JFK

Tuesday

Mark Piesing

Did Robert McNamara know Vietnam was unwinnable?

Former US defense secretary Robert McNamara was known in Washington as a relentless, humorless taskmaster or even “a computer on legs.” Then on February 9, 1962, a little over a year after taking office, McNamara made headlines when he danced the twist with Jackie Kennedy at a White House party. A few days later, the then-first lady sent by hand to McNamara a lighthearted Valentine collage she had made from the news coverage of their dance. After her husband’s assassination, their friendship deepened. Jackie’s opposition to the Vietnam War grew, as did her conviction that McNamara secretly opposed it.

mcnamara

Friday

Bill McMorris

Are we still doing phrasing?

Grandma McMorris seldom curses, so when she said, “never let a son of a bitch know he’s a son of a bitch,” I knew she was quoting her father, Pop Pop. My grandfather oozed apothegms, nuggets of wisdom that are now only found on refrigerator magnets, motivational posters and throw pillows: the Silent Generation’s forerunner to the meme. Mom was giving me work advice. It’s only been two months, but I no longer remember who the son of a bitch that I called a son of a bitch was, let alone why I called him that. The particulars vanished as soon as my mother spoke, the work crisis overtaken by a personal one. It was a barbecue, probably. Or perhaps a s’mores night at the firepit. A birthday party for one of her sisters? “Dad, when can I have a cigarette?

words

Monday

Josie Cox

The real Kennedy men

Long before the #MeToo movement shattered the careers and reputations of people like Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey; long before Jeffrey Epstein and R. Kelly were locked up for committing heinous sex crimes; and long before we’d become familiar with names like Monica Lewinsky and Virginia Roberts Giuffre, there were the Kennedys. In very basic terms, that’s the premise of Maureen Callahan’s book Ask Not — a title that riffs on JFK’s inaugural address — which salaciously chronicles how men from three generations of one of America’s most exalted families spent their lives perpetrating violent misogyny and psychological abuse without suffering so much as a polite slap on the wrist.

Kennedy

Monday

Christopher Sandford

Was JFK any ‘good’ as a president?

How should we assess the value of a US president? In the case of John F. Kennedy, who died sixty years ago, the box denoting youthful vigor clearly gets a checkmark. Kennedy was just forty-six at the time of his assassination, which makes him younger than Hunter Biden is now. The box denoting the “vision thing” gets checked as well, if only because Kennedy saw the potential for beating the Soviets in the race to put a man on the moon, famously declaring, “We choose to do this, not because [it is] easy, but because it is hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.” Also to be considered is the collective trauma of the events of November 22, 1963.

jfk

Sunday

Christopher Sandford

John F. Kennedy’s trip worth remembering

Sloppy Joe Biden may face strong political headwinds with just seven months to go before the first presidential primary, but at least he’s in good company. Assessing the Washington landscape in mid-June 1963, when John F. Kennedy set off on a European tour designed to bolster not only the NATO alliance but his own poll numbers, the British ambassador David Ormsby-Gore cabled back to London: He will be leaving behind a disquieting domestic situation, [with] economic troubles to the fore... The Negro leaders are beginning to talk about large scale civil disobedience on a nation-wide basis... Moreover, the racial crisis is causing new difficulties for [Kennedy’s] legislative program...

Kennedy in Berlin

Tuesday

Timothy Jacobson

A Cuban Missile Crisis spent on the Atlantic

It is a common thing we have all experienced to be true: events that forever fix themselves in our memory of a certain place. Call it the “I’ll never forget where I was on December 7, 1941 or September 11, 2001” syndrome. On the Sunday Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, my father was on a train passing through western Pennsylvania after a job interview in New York City; he preserved a copy of the Pittsburgh paper to prove it. On the morning of September 11, I was breakfasting at home, awaiting my driver for Dulles International Airport; due to fly that day, I did not.

Sunday

Ben Sixsmith

Down the QAnon rabbit hole

Lies, in many cases, are comparable to sparks. They might not be very dangerous in and of themselves but under the right conditions — or, perhaps, the wrong conditions — they can lead to spectacular fires. Consider, for example, how a chain of events that began with an anonymous message being posted on an obscure message board in October 2017 led, four years later, to hundreds of Americans gathering in Dallas, Texas, to await the return of the long dead JFK Jr. Back in October 2017, someone calling themselves “Q” began posting bizarre messages on the /pol/ board of the notorious website 4Chan.

qanon shaman jake angeli-chansley

Thursday

Will Lloyd

How the myth of JFK tortured the Democratic Party for 55 years

Will the Kennedy assassination ever lose its cultural centrality? Even as organic memory of the event fades, new works of pop art like Jackie (2017) and 11.22.63 (2016) attest to the powerful ongoing significance of the event. The slain president turned out to have much more weight dead than living. Woodrow Wilson once claimed that while men die, ideas live. John F. Kennedy had no ideas but in death he became one. All the zesty confidence and breezy chutzpah of the American century became flesh in JFK, though like him it would never recover from what happened in Dallas. The United States now had a wound that was worthy of Shakespeare, what Don DeLillo memorably called the moment ‘that broke the back of the American century.

jfk assassination