During the election of 1940, the married Republican candidate, Wendell Willkie, gave speeches from the apartment of his editor girlfriend, Irita Van Doren (who helped write them for him), while the campaign train of President Franklin D. Roosevelt made routine stops at a certain small town in New…
Cleveland
Last week, the New York Times rolled out a petty and somewhat meanspirited editiorial against Chris Christie and the rest of the Republican field. The gist of it is that, by running for president, Christie isn't spending as much time at home working for New Jersey as he ought to:
President Obama defended the Iran deal at American University in Washington this week, inviting comparisons to President Kennedy’s address there in 1963. While some consider the allusion a masterstroke of political theater, the JFK comparison might not suit the president as well as he thinks.
In John Kerry's statement on President Obama's Cuba policy changes, the secretary of state doesn't simply suggest the policies in place for five and a half decades are outdated. He seems to be suggesting they were a failure from the start. And in doing so, he apparently misstates his own age at the…
"If today’s extremist rhetoric sounds familiar, that’s because it is eerily, poignantly similar to the vitriol aimed squarely at John F. Kennedy during his presidency. And just like today, Texans were leading what some of them saw as a moral crusade. To find the very roots of the paranoid right of…
The Washington Post, like many publications, has been observing the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in considerable detail. No, make that lurid detail. No day has gone by in recent weeks without extended lists, recycled photographs, old reminiscences, new theories, and the sort…
Everyone of a certain age, it is said, remembers the moment when they heard that John F. Kennedy had been shot. Yet even though I was 13 years old at the time, and recall quite a lot from 1963, I do not remember this, though for a technical reason.
The legacy of President John F. Kennedy is a wondrous thing. Any president compared with Kennedy comes up short, even if his actual accomplishments were greater than JFK’s. Presidents in the modern era can never measure up to JFK in the public’s mind, period. Today, 50 years after JFK’s death, it’s…
Reading this provocative and compelling analysis of John F. Kennedy’s political vision, I could not help but think of the reaction Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. had when his colleague John P. Diggins told him he was writing a book favorable to Ronald Reagan’s presidency. “Please,” Schlesinger said,…
John Forbes Kerry is one of those upper-middle-class East Coast types of estimable lineage and impeccable credentials (St. Paul’s, Yale, U.S. Navy) whose tribal habits were the subject of the late sociologist E. Digby Baltzell (The Protestant -Establishment, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia,…
This isn’t going to be a good week for me. Friday will mark the 50th anniversary of the death in Dallas of President John F. Kennedy, and between now and then I expect a complete media blitz—make that a blitzkrieg—of stories, films, docudramas, book reviews, and counterfactual explorations about…
The fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy is nearly upon us, so one would expect America's public intellectuals are gearing up to present a series of sober and illuminating reflections about the tragedy's cultural and political legacy.
Speaking in support of military action against Syria, Alexander Bolton of The Hill reports, Senator Harry Reid brought up the example of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust:
It has become increasingly clear that the Obama-era Democrats view every major societal event as a new invitation to spend money, centralize power, or both. The horrendous shootings in Connecticut have the Democrats lobbying not only for new legislation, but new federal legislation — and hence…
Sally Bedell Smith has a thing for kings. Or, not kings quite so much as powerful people who form courts around themselves as a function of power or wealth. Her very best books all describe these arrangements: In All His Glory, about the CBS mogul William Paley; Grace and Power, about the Kennedy…
The Hill: "Dick Armey: Gingrich campaign turned into 'first-rate vendetta' against Romney"
Mitt Romney is back to talking about firing people. During last night’s debate, he responded to Newt Gingrich’s proposal that America establish a lunar colony by the end of the decade by saying that if someone presented him with that proposal, “I’d say, ‘You’re fired.’” While one might think…
During last night’s debate, Mitt Romney responded to Newt Gingrich’s proposal that America establish a lunar colony by the end of the decade by saying that if someone presented him with that proposal, “I’d say, ‘You’re fired.’” While one might think Romney justified in firing someone who pitched…
Writing in USA Today, Neil Armstrong, Gene Cernan, and Jim Lovell —the first and last men on the moon, and the commanders of Apollo 11, 17, and 13 — highlight another example of President Obama’s lack of faith in American exceptionalism. In a piece entitled, “Is Obama Grounding JFK’s Space…
I was reminded yesterday of the single greatest public relations coup of the 20th century. Late last month, the Gallup poll asked Americans to evaluate how recent presidents handled their job in the White House. The big news for the political class was that 47 percent of respondents approved of…
Since 1963 Theodore C. Sorensen has been subsisting on his eight-year career as a ghostwriter for John F. Kennedy, and faithful readers of the New York Times have come to rely on his periodic contributions to the editorial pages during the past 47 years. Here Sorensen has repeated, with emphasis,…
The Cuban missile crisis is the closest the human race has come to Armageddon. Oddly though, like the moon landing -- another 1960s event of millennial importance -- it has faded from our historical imagination. For a new generation, its gravity is unappreciated. Thirteen Days, the new Kevin…