Kennedy

New movie approaches the grisly story non-ideologically.

On October 26, the National Archives was supposed to release the last of its remaining records on the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The date was chiseled in a 1992 statute. Around 88 percent of the records had already been made public, but there were still 3,200 documents that…

I remember as a kid hearing John, Robert, and Teddy Kennedy all using in speeches various paraphrases of these lines from a play by George Bernard Shaw: “You see things; and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?’ ”

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. possessed the most sparkling intelligence of his generation of historians. He may not have had the most subtle or profound mind, but his was the most effervescent disposition, and no one could surpass him in sheer energy, knowledge, and skill as scholar and writer.…

A few years ago Boston honored Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy—the mother of President John F. Kennedy as well as Senators (and presidential candidates) Teddy and Robert Kennedy—by naming its newly reclaimed Greenway after her. Two of her daughters also achieved great success in public service: Eunice…

When Chief Justice John Roberts administers the oath of office to the next president, he will be flanked by three, and almost four, octogenarians: Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg (83), Antonin Scalia (80), Anthony Kennedy (80), and Stephen Breyer (77). The next president will likely have the…

The dynasty project is not faring well. Two relatives of three of our most recent presidents have faced early woes in their succession plans, despite layers of aides, networks of backers going back generations, and extravagant levels of cash. On June 11, a front-page story in the Washington Post…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with executive editor Terry Eastland on the Obergefell v. Hodges decision rendered by the Supreme Court today.

Later this summer the Supreme Court will decide whether the Constitution requires that every state recognize same-sex marriages. Thus, in a ritual that would seem bizarre if it had not become so ordinary, nine lawyers will issue a decision authoritatively resolving subtle and far-reaching issues…

On September 4, 2014, as the NATO summit convened in Wales, President Barack Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron coauthored an op-ed in the Times of London. Its headline: “We will not be cowed by barbaric killers.” On January 15, a mere four and a half months later, the same coauthors had 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…

As Americans pause to mark the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, they should not overlook the other fateful assassination that took place that same month. On November 2, 1963, South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem was murdered in Saigon in a coup carried out by a…

The Sunday after Kennedy was shot my dad and I drove downtown to Dealey Plaza. It was an apology of sorts since my parents had refused to let me skip school to see the presidential motorcade on November 22. We were standing on the grassy knoll between the Old Red Courthouse and the Triple Underpass…

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,…

The 50th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy is nearly upon us, and it feels as if Camelot has returned like Brigadoon. Many a navel is currently being gazed upon in the media in an attempt to wring some contemporary meaning out of JFK’s tragic end. Some of this was inevitable—the…

For a brief moment last week, The Scrapbook felt a twinge of compassion for President Obama. The setting was Berlin. Readers will remember the extraordinary (and extraordinarily peculiar) sight in 2008 of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama speaking to a throng of 200,000 worshipful…

President Obama, speaking earlier today at conference on mental health at the White House: 

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…

In a Sunday story in the New York Times, former congressman Patrick Kennedy alleged "quid pro quo" access to the White House. After telling the Times it's "how this business works,” Kennedy said, "If you want to call it ‘quid pro quo,’ fine."

Is there a more empathetic person in the world than Diane Sawyer, the top newsreader at ABC TV? I’m sure there must be—around seven billion of them, probably. But is there anyone who looks more empathetic than Diane Sawyer? Not a chance. When she peers at you through the camera she has the look of…

Did John F. Kennedy really write Profiles in Courage? It’s a question that has been on the table ever since Kennedy won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1957, and with the death of Theodore Sorensen—Kennedy’s able speechwriter—the issue of authorship has again surfaced. It’s an appropriate time…

Might voters replace another New England Kennedy with a Republican? A new poll, commissioned by the National Republican Congressional Committee and conducted by Public Opinion Strategies, shows that Rhode Island’s First Congressional District is in play, with Republican state representative John…

You might have thought that Kennedy kitsch was not likely to proceed much further beyond The Best Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, edited by Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg (2005), or that the gold standard had long ago been established with Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye: Memories of John…