Lazy Caturday Reads

Good Afternoon!!

Yesterday was the 61st anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. I was 15 years old, a junior in high school. I still see that day as a defining event in my life. It was my first real experience of death, and I recall how difficult it was for me to comprehend and accept that our brilliant and charismatic president was really gone forever. It was my first lesson in how quickly dramatic events can change our understanding of the world.

Everything was different after that. If Kennedy had lived, he very likely would have won a second term, and perhaps the course of the Vietnam War could have been different. Perhaps Richard Nixon would not have made his comeback and been elected president in 1968. We can’t know what would have happened, but I think that if Kennedy could have completed a second term, our history would have been very different.

Of course Lyndon Johnson did complete many of Kennedy’s projects like the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Medicare and Medicaid Act of 1965. Kennedy’s tragic death and Johnson’s legislative experience likely helped these laws get passed. But there was something about Jack Kennedy that inspired and energized the country, and that energy was lost after his death–especially after Johnson’s failure in Vietnam and his stubbor refusal to change course.

It’s the weekend and I need a break from the current madness in politics, so I’m going to share a few reads about that long ago day in 1963.

Heather Cox Richardson at Letters from an American: November 22, 2024.

It was November 22, 1963, and President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy were visiting Texas. They were there, in the home state of Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, to try to heal a rift in the Democratic Party. The white supremacists who made up the base of the party’s southern wing loathed the Kennedy administration’s support for Black rights.

That base had turned on Kennedy when he and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, had backed the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in fall 1962 saying that army veteran James Meredith had the right to enroll at the University of Mississippi, more commonly known as Ole Miss. 

When the Department of Justice ordered officials at Ole Miss to register Meredith, Mississippi governor Ross Barnett physically barred Meredith from entering the building and vowed to defend segregation and states’ rights. 

So the Department of Justice detailed dozens of U.S. marshals to escort Meredith to the registrar and put more than 500 law enforcement officers on the campus. White supremacists rushed to meet them there and became increasingly violent. That night, Barnett told a radio audience: “We will never surrender!” The rioters destroyed property and, under cover of the darkness, fired at reporters and the federal marshals. They killed two men and wounded many others. 

By Susan Herbert (after The Milkmaid by Johannes Vermeer)

The riot ended when the president sent 20,000 troops to the campus. On October 1, Meredith became the first Black American to enroll at the University of Mississippi.

The Kennedys had made it clear that the federal government would stand behind civil rights, and white supremacists joined right-wing Republicans in insisting that their stance proved that the Kennedys were communists. Using a strong federal government to regulate business would prevent a man from making all the money he might otherwise; protecting civil rights would take tax dollars from white Americans for the benefit of Black and Brown people. A bumper sticker produced during the Mississippi crisis warned that “the Castro Brothers”—equating the Kennedys with communist revolutionaries in Cuba—had gone to Ole Miss. 

That conflation of Black rights and communism stoked such anger in the southern right wing that Kennedy felt obliged to travel to Dallas to try to mend some fences in the state Democratic Party. 

How the day began:

On the morning of November 22, 1963, the Dallas Morning News contained a flyer saying the president was wanted for “treason” for “betraying the Constitution” and giving “support and encouragement to the Communist inspired racial riots.” Kennedy warned his wife that they were “heading into nut country today.”

But the motorcade through Dallas started out in a party atmosphere. At the head of the procession, the president and first lady waved from their car at the streets “lined with people—lots and lots of people—the children all smiling, placards, confetti, people waving from windows,” Lady Bird remembered. “There had been such a gala air,” she said, that when she heard three shots, “I thought it must be firecrackers or some sort of celebration.”

The Secret Service agents had no such moment of confusion. The cars sped forward, “terrifically fast—faster and faster,” according to Lady Bird, until they arrived at a hospital, which made Mrs. Johnson realize what had happened. “As we ground to a halt” and Secret Service agents began to pull them out of the cars, Lady Bird wrote, “I cast one last look over my shoulder and saw in the President’s car a bundle of pink, just like a drift of blossoms, lying on the back seat…Mrs. Kennedy lying over the President’s body.” 

As they waited for news of the president, LBJ asked Lady Bird to go find Mrs. Kennedy. Lady Bird recalled that Secret Service agents “began to lead me up one corridor, back stairs, and down another. Suddenly, I found myself face to face with Jackie in a small hall…outside the operating room. You always think of her—or someone like her—as being insulated, protected; she was quite alone. I don’t think I ever saw anyone so much alone in my life.” 

After trying to comfort Mrs. Kennedy, Lady Bird went back to the room where her husband was. It was there that Kennedy’s special assistant told them, “The President is dead,” just before journalist Malcolm Kilduff entered and addressed LBJ as “Mr. President.” 

There’s a bit more at the link.

Colin Moynihan at The New York Times: Desperate Bid to Save J.F.K. Shown in Resurfaced Film.

Nearly 61 years ago, Dale Carpenter Sr. showed up on Lemmon Avenue in Dallas, hoping to film John F. Kennedy as his motorcade passed. But the president’s car had already gone by, and he recorded only some of the procession, including the back of a car carrying Lyndon Johnson and the side of the White House press bus.

So Mr. Carpenter, a businessman from Texas, rushed to Stemmons Freeway, several miles farther along the motorcade route, to try again.

There, just moments after Kennedy had been shot, he captured an urgent and chaotic scene. The president’s speeding convertible. A Secret Service agent in a dark suit sprawled on the back. Jacqueline Kennedy, in her pink Chanel outfit, little more than a blur.

Kennedy himself could not be glimpsed. He had collapsed and was close to death.

For decades Mr. Carpenter’s 8-millimeter snippets of what transpired in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, have been a family heirloom. When he died in 1991 at 77, the reel, which included footage of his twin boys’ birthday party, passed to his wife, Mabel, then to a daughter, Diana, and finally to a grandson, James Gates.

Later this month, the Kennedy footage is to be put up for sale in Boston by RR Auction, the latest in a line of assassination-related images to surface publicly after decades in comparative obscurity. The auction house says it is the only known film of the president’s car on the freeway as it sped from Dealey Plaza, the site of the shooting, to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where Kennedy was pronounced dead at 1 p.m.

Footage shot by Abraham Zapruder, a bystander, has long provided disturbing images of the assassination itself, one of the most traumatic and closely examined events in American history. Mr. Carpenter’s film shows what happened before and just after the Zapruder film was shot. The first section is a prosaic scene of the president’s motorcade; the second, a race for help imbued with all the uncertainty that filled the moments after the gunshots.

Though Mr. Carpenter’s film, just over a minute long, contains nothing likely to affect the debate over Kennedy’s death, several experts said it is still an important addition to the mosaic of images that recorded that day in Dallas.

Paul Singer at WGBH: A newly uncovered memo shows how the JFK assassination reverberated in Boston.

This story is about a trip I took to look at the files of Freedom House, and the four remarkable pages I found in those files.

Freedom House was the community-based, Black-led nonprofit that helped the city of Boston sell the Washington Park plan to Roxbury’s Black residents. And the files that Freedom House kept of that time period now sit in nearly 90 boxes in the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections.

I called over and the archives folks warmly welcomed me to browse a small sample of the Freedom House collection. When I arrived, they had set aside two banker’s boxes full of numbered file folders.

It was in box 32, folder 1111 that I struck gold. Or, more accurately, yellow.

Four pages of yellow notepad paper, filled with cursive handwriting. It was a report about a special conference called to address the “Low Income Housing Crisis” in Boston on Nov. 22, 1963.

That date rang a bell. Wasn’t that the day JFK was shot?

It was.

And the memo documents how that tragedy played out in real time 1,700 miles from Dallas’ Dealey Plaza.

The meeting was to address the issue of how urban renewal in 1960s Boston was hurting the city’s poor and people of color, especially the need for low-income housing. When the group broke for lunch the news of Kennedy’s death reached them.

In extraordinarily poetic terms, McGill writes that the group tried to continue with its important work of addressing low-income housing needs, but it was difficult to concentrate.

“… people were sobbing uncontrollably and our spirits kept foundering under the awful waiting vigil our hearts were keeping at the side of the president.”

When Kennedy’s death was confirmed, McGill wrote how the collective weeping grew. She witnessed a priest across the room as his face “crumpled helplessly.”

The attendees abandoned any effort to continue their work, and a closing prayer was offered.

“Charles Abrams was scheduled to deliver a special address at the close of the conference … but he had no heart to give the speech he had prepared. He talked about the tragedy and its implications instead — very briefly. Dr. Barth closed the conference with special prayers for the President, the bereaved family, and for the healing of the sickness of violence and hate in our country.”

Standing in a library basement with these pages in my hand, I was struck by how much that prayer still rings true 61 years later.

And Boston still has a low-income housing crisis.

Trump’s Awful Nominations.

Steven Contorno and Kristen Holmes at CNN: Fox hosts, cable news regulars and entertainment pros: Trump is casting a made-for-TV Cabinet.

A common thread weaves through many of Donald Trump’s picks for his incoming administration, a quality the president-elect values as highly as loyalty and perhaps even more than conventional qualifications: a flair for television.

He has plucked two Fox News stars from their airwaves – Sean Duffy for Transportation secretary and Pete Hegseth to lead the Pentagon. For the agency overseeing Medicare and Medicaid, Trump has turned to Dr. Mehmet Oz, the celebrity physician known for his health show that aired for 13 seasons. His pick for the Department of Education, meanwhile, is Linda McMahon, who co-founded and built a professional wrestling and entertainment empire alongside her husband.

Trump’s choice for ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, had a six-year run hosting a Fox News show. Tulsi Gabbard, his selection for director of national intelligence, was a contributor on the conservative network after she left Congress and once subbed for its former primetime host Tucker Carlson.

As a former reality TV star, Trump is deeply attuned to the power of the small screen. His selection process has centered on people who can not only articulate his message but also defend him in the kind of high-stakes, combative settings that define modern media.

His transition team, operating in a war-room style setup at Mar-a-Lago, has embraced this focus. On large screens, his advisers play video clips of potential appointees’ media performances, including footage of them defending Trump but also their past criticism of him, underscoring the centrality of media strategy in his decision-making.

The outcome is a made-for-TV Cabinet who he thinks will sell his agenda to Americans and defend the administration against media scrutiny on their networks. Meanwhile, in some departments, the expectation is that deputies and top staff will oversee the day-to-day operations.

Another comment thread: incompetence and lack of relevant experience.

Ryan Bort and Asawin Suebsaeng at Rolling Stone: Team Trump Is Furious Hegseth Hid Sex Assault Claim: ‘This Is the F–king Pentagon!’

Matt Gaetz may have withdrawn his name from consideration to become Donald Trump’s attorney general over sexual misconduct accusations — but alleged sexual abuser Pete Hegseth is still fighting to persuade Republican senators to confirm him to one of the most powerful positions in government.

Hegseth was already facing an uphill confirmation battle to become the Secretary of Defense given that he is best known as a Fox News host with no government experience. The emergence of a disturbing sexual assault accusation against him from 2017 isn’t helping matters — and Trump’s team is pissed. 

According to four sources familiar with the situation, some top Trump transition officials and others close to the president-elect have been puzzled, if not infuriated, that Hegseth did not preemptively inform them of the allegations against him before they made their way into the press — most notably through the publication of a police report detailing the alleged incident at a hotel in Monterey, California.

“How did he not know? Why didn’t he tell us?” a source close to Trump says. “Pete wasn’t interviewing for a job at McDonald’s; this is the fucking Pentagon! … Even if the allegations are fake, it doesn’t matter because he was supposed to tell us what we needed to know so we could be better prepared to defend him — not learn about it from the media.”

There was, the sources say, a vetting process for the Hegseth pick, but it did not uncover these details, nor was it especially invasive. Trump’s transition team did not sign agreements with the White House or the Justice Department to allow the FBI to conduct background checks on the president-elect’s nominees.

“When we ask, ‘Is there anything else we need to know about?’ that is usually a good time to mention a police report,” a Trump adviser says. “Obviously he remembered that this all happened and there is no way — I don’t think — he could have believed this wouldn’t come out once he got nominated.”

Why haven’t they withdrawn Hegseth’s name yet?

Liam Archacky at The Daily Beast: Now GOP Senators Want Another Trump Nominee’s Full FBI File.

Some Republican senators are privately eager to see the FBI file on Tulsi Gabbard, whose history of alignment with Russia has drawn concern in the wake of her nomination for the post of director of national intelligence, reported Punchbowl News.

Although Gabbard has drawn headlines for previously echoing Russian talking points on topics like the wars in Ukraine and Syria, it’s her support for leaker turned Russian citizen Edward Snowden that is allegedly most troubling for some lawmakers.

The former Democratic congresswoman openly pushed for the U.S. to “drop all charges” against Snowden in a 2020 bill that was co-sponsored by former Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz, another one-time Trump cabinet nominee who was yesterday forced to withdraw his name amid sexual misconduct allegations he denies.

Lawmakers, including members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is responsible for processing Gabbard’s nomination, reportedly find Gabbard’s support for Snowden—a former NSA employee who leaked state secrets—especially concerning because of the danger his actions posed to national security, reported Punchbowl.

Although FBI file reviews are standard for presidential cabinet candidates, Punchbowl reported that the Republican senators’ interest in doing so seems to suggest that they believe there could still be unknown information in the file—such as potential foreign contacts.

The New York Times: Trump Picks Key Figure in Project 2025 for Powerful Budget Role.

President-elect Donald J. Trump on Friday picked a key figure in Project 2025 to lead the Office of Management and Budget, elevating a longtime ally who has spent the last four years making plans to rework the American government to enhance presidential power.

The would-be nominee, Russell T. Vought, would oversee the White House budget and help determine whether federal agencies comport with the president’s policies. The role requires Senate confirmation unless Mr. Trump is able to make recess appointments.

The choice of Mr. Vought would bring in a strongly ideological figure who played a pivotal role in Mr. Trump’s first term, when he also served as budget chief. Among other things, Mr. Vought helped come up with the idea of having Mr. Trump use emergency power to circumvent Congress’s decision about how much to spend on a border wall.

Mr. Vought was a leading figure in Project 2025, the effort by conservative organizations to build a governing blueprint for Mr. Trump should he take office once again. Mr. Trump tried to distance himself from the effort during his campaign, but he has put forward people with ties to the project for his administration since the election.

Mr. Vought’s role in Project 2025 was to oversee executive orders and other unilateral actions that Mr. Trump could take during his first six months in office, with the goal of tearing down and rebuilding executive branch institutions in a way that would enhance presidential power.

Joyce Vance at Civil Discourse: Project 2025: It’s On (Predictably).

Before Bill Barr became Donald Trump’s third attorney general, he circulated a memo that was more or less an audition tape for the job he ultimately got. That memo reached both the White House Counsel’s Office and Main Justice. In it, Barr argued in favor of what had previously been a fringe theory of a powerful “unitary executive,” in other words, a president able to consolidate power at the expense of the other two branches as a very powerful leader. The writing was on the wall with Barr’s selection, although the Supreme Court cast it in stone when the conservative majority signed off on the view that presidents couldn’t be criminally prosecuted as long as the crimes they committed fell under the umbrella of official acts. Even Bill Barr would have never dreamed of arguing the president could use SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival and walk away with no consequences. Now, the Supreme Court says it’s so.

That’s the context that’s essential for understanding Trump’s Friday evening “nomination” (if you can call a social media announcement that) of Russell Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Vought is a proponent of a powerful executive and of restructuring our institutions to facilitate a government that veers toward the monarchical and away from the democratic. He was one of only four out of forty-four of Trump’s cabinet officials from his first administration who said they’d support him this time.

Vought entered OMB at the start of Trump’s first administration and was confirmed as its director in July 2020. In the archive of his official biography, his role is described like this: “he is responsible for overseeing the implementation of the President’s policy, management and regulatory agendas across the Executive Branch.” OMB is a powerful agency, and its director is, in a very real sense, a president’s right-hand man. Among the job experience Vought touts in his bio are his seven years as Vice President of Heritage Action for America, a sister organization to the Heritage Foundation, which, as readers of Civil Discourse are well aware, is where Project 2025 was incubated….

Now Vought, godfather to Project 2025 and author of its chapter on OMB, will be in charge of administering policy in the next Trump Administration. So much for Trump’s efforts—back when reporting about Project 2025 led to enormous public concern and seemed poised to shift the tide against him— to distance himself from the project. At the time, he disavowed any knowledge of or agreement with the plan, but the claims felt hollow.

Read much more about Vought at Civil Discourse.

More Relevant Reads

David H. Graham at The Atlantic: Pam Bondi’s Comeback.

USA Today: Trump considers ex-intelligence chief Richard Grenell for Ukraine post, sources say.

The Washington Post: Trump plans to fire Jack Smith’s team, use DOJ to probe 2020 election.

The New York Times: Elon Musk Gets a Crash Course in How Trumpworld Works.

The New Republic: Elon Musk Is Now Cyberbullying Government Employees.

Jonathan Last at The Bulwark: Be Not Afraid. Trump and MAGA want to frighten you. Don’t let them.