JFK: How Quickly We Forget

"[when each elected official] presses its own ends...which generally results in no action at all...they devote more time to the prosecution of their own purposes than to the consideration of the general welfare...and so, as each separately entertains the same illusion, the common cause imperceptibly decays."

Greek historian Thucydides, on the main flaw of his nation's ruling counsel. A favorite quote of John F. Kennedy.

When I pulled up Google News this evening, I was horrified to find nothing on the front page about what I thought would be the top story: today marks the 48th anniversary of the fateful, despicable murder of President John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald.

What could I have gleaned from the news aggregation service? That the Denver Broncos released quarterback Kyle Orton. That HP sold a few of its TouchPad tablets before discontinuing the model. And, lest I go a moment bereft on star-crossed teen vampire news, that many viewers are seeing the new Twilight movie twice.

Let me restate: this is the anniversary of the day that a President of the United States died.

And yet, we concern ourselves with trivial morsels that can neither satisfy nor advance us. None of them evil or inherently wrong, yet all sideshows, distractions from the history we ought to be immersing ourselves in on this day, of all days.

The top story, thankfully, was a little more substantive - an overview of the Republican debate on foreign policy.  Yet, as I digested it, I was reminded of how we're cultivating the politics of division, of how feuding and finger-pointing has taken the place of positive policy-making, and how paralyzing partisanship has derailed the budgetary not-so-super committee, stalemated the Senate and which will likely cloud all political coverage until November 2012.

This, in turn, prompted the recall of the quote at the top of this page, which I borrowed from page 331 of William Manchester's informative, moving, and fantastically detailed tome on JFK's demise, The Death of a President (review to follow soon). Now, Kennedy was certainly a divisive figure - his mere Catholicism was almost enough to prevent his election, his rich background bothered many and his appointment of fellow Irish Catholics irked outsiders. And he certainly had personal flaws - don't we all!



Yet, he was, too, a man with the courage to own up to his folly in the Bay of Pigs debacle, the strength to stare down the Soviets in the Cuban Missile Crisis and the fortitude to take on the violent ignorance of white supremacists over civil rights, even at the risk of alienating the southern Democrats. As I recently wrote, he also had a keen mind, as evidenced by his Pulitzer Prize-winning literary work. When he spoke of change in his inspiring inauguration speech, he had the policies to back up the sentiment, and the determination necessary to force them through.

How very different to certain political "leaders" of today, on both sides of the aisle. They talk a big game in the locker room, but have neither the intellectual chops nor the gumption needed to win when they get on the field. They spend too much time slinging dirt and focusing on what their opponents haven't done, rather than convincing us of what they themselves can do. With their teenager-like egos and insecurities, they worriedly watch the opinion polls and are blown this way and that by the fickle winds of public opinion. This is no way to inspire, to lead, or to govern. What we need is someone who is principled enough to form new ideas, articulate enough to explain them, and determined enough to implement them when they reach office.

Then, and only then, can the pretenders of today live up to the legacy of Kennedy, Reagan and Lincoln, for the good of what Thucydides called the "common cause." Assuming of course, that our politicians know their history, and aren't too busy reading the drivel that makes it onto the front pages these days.

The Guns Will Be Silent

This past week we had a date anomaly – the day, week and month all mirroring each other. But for a small, and ever-dwindling, group of men, the past seven days were significant for a reason far more profound than calendar alignment. They gathered at sites across Europe and America commemorate the moment when, on the 11th hour of the 11th day in the 11th month of 1918, the roaring guns of World War I finally fell silent.

It soon became known as the “Great War,” yet that is ill-fitting in all respects save one – the great sacrifices made by soldiers and their families on both sides. More than 8.5 million died (and a further 21 million were wounded), and their number has been dubbed “The Lost Generation,” to signify the enormous loss of life and potential on the fields of Flanders and beyond.

After the war, the leaders of the Western Allies idealistically hoped for permanent peace, though the League of Nations that was set up to foster togetherness and prevent future hostility quickly proved to be a paper tiger. Nonetheless, the sentiment of “never again” was on most lips among the “victors.” Meanwhile, the defeated Germans smarted, not just at their losses of men and material, but also at the overly-punitive terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which punished the “Fatherland” by imposing harsh sanctions on an already ravaged economy, and confiscated territories far and wide. It was the resulting frustration and the promise of restoring national pride that enabled Hitler to take power so swiftly and terribly in the mid to late 1930s. Even with his rise, the majority outside of Germany still hoped for peace, not seeing that no number of Munich Agreements could slake the Fuhrer’s lust for revenge and land.

Though it is easy with hindsight to slam those who, like British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, signed such treaties and they must certainly be held accountable for inaction and, in some cases, capitulation, it is just as easy to forget how horrendous the trench-based battles of World War I were, and the impact they had on the collective psyches of both the victors and the vanquished.

Trench foot, rat bites, and typhoid were rampant, as the soldiers literally rotted in their water-logged holes, to say nothing of the mustard gas. There was no sanitation, no clean facilities to treat the wounded, no place to bury the dead. Then, when they were sent over the top, the weak, despairing bunch were greeted by machine gun fire that toppled their ranks like contorted dominoes and, if they advanced to the enemy lines, were ensnared as if they were game in barbed wire, or run through by enemy bayonets. Those who did not capture their foes’ positions yet could not make it back to their own trenches were sometimes so stunned by the clamor, the fear and the firework flashes of barking muzzles that they wandered around in “No Man’s Land” until captured, finished off or, for a lucky few, retrieved by their comrades. Some opposing trenches gained or lost a total of mere inches over the course of the war.

Click here to read the rest of this post on the blog of Boston University's The Historical Society

JFK: President of Firsts

This week marked the 51st anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s election victory, which saw him become the 35th President of the United States. The Camelot myth aside, he was undeniably a President of firsts:

• The first President to win the office at age 43, and the first "Chief Executive" born in the twentieth century.

• The first Catholic in the White House. It is easy to forget how difficult it was for the Kennedy clan (JFK’s father, Joseph–the US Ambassador to Britain who FDR pressured into resigning in November 1940–masterminded his son’s career) to overcomeProtestant opposition to their faith during the campaign.

• The first President to win the Pulitzer Prize. His book,Profiles in Courage, which highlighted the bravery of John Quincy Adams and seven other U.S. Senators claimed the award in 1955. Interestingly, it was patterned on Winston Churchill’s Great Contemporaries, which was not the only literary connection between the two. Kennedy’s Harvard thesis, Why England Slept, (published by Wilfred Funk in 1940 after several big publishers rejected the manuscript) was a play on Churchill’s While England Slept, which examined Germany’s militarism and England’s failure to stem Hitler’s ambitions. Churchill went one better, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature for his war memoirs. On April 1, 1963, Kennedy conferred honorary citizenship on his literary and rhetorical hero.

• A participant in the first televised Presidential election debates, with Richard M. Nixon. Popular opinion contends that the first debate was a turning point in the campaign. The dashing Massachusetts senator and the Vice President were opposites in style and appearance–Kennedy fit and poised, Nixon unattractive and growling. The encounters moderated by Howard K. Smith (a pioneer of broadcast journalism and one of the Murrow Boys) also changed the campaigning landscape for good, and put a premium on candidates’ ability to come across well on the small screen. It’s fascinating to me that last year (yes, 2010) saw the first televised debates in British electoral history. That’s half a century after the US got in on the game!

• The first celebrity Presidential couple. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, were the most photographed, most fawned-over political partners in history. As in the debates, his camera-ready appearance helped, though he was often overshadowed by his gorgeous fashion queen.

Click here to keep reading at the blog of Boston University's The Historical Society

Book Review: The Fear Index by Robert Harris

I’ve been a big fan of British writer Robert Harris since a friend lent me a copy of Fatherland, an alternative history novel in which Germany won World War II. Since then, I’ve consumed Harris’s other books like kids munching candy on October 31st – quickly, and with joyous abandon. But that is not to suggest that his novels are a mere sugar high. On the contrary, Harris meticulously researches his topics, creates substantial, memorable characters and crafts a three-dimensional world that I immerse myself in for a few hours each time I pick up one of his books.

So it was with great satisfaction that I stumbled across the pre-order listing for a new Harris novel a couple of months ago – The Fear Index. Annoyingly, it won’t be released in the US until January 31st, 2012, but help was at hand: my good friend, Mr. Paul Hunt, dispatched his mum (deliberate spelling, American readers!) to her local bookstore in what Paul calls “God’s Country” – that’s the English county of Yorkshire, for the uninitiated. As luck would have it, she not only got the book the day it came out for half price, but it was also a signed copy. Huzzah.

For the sake of those who may read the book, I will endeavor to avoid spoilers. Here’s the synopsis, which is nothing you can’t find on the jacket: Dr. Alex (for some reason the Amazon.com pre-order page lists him as “Max” – did the US publisher really change his first name because Alex, or heaven forbid his full name, Alexander, is too British?) Hoffman is a brilliant scientist working for CERN, the organization that runs the Large Hadron Collider. An ambitious London banker hears about Hoffman’s experimentation with computing models, and recruits him to co-found a hedge fund in Geneva. Not just any fund, mind you, but one in which the trades are conducted by an algorithm based on the VIX, of “Fear Index”, which measures market volatility.

All is going well for their company – unheard of year-on-year returns of more than 80 percent, several billionaire investors ready to pump more money in, and, for Hoffman, marriage to a beautiful and creative woman. But when a violent intruder breaks into his house, Hoffman’s world and the numbers he has put his faith in to build it start unraveling at a dizzying pace. He becomes totally isolated from all he holds dear and Harris offers two, equally distrurbing possibilities for this: either his protagonist is losing his mind, or someone’s trying to make him think he is.

As with every Harris book I’ve read, I was pulled into the plot from the beginning? Why? First, believable and inherently flawed characters whose specialties are not my own – as anyone who knows me will attest, I know little of science or economics. In fact, I’m the type of guy that has to put his 401K on autopilot, as anything else would, I fear, wipe out the meager sum therein in record time. As for science, as my good friend, Mr. Paul Avery, may recall, I once scored 28 percent on a physics exam. Yikes.

Second, Harris has evidently been to Geneva many times, and brings a city I have regrettably never visited to life, from the chill breezes coming off the lake, to the grandeur of the stone-façade buildings, to the pretentiousness of the artsy crowd who prance through its galleries.

I’ve already mentioned the fast pace of this novel, which rattles us through 24 hours of chaos, but it would be ineffectual without Harris’s ability to build suspense. Thankfully, he dials up the tension without resorting to the graphic violence of, say, Stieg Larsson to cap it off (a trend in today’s thrillers that I find troubling). For a sample of what I’m describing, check out this excerpt from The Daily Telegraph.

Timing is also key with this book and indeed, Harris paused his work on volume three of his Cicero trilogy (check out part one here and part two here) to write The Fear Index while we’re still feeling the reverberations from the financial crisis. I have just about forgiven him for this transgression, despite my own concern that I’ll be waiting until 2013 for the concluding volume. Curses.

OK, so back to the book I’m supposed to be reviewing. I also liked how Harris takes his time to drip feed revelations about Hoffman’s character and past throughout the text, rather than, as a rookie writer might, telling us everything up front. Harris also capably shifts his point of view (the most overused and annoying phrase on Project Runway, which Nicole has roped me into watching with her!); from Hoffman, to his wife, Gabrielle, to Hugo, his business partner. (Incidentally, is the name Hugo not seen as too British by the American publisher? I’ve never come across anyone by that name in my ten years in Kansas City. There are far more Alex’es here than Hugos). By seeing the world through several sets of eyes, I was drawn deeper into the book – hence the 2:00 a.m. bedtime on my second night of reading it. It took me three nights to finish The Fear Index, but I could’ve pushed through in two evenings or, possibly, in one transatlantic flight. War and Peace, this is not.

My only reservation when starting to read The Fear Index was the foreknowledge that Paul Greengrass (who directed the excellent Bourne Trilogy) had already optioned the script and that Harris is writing the screenplay. Much as I admire Mr. Greengrass’s work and respect Harris’s artistic integrity, I was concerned that the latter had written this book with the intention of getting such a deal, and the big bucks that accompany it – a suspicion not dispelled with Harris’s acknowledgment of Greengrass in the front matter. This is not the first Harris book to come to the big screen – Roman Polanski pulled in the talents of Ewan McGregor and Pierce Brosnan for The Ghostwriter, which I enjoyed.

However, The Fear Index hooked me on page one and, while I can see how certain elements were conceived with the big screen in mind (sorry, have to keep that promise of no spoilers!), the book is not a cynical vehicle to get Harris to a Hollywood deal. It stands alone as both a taut, engaging narrative and a timely critique of the flighty and unpredictable financial market.

In summary, I pose three questions to you:

1) Do you enjoy exciting yet intelligent thrillers with intriguing characters?

2) Would you like to know more about the stock market without reading dull economics books?

3) Have you got 12 spare hours over the next few weeks?

If the answer to either/all of the above is yes, then I implore you to get a copy of The Fear Index, sink into a comfy chair, and read the book cover to cover in as few sessions as possible.