The Death and Transfiguration of JFK

It seems we will have another Kennedy Love-In this Fall as this November will mark 50 years since his assassination. It is really remarkable how the legacy of Kennedy lives on. My feeling it is more about the promise that his presidency held than it is any policies he set, but Larry Sabato, the director of UVA's Center of Politics believes fully that Kennedy was a transformative figure in American politics.

I suppose a lot of it has to do with the way LBJ literally carried his predecessor's torch as he pushed through Civil Rights legislation that had been first put forward by the Kennedy administration. But, in reading Caro's recent book on LBJ and other accounts it is highly unlikely Kennedy would have ever gotten that legislation through Congress on his own, as it took someone with the determination and means of LBJ to get the bill passed by a very conservative Congress. However, Kennedy is still given much of the credit for this and other legislation that was passed during the Johnson years.

The myth of Camelot has been nurtured by many others. It was a time when the Presidency almost felt like nobility and Kennedy certainly surrounded himself with some of the best and brightest of cabinet members that offered a bold new agenda for a modern era. However, America still seemed mired in a Cold War mentality that neither the Kennedy nor the Johnson administrations were able to shake.

Kennedy is probably best remembered for facing down Khrushchev over the Cuban Missile Crisis, which cost Nikita his premiership. Even Caro contrasted a cool, level-headed Kennedy to a hot-tempered Johnson, as he portrays reason trumping emotion in this highly-charged episode. But, there is little to suggest that Kennedy would have handled Vietnam any differently than Johnson, which LBJ became saddled with.

In many ways Kennedy was as conservative as his predecessors, but what set him apart was the vigor he was able to project in the Presidency and a bold spirit that captivated the world. He embraced novel ideas like Peace Corps, but at the same time plotted third world coups as Eisenhower and Truman had done. His untimely death elevated him above the more sordid aspects of his administration, and he became projected as the liberal ideal, especially with Johnson's administration bogged down with the Vietnam War in his second term.

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Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

The People Debate the Constitution

As Pauline Maier describes in Ratification , there was no easy road in getting the Constitution ratified. After 10 years of living together as a loosely knit confederation, a few forward thinking men decided that the Articles of Confederation no longer worked and it was time to forge a Constitution. Washington would not go until he could be assured something would come of the convention and that there would be an august body of gentlemen to carry the changes through. But, ultimately Maier describes it was the people who would determine the fate of the new Constitution. This is a reading group for Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution 1787-1788 . The book has been well received by fellow historians like Jack Rakove , among others. Maier has drawn from a wealth of research piecing together a story that tells the arduous battle in getting the Constitution ratified. A battle no less significant than that Americans fought for independence.

Dispatches from Vilnius

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