JFK-a-Palooza, faux correction &
more
From The Scrapbook.
JFK-a-Palooza
Herewith a friendly warning from The Scrapbook: We’re just a few weeks away from the golden anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s election as president, and already the commemorative essays and video tributes are raising the nation’s blood sugar to diabetic levels.
One example is USA Today’s September 27 edition, which not only features a wistful, front-page photograph of JFK from his Senate days and weepy analysis—“50 years after win, a legacy endures: JFK’s short tenure is still shaping USA”—but, literally, a special nine-page section devoted to the two-and-a-half-year Kennedy presidency. The Scrapbook has read it so that you don’t have to, but we think that just repeating a few of the headlines—“Caroline carries on her parents’ legacies,” “America’s quintessential icon of style and grace,” “Obama: Life was ‘source of inspiration’ ”—is sufficient to convey the overall tone to interested readers.
Which leads us to a corollary that The Scrapbook firmly believes: Journalism may be the “first rough draft of history,” as journalists like to say; but once journalists get something wrong, they cling to their mistake with all the tenacity of Rosie O’Donnell clutching a Big Mac.
The Kennedy presidency (1961-63) is a wearisome case in point. The president’s tragic murder, for example, took place in Dallas, Texas, where, as we are persistently reminded, right-wing politics and polemics were dominant, and the John Birch Society was especially active. But you can read innumerable accounts of the Kennedy assassination without ever learning that his actual assassin was a standard left-wing crank of the day—active with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a defector to the Soviet Union! It isn’t all that difficult to picture him today, a splenetic 71, tuning in to, say, Keith Olbermann on MSNBC for his nightly fix.
Read USA Today and you will learn that, in 1960, the American people fell in love with the handsome young war hero/senator from Massachusetts, unanimously elected him president over the five-o’clock-shadowed Richard Nixon, and that before Dallas, JFK enthralled the world with his dynamic leadership, transformed American life with one legislative triumph after another, and inspired a generation of young people to “ask not what your country can do for you,” etc.
In truth, of course, on the heels of recession, Kennedy barely squeaked by the incumbent vice president Nixon, and it was Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, who actually got the Kennedy-Johnson legislative agenda enacted in the form of the Great Society—a mixed achievement at best. Indeed, even if you accept USA Today’s assertion that Kennedy’s “short tenure is still shaping USA,” it is worth speculating about the shape of the USA and a wider world if Kennedy had, in fact, been defeated in 1960, and Richard Nixon and Henry Cabot Lodge had led the country for the next eight years.
If, for example, the Bay of Pigs invasion had been supported by American airpower (as Nixon would undoubtedly have ensured), Fidel Castro might well have been overthrown some 49 years ago, to the incalculable benefit of the Cuban people. If Nixon had met with Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna in June 1961, as JFK did, he is not likely to have impressed the Soviet leader with his weakness and inexperience, as JFK did—which would probably have prevented the construction of the Berlin Wall (August 1961) and the installation of offensive nuclear missiles in Cuba, which would have meant no Cuban Missile Crisis (1962). It is unlikely that Nixon, Dwight Eisenhower’s faithful deputy for eight years, would have presided over a slow, clandestine, uncertain buildup of U.S. troops fighting a “limited” counterinsurgency in South Vietnam.
There would have been no legislation authorizing the organization of public employees into labor unions, no attempt to regulate steel prices, no wiretapping of Martin Luther King, no Mafia molls slipping in and out of the White House, no Camelot or Jackie O or Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy. You could still fly from Heathrow to Idlewild, and Mary Jo Kopechne would be 70 years old. And since Nixon would probably have served two terms throughout the 1960s, there would have been no Watergate, no War Powers Act, no Harry Blackmun, no Jimmy Carter.
And not least, no nine-page special section of USA Today celebrating Richard Nixon’s 1960 election. ♦
What’s Wrong with this ‘Correction’?
The New York Times ran a curious “correction” on September 23, which reads as follows: “An article on Wednesday about the quarrels among President Obama’s national security advisers described in a new book by Bob Woodward referred incompletely to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s reported assessment of Richard C. Holbrooke, the president’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. While Mr. Biden is indeed quoted as calling Mr. Holbrooke ‘the most egotistical bastard I’ve ever met,’ he also is quoted saying that Mr. Holbrooke ‘may be the right guy for the job.’ ”
The curious part is that, if you read closely, you’ll notice that nothing is being corrected. The quotation was accurate but unflattering to the famously thin-skinned, not to say egotistical, Holbrooke, who had sufficient clout with the Times that he got them to revise and extend their remarks to make them marginally less unflattering.
An enterprising blogger who goes by the nom de plume NYTPicker and who, as his name suggests, makes it his business to read the Times with a magnifying glass, noticed that this is not the first time Holbrooke has leaned on the Times for a faux-correction. There have been many through the years. Our favorite, from August 27, 1999:
An article yesterday about Richard C. Holbrooke’s first appearance at the United Nations since his Senate confirmation as chief United States representative misstated the history of the appointment. While his confirmation was delayed for nearly a year, most of the delay was due to a Justice Department investigation, not to Congressional roadblocks. The article also misstated the duration and nature of the Senate hearings. They did not last months and were not grueling. ♦
No Questions Asked?
One of the more puzzling episodes in the history of federal meddlesomeness occurred two weeks ago when the Drug Enforcement Administration announced a nationwide prescription drug “take-back” at some 4,000 locations around the country. Bring in your unused prescription drugs, it was announced, and they would be collected and destroyed. Moreover, the DEA emphasized: “No questions asked.”
Now, The Scrapbook understands that prescription drugs—like any controlled substance—can be abused, and that unauthorized drug combinations and overdoses cause a certain number of accidental (or deliberate) fatalities each year. But why would the DEA think it’s necessary for conscientious people to transport their unused prescription medications to federally authorized centers for official collection and destruction? We agree it’s not a good idea to flush pills down the toilet, or toss them to the wind where some small animal might ingest them; but if you wish to be rid of them, what’s so difficult about depositing pills and capsules in your handy trash can?
For that matter, why should people be assured that “no questions” will be asked? The Scrapbook can’t think of any legitimate government inquiry under the circumstances. We would understand such an attitude, of course, if this were a case of turning in illegal firearms, or a tax amnesty, or some comparable gesture of federal noblesse oblige. But there is no statute preventing people from retaining drugs for which they have a prescription; and a federal “take-back” program, aside from a waste of taxpayers’ money, seems to imply a certain illegality where there is none.
The Scrapbook does not take the problem of drug abuse lightly, but it might be necessary to remind the DEA that most Americans are not addicts, consume prescription medications responsibly, and don’t deserve to be treated by their government with suspicion. ♦
Year Two, Better than Ever
The fifth issue of National Affairs, successor to the legendary quarterly The Public Interest, has just appeared. The magazine, edited by Yuval Levin, goes from strength to strength.
Interested in public sector unions (as you should be)? Daniel DiSalvo, who wrote about them in these pages with Fred Siegel (“The New Tammany Hall,” October 12, 2009), has a terrific primer about the problem, its severity, and the range of possible solutions. Interested in our national debt? Jason Thomas tells you what you need to know. School choice? Frederick Hess is your man.
It’s a first-rate collection of pieces that should cement National Affairs’ reputation as a quarterly must read for anyone interested in American public policy. To subscribe, go to national-affairs.com. ♦
More Progress for the Rake
A tip of The Scrapbook homburg to our colleague Matt Labash. His profile of former Washington, D.C., mayor Marion Barry, “A Rake’s Progress,” which first appeared in these pages last September, has been selected to appear in the volume Best American Essays 2010 (Mariner Books).
Barry later lavished praise on Labash’s reportorial technique: “He was nosy as hell”—quite a compliment from a man who was investigated by the FBI, the IRS, and federal prosecutors (among others) during his storied political career. ♦
