver Stone should have won an Oscar for Best Director for JFK (1991). It's superior to that of the others nominated that year, earning his cinematic stripes with his truly epic examination of the Kennedy Assassination and the flawed Warren Commission follow-up. JFK deserved more than two mere technical wins. Through the JFK assassination and the events that followed, including the Vietnam War, the public became aware of the dark underbelly of the American system. Oliver Stone’s JFK uses media, information to discuss a perceived truth, who was really behind the assassination of Kennedy? Stone’s theory is as skeptical as any others, but the way in which he anticipates the information by using footage from the time, by drawing up dossiers, using courtrooms and the recurring theme of secretive meetings makes a stronger case than most of the standard political biopics. Stone’s film creates its own historical memory of the events around the era and the assassination, at times both contradicting and confirming parts of the story issued by the government and the media. It contains documentary footage, newsreels, reenactments, and fictional scenes to question and confront what had, in the public’s mind, long been identified as a pure memory. Stone uses the same footage more than once, sometimes black in white, sometimes in color, sometimes on a monitor in one corner of the screen. He asks the audience to question what they see and how they see it.

The film not only destroys nostalgic warmth by hinting that the seedy underbelly has always been a part of American society, but by suggesting that there is no clear cut truth. As Robert Sklar notes in his book Movie Made America, “sensational as they are, the political accusations that JFK makes almost pale alongside the emotions the film expresses: its sense of displacement and unrecoverable loss; its anger at the illegitimacy of power; its myth of transformation contained in a martyred president who is victim of the ruinous policies and ideologies of his era.” Media influences memory and, as Sklar points out, memory compounds media to the effect that no truth, even caught on film, is certain. Both Oliver Stone and Stephen King (11/22/63) play with the nostalgic idea that had Kennedy lived, America would have withdrew from Vietnam and continued to prosper. Nostalgia for this era seems to indicate that if the president had not been assassinated, the Happy Days may have continued ad infinitum. The particular focus on this particular point in American history, when innocence was lost, when unwilling knowledge was brought out into the forefront, brings to the forefront society’s combative relationship with truth. Evil had always had a face and voice which we cannot see or hear. 

With the JFK assassination, with the advent of television news, the discussion went deeper--that we could witness the atrocity, even the perpetrator, but we can still not wrap our heads around the why. There has to be something more. We wish we could turn back the clock. There have been too many of these tragic events in the past months, years, decades. It’s become an unfortunate fact of life. But if these tales of nostalgia have taught us anything, it’s not that we suffer because of our new knowledge. It’s that the memories we cherish should not just be things we merely hold onto, but should be what propels us forward. We continue to persevere, to carry on. We find solace, not only in nostalgia or memory, but community. Our collective memory may shift and distort events, but our identity as a society remains. Source: popmatters.com

JFK Jr. (George magazine, 1998): “I like the idea of educating the masses, of being an inspiration to the downtrodden. I like the idea of fighting for equal rights for all American citizens. I like the idea of embracing other countries and other cultures and promoting world peace. Fighting the good fight, as it were. I think artists are allowed to make more mistakes, they are allowed to dress badly and have a not so perfect past. In short, artists are allowed to be human. And presidents are not. So the question is: How can someone be a good leader if he or she isn’t allowed to be human? I’d rather eat glass.”