"There are a number of people who will never forgive [Barack Obama] for being half-black" (the late Stanley Hoffmann)

Plus some thoughts on Zbig Brzezinski, Henry the K,
the brothers Kennedy, and some fellow Frenchies


Harvard Prof. Stanley Hoffmann speaking on European-American relations at the Salzburg Global Seminar in 1984

by Ken

The New York Review of Books is remembering a frequent contributor, the late Stanley Hoffmann, longtime professor of international relations at Harvard. who died on September 13, with online publication of a "conversation" drawn from a never-published December 2011 interview with Michal Matlak ("a PhD student in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and a regular contributor to the Polish magazine Liberal Culture").

I've plucked out a few excerpts from those excerpts.


A COUPLE OF HARVARD DEPARTMENTAL COLLEAGUES:
ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI AND HENRY KISSINGER

About Brzezinski, and the radical change he underwent, Hoffmann recalled:

He was always fascinated by and worried about the Soviet Union and nothing else. I liked him very much. But then he was a great supporter of the Vietnam War which I thought was a disaster and unwinnable. Now he has completely changed. I don’t think he remembers that he was such a supporter of the war. I was quite surprised at a conference which took place in Berlin about ten years ago to hear Zbig explaining that what the US did in Vietnam was a form of colonialism. He would never have said that earlier. In other words he was wise enough to change his mind. We are exactly the same age.

Zbig is a complicated guy. There was this permanent battle that went on between Zbig, representing the hard line on Russia, and Cyrus Vance, who wanted more accommodation, more flexibility. And the relations between the two of them were just awful. The story of my department was, for years, the battle between Zbigniew and Henry Kissinger. The difference has been that Kissinger never took Zbigniew seriously, and Zbigniew could not tolerate Henry, because Henry was there always before Zbig in occupying the high positions.

As for Henry the K, Hoffmann said: "I could write a book on Henry, which I will not. Everything is very complicated with Mr. Kissinger."

He did comment on something Kissinger "was very good at":

There was very recently, in The New York Times, a long front-page review by him of a new and very long biography of George Kennan. And what I found remarkable about Henry’s article was that it said nothing. I went through all of it and you don’t know at the end what he really thought. And he was very good at that.

ABOUT THE BROTHERS KENNEDY

After some conversation about "politicians who are able to combine moral ends with Realpolitik, Hoffmann was asked about another possible "successful idealist."

You knew John F. Kennedy. Did he belong to the same group of successful idealists?

Although I knew Kennedy a little, I did not like him, for purely personal reasons. He was very much an opportunist, very intelligent. I knew all three of the Kennedys. The youngest one, Teddy, who died about three years ago, was my student. He was not a genius, but he was a good person. He spent much of his time as a member of the Senate helping people get visas to the United States. He saved people. And he never really thought much about himself, because he didn’t think he was quite smart enough to reach the heights. But I liked him. The other two, Bobby and John Kennedy, struck me as hard-nosed, calculating machines.

So you don’t see in their politics a strong connection to human rights?

I think that the one who developed [this connection]—just before he was murdered—was Bobby Kennedy. He started as an aide of [Republican Senator Joe] McCarthy, so he travelled a great deal, so to speak. John F. Kennedy, I couldn’t quite figure him out. In any case his assassination was a disaster, because his successor, LBJ, did some very good things in some areas relating to human rights, but foreign policy was not his domain. But who are we to pass judgment on everybody?

"FOR THE TIME BEING AMERICA IS UNGOVERNABLE"

About President Obama, Hoffmann expressed admiration for his two books, saying, "He writes well and he is a very good speaker."

[Y]ou have lots of people, including Newt Gingrich and some others, who still wonder whether Obama is really an American. It requires a certain amount of chutzpah for somebody like Obama to be president because he knows there are a number of people who will never forgive him for being half-black. And for the time being America is ungovernable. The Constitution—and all the additions that have been grafted on it—make effective government almost impossible. For almost every important measure you need a 60 percent majority in the Senate. It is almost impossible to get this. So nothing works.

AS YOU CAN NO DOUBT GUESS FROM THE NAME --

Stanley Hoffmann was by birth French. (He had vivid memories of the Nazi occupation of his homeland.) And he had interesting things to say about Europe generally, and in particular about several of his countrymen, including --

• Mitterrand, about whom he wrote a book, and whom he described as "not an admirable politician," "highly intelligent, but also a narcissist."

• De Gaulle, of whom he said, "I have learned more about politics by studying de Gaulle than by studying Mitterand." He admired De Gaulle's being "very flexible when it came to the personalities with whom he worked." "[A]fter the liberation, some of the people who were most useful to France were not politicians or ex-politicians; they were business people, technicians, civil servants, who were totally indifferent to the battles between socialists and Christian democrats."

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What Turns A Normal Baby Into A Right Wing Sociopath?

Born in 1911, Ronald Reagan came from a normal working class Illinois home. He was a labor union activist in the 1940s and the president of his union from 1947 until 1952 and again in 1959 but at some point in there he sold out to management and started secretly ratting out other actors to the FBI as "communist sympathizers." He remained a Democrat and even helped California Senator Helen Gahagan Douglas defend herself against the deranged attacks from a sleazy, fascist-oriented political newcomer, Richard Nixon. By then, though, he was dating Republican Nancy Drew and he started shifting his flimsy political beliefs rightward. Once General Electric, an overtly conservative firm, hired him as a TV host in 1954 he worked to please them by adopting their right-wing agenda, including a new anti-union stance. By 1962, he switched parties and became not just a Republican, but a far right Republican, even embracing racism. Opposing civil rights legislation, he said "if an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, it is his right to do so" and he actively campaigned against Medicare.

Many people point out that Reagan wasn't as extreme as Republicans are today. They're incorrect. His actual beliefs may have been shallow but his intent was always to go hard right. He would be as much a crackpot today as Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson, or Jim Inhofe. He'd fit right in. You may find a liberal saying something respectful about him but you'll never find a liberal claiming Reagan was ever anything else than what he was, a right-winger.

Last week, as normal people commemorated the tragic assassination of John F. Kennedy, lots of delusional Republicans and right-wing trolls tried claiming JFK was a conservative. In fact, in 1960, when JFK accepted the nomination of New York's Liberal Party, he was widely quoted as saying "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'."

In their scholarly new book, Predisposed, John Hibbing, Kevin Smith and John Alford investigate what makes one person a conservative and someone else a progressive. Their premise is that people experience and process different world. "We taste and smell the same things differently," they wrote. "We cognitively and subjectively interpret the same paintings or stories or jokes differently. We have different personalities, moral foundations, and personal values-- and we have different politics… Openness means openness to experience and information and refers to people who are curious, creative and arty, those who enjoy and seek out novel experiences and are more likely to adopt unconventional beliefs… People who score high on openness, for example, tend to like envelope-pushing music and abstract art… Those open to new experiences are not just hanging Jackson Pollock prints in unorganized bedrooms while listening to techo-pop reinterpretations of Bach by experimental jazz bands. They are also more likely to identify themselves as liberals."

Social scientists have suspected for the better part of a century that political orientations are tied to personality. In fact, in some instances the controversy has been less about whether personality traits influence ideology than whether ideology is a personality trait. Personality can be thought of as the particular patterns of thoughts, feelings and behaviors that make an individual unique.

…Liberals and conservatives might differ on such eclectic non-political tastes as literature and salads for the same reason people with particular personality traits have different tastes and preferences. Maybe “liberal” and “conservative” are just handy terms for describing people who happen to have distinct bundles of traits driving their thoughts, feelings and actions. The big trick, of course, is figuring out the specific traits that consistently distinguish liberals from conservatives… This research, to put it mildly, has been controversial. It began with reflections on the traits that make for a good Nazi.

Erich Jaensch was a psychologist in pre-World War II Germany who was best known for his work on eidetic imagery (an eidetic image is an image that is perceived as real but is not). He began classifying people on their eidetic capabilities and then, ominously, began attaching cultural significance to these capabilities. Somewhere in the process this agenda morphed into providing scholarly cover for some of the more odious racial elements underpinning Nazi ideology. Jaensch’s argument that eidetic individuals are more likely than non-eidetic individuals to possess certain traits does not seem particularly freighted with political importance. Yet from this basis he started to develop a classification scheme for two personality types that accrued major political ramifications.

The “J” type personality was athletic, practical, and decisive. The “S” type was individualistic, egocentric, and liberal. J-types were likely to be upstanding Nazis; S-types, according to Jaensch, were more likely to be Jews and perhaps Frenchmen. He saw these personality types as biologically (read racially) rooted and connected to, not just different views of the world but maybe even different forms of humanity that would take predictably different sides in any cultural conflict. There is no prize for guessing who Jaensch viewed as the good guys in such conflict.

After the J-types jackbooted themselves and everyone else into a bloody, global conflict and lost, they were viewed less as practical and decisive than as existential threats to humanity.

During and immediately following World War II a number of social scientists investigated the inner workings of J-types. No one really believed in Jaensch’s chain of inference-- the conclusions were not only morally repugnant but empirically unsupported-- but the concept of an authoritarian personality type had been floating around in academic circles for quite a while. Maybe humanity was not divided into J- and S-types biologically fated to clash in a global struggle for cultural dominance but maybe there was something to the notion of certain personality traits being more acceptant of authoritarian social structures. This possibility was a very big deal in the middle of the 20th Century, when authoritarian ideological systems aggressively sought to replicate themselves through persuasion or force.

The big ideological “isms” that threatened democracy-- fascism on the right and communism on the left-- were clearly aided not just by the acceptance but in many cases the enthusiastic support of large numbers of seemingly ordinary people. This support came despite the indisputable fact that these regimes often fostered scientific ideas that were specious: Jaensch’s extrapolation from eidetic capabilities to justifications of Nazi racial purity or Trofim Lysenko’s rejection of Mendelian genetics for a new form of “anti-bourgeois” agronomy.

Moreover, the moral consequences of the policies being justified were difficult to miss: Gas chambers and gulags, wars and genocide, man-made famines and a generally cavalier approach to human rights and dignity. What was truly puzzling to social scientists was that these policies were not only accepted and implemented by the ideological true believers but by the average tovarisch and burgher. To be sure, many people just acquiesced in order to protect family and others actively resisted at extreme costs to themselves. Yet, authoritarian regimes needed many average citizens to get with the program. And lots of them did. Why?

In the 1940s and 1950s, psychologists began to hypothesize that people with certain preferences-- a desire for social order and clear, universally followed rules and regulations-- were more likely to provide that support to authoritarian regimes. They began to wonder whether these preferences were deeply psychologically embedded; in other words, whether they constituted a distinct and identifiable set of traits that could be isolated as a personality type. Thus was born the notion of the authoritarian personality. Investigators accept at least parts of Jaensch’s conception of a J-type but often view such personality types as threats to rather than foundations of society. A number of names are associated with the academic work foundational to developing and testing the concept of the authoritarian personality. The most prominent, though, is Theodor Adorno, a German academic whose experience with authoritarianism was all too practical. He was a man of broad interests-- he is still remembered as a music and cultural critic-- who studied philosophy, psychology and sociology, receiving his PhD in 1924. A rising star in more than one academic field, Adorno fled Hitler’s regime after losing his right to teach. Adorno’s father was a Jew who had converted to Protestantism, a dangerous genealogy to have in Nazi Germany.

Adorno ended up at the University of California Berkeley studying, among other things, the sociology and psychology of prejudice. There he began a series of collaborative research projects with Else Frenkel-Brunswik, an Austrian-born psychologist and fellow refugee of the anti-Semitic pogroms of the Hitler regime, and Daniel Levinson and Nevitt Sanford, two psychologists who studied ethnocentrism. These projects resulted in The Authoritarian Personality. Theories about authoritarianism had been making the rounds in respectable academic circles for a decade or more before this book was published in 1950, but this was likely the first-- and certainly best known-- systematic empirical investigation into whether there was such a thing as a personality rooted in politics. As the authors put it, their major hypothesis was “that the political, economic, and social convictions of an individual often form a broad and coherent pattern, as if bound together by a ‘mentality’ or ‘spirit’ and that this pattern is an expression of deep-lying trends in his personality.” Specifically, what they were interested in were “potential” fascists-- not overt and committed ideologues, but those predisposed to accept or support fascism should it become a mainstream social movement. [Basically, teabaggers of the day]

They ended up developing the F-scale-- the “F” stood for fascist. The F-scale focused on nine traits, which for the most part ignored specific policy issues like preferences on hiring quotas and focused on “central trends in the person.” These traits included conventionalism (a rigid adherence to conventional, middle-class values), superstition and stereotypy (a belief in mystical determinants of individual fate coupled with a predisposition to think in rigid categories), and anti-intraception (an opposition to the subjective or the imaginative). A number of the questions they used to try and get at these traits were prescient in that they reflected the sorts of non-political items now known to discriminate between liberals and conservatives. For example, one of the anti-intraception questions was: “Novels or stories that tell about what people think and feel are more interesting than those which contain mainly action, romance and adventure.” One of the conventionalism questions asked whether it was more important for a person to be artistic and sensuous or neat and well-mannered.

…In The Psychology of Politics, published just a few years after The Authoritarian Personality (1954), Hans Eysenck argued that personality was projected onto social attitudes. In this book, Eyesenck suggested that ideology was a product of two core underlying dimensions. One of these dimensions amounted to a basic left-right take on political and social issues. The other was “tendermindedness” or “toughmindedness.” The idea was that ideology depended not just on issue preferences but also on underlying personality. Authoritarians, be they on the left or right, were more likely to be toughminded. Eyesenck put both communists and fascists in this category since both groups were willing to pursue their political beliefs with little regard for the preferences and interests of others.

…[I]n the 1960s Glenn Wilson and colleagues in England, New Zealand, and Australia, took the basic concept of conservatism as reflecting a dimension of personality characterized by resistance to change and adherence to tradition. The result was the C-scale (“C” for conservatism) also broadly known as the Wilson- Patterson index-- versions of which we use in our own research. They measured conservatism with questions probing attitudes on everything from school uniforms to the death penalty and found it to correlate not just with the political orientations you would expect but also with tastes and preferences more broadly.

A more recent extension of the authoritarian personality research program is right-wing authoritarianism (RWA). It was developed in the 1970s and 1980s by Canadian psychologist Robert Altemeyer, who wondered whether there was a set of people “so generally submissive to established authority that it is scientifically useful to speak of ‘authoritarian people’.” Altemeyer’s answer was a decisive yes. He spent decades refining what amounted to an RWA personality test. Through various iterations this test included questions that had clear political implications, but he also experimented with questions that dealt with child rearing, music and films, and personal hygiene. RWA had much stronger psychometric properties than its F-scale predecessor and Altemeyer consistently reported that people scoring high on RWA tests were more likely to support controls on personal freedom, support harsh forms of punishment, be hostile to perceived out groups (e.g. homosexuals, feminists), and be more likely to support government persecution of these groups.

Reagan was pretty clueless about where he belonged on the spectrum. Kennedy certainly has a much keener understanding.

The JFK assassination a half-century later -- marginal notes on an event that really did change everything, or nearly

Bosom buddies -- um, not hardly

by Ken

I don't know about you, but I'm mostly numbed by the prospect of enduring yet another JFK assassination anniversary. It's like we've been through this 50 times already.

Don't you hate it when a bunch of clichés and bromides turn out to be true? An event that changed everything. The day America lost its innocence. And so on and on. You can pick at them all. It didn't change quite everything, and the innocence of America probably wasn't more than a centimeter or two deep. Still . . . .

It is possible to find new takes on the event. The other day George F. Will immersed himself in his miasma of right-wing creepery and found a true buttwipe's way to celebrate the event, with a WaPo column that was blurbed: "For liberals, his fiscally conservative nature is an inconvenient truth." (No, I'm not offering a link. The other day I offered a link to an Alessandra Staley review, but I do have limits. If you want to read this piece of willhooey, you can find it yourself.)

A few weeks ago I was thinking I might mark the occasion by passing on the story CBS News's Bob Schieffer had shared in AARP The Magazine about his status as "a footnote of sorts to the awful events of that weekend in 1963" -- how as a young reporter on the Fort Worth Star-Telegram he gravitated automatically to the newspaper office after hearing news of the president's shooting and wound up answering a phone call that turned out to be from Lee Harvey Oswald's mother, wanting to know when someone was going to pick her up to take her to the Dallas police HQ to see her son, and Bob jumped into the breach, and when he arrived with Mrs. Oswald, because it was his habit to dress for work in a suit, he was presumed to be a law-enforcement person, and very nearly got into an interview room with the Oswalds, mother and son, before finally somebody asked the question he points out he should have been asked from the start, namely who he was. In that particular time and place, "a reporter" was definitely not a good answer.

I expect Bob has told this story upwards of 6 million times over these 50 years, but I don't remember ever hearing it before, and I think it's a heckuva story. Of course everyone is presumed to have a story about where they were when they heard the news, and everyone seems to be sharing those stories in the media. The best I've heard is now-retired 35-year Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, now 94, recalling that at the time he was U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York (that's the big NY USA job), and he was visiting Bobby and Ethel Kennedy at their home in Virginia when the attorney general, his boss, got word about the events in Dallas.

But my favorite story for this anniversary year comes from the Washington Post's Loop-master, Al Kamen, under the heading "Echoes Not So Distant (links onsite):

President Richard Nixon apparently thought the JFK assassination might quickly fade from the country's collective memory, newly transcribed audiotapes show.

Not exactly. All the events and reminiscence leading up to the 50th anniversary on Friday of the tragic event say otherwise. And though Nixon assumed that recollections had faded less than a decade after Kennedy's death, it still cast a shadow on the 37th president and his aides, according to our friends at the University of Virginia's Miller Center, who are transcribing the tapes of Nixon's White House years.

The subject came up in August 1971 when Nixon was discussing travel plans to Dallas and New York with his top aide, H.R. Haldeman, the tapes show. Kennedy had been gunned down in a motorcade in Dallas less than eight years earlier, but Nixon seemed to think a parade of his own wouldn't be a problem.

The assassination, Nixon told Haldeman, "was so far back in the public consciousness."

Though the conversation ended with Nixon assuming he would do a motorcade of only "three or four blocks," the president ultimately traveled across the city via helicopter.

In another transcribed conversation from just a few months later, Nixon and his secretary, Rose Mary Woods, realize that it is the anniversary of JFK's death. "You know, listen, I had not thought of it, but -- " Nixon says as Woods calls to the president's dog. "This is the day the -- "

"That Kennedy was -- " Woods says.

"Right," Nixon replies.

It's just another example of why Tricky Dick was always famous for his keen sense of history.

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For a "Sunday Classics" fix anytime, visit the stand-alone "Sunday Classics with Ken."

Are You One Of The Tiny Minority Of Americans Still Taken In By The JFK Assassination Lies?

On November 22, 1963 I was just a kid but I remember thinking, when I was walking down the staircase of my school and heard that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas, that the right-wing hate-mongers and racists had killed the president. In 5 days it will be 50 days since that first impression popped into my brain. It's never going away, no matter how many and how elaborate and how determined the lies the ruling elites put out about how he was assassinated. Recently Secretary of State John Kerry told NBC that "To this day, I have serious doubts that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone." According to recent polling only 24% of Americans accept the "official" version that Oswald was acting alone.

Wednesday Bill and Hillary Clinton will accompany President and Michelle Obama at a wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. Living on twitter and following right-wing Republicans like Bryan Fischer and Texas congressman and Oklahoma bombing conspirator Steve Stockman, it's amazing to me that neither Clinton nor Obama was been murdered.

Friday, The Guardian, remarking on John Kerry's suspicions about who was behind the murder, speculated that the list includes the CIA and the Mafia, always the most logical suspects. And there are more and more books being published on the topic, over a thousand since the assassination. Here are 3 books The Guardian synopsied with very different conclusions:

1. The Mob did it

• The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination, by Lamar Waldron (Counterpoint)

Thesis: Godfathers Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante took out the president to neutralise his anti-mafia crusade. They framed Oswald and his supposed Cuban puppet-masters, a ruse which deceived LBJ and, to this day, Kerry.

"They got away with it because they planted the evidence against Castro," said Waldron. A cover-up endures. "We know the FBI had Marcello's confession in 1985 and basically suppressed it." A Warner Brothers film due out next year, based on this and a previous book co-authored by Waldron, will star Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro. "We hope the movie will bring attention to the fact hundreds of (government) files haven't been released."

2. The CIA did it

• CIA Rogues and the Killing of the Kennedys: How and Why US Agents Conspired to Assassinate JFK and RFK, by Patrick Nolan (Skyhorse)

Thesis: Top spooks Richard Helms and James Jesus Angleto hired mafia hitmen to murder Kennedy to derail his planned disengagement from Vietnam and rapprochement with Cuba and the Soviet Union. "Their motive was power, self-preservation."

Nolan cites research by "world-famous forensic scientist Dr Henry Lee," who writes the book's foreword, to argue there was more than one gunman. Nolan's website says he "utilizes the mosaic method of intelligence, analyzing each piece that is obtained and determining its relationship to other pieces to arrive at the solution."

3. Lyndon Johnson did it

• The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The case against LBJ, by Roger Stone (Skyhorse)

Thesis: The vice-president orchestrated an elaborate plot involving elements in the mob, CIA, White House and Cuban exile community to eliminate his boss. The motive: JFK planned to dump LBJ from the ticket in 1964, leaving him exposed to corruption probes.

The Texan Johnson's control over Dallas police facilitated the cover-up of evidence such as a fingerprint in the book depository's sniper's nest which matched his personal hitman, Mac Wallace. The truth, says Stone's Amazon entry, was hiding in plain sight all this time. "LBJ was not just shooting his way into the White House, he was avoiding political ruin and prosecution and jail for corruption at the hands of the Kennedy's (sic)."

I'm not reading any of these books. I am reading Dallas 1963 by Bill Minutaglio and Steven Davis-- which we first discussed in October in terms of unhinged Dallas area radical Pete Sessions (R-TX). Yesterday, the Seattle Times reprised a review of the book by Steve Weinberg that first ran November 16. Weinberg suspects that none of the slew of new books related to the assassination will achieve a fresher approach, or be presented as skillfully, as Dallas 1963.

The four-year narrative does not attempt to answer definitively whether Lee Harvey Oswald killed the president without assistance. (Oswald does not make his first appearance in the narrative until page 178. The focus is not on him until the book reaches the year 1963.)

Instead, longtime Texas scholar/journalists Minutaglio and Davis set out to explain why the city of Dallas in 1963 was the mostly likely place in the world for a fatal shot to be aimed at Kennedy, and why in the aftermath it was the most likely place in the world for the suspected assassin to be murdered by unhinged nightclub owner Jack Ruby.

Avid followers of previous Kennedy assassination books will probably recall that multiple presidential advisers and Dallas civic leaders begged the president to stay away from the city during November 1963. Those prescient individuals understood how Kennedy haters from various political groupings had coalesced. The lineup of Kennedy haters as assembled by the authors is impressive and fascinating. The first among equals is Gen. Edwin A. Walker, a high-ranking U.S. military officer who died in 1993. His military bearing, his penchant for violence and his widely disseminated hateful political views in combination managed to exude an undeniable charisma.

Additional Kennedy haters with power among the Dallas elite include U.S. congressman Bruce Alger, Dallas mayor Earl Cabell, Baptist minister W.A. Criswell, newspaper publisher Ted Dealey and billionaire oil tycoon H.L. Hunt. Minutaglio and Davis draw masterful word portraits of each man, as the characters show up for a few pages, disappear and then reappear.

Occasionally, Dallas leaders emerge who might be called heroic, as they labored to diminish the hatred of the powerful elite against not only the president, but also against minorities and low-income residents. The most unlikely semi-hero is Stanley Marcus, the wealthy owner of the Neiman Marcus department store. Because of his wealth and high-end clientele, Marcus had a voice among the Dallas elite. On the other hand, because of his Jewish heritage, Marcus was considered a fringe member of the power structure. He understood that defending Kennedy and promoting civil rights in general would cause many of the department store’s wealthiest customers to take their business elsewhere. So, naturally, Marcus felt conflicted. His portrayal by the authors is memorable and might lead readers (including me) to learn more about Marcus. He died in 2002.

Near the book’s opening, the authors state what came together in Dallas during the early 1960s was “unlike anything in the history of the country-- a handful of people in a seemingly staid city begin to set the stage for one of the greatest tragedies” the United States has experienced. “Marooned in an outpost of super-patriotism, their first, cautionary discussions begin to morph into a cacophony of anger.” The zenith of the cacophony turned out to be a rifle shot aimed at the Kennedy motorcade.

Let's hope a similar introduction referencing Bryan Fischer and Rep. Steve Stockman in a similar context. But I wouldn't discount the possibility.

Let's hope that's not what it takes to break the legislative stranglehold of "Just Say No" R's and right-wing Dems

Our pal Al Kamen concludes today's Washington Post "In the Loop" column with this little stroll down memory lane:

WE'VE BEEN HERE BEFORE

Deja vu? A report in the New York Times said: "Tomorrow night, getting right into the thick of the battle," the president would "carry his message to the people in a nationwide television and radio speech" fighting for enactment of his health reform bill, which opponents tagged as "socialized medicine" and "an entering wedge for the takeover of private medicine by the federal government."
The president was John F. Kennedy, the program was Medicare, the Times story was published on May 20, 1962. Despite the speech, the effort failed until passage in 1964.

One thing we'll never know is whether Medicare and the host of other revolutionary social programs enacted in the wake of President Kennedy's assassination, when President Lyndon Johnson parlayed the country's shock and horror into a groundswell of support for many of the initiatives Kennedy had been unable to move through the obstructionist legislative coalition of Republicans and still-"Democratic" Confederates.

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