The view from 90

Guest post by Robert Stein

Ed. note: A couple of months ago, my friend and fellow blogger Bob Stein turned 90. I meant to publish this wonderful post at the time, but, well, time got away from me and it's been a sporadic couple of months of blogging for me anyway.

It is, in any event, a timeless post, and I'm very happy to publish it today, belatedly. Bob has led an incredibly interesting life and he's seen some incredibly interesting things. What is truly encouraging (and amazing) is that as he looks not just back at America's and the world's messy history but out at the crazy world around him now, he retains a sense of hope and optimism that overrides doubt and despair. He sees the good, that is, even when it is hard to find.

I wish him all the best, and a (belated) happy birthday, from all of us here.

This is Bob's third guest post here at The Reaction, and the first since his reflections on the anniversary of JFK's assassination last November. (His first post for us was "A life in black and white: Personal reflections on race in America.") -- MJWS

Robert Stein has had a long career as an editor, publisher, media critic, and journalism teacher. A former chair of the American Society of Magazine Editors, he currently blogs at Connecting the Dots. 

**********

On March 4, 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated. It was my ninth birthday.

In April 1945, I was a 21-year-old foot soldier on the floor of a German farmhouse when someone shook me awake to whisper that FDR had died. 

Now, at 90, I am inevitably shaped by those years after a working lifetime as writer, editor and publisher trying to explain the world to others -- and myself.

The scenes around me today are filled with human folly, selfishness and shameless behavior, but that’s far from the whole story. My so-called Greatest Generation, which survived a Depression and World War, does not in retrospect seem so morally superior to those that succeeded it but only more limited in education, experience of the world and outlook.

Many of our virtues were rooted in ignorance: no TV, cable, computers, Internet, no electronics of any kind, only radios with music, soap operas and swatches of evening news lifted from newspapers (as a teenage copy boy, I wrote some of them.)

As a nation we were united, but in an innocence that also had its dark side -- racial ghettos, religious prejudice, rural isolation -- where only unseen white men, all Protestant, held power over our lives in government and business.

Women then lived no fuller a life than those in Nazi Germany: Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church). Our mothers patrolled homes in house dresses, with only one exception.

Although we knew her as Mrs. Goldstein, nothing went with that matronly name, not the shimmer of clothes clinging to her trim body, or the beauty-parlor hair, the high-heeled shoes and face painted with makeup even in daytime, or the sweet perfume cloud that came into the living room in late afternoons when she kissed her son goodnight and dazzled the rest of us playing there with a cupid's bow smile on her way out.

She always seemed on the move to someplace exciting or, if my mother's mutterings could be believed, sinful. I had no idea what nafka meant, but Mrs. Goldstein gave our pre-teen senses a whiff of hope that the night life on movie screens existed somewhere in the real world.

Jump cut through decades: a World War; prosperous but Man-in-the-Grey-Flannel-Suit Fifties; JFK, the Youthquake, Civil Rights awakening and Women's Lib of the televised Sixties; a backlash of the Silent Majority and Watergate in the Nixon years; Reagan's "Morning in America" to paper over growing economic and political gulfs followed by Clinton's centrism and self-centeredness barely surviving Gingrich's loopy Contract with America; and then almost a decade of W's preemptive war and mindless tax cuts to bring us into the Obama years of almost total Tea Party collapse of the civility that held us together all that time, with racism showing its naked face.

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My November 22, 1963

Guest post by Robert Stein 

Ed. note: This is Bob's second guest post here at The Reaction. His first was "A life in black and white: Personal reflections on race in America." We will have more of his reflections on JFK in the days to come. -- MJWS 

Robert Stein has had a long career as an editor, publisher, media critic, and journalism teacher. A former chair of the American Society of Magazine Editors, he currently blogs at Connecting the Dots. 

**********

I woke up feeling good that Friday morning. Someone using my face had been on an eight-day swing of Minneapolis, Detroit and now Chicago, like a politician, selling a version of himself in hotel dining rooms, on morning TV and late-night radio, in offices and auditoriums, not for votes but pages of magazine advertising by making himself more affable to strangers than the equally fictitious other guys.

By nightfall I would be heading home to my real self, family, friends, life and work. To celebrate I treated myself to a barber-shop shave, savoring that prospect of release after a luncheon speech to 300 ad people in the ballroom of the Ambassador East.

Shortly after noon, food was being served when a waiter whispered into my ear, "Kennedy’s been shot."

I followed him into the kitchen where cooks, waiters and chambermaids, many with tears in their eyes, were staring at a small black-and-white TV set, frozen in attitudes of holding cleavers, platters and mops as if the world had suddenly stopped.

President Kennedy was on his way to Parkland Hospital, badly wounded.

In the ballroom, I went up to the stage, took the microphone and said, "I'm very sorry to have to tell you that the President's been shot in Dallas. It looks serious. I'm sure you'll want to go where you can follow what"s happening."

When I returned to my table, the waiter said, "I kept your lunch warm." When I shook my head, he vanished and returned a minute later with a large goblet of brandy.

A silver-haired man in an expensive suit came up and asked, "Does this mean you're not going to give your speech?" I nodded and went upstairs where I could be alone to watch Walter Cronkite, in a breaking voice, say "The President is dead."

The assassination was a shock not only to my nervous system but the nation's. The powerful, rich and famous, embodiments of what we dream for ourselves, are supposed to be safe. We are not prepared to see their skulls exploding before our eyes.

In a railroad dining car that evening, I was still in a daze, watching people eating, drinking and laughing as if nothing had happened, as if the world hadn't changed.

Back in my Pullman bed, stretched out for a night of sleepless sleep, I felt as if I were laid out in a tomb.

Five lingering unsolved mysteries from the JFK assassination

By Marc McDonald


It has now been 49 years since President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Since then, thousands of books have been written about what is probably the single biggest unsolved mystery of the 20th century. After nearly half a century, it's becoming increasingly clear that we may never fully understand what happened that day.

I myself have long harbored doubts about the government's own seriously flawed version of what happened in Dealey Plaza. The 1964 Warren Commission Report has rightfully been criticized over the years for the inaccuracies and flawed information it contained.

The vast majority of Kennedy assassination books over the decades have concluded that there was a conspiracy to kill JFK. However, many conspiracy theories themselves have been debunked over the years. In fact, sloppy work by conspiracy writers has, in my view, damaged the quest for truth in the case.

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November 22, 1963

By Mustang Bobby

Friday, November 22, 1963. I was in the sixth grade in Toledo, Ohio. I had to skip Phys Ed because I was just getting over bronchitis, so I was in a study hall when a classmate came up from the locker room in the school basement to say, "Kennedy's dead." We had a boy in our class named Matt Kennedy, and I wondered what had happened – an errant fatal blow with a dodgeball? A few minutes later, though, it was made clear to us at a hastily-summoned assembly, and we were soon put on the buses and sent home. Girls were crying.

There was a newspaper strike at The Blade, so the only papers we could get were either from Detroit or Cleveland. (The union at The Blade, realizing they were missing the story of the century, agreed to immediately resume publication and settle their differences in other ways.) Television, though, was the medium of choice, and I remember the black-and-white images of the arrival of Air Force One at Andrews, the casket being lowered, President Johnson speaking on the tarmac, and the events of the weekend – Oswald, Ruby, the long slow funeral parade, "Eternal Father, Strong to Save" – merging into one long black-and-white flicker, finally closing on Monday night with the eternal flame guttering in the cold breeze.

I suspect that John F. Kennedy would be bitterly disappointed that the only thing remembered about his life was how he left it and how it colored everything he did leading up to it. The Bay of Pigs, the steel crisis, the Cuban missle crisis, the Test Ban Treaty, even the space program are dramatized by his death. They became the stuff of legend, not governing, and history should not be preserved as fable.

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Is she a slut?

By Carl 

No, this isn't about Petraeus/Kelley/Broadwell/Allen.

Well, tangentially, because that was the topic that created this chain of thought in my mind. But I want to look at a deeper point.

I don't really care what adults do in the privacy of their own homes and my only real comment on the whole sordid mess is that this was not just two -- or four, or how many -- consenting adults, but entire families, including apparently non-consenting adults and children, so that's a shitty excuse for deciding it should be ignored.

However, it does not affect me so I really don't care about the people involved. What I do care about is words.

A lot of political hay, a lot of what's wrong with American culture in general, is the ambiguity of words.

So I asked myself (and a few other people), "What makes a slut?" If Kelley or Broadwell (or for that matter Petraeus or Allen) had slept with two generals? Four? Where do we draw the line and agree, that's running into slutitude?

You're going to reply, "It doesn't matter, it's an offensive word and should be banned from use." But it's not going to be, and it sure as heck didn't spring out of the muck, in search of a definition.

The way to take the power away from a word is to define it. Let me instruct with an example:

"A liberal application of paint." No one would object to that adjective, "liberal." It's a very factual description of how to apply paint. Let's switch the words around:

"An application of liberal paint."

Now you're forcing this sentence into a context. If I say it, "An application of liberal paint," it comes off as a very benign and even positive sentence.

Now imagine Glenn Beck saying it. Now imagine the imagery he would try to create with it: cheaply made, overpriced, probably government issued, masking an underlying problem of such great depth and profundity that it would require a tax cut for himself. I mean, the wealthy.

"Liberal" used to be a good thing to be. "Conservatism" was defined by its reactionary -- the word that we all used when we wanted to characterize someone negatively -- outlook and its "stuck in the past" first principles. In an era where progress was paramount, conservation was antithetical to society.

Now, in an era that desperately cries out for moving forward, "liberal" is only just starting to emerge from the turtle shell we all withdrew into decades ago, and conservatism is the ideology in the dock.

If you scroll to the top right corner of my blog, you'll find this quote, which I think sums up this column nicely. It is also one of the greatest lines ever written for TV: 

"Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote. Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. Liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. What did Conservatives do? They opposed them on every one of those things...every one! So when you try to hurl that label at my feet, 'Liberal,' as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won't work, Senator, because I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honor." -- Matt Santos, The West Wing 

In truth, this quote is probably loosely based on a quote from JFK:

If by a "Liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people — their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties — someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "Liberal," then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal."

By redefining the word, liberal now means something powerful to me. It goes from being an epithet spit out by someone full of bile and hatred and becomes an affirmation of my life and my beliefs.

There have been a few attempts to take back the word "slut." I'm thinking of how many feminist groups have annual "slut walks," protesting how women are portrayed in the media and in culture. My own daughter has participated in these. (She has her dad's temper. I never worry about her.)

It's not enough. When Rush Limbaugh can define the word to apply it to a woman who merely testifies that it would be nice if contraception was maintained as an insurance benefit, despite the religious status of the employer, then the word begs to be defined better.

Because if we don't do it, the Limbaughs of the world surely will. And we fought hard to make liberal an acceptable word again. And I like being a liberal again. 

But then, I'm also a slut, undeniably.

 (Cross-posted at Simply Left Behind.)

Ask not what your country can do for you...

By Carl 

History teaches us many things and yet teaches us nothing:

Economists point out that the woes of the middle class are in large part a consequence of globalization and technological change. Culture may also play a role. In his recent book on the white working class, the libertarian writer Charles Murray blames the hollowed-out middle for straying from the traditional family values and old-fashioned work ethic that he says prevail among the rich (whom he castigates, but only for allowing cultural relativism to prevail). 

There is some truth in both arguments. But the 1 percent cannot evade its share of responsibility for the growing gulf in American society. Economic forces may be behind the rising inequality, but as Peter R. Orszag, President Obama's former budget chief, told me, public policy has exacerbated rather than mitigated these trends.

Even as the winner-take-all economy has enriched those at the very top, their tax burden has lightened. Tolerance for high executive compensation has increased, even as the legal powers of unions have been weakened and an intellectual case against them has been relentlessly advanced by plutocrat-financed think tanks. In the 1950s, the marginal income tax rate for those at the top of the distribution soared above 90 percent, a figure that today makes even Democrats flinch. Meanwhile, of the 400 richest taxpayers in 2009, 6 paid no federal income tax at all, and 27 paid 10 percent or less. None paid more than 35 percent.

Historically, the United States has enjoyed higher social mobility than Europe, and both left and right have identified this economic openness as an essential source of the nation's economic vigor. But several recent studies have shown that in America today it is harder to escape the social class of your birth than it is in Europe. The Canadian economist Miles Corak has found that as income inequality increases, social mobility falls — a phenomenon Alan B. Krueger, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, has called the Great Gatsby Curve. 

Obviously, the Great Equalizer in American society, at least since the Industrial Age, has been education. Through education, working and middle class children could aspire to greater things than their parents had.

Thirty years ago, Republicans gathered behind Ronald Reagan to begin the dismantling of the public education system in America, a system considered vital just thirty years earlier by no less than Dwight Eisenhower, who felt that the lag in American scientific accomplishment was due in large part to the woefully underfunded process of educating our children.

Sadly, that has continued even to this day with the simplification and idiocratization of education, which has gotten to the point that, rather than teach a subject, we teach a test.

Which is great if, you know, the world is only going to throw the same problems at your citizenry as those tests measure. The problem is, it doesn't.

Worse, this simplification has occured to the benefit of those at the very top, those who are now extracting wealth from America and placing it overseas.

This occurs, even as they run for president.

Say, remember when Mitt Romney had at least enough shame to lecture his gardener not to hire illegal immigrants because "I'm running for president, for gosh sake!"

Now, he doesn't even have enough shame to keep an American flag flying over an American factory.

Conservatives defend this, but anyone recall the flap over President Obama's flag pin?

We've already begun down the same slippery slope that Venice, ancient Rome, pre-revolution France and countless other societies have slid down: we've begun to allow the wealthy to accumulate and aggregate wealth well beyond their value to American society.

Indeed, if anything, we've blessed this venture on their part, agreeing to tax income into which they put absolutely no sweat equity at a lower rate (e.g., capital gains and carried interest rates.)

Really. Is the value of a dollar I invested some twenty percent more than the value of a dollar I earned working? I think not, but the wealthy around me do.

The problem with slippery slopes is momentum: it's easy to stop the slide at its very beginnings, but you have to be alert enough to see it coming and to sway the masses to your side. That takes a rare person (Teddy Roosevelt leaps to mind).

Now, I'm not sure it's too late. Already both political parties can be found genuflecting before the power of the wealthy and even our grand institutions that were designed to protect the people have been corrupted by that power (cf Citizens United).

There is a bottom and it is coming and it will be harsh and painful, as all slides down a slope go. I don't see it ending well for many years after that, either.

Unless we can somehow remind those who are agglutinating money of the immortals words of one of their own:

In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility -- I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it. And the glow from that fire can truly light the world.

And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.

If ever freedom needed defending, it is now, and to that end we should insist that all Americans "mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor."

Even you folks on yachts.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

This day in history - August 2, 1943: Lt. John F. Kennedy's PT-109 is rammed by a Japanese destroyer

By Richard K. Barry

Working with a lot of younger people as I do, I no longer take it for granted that they will have a working knowledge of the historical events that I consider important. It would have been impossible to have grown up in the '60s, for example, without knowing the story of President John F. Kennedy's exploits as a young naval officer in the Pacific during WWII. They even made a movie about it, not to mention the book, both of which came out in 1963.

The short of it is that Kennedy commanded a small patrol boat that was rammed by the Japanese destroyer Amagiri. Although there were a couple of fatalities, the remaining crew managed to reach an island and were later rescued. Kennedy's leadership in helping to secure the crews' rescue was no doubt helpful in defining him in a way helpful to his political career.

If you are of a certain age, you knew all of that.

Interesting to note that Kennedy's exploits were more or less accepted at face value, though many decades later John Kerry's military record and reputation were all but destroyed by lies and innuendo. Makes you wonder what has changed.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

November 22, 1963

By Mustang Bobby

Friday, November 22, 1963. I was in the sixth grade in Toledo, Ohio. I had to skip phys. ed. because I was just getting over bronchitis, so I was in a study hall when a classmate came up from the locker room in the school basement to say, "Kennedy's dead." We had a boy in our class named Kennedy, and I wondered what had happened -- an errant fatal blow with a dodgeball? A few minutes later, though, it was made clear to us at a hastily-summoned assembly, and we were soon put on the buses and sent home. Girls were crying.

There was a newspaper strike at The Blade, so the only papers we could get were either from Detroit or Cleveland. (The union at The Blade, realizing they were missing the story of the century, agreed to immediately resume publication and settle their differences in other ways.) Television, though, was the medium of choice, and I remember the black-and-white images of the arrival of Air Force One at Andrews, the casket being lowered, President Johnson speaking on the tarmac, and the events of the weekend -- Oswald, Ruby, the long slow funeral parade, "Eternal Father, Strong to Save" -- merging into one long black-and-white flicker, finally closing on Monday night with the eternal flame guttering in the cold breeze.

I suspect that John F. Kennedy would be bitterly disappointed that the only thing remembered about his life was how he left it and how it colored everything he did leading up to it. The Bay of Pigs, the steel crisis, the Cuban missle crisis, the Test Ban Treaty, even the space program are dramatized by his death. They became the stuff of legend, not governing, and history should not be preserved as fable.

I never thought I'd be old enough to look back forty-seven years to that time. And according to NPR, sixty percent of Americans alive today were not yet born on that day. Today the question is not do you remember JFK, but what did his brief time leave behind. Speculation is rife as to what he did or did not accomplish. Would we have gone in deeper in Vietnam? Would he have pushed civil rights? Would the Cold War have lasted? We'll never know, and frankly, pursuing such questions is a waste of time. Had JFK never been assassinated, chances are he would have been re-elected in 1964, crushing Barry Goldwater, but leading an administration that was more style than substance, battling with his own party as much as with the Republicans, much like Clinton did in the 1990s. According to medical records, he would have been lucky to live into his sixties, dying from natural causes in the 1980s, and he would have been remembered fondly for his charm and wit -- and his beautiful wife -- more than what he accomplished in eight years of an average presidency.

But it was those six seconds in Dealy Plaza that defined him. Each generation has one of those moments. For my parents it was Pearl Harbor in 1941 or the flash from Warm Springs in April 1945. Today it is Challenger in 1986 and of course September 11, 2001. And in all cases, it is what the moment means to us. It is the play, not the players. We see things as they were, contrast to how they are, and measure the differences, and by that, we measure ourselves.

(Previously published, with minor edits, at Bark Bark Woof Woof on November 22, 2003.)

Oh, Lord

By Mustang Bobby

A lot of people are understandably upset that Barack Obama has invited Pastor Rick Warren to give the invocation at his Inauguration next month.

Barack Obama’s choice of a prominent evangelical minister to perform the invocation at his inauguration is a conciliatory gesture toward social conservatives who opposed him in November, but it is drawing fierce challenges from a gay rights movement that – in the wake of a gay marriage ban in California – is looking for a fight.

Rick Warren, the senior pastor of Saddleback Church in southern California, opposes abortion rights but has taken more liberal stances on the government role in fighting poverty, and backed away from other evangelicals’ staunch support for economic conservatism. But it’s his support for the California constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage that drew the most heated criticism from Democrats Wednesday.

“Your invitation to Reverend Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at your inauguration is a genuine blow to LGBT Americans,” the president of Human Rights Campaign, Joe Solomonese, wrote Obama Wednesday. “[W]e feel a deep level of disrespect when one of architects and promoters of an anti-gay agenda is given the prominence and the pulpit of your historic nomination.”

And this backlash has delighted the righties, who are chortling that the queers are all in a tizzy over Pastor Rick. That's their way of covering up the fact that there are probably a fair number of wingers who are not happy that Mr. Warren is giving the blessing to the enemy... or were hoping for the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

I'm not exactly sure why the inauguration of a president requires the inclusion of the clergy to conduct a ritual, but other than the obvious political posturing and pandering that is woven into the fabric of the moment, it is a tradition and it would have been a huge story if that part of the ceremony had been left out. I can't remember it ever being a big deal as to who it is who gives the invocation, although I can imagine that some people weren't happy when John F. Kennedy had Cardinal Cushing give the invocation at his inauguration.

As the article notes, Pastor Warren was outspoken in his support for the passage of Prop 8 in California, comparing same-sex marriage to polygamy and incest, which is, to me, the same as saying getting a driver's license leads to grand theft auto. So I hope that this one event is the last we'll be hearing from him in terms of public speaking on behalf of the Obama administration. Far be it from me to tell the president-elect who to choose as his spiritual counsel, but I hope that his actions speak louder than words, and I hope that what follows in the next four years will do more to piss off the Religious Right -- the end of DADT, repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act, and the passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act would be a start -- than it will to mollify them with a thirty-second appeal to a mythological being.

(Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Johnny, we hardly knew ye

By Carl

Imagine for a moment, a five-year-old boy. He is terribly skinny, has blonde hair cut short. He is in his first grade class. His teacher, Miss McCaffery, is a tall, willowy woman, fragile to even look at. In his eyes, a giant.

The class has just returned from lunch and is beginning preparation for art class. The ceilings are high in his room, which is in a schoolbuilding built just about thirty years earlier, in a time when education was considered holy, and schools looked like cathedrals. A place of training for a world about to change dramatically.

The boy puts on his apron, carefully tying the laces behind him since he still really hasn't mastered shoelaces even. The apron is blue, flecked with dots of tempra paints, the paint of choice for schools worldwide. One by one, in rows, the class is called to the back of the room to get a tray of paints and paintbrushes.

In another universe, on another earth, the boy will paint a masterpiece that will begin a long career in art.

In this universe, the PA system clicks on as the boy returns to his desk along the aisle by the coat rack.

"Teachers, students...we've learned that President John Kennedy has been shot today in Dallas. We have called your parents and are making arrangements to have them come pick you up, boys and girls. For those who's parents we cannot reach, we will remain open until 3."

The benumbed boy, the budding artist, drops his tray. His masterpiece lies on the floor in its component splatters. Miss McCaffery, who must have known something was up, slumped in her chair, releasing what she had been holding onto.

Next, the principal places the mic near the radio (or TV) to broadcast Walter Cronkite's voice to the school, describing what is happening.

The rest of the afternoon is a blur. He remembers finding his sister in the schoolyard. They come together and she hugs him, even if he is too young to fully comprehend what is happening. He remembers walking home past Sloan's Supermarket, his mom holding his hand for the first time since his daily trips to the skating rink in kindergarten. His sister's sobs still ring in his ears to this day. She never cried!

He spent that weekend and that Monday glued to the television set.

Little did I know how that event would twine and intersect my life in so many ways, but that's a different post.

I saw Oswald shot, live. But the most harrowing image of the weekend for me was the symbolic horse, Black Jack, the soldier's boots placed backwards in the stirrups.

Black Jack represented the fallen commander. There was a moment in the funeral procession when Black Jack bridled and in that moment, an electric horse could summon the feelings of a nation. His reluctance to move forward with the procession echoed our own disbelief that someone so young and vital could be cut down so summarily.

It was then, that moment, that I truly began to understand what was happening. And it terrified me.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

November 22, 1963

By Mustang Bobby

Friday, November 22, 1963. I was in the sixth grade in Toledo, Ohio. I had to skip Phys Ed because I was just getting over bronchitis, so I was in a study hall when a classmate came up from the locker room in the school basement to say, "Kennedy's dead." We had a boy in our class named Kennedy, and I wondered what had happened - an errant fatal blow with a dodgeball? A few minutes later, though, it was made clear to us at a hastily-summoned assembly, and we were soon put on the busses and sent home. Girls were crying.

There was a newspaper strike at The Blade, so the only papers we could get were either from Detroit or Cleveland. (The union at The Blade, realizing they were missing the story of the century, agreed to immediately resume publication and settle their differences in other ways.) Television, though, was the medium of choice, and I remember the black-and-white images of the arrival of Air Force One at Andrews, the casket being lowered, President Johnson speaking on the tarmac, and the events of the weekend - Oswald, Ruby, the long slow funeral parade, "Eternal Father, Strong to Save" - merging into one long black-and-white flicker, finally closing on Monday night with the eternal flame guttering in the cold breeze.

I suspect that John F. Kennedy would be bitterly disappointed that the only thing remembered about his life was how he left it and how it colored everything he did leading up to it. The Bay of Pigs, the steel crisis, the Cuban missle crisis, the Test Ban Treaty, even the space program are dramatized by his death. They became the stuff of legend, not governing, and history should not be preserved as fable.

I never thought I'd be old enough to look back forty-five years to that time. And according to NPR, sixty percent of Americans alive today were not yet born on that day. Today the question is not do you remember JFK, but what did his brief time leave behind. Speculation is rife as to what he did or did not accomplish - would we have gone in deeper in Viet Nam? Would he have pushed civil rights? Would the Cold War have lasted? We'll never know, and frankly, pursuing such questions is a waste of time. Had JFK never been assassinated, chances are he would have been re-elected in 1964, crushing Barry Goldwater, but leading an administration that was more style than substance, battling with his own party as much as with the Republicans, much like Clinton did in the 1990's. According to medical records, he would have been lucky to live into his sixties, dying from natural causes in the 1980's, and he would have been remembered fondly for his charm and wit - and his beautiful wife - more than what he accomplished in eight years of an average presidency.

But it was those six seconds in Dealy Plaza that defined him. Each generation has one of those moments. For my parents it was Pearl Harbor in 1941 or the flash from Warm Springs in April 1945. Today it is Challenger in 1986, and of course September 11, 2001. And in all cases, it is what the moment means to us. It is the play, not the players. We see things as they were, contrast to how they are, and measure the differences, and by that, we measure ourselves.

(Previously published, with minor edits, on November 22, 2003 at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Political history

By Mustang Bobby

One of the recent Questions of the Day at Shakesville was "What's your first memory of a political campaign?" or something in that vein. Mine was in 1956 when my older sister and brother taught me "Whistle while you work! Stevenson's a jerk!" I was four and I had no idea what it meant. Then when I was eight my Cub Scout troop was recruited to canvass for Richard Nixon's run in 1960 against John F. Kennedy. All of my Catholic friends were Kennedy supporters, so I came to the logical conclusion that Catholics were Democrats. I dutifully went along with my troop, and I remember being in a political parade down Louisiana Avenue in late October 1960 in Perrysburg. There was a big cardboard "X" plastered on my bike basket and I was in a row of riders that spelled out N-I-X-O-N. It would be another ten years or so before I found out that my parents, going against their friends and long family upbringing, voted for JFK in 1960.

I don't need to bore you with my entire political-junkie life story. Suffice it to say that I have followed politics more as an observer than a participant, even though I have worked on campaigns, national and local, since I was old enough to understand the difference between the political parties and the issues that matter to me both as a person and as a citizen. My first crush, so to speak, was Bobby Kennedy, and in many ways I have never really gotten over it. I have not been as excited or energized about a candidate since then, although it's fair to say that like all teenage crushes, the intensity is never the same as the first time. And now, forty years later, I find that my ardor has mellowed and tempered with age and experience. No candidate is perfect; they will disappoint you and show their flaws, and at some point you will seriously ponder what it was you saw in them that attracted you in the first place. But unlike the mercurial passions of youth, you know that compromise, tolerance, and forgiveness are a part of every relationship, even if it's with someone who doesn't know you exist and only appealed to you for their attention because they needed your vote. As long as you realize that, you can put it in perspective: you're only choosing the leader of the free world, not your prom date.

Every candidate says that "this election is the most important in our nation's history." Well, of course they're going to say that; otherwise, why should we pay attention to them? But in truth, this election of 2008 is very important, and not just for the prospect of either electing the first black man to be president or the first woman to be vice president. This election comes front-loaded with expectations above and beyond the events that will occur after January 20, 2009. And while there is no doubt that the next few years are going to be difficult in many ways, not the least of which will be recovering from the last eight, they will be anticipated as being important because of what this election brings with it. It wasn't always so. The election of 1980 was not foreseen as momentous; most of the conventional wisdom said that Jimmy Carter would be re-elected over Ronald Reagan and the 1980s would go on as before. No one really saw the tectonic shift in the Republican Party coming, either, at the hands of the evangelical Christians. Now, half my lifetime later, we are seeing what a lot of people consider to be the end of the aftershocks of that election, and the beginning tremors of another. That may easily be; only history will tell. But I have the feeling that no matter what happens tonight, this election really is one of the most important in our history. I can't help but feel a little more than amazed that I've been a participant and observer.

So, if you haven't already, participate in history and vote.

(Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.)