The CBC likes the Diefenbaker v. Pearson precedents too, only they’re going with 1965. And reversing the comparison entirely.

Fair enough.

While we’re here though, consider this description of Diefenbaker circa 1960, taken from Christina McCall’s essay The Unlikely Gladiators: Pearson and Diefenbaker Remembered.

“That was the year when Diefenbaker’s errors of judgment in foreign and economic affairs, his ineptitude in managing his cabinet and caucus, and increasing alienation from the intertwined business and bureaucratic elites began to tell. The year when monetary policy conflicts between the prime minister and James Coyne, the bloody-minded governor of the Bank of Canada, began to surface. The year when the Opposition Liberals were heartened by their provincial counterparts’ victories in Quebec (under Jean Lesage) and New Brunswick (under Louis Robichaud); by the election of the liberal Democratic candidate, John Kennedy, as president of the United States; and by the demoralizing effect their determined attacks in Parliament were having on Diefenbaker and his inexperienced front bench.”

A Liberal read of this will find half a dozen similarities. The questionable management of an inexperienced cabinet, errors of judgment in foreign and economic affairs, determined attacks in Parliament, alienation of the bureaucratic elites, a Liberal in Quebec, a Liberal in New Brunswick, a would-be JFK on the verge of the White House.

But it’s probably not quite 1960 all over again. This seems to me, in a worst case scenario for our PM, a description of Stephen Harper’s public perception circa early 2009. (Though the critical favour of Mr. Harper does seem to have turned of late with his fixed election date dodge.)

Of course, that might also help explain why we’re almost all set to go to the polls in October.

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Though he won’t be participating in the upcoming federal election, a word or two needs to be said about John Godfrey. The outgoing MP for Don Valley West in Toronto, Godfrey will be ceding his position as Liberal shoe-in to Rob Oliphant in this multi-ethnic and multi-income-bracket riding, bridging the great urban/suburban divide.

We interviewed Godfrey two years ago for our book and the then-minister of state for infrastructure and communities gave us two and a half hours of his time at the Marriott cafe on Bay Street. Here’s a little of his story: Godfrey came from a well-to-do family from Toronto’s leafy Rosedale neighbourhood. Growing up after the Second World War, he watched his house become a meeting point for European immigrants fleeing that war-ravaged and partly-totalitarian continent. His parents found these newcomers enticing – and so did the young Godfrey. (I should note here, to throw all objective integrity out the window, that my own grandparents, coming over from Switzerland in 1945 were among this lot taken in by the Godfreys… but that’s another story entirely.)

Godfrey maintained an interest in politics throughout his academic career. He talks about one moment when the entire political structure shifted: the day John F. Kennedy was killed in 1963. From that point on, younger people turned from participants to activists, and the culture went from one of hope & progress to one of tension & disparity. Godfrey tried to incorporate many of the elements of this change – eventually bringing it to political life when first elected for Jean Chrétien’s Liberals in 1993 – but he always tried to build another career for himself before diving headfirst into that “game.” This is something for young people, perhaps inspired by such current lightning-rods as Barack Obama or Stephen Harper (ha!), to take note of. A life in the world of politics is a difficult one. You can either try to work your way up the ranks, as a staffer or an election foot soldier (going door-to-door, putting up posters on quiet street corners at 2:30 in the morning, etc.), from an early age or you can, like Godfrey, establish yourself in another career – the man was President of King’s College in Halifax and editor of the Financial Post (now reborn as the National Post) – before giving politics a try.

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Must-reads: Robert Fulford, John Ibbitson, David Frum, Doug Saunders, Dan Gardner and John Ivison on the only thing that matters today.

Oh yes he did
What the 44th President means to the United States, Canada and the world.

The Ottawa Citizen’s Dan Gardner traces a brief history of racist American legislation and public opinion for the purposes of highlighting just how far the nation has come, and how quickly. He recounts the story of Jacqueline Henley, a Louisiana toddler whose aunt found it impossible to raise her amidst rumours the child’s father was black, and whose adoption by a black couple was rejected by the courts on grounds she was officially white, and they wouldn’t inflict official blackness on her unless there was irrefutable evidence. That madness was in 1952; today, says Gardner, everybody knows Barack Obama’s mother was white and nobody cares. Heck, it was only 41 years ago the Supreme Court nixed anti-miscegenation laws, and in that time public approval of intermarriage has gone from 80 per cent against to 80 per cent in favour. In short, don’t you tell Dan Gardner that “moral progress” is impossible.

Can this “new Democratic coalition of New Southerners, liberal northerners, wary blue-collars, African Americans, Latinos and suddenly mobilized” youth be sustained, John Ibbitson asks in The Globe and Mail, or will it “dissolve as [Obama] struggles to reverse economic decline and financial panic”? It remains, naturally, to be seen. But Americans made a historic decision yesterday, he contends, that “the last eight years were a waste” and that “we need to start again”—and the world will take note. More fundamentally, however, Ibbitson says Obama’s victory is a reaffirmation of what’s possible in the political world. “Peace can come to Ireland. The Cold War can end. America’s racial wounds can start to heal.”

In the National Post, Robert Fulford offers an eloquent and altogether terrific summation of Obama’s victory, arguing that rather than playing to his base, “he insisted on expanding the base until it became his own creation, a superbly organized coalition of Americans who wanted to rise above both racism and the rancorous left-right divisiveness that has made it impossible to govern the United States without regular infusions of partisan hatred.” He “changed the subject,” in other words, and in so doing he “fashioned himself into an answer to the problem that [Ralph] Ellison’s Invisible Man posed”—i.e., in Ellison’s words, “revealing the human universals hidden within the plight of one who was both black and American, dealing with the sheer rhetorical challenge involved in communicating across our barriers of race and religion, class, color and region.”

The Vancouver Sun’s Daphne Bramham also expresses hope Obama can lead America into a post-racial era, and suggests, by way of a presidential to-do list, that “it would be enough to expect him to be an interlocutor between the angry and excluded on both sides of the American colour divide, the person to resolve the legacies of slavery and finish the civil rights movement.” Er, yeah, that would sure be nice alright. What’s that you say? You want more? Indeed, she notes, he also faces difficult-to-manage “expectations that he’ll end (in victory) the wars that George W. Bush started, restore the economy, fix health care, put a roof over everyone’s head and a cooked chicken (real or tofu) in every oven.”

The Globe’s Jeffrey Simpson has foreseen the need to let America down easy, and helpfully writes a speech for Obama in which he explains why he’ll have to abandon all those tax cuts he promised. But really, who cares what Simpbama says? The very idea of him writing in Obama’s voice is cringe-inducingly embarrassing, frankly. Still better than the Uncle Fred columns, though.

The Toronto Star’s Thomas Walkom has done some interesting door-to-door, canvas-the-plebes type stories before. His tour of southwestern Ontario’s purported rust belt comes to mind. But his stuff from the American heartland has been strangely lifeless, and the point of it all escapes us. Yesterday, for example, he tooled around Broward County in Florida with a nursing assistant and a medical assistant who were handing out water (bought by the Obama campaign) to people in line at polling stations. He hints at a few points—the polling stations were difficult to find thanks to undisclosed “peculiarities of … state law,” for example—but nothing ever comes of them. And “I’m waiting [in line] because I’m going to vote” has to be one of the worst quotes we’ve ever read.

The Star’s Rosie DiManno, meanwhile, reports approvingly from Chicago, using all sorts of bizarre colloquialisms—e.g., “a bro is the prez”—that seem, nay, that are, completely inappropriate for the occasion.

Colby Cosh plays spoilsport in the Post, arguing the election proved “it’s still possible to cash in on 60 years of relentless, blind media buildup for the myths of the New Deal,” thus provoking American Liberals into “genuine, ululating wallet-terror over [McCain] … even though Obama’s protectionism is the single greatest danger to the real-world economy in the months to come.” He hopes Obama is “a better president than [these people] deserve.” What a cold place Edmonton can be. Join us, Mr. Cosh. Let President-elect Obama clasp you to his bosom. He is your president too.

Also in the Post, Lorne Gunter dismisses comparisons between Obama and John F. Kennedy (as indeed, he dismisses Obama) on grounds that he isn’t a sweat-drenched anti-Communist—which is very important in 2008, don’t you know—doesn’t exhibit sufficient belief in American exceptionalism, “has wined and dined with radical Islamists, [and] befriended ‘60s hippy terrorists,” and “seems to feel shame for his own country, at least in international affairs.” Bitter, stupid and gratuitous are all adjectives that fall short of adequately describing this column.

Still in the Post, David Frum suggests two paths forward for the GOP. It can stay the course on “taxes, guns, right to life [and] patriotism,” continuing to bet the proverbial farm on the Joe the Plumber vote. And “if 60% of the Joe vote is no longer enough, nominate Palin—and win 65%. Or 70%. Whatever it takes.” Or it could face reality and try to recapture a demographic it once appealed to—college graduates, who now trust the Democrats with their money and won’t let Republicans anywhere near their values. This path “will involve painful change,” Frum concedes, “on issues ranging from the environment to abortion,” and it will involve embracing politics that are “less overtly religious, less negligent with policy and less polarizing on social issues.” Sarah Palin’s out of luck in this future. But “a Republican recovery” isn’t out of the question.

The Globe’s Doug Saunders dismisses the narrative under which the people of the world will now reevaluate their positions on America en masse, and governments will beat a friendly path to the White House door. Polls show people are “far more skeptical about Mr. Obama’s chances of improving things” than they are enthusiastic about his getting a chance to try, he notes—just “22 per cent of Jordanians, 31 per cent of Egyptians and 34 per cent of Lebanese feel that he will ‘do the right thing’ in world affairs.”

Back in the Post, L. Ian MacDonald suggests Canada’s recently announced 2011 pullout form Afghanistan “may come as something of a surprise to Obama” as he’s briefed on the various international files. And as “the jostling among foreign governments for the attention of the president-elect” gets underway, he hints a rethink may yet occur in Ottawa on the subject. “Gosh,” he quips, “the things that politicians say during elections.”

The Vancouver Sun’s Barbara Yaffe dusts off all the tired complaints about Washington’s treatment of poor little Canada—including that unbelievably childish whinge about Bush not thanking us for helping out during the September 11 attacks and the fact that he “never once invited a Canadian leader to his Texas ranch”—and suggests the Obama era may bestow upon us a more open border, as long as we fulfill our obligations on climate change.

Derek Burney assures the Post’s John Ivison that our strong bargaining position on NAFTA, our likeable new foreign affairs minister and the superior optics of cozying up to Obama than to Bush put bilateral relations in a good place. He suggests “build[ing] on the success of the North American Aerospace Defence Command agreement to create a more secure continental perimeter” should be the first issue broached with the new administration. And we’ll go ahead and predict that’s the precise moment vast portions of the Canadian left will abandon Obamamania and return to suspecting the Americans of generalized evil-doing.

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Life magazine and Google have cooperated to put several centuries of photos online, many of them previously unpublished.

For our purposes, there is an impressive collection of prime ministers, at least of a certain vintage—namely Trudeau, Diefenbaker, Pearson and St. Laurent. The Mackenzie King file would seem to mostly include pictures from his funeral. Elsewhere, there are photos of presidents Kennedy and Eisenhower addressing Parliament.

Then there are the random finds like this shot of former air minister Charles G. Power, grandfather of Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon.

Best find so far: The Queen square-dancing at Rideau. Nice poodle-skirt, your majesty.

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In addition to a Twitter feed, this blog now has a YouTube hub—including (so far) 60 videos and links to the YouTube channels of Stephen Harper, Michael Ignatieff and this magazine’s own collection of clips.

Vintage Harper hair, Stephane Dion tries to tell a golf joke, Michael Ignatieff hanging out with Charlie Rose, Pat Martin’s puppets, and some gems from the CBC archives. Enjoy. The page will be regularly updated.

The best find so far might be the following footage of John F. Kennedy addressing the House of Commons in 1961. If Barack Obama makes a similar appearance later this year, he could do worse than to borrow liberally from both JFK’s words and attire.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DahmEydtl3U&feature=channel_page

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Since Barack Obama will be in Ottawa this week, we thought it timely to look back at some previous presidential visits to our nation’s capital.

Franklin D. Roosevelt: August 1943
The city proclaimed a half-day holiday to mark the first-ever U.S. presidential visit to Ottawa. About 27,000 people jammed Parliament Hill to hear FDR’s public address. During his car tour of Ottawa, spectators held up black Scottie dogs as a show of support for his dog Fala.

Harry S. Truman: June 1947
While in Ottawa, Truman met with Mackenzie King and Governor General Alexander. During his parliamentary address, Truman praised Canada for achieving internal unity. When he was finished, politicians thumped their desks in approval. Truman’s trip to the capital included lunch at the Chateau Laurier, a tree-planting and a state dinner at Rideau Hall. He also traveled to Montebello, where he fished for trout. It was his second trip abroad after the Second World War.

Dwight D. Eisenhower: November 1953, July 1958
Both visits to the capital included a parliamentary address. In 1953, more tickets were sold to the House of Commons gallery than there were seats, and some spectators had to be turned away. In 1958, Ike drew fire for his virulent defence of U.S. trade interests in his speech. It was during his second visit that he and PM John Diefenbaker agreed to set up the Canada-United States Committee on Joint Defense. While in Ottawa, Ike played a round of golf at the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club and took a trip to Gatineau Park.

John F. Kennedy: May 1961
When JFK and Jackie arrived on Parliament Hill, there were reportedly 50,000 people there to greet them. It was their first post-inauguration trip. Jackie looked on from the visitors’ gallery during the President’s Parliamentary address, during which he famously said: “Geography has made us neighbours. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners. And necessity has made us allies.” He even tried to articulate a few sentences in French — albeit poorly. And he hurt his back while planting a tree on Parliament Hill.

Lyndon B. Johnson: May 1967
While in Canada for Expo 67, Johnson spent some time at the prime minister’s official retreat on Harrington Lake, where he met with Lester B. Pearson. As the story goes, a security stopped PM Pearson on his way to the bathroom to ask him who he was and where he was headed. “I’m the Prime Minister of Canada and I’m about to go and have a leak,” he reportedly answered.

Richard Nixon: April 1972
Vietnam War protestors greeted Nixon when he arrived in Canada. Despite his infamously acrimonious relationship with Pierre Trudeau, he opened speech to the House of Commons with a joke about Ottawa’s weather, and cheered Canada for being a fine neighbour. “The Canadian-American example is an example for all the world to see,” he said. The Great Lakes Pollution clean-up agreement was inked during his visit.

Ronald Reagan: March 1981, April 1987
During Reagan’s address to Parliament in 1981, NDP MPs sported black armbands to indicate their opposition of the U.S. involvement in El Salvador. Though his relationship with Brian Mulroney was much warmer than it had been with Trudeau, Reagan only visited Ottawa once while Mulroney was in office. When Reagan spoke in the House of Commons in 1987, he was interrupted by MP Svend Robinson, who implored the president to “Stop Star Wars now.” During their time in Canada, Nancy Reagan urged students at Ottawa’s Brookfield High School to “say no to drugs.”

George H. W. Bush: February 1989, March 1991
George and Barbara traveled to Ottawa less than a month after Bush’s inauguration. While the President met with Mulroney, Barbara read to local students at a nursery school in  Fern Hill. Among the pupils was the PM’s son, Nicholas.

Bill Clinton: February 1995, October 1999
Jean Chrétien, with whom Clinton had a close relationship, took the President on a tour of the Centre Block while Hillary skated on the Rideau Canal. During his first address, Clinton touted Canada as an example “of how people of different cultures can live and work together in peace, prosperity and respect,” and spoke of the “ties that bind the United States and Canada.” In 1999, he came to Ottawa to dedicate a new Embassy building.

George W. Bush: November 2004
Though George W. was scheduled to address Parliament in May 2003, he cancelled the trip, citing the war in Iraq. Others suggested that the President’s relationship with Chrétien, which had become strained, was to blame for the change in plans. When he did arrive in Ottawa in November 2004, some 5,000 protestors demonstrated against the Iraq war. The first couple visited a Gatineau archival presentation centre, where they reportedly set eyes on Shania Twain’s songbook, and one of the earliest baseball rule books.

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The three brothers share a Virginia hillside with a view of a city that few would call shining. John F. Kennedy’s gravesite—as befitting a fallen president—is the most elaborate. A large circular stone plaza to accommodate the crowds that still come to Arlington National Cemetery 46 years after his assassination, topped with a simple black granite headstone and an eternal flame. Down a short path like the spoke of a wheel, Robert F. Kennedy, gunned down in 1968, lies beneath a plain white cross. And now, a little further still, Edward M. Kennedy, buried this past weekend in the shadow of two large maples, and his tragic siblings.

The 77-year-old, who succumbed to brain cancer on Aug. 25, was the youngest of nine children, and never meant to be the family standard-bearer. But the political ambitions that fell to J.F.K. when the eldest brother, Joseph Jr., died in action during the Second World War descended inexorably down the line with each fresh family horror. And in the end, “Teddy,” a man who proved to be far too flawed for the nation’s highest office, improbably may be remembered as the greatest of them all. In his 47-year career as a U.S. senator for his native Massachusetts, Kennedy authored more than 300 pieces of legislation, and steered thousands more through partisan shoals with a unique mix of bluster, bonhomie, and pragmatism (“Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” was his oft-repeated credo).

His progressive legacy includes legal protection for the disabled, state-run health insurance for children, food programs for poor mothers, education reform, and lowering the voting age to 18. “The greatest expectations were placed upon Ted Kennedy’s shoulders because of who he was, but he surpassed them all because of who he became,” President Barack Obama eulogized at the packed funeral mass in a Boston basilica. “A champion for those who had none, the soul of the Democratic party, and the lion of the United States Senate.”

History has taught us that John and Jackie’s Camelot was never more than a glamorous myth. Robert may have joined Martin Luther King Jr. in calling for a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, but after his slaying it took five more years and a Republican president to bring his brother’s war to an ignoble end. Written off as a political force after 1969’s Chappaquiddick incident, Teddy proved that some American lives do indeed have second acts. And as if to emphasize the point, fell from public grace again two decades later as an aging, drunken roué, only to stage another comeback. He was the best and the worst his country has to offer wrapped up in a single package. The last call for an American dynasty.

If Joseph P. Kennedy, the late president’s father and patriarch of the clan, left his sprawling brood with anything—besides a vast fortune and influence to burn—it was an almost religious belief in the virtues of effort. “For the Kennedys,” he used to boast, “it’s the outhouse or the castle—nothing in between.” But for the longest time, it seemed like Teddy never absorbed the lesson. Growing up in a family of strivers—J.F.K.’s prep-school yearbook presciently declared him “Most likely to become president”—he was an indifferent student. And in 1951, his first year at Harvard, he was expelled for having a friend take a Spanish exam in his place. (The family managed to suppress the story until Ted first ran for his big brother’s old Senate seat 11 years later.) There was a two-year stint in the army, spent safely away from the battlefields of Korea at NATO’s then-headquarters in Paris, then a less eventful return to Cambridge to complete his degree before moving on to study law at the University of Virginia.

Ted’s first political experience was managing John’s Senate re-election campaign in 1956. (The war hero returned to Boston from his PT boat and won a seat in Congress in 1946, graduating to the upper chamber six years later.) In 1960, he oversaw efforts in the Rocky Mountain states for J.F.K.’s presidential campaign. But it was Bobby, a crusading special counsel in Washington, who was rewarded with a seat at the cabinet table as attorney general.

The Kennedy blueprint called for Ted to take over in the Senate, but at 28 he was two years younger than the minimum age set out in the U.S. constitution. A family friend, Ben Smith, was named as a placeholder and served until 1962, when the youngest Kennedy triumphed over his razor-thin resumé—he was nominally an assistant district attorney in Boston, but spent most of his time building his political profile—and won both the Democratic primary, and a special election. Years later he still cherished the photo Jack sent him in the wake of the win. “To one coattail rider from another,” the president had written.

A report card for Ted Kennedy’s early Senate years would damn him with the faint praise, “works well with others.” Despite his famous brothers, it was generally agreed that he knew his place, was properly deferential to more senior legislators, kept his mouth shut and worked hard. He was presiding over the chamber on the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963, when his brother was gunned down in Dallas. Bobby took charge of the family and funeral. It was Ted’s job to travel to Hyannis Port and break the news to their father, by then severely disabled from an earlier stroke.

When J.F.K. was slain, most of his ambitious legislative program was bogged down in Congress. It was his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, with Bobby’s incessant prodding, who finished the work and carried it further, invoking the president’s memory to push through the 1964 Civil Rights Act and start the War on Poverty. Ted remained in the background as R.F.K. picked up the family torch. Shaken, but seemingly not as stirred.

A June 1964 plane crash almost made him a historical footnote (Joe Jr. and his sister Kathleen were both killed in aviation accidents). A political aide and the pilot died, and Kennedy suffered a broken back. He waged a successful re-election campaign from his hospital bed, with his wife, Joan, taking on his public appearances. It wasn’t until 1965 that he really established his bona fides as a Washington power broker. Back in the Senate, he proposed an amendment to the proposed Voting Rights Act that would have abolished a long-established “poll tax” that helped keep southern blacks away from the ballot box. Going against much of his own party and president Johnson, who feared the amendment would sink the bill and its other reforms, he pushed the matter to a vote, narrowly losing, but serving notice of his increasing clout.

Robert’s assassination in June 1968, during celebrations of his California presidential primary victory, thrust Teddy into the national spotlight. His moving eulogy—“My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it”—electrified the nation. But Teddy struggled deeply with the notion that he must be the one to fulfill the family destiny. He spurned attempts later that summer to draft him to the 1968 Democratic presidential ticket. And he began to drink heavily, with his public behaviour becoming more and more indiscreet.

In the spring of 1969, he fulfilled a campaign promise R.F.K. had made to visit Alaska. On the flight home, he got drunk and unburdened himself before a planeload of reporters: “They are going to shoot my ass off the way they did Bobby’s.”

In the early morning hours of July 18, 1969, Kennedy made the mistake that defined his life. Coming home from a party in honour of his late brother, he took a wrong turn, and plunged his car off a dike on Chappaquiddick Island in Massachusetts. His passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, a 28-year-old campaign secretary for R.F.K. (reputed to be Robert’s mistress in a recent muckraking book, Bobby and Jackie: A Love Story, which also claims there was a four-year-long tryst between the former first lady and her brother-in-law), drowned. Kennedy always maintained that he tried desperately to rescue her, diving repeatedly until exhaustion forced him from the water. But he waited nearly 10 hours to report the accident, calling family and political advisers long before the police.

As the scandal grew, his took to the airwaves to plead for understanding, claiming the shock and a concussion resulted in the “various inexplicable, inconsistent and inconclusive things I said and did.” His obvious contrition and regret even won over Kopechne’s mother: “I am satisfied with the senator’s statement, and do hope that he decides to stay in the Senate,” she wrote to reporters. In the following days, Western Union delivered more than 10,000 telegrams to the family compound in Hyannis Port. Fewer than 100 demanded he resign. Kennedy had saved his political skin, but at a great cost. He would never be president.

Kennedy passed on a chance to be the running mate of the doomed George McGovern in 1972. He ruled himself out in the early stages of the 1976 campaign to deal with family troubles, including his son Ted Jr.’s loss of a leg to bone cancer. And when he finally did make a grab for the brass ring in 1980, his attempt to wrest away the Democratic nomination from a sitting president, Jimmy Carter, quickly turned into a quixotic charge. The campaign was poorly organized and dogged by questions about Kennedy’s behaviour at Chappaquiddick. And despite late victories in the California and New York primaries, the race was never close. In fact, Kennedy’s finest moment came in defeat, in a feisty speech to the Democratic National Convention at Madison Square Gardens, that was a concession in name only. “For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end. For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

But the notion that a Kennedy’s place was in the White House had suffered a mortal blow. The senator laid the groundwork for a 1984 campaign, but never launched it, convinced that the memory of Mary Jo Kopechne was still too powerful. And, newly divorced from Joan, his wife of 24 years (she left the family home in 1978 to deal with her own alcohol problem, but campaigned by his side in 1980), his personal life started to again come under scrutiny.

There had always been plentiful gossip about Kennedy’s womanizing. Richard Nixon used the Secret Service agents assigned to protect Ted to gather dirt against his potential rival. And the infamous Oval Office tapes caught the Republican president and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, marvelling at the senator’s recklessness in the summer of 1972:

Nixon: What the hell is the matter with Teddy? It isn’t a question, I mean, I don’t think it’s a sex business. I think his problem, his lack of discretion, don’t you think it’s the booze? He can’t resist . . .

Kissinger: First of all, he drinks.

Nixon: No, no. Bobby and Jack, everybody knows it, had their own ladies. They were a hell of a lot more discreet.

But it was not just Ted Kennedy’s behaviour that was raising eyebrows. What would become the continual cheapening of his brothers’ legends started with a 1973 book by Earl Wilson, a Hollywood gossip columnist, claiming an affair between J.F.K. and Marilyn Monroe. And when a U.S. Senate committee probing CIA dirty tricks released a report in December 1975 suggesting that Judith Exner, a woman who allegedly helped recruit agents to assassinate Fidel Castro, was a “close friend” of both the late president and mobster Sam Giancana, the gloves really came off—and would stay off.

The press, which had long protected the brothers—in his memoirs, Ben Bradlee, who helped bring down Nixon as editor of the Washington Post, relates a story about going to a porno theatre with friend and neighbour J.F.K. during one of his Senate campaigns—revelled in the Kennedys’ dirty laundry. A 1990 GQ article about the “slurred” and “bibulous” voice of liberalism was typical of the genre, gleefully detailing a waitress’s tale of catching Ted and a female lobbyist in flagrante delicto on the floor of a Washington restaurant following a boozy lunch. Eventually, what was once unthinkable—naming your punk band the Dead Kennedys, conspiracy theories writ large as Hollywood film, a hit sitcom, Seinfeld, making jest of the footage shot by bystander Abraham Zapruder of J.F.K.’s motorcade and assassination—became mundane. No more heroes.

The nadir for the senator came in April 1991, when his nephew William Kennedy Smith was charged with raping a woman at the family compound in Hyannis Port. Kennedy, who had been out drinking with the 30-year-old earlier that Good Friday evening, was called to testify at the highly publicized trial. And despite Smith’s eventual acquittal, the family name was again dragged through the mud.

Whether it was the shame, or the sense that his own legacy was now in peril, the event proved to be a turning point for Kennedy. In a Harvard speech before he took the stand that fall, the senator once again offered a public mea culpa. “I recognize my own shortcomings—the faults in the conduct of my private life,” he said. “I realize that I alone am responsible for them, and I am the one who must confront them.” The next year he married Victoria Reggie, the 38-year-old daughter of family friends, and at the age of 60, his wild years came to an end.

But perhaps the oddest thing about Kennedy’s unusual career is that his greatest years as a senator were also his most tumultuous. The bulk of his legislative accomplishments came in the 1980s. “Even when he was drinking too much or playing around with women young enough to be his daughter, he was still very effective,” says Adam Clymer, the former New York Times chief Washington correspondent who wrote a 1999 biography of the senator. “After people became convinced he wouldn’t run, they stopped worrying that he was doing things to advance his presidential hopes. And that helps in the Senate.”

Kennedy never cared that much about public credit for the bills he helped craft, which was also a boon. Clymer, who attended his funeral, says he wasn’t surprised at the flowery tributes from Republicans who spent years publicly railing against Kennedy, painting him as a liberal bogeyman and filling their own campaign coffers by promising to take him on. For within the confines of Capitol Hill, all his colleagues shared a deep appreciation for his charm, personal kindness, and pragmatism. Ted didn’t need tragedy to make him a Washington legend. “J.F.K. and Bobby burned very brightly on the national scene, but Ted was around for a lot longer. He was alone for 41 years,” says Clymer. “I think it’s his era. Not a Kennedy family era.”

There is speculation that a family member, perhaps Joseph P. Kennedy II, a former congressman and R.F.K’s eldest son, might take a run at his uncle’s Senate seat in a special election this January. But since the death of John F. Kennedy Jr., the late president’s son, in a July 1999 plane crash, the next generation has lacked a true star. “John-John’s” sister Caroline made a tentative run at Hillary Rodham Clinton’s New York Senate seat this past winter, but was widely panned as an uninspired candidate and unqualified for the post. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made a name as an environmentalist and radio host, and has hinted at larger ambitions, but his past drug problems, including a heroin bust in the early 1980s, might weigh him down. The only current family office-holder is Patrick J. Kennedy, Ted’s son, a member of the House of Representatives. But he, too, has had problems with drugs and alcohol, most recently in 2006, when he sought help for an OxyContin addiction after crashing his car into a traffic barricade on Capitol Hill.

And regardless, the Kennedy mantle has for all intents and purposes already been passed on. Ethel, Bobby’s widow, anointed Barack Obama as R.F.K.’s inheritor back in 2005, at a commemoration ceremony of what would have been her husband’s 80th birthday. “I think he feels it,” she said. “He feels it, just like Bobby did. He has the passion in his heart. He’s not selling you. It’s just him.” Ted cast his own vote in January 2008, throwing his weight behind Obama as the Democratic nominee, despite the entreaties of his friends Bill and Hillary Clinton. (The move was symbolic, but not that politically significant. Hillary still handily won the Massachusetts primary.)

The final chapter of Ted Kennedy’s legacy will be written in the coming months. Obama’s ambitious health care reforms are thoroughly bogged down in Congress. But Kennedy’s memory—he called universal health care “the cause of my life”—might be a powerful motivator for his mourning colleagues to craft a deal.

Meanwhile, the still lingering questions about Chappaquiddick may finally be put to rest when Kennedy’s autobiography, completed in the final months of his life, is published in September. Or in early 2011, when the University of Virginia releases tapes of 30 candid interviews conducted for an oral history project on the senator’s life. James Sterling Young, the director of the project, won’t yet reveal what Kennedy said, but allows that “his hurt was apparent. This was not easy for him to do.” Kennedy took his family’s place in American history seriously, and was, in his own way, committed to trying to live up to the lofty rhetoric that he and his brothers will always be remembered for. Few would have predicted it, but Ted Kennedy lasted longer, went further, and unexpectedly grew in stature. “He far exceeded the best tradition of the Senate. He showed what you could do to become a national leader,” says Young. “He was a president, except in name and office.”

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Dwight Eisenhower’s heart attack, LBJ’s gallbladder, Kennedy’s many ailments, even George Bush Sr.’s bout of nausea in Japan: ever since the occupant of the White House became the Most Powerful Man in the World, the health of U.S. presidents has been of consuming interest. Much of that concern is pure finger-on-the-nuclear-button angst, but a significant portion derives from the fate of president Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

When the first leader of superpower America died in office in 1945, it was a shock to most of his countrymen, who were largely unaware of just how sick FDR was. In fact, according to neurologist Steven Lomazow and journalist Eric Fettmann, authors of FDR’s Deadly Secret, they are the first to crack wide open the secrecy that has shrouded Roosevelt’s health until now. FDR, they write, died of cancer, a disease that had deleterious effects on his mental as well as physical health. In concealing the cancer from the American people, the authors argue, Roosevelt was “rolling the dice with history”: he won (mostly), but it was a very close run.

By the time his health began seriously declining in the 1940s, Roosevelt was long accustomed to disguising his disability. At 39, 11 years before he was first elected president in 1932, polio left the ambitious politician paralyzed for life from the waist down. FDR took care never to let it show in public. He used a wheelchair in private, but before crowds walked with the help of five-kilogram iron braces fitted to his hips and legs, and he had hand controls in his cars so he could be seen driving. Voters never noticed—or, pinning their hopes on Roosevelt through catastrophic depression and the greatest war in history, never wanted to see—the stage management. During the 1944 campaign, caught in a New York parade during a persistent rainstorm, the president’s open car was several times whisked out of the cavalcade and into a heated garage. Secret Service agents would stretch Roosevelt out on blankets laid on the garage floor, remove all his clothes, towel him dry and rub him down; re-dressed in dry clothes and fortified with a shot of brandy, FDR was soon back in the downpour.

Roosevelt’s health was thus never an election issue, and his physicians’ explanation of his sudden death—caused, in their words, by “a bolt out of the blue,” a massive and unforeseeable stroke brought on by overwork—was accepted by Americans. Even at the time, though, privileged observers, like prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King and Churchill’s personal physician, Lord Moran—both of whom recorded their shock at FDR’s appearance months before his death—knew better. In 1970, Howard Bruenn, Roosevelt’s last surviving doctor, finally admitted his patient had been fighting severe heart disease throughout 1944 and 1945.

But that still isn’t the whole story, according to Lomazow and Fettmann. They maintain FDR died from melanoma, malignant skin cancer that metastasized from his forehead to his brain, causing his fatal stroke. The brain cancer diagnosis fits better than heart trouble with the fact that the likes of King and Moran were even more shocked by the president’s sometimes rambling mental state than by his appearance. But the authors’ best evidence lies in photos, including their book’s cover image, that show a lesion over FDR’s left eyebrow. The photos date from 1923 on, and the once tiny spot steadily grows through the Depression before disappearing in 1940, probably through surgery.

Since FDR’s medical records went missing after his death (a fact suspicious in itself), the case will never be conclusive. But Lomazow and Fettmann are right that this ancient history matters. It raises anew the moral argument over whether a political leader has any right to medical privacy. If Roosevelt really did have an eyebrow lesion surgically removed in 1940, he would have known then, even before the U.S. entered the Second World War, that he had scant years to live. FDR may genuinely have believed he was still the best man to win the war—and who can gainsay him that?—but he chose not to let the voters decide. And for a man with limited life expectancy, Roosevelt was cavalier about his vice-presidents, picking them for domestic political reasons, not by who was best suited to lead in dangerous times. That the untested Harry Truman turned out, in the judgment of historians, to have been an exceptional successor, was more a matter of luck than of FDR’s foresight. Rolling the dice, indeed.

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You wouldn’t want to cross either one
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin burnished his credentials as a man of action last week, while also asserting some Arctic sovereignty. He helped scientists track endangered polar bears in Franz Josef Land, an Arctic archipelago. With cameras rolling, he attached a tracking collar to a tranquilized bear. “Be well,” he said, shaking its paw. “The paw is heavy,” said Putin, one force of nature saluting another. “This is a master of the Arctic, you can feel that straight away.”

That’s how it’s done in Wawota, Sask.
Washington Capitals fans Mary Ann Wangemann and her 14-year-old daughter Lorraine were driving home from the Caps’ game-seven loss to the Montreal Canadiens when their tire was flattened by a pothole. An SUV pulled over as they stood by the side of the road in their team colours. To their amazement, out hopped Brooks Laich, the Alberta-born, Saskatchewan-raised Caps centre. He peeled off his suit jacket and spent 40 minutes, on one of the worst nights of his life, installing a spare tire for two strangers. Mary Ann asked Laich, 26, how to repay the favour. “I’m sure you’ll do something nice for someone in the future,” he said.

Andy, Andy, we got us a crime wave!
There’s three reasons why Mayberry, the idyllic, fictional setting of The Andy Griffith Show, was so law-abiding, hapless deputy Barney Fife once explained. “There’s Andy, and there’s me, and [patting his gun] baby makes three.” Things have changed since the 1960s. Mount Airy, N.C., the birthplace of actor Andy Griffith and the inspiration for Mayberry, had a real-life wallet-snatching last week. The victim: 83-year-old Betty Lou Lynn, the actress who played Fife’s girlfriend Thelma Lou. In a double irony, she’d moved there to escape the crime of Los Angeles. A suspect is under arrest.

No place for media in the bedrooms of the nation
Sex scandals aren’t the forte of the French press, but last week Paris Match broke the don’t-ask-don’t-tell convention with the revelations of an 18-year-old “escort.” Zahia Dehar told the magazine she had paid sex with stars of France’s national soccer team, including Karim Benzema, Sidney Govou and the very married winger Franck Ribéry. More shocking, she said her clients didn’t know she was under the legal age of 18 at the time. The allegations have shaken the team as it prepares for the World Cup in South Africa next month—and unsettled French journalists. “It is not our way of thinking,” Claude Soula, media editor of Le Nouvel Observateur, wrote of the scandal. “Sex? Yes, we are French. But only in the bedroom please.”

A state of fear
Arizona’s crackdown on illegal immigrants is getting blowback, and not just from the White House. Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik said he won’t enforce the bill, which he called “racist,” “disgusting,” and “unnecessary.” Columbian singing sensation Shakira shimmied over to Phoenix to share her thoughts with that city’s mayor. “It is unjust and it’s inhuman and it violates the civil and human rights of the Latino community,” she said. She noted she was vulnerable herself since she wasn’t carrying a driver’s licence to prove her identity: “I’m pretty much undocumented.”

Also found: embers from burning bush
The “discovery” on Mount Ararat of the wooden remnants of Noah’s Ark doesn’t hold water, an archaeologist says. Randall Price, director of the Center for Judaic Studies at the conservative Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., was part of the Chinese-led team that found ancient beams on the Turkish mountainside. They purportedly proved the Old Testament story that Noah built a giant boat to escape the flood of a wrathful God. Price now thinks local Kurds hauled the wood up to the mountain in an elaborate hoax. People can believe what they want, he said. “My problem is that, in the end, proper analysis may show this is a hoax and negatively reflect how gullible Christians can be.”

Blood is thicker than vodka
Joan Kennedy, the mother of Rhode Island congressman Patrick Kennedy, won’t comment on reports her much-rehabbed son fell off the wagon. But Roll Call, the Capitol Hill newspaper, said Patrick downed six shots of vodka at a Washington bar, hours after giving a talk about his fight against substance abuse. Joan told the Boston Herald the death of her ex-husband Sen. Ted Kennedy hit his son Patrick and all family members hard. Patrick is reported to have told a fellow barfly that Barack Obama is “the best President ever.” What about your uncle, the man asked, referring to the late president John F. Kennedy. “Oh, yeah! Good one,” a genial Patrick conceded.

I’m from Ottawa, I’m here to help
Time was, sending a Trudeau into Alberta was a Liberal suicide mission. But last weekend, Montreal MP Justin Trudeau, son of the man who imposed the hated National Energy Program, was in Lethbridge to address a conference aimed at boosting the party’s dismal western fortunes. He emerged wearing neither tar nor feathers. It helps that Trudeau, a less combative figure than his late father, Pierre, gave cautious support for Alberta’s oil sands. More environmental study is needed, he said, but he called the project “a source of wealth and prosperity for the entire country.” He urged Alberta to invest some of the proceeds in alternate energy research. But, hey, just a suggestion.

Kill people, not seals
Matt Smyth, a software engineer from St. John’s, Nfld., accuses Apple of a strange double standard after its App Store rejected his video game, which lets players club seals on their iPhones. Smyth wrote on his blog that iSealClub shows no blood and players lose points for killing pups. He said Apple stocks many hunting games, another allows the torture and killing of pygmies, and players of Grand Theft Auto “run people over, shoot and kill people (including cops) in cold blood.” “I certainly don’t consider it dumb,” he said of his game. “Paying $2 for bottled water is dumb.”

Comedian-in-chief
Barack Obama, U.S. President and court jester, mopped the floor with Jay Leno Saturday at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The President out-funnied Leno’s stand-up routine, and he needled Leno for reclaiming The Tonight Show from Conan O’Brien. “I’m glad to see the only person whose ratings fell more than mine last year is here tonight. Nice to see you, Jay,” Obama deadpanned. He added he was grateful to speak first: “We’ve all seen what happens when somebody takes the time slot after Leno’s.” Obama had help sharpening his barbs. The Daily Beast reports Kevin Bleyer, a writer on the The Daily Show, produced much of his material.

Smells like teen spirit
A 14-year-old student who habitually disrupted science teacher Peter Harvey’s class got more than a failing grade when the teacher in Mansfield, England, snapped after one too many outbursts. Harvey beat the student with a three-kilogram dumbbell while shouting, “Die, die, die.” The student suffered a fractured skull, but last week a judge found Harvey not guilty of attempted murder or causing “grievous bodily harm.” The trial heard students had baited the 50-year-old teacher, who was just back from stress leave. Harvey spent nine months in jail before trial because he felt he didn’t deserve bail. He wants a new job in a helping profession, one not involving children.

Charlie Brown goes home
Ten years after the death of their creator Charles Schulz, products featuring Charlie Brown and the gang generate $2 billion in annual retail sales. Last week, E. W. Scripps, which first marketed the strip in 1950, sold the licensing rights to the 60-year-old brand—as well as to Dilbert and other comic properties—for US$175 million. The licences generate $75 million a year—enough to keep Snoopy in dog food. The buyer is merchandising giant Iconix, owner of such brands as Joe Boxer, but a 20 per cent share reverts to members of the Schulz family. Charles tried for years to buy the rights to his creation, his wife, Jean, said. “I think he’s smiling today.”

Life with W
Don’t expect any state secrets in Laura Bush’s memoir, Spoken From the Heart. The former first lady is fiercely protective of hubby George W. Bush’s legacy, but she does let a few things slip. She said he was a “bore” when he drank. She hints at a frosty relationship with his mother, Barbara Bush. “What I came to see ultimately as our bond was that we both loved George,” she writes. “Beyond that, we had little contact.” And she writes of a car accident she caused at 17 when she ran a stop sign, killing classmate Mike Douglas. She still regrets not attending his funeral or reaching out to his parents. She’d prayed Douglas would live. “I lost my faith that November,” she said, “lost it for many, many years.”

Out of the closet and into the fire
The much-buzzed-about mystery celeb who was coming out in this week’s issue of People turned out to be country music star Chely Wright. “There had never, ever been a country music artist who had acknowledged his or her homosexuality,” she said. This may be news to k.d. lang. In any case, if you aren’t a star, coming out can carry a high price. Ceara Sturgis, a lesbian at Wesson Attendance Center, a high school in Wesson, Miss., had her photo and name dropped from the yearbook’s portraits of the graduating class. School officials said her tuxedo didn’t conform to the dress code for girls. Her mother, Veronica Rodriguez, called it blatant discrimination. Sturgis did appear in group photos of the soccer team and the National Honor Society, where she’d be hard to erase.

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Keystone Press/ Bob Falcetti/Getty Images

Half a century ago, when religion entered the political arena in the U.S., it was as a matter of tensions between denominations, the kind of flare-up in tribal loyalties sparked by Catholic John F. Kennedy’s 1960 run for the presidency. With a full 30 per cent of respondents telling pollsters that they would never vote for any Catholic, Kennedy had to repeatedly assure voters he didn’t take marching orders from the pope.

But religion itself was quiescent—certainly in comparison to other times in American history, including the present—primarily because both religious and secular Americans held the same conservative views on sexual morality. It’s an era that now seem almost as far in the past as the Inquisition: by 2004, when Catholic John Kerry ran against George W. Bush, the religious tribes had almost vanished and Kerry’s denomination was of little interest to Protestant voters. What counted was how devout he was, and how his religiosity, or lack thereof, affected his policies on the hot-button moral issues of American politics.

How American religion lost its interior animosities (mostly, that is—Mormons and Muslims are still largely outside the tent), while becoming a much more militant side of a deep religious-secular divide, is the key question for Robert Putnam and David Campbell in American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. To find the answer and to see if current trends seem likely to hold up, the co-authors comb through the two most comprehensive surveys ever done on religion and public life in the U.S., specially commissioned for their book. Campbell and Putnam, the latter a political scientist who rose to fame in 2000 with Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital, get where they’re going all right, and they turn up a lot of fascinating information about America’s ever-evolving religious life along the way.

Saying grace before meals, they learn, is an exceptionally strong indicator of conservative political beliefs and cultural practices. The more often grace is pronounced, the more likely the sayer is to identify as a Republican, the less often, a Democrat. And there is very little grey area in the custom: half the nation reports saying grace almost all the time and half almost never. The authors can’t think of anything else—save “carrying a purse”—that is so common in one half of the population and so rare in the other.

Then there are the polls showing that Americans (even the most secular-minded) believe religious people make more trustworthy leaders, which perhaps explains why Bibles are as much a photo prop for political candidates as photogenic children. And despite what the secular-minded firmly believe, there is very little overt politicking in churches, and when it happens it’s more frequent in liberal than conservative congregations. There are so few redoubts of liberal religious believers remaining that such congregations tend to be highly motivated and less likely—especially if they are committed to the social gospel—than their conservative brethren to accept there is any real distinction between faith and politics.

The seismic change in the religious landscape was brought about by the sixties’ social revolution. Most of the decade’s upheavals were accommodated by the devout in America in much the same way as they were by everyone else. Outside of fringe groups, Christian women entered the workforce in the same numbers as their secular sisters, and racial equality—in the struggle for which Protestant churches of all stripes were so vital—is embraced, at least in principle. Even opposition to divorce, once an insuperable barrier to political support among evangelicals, was eventually blown away by the appeal of Ronald Reagan. Where the churched and unchurched parted ways was on sexual morality: casual sex (especially among teens), abortion and gay rights became religious America’s line in the sand.

The current political alignment of the religious right ensconced in the Republican party, and militant secularists dominating the Democrats, didn’t naturally follow—in past political battles, particularly over slavery, evangelicals were often found on the liberal side—and took time to shake out. The first “born-again” candidate with wide appeal to newly politicized evangelicals was, after all, Democrat Jimmy Carter, while the Republicans, historically seen by many churchgoers as the party of godless Wall Street profiteers, had some serious wooing to do. But eventually the sides coalesced, as voters shifted their politics to fit their faith and—increasingly—shifted their faith to fit their politics. Now, while the Democrats still harbour devout (especially black) supporters and the Republicans a subgroup of secular libertarians and pro-choice advocates, they are very much minority voices.

Conservative Protestants now get along with conservative Catholics much better than either side coexists with liberals within their own churches, making denominational differences almost moot. (The exception here being Mormons who, despite their overwhelmingly conservative social and moral views, are seen as cultists by many old-line Christians.) Still, for Putnam and Campbell, taking the long view of their remarkably religious country, the current situation may end more quickly than most observers expect.

Just as the sixties’ sexual revolution sparked a morally conservative counter-revolution, so the latter inspired a reaction against religious intolerance, especially on gay rights. The authors’ polls show that the “millennials,” the children of boomers, are the least religious generation, and are overwhelmingly accepting of same-sex marriage. Generational change is at work. The most religious millennials hold an attitude toward gays roughly as accepting as that held two generations ago by the most secular-minded of their grandparents—meaning the whole of society has shifted leftwards on the issue, a shift that is still ongoing. But millennial Americans (even the most secular) are less accepting of abortion rights than their boomer parents. That leaves Putnam and Campbell to ask what the future holds for America’s culture wars: how will the political coalition of the religious hang together if religious voters start to endorse gay unions and secular voters have qualms about abortion?

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George S. Zimbel/Getty Images

For more than four decades, the forces of orthodoxy, from the 1964 Warren commission to Vincent Bugliosi’s 1,648-page Reclaiming History (2007), have insisted that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, assassinated U.S. president John F. Kennedy. But Amazon now lists more than 1,200 titles on the events of Nov. 22, 1963, and the books keep on coming at such a rate that their number will one day (soon) exceed Bugliosi’s page count. The vast majority oppose the official version. In that regard, their authors are solidly in tune with U.S. popular opinion. Forty years of polling have consistently shown that more than two-thirds of Americans simply don’t believe the Warren report.

That alone is enough to make The Kennedy Detail by Gerald Blaine, one of the 34 Secret Service agents on White House service during JFK’s administration, a stand-out assassination book: the surviving agents—speaking openly for the first time (and only because it was one of their own who asked)—are unanimous that it was Oswald, and Oswald alone. But there is also a wealth of detail about the most traumatic day of their lives, and Blaine’s convincing argument that a protective system that worked for Kennedy’s predecessor was stretched past the breaking point by Kennedy himself. Among the many legacies of JFK—the man who single-handedly retired hats from formal male attire—was a revolution in presidential security.

Dwight Eisenhower, supreme allied commander during the Second World War and president from 1953 to 1961, had lived in a protective bubble almost since Pearl Harbor, so much so that his Secret Service agents spent hours during the lame duck days before JFK’s inauguration teaching Ike how to drive a modern car. Eisenhower didn’t leave the White House often—except to play golf, accompanied by agent/caddies with submachine guns in their club bags—and he rarely drew a crowd or mixed with one. What the Secret Service called its “confidence factor” in protecting him was a sterling 95 per cent.

Kennedy was different. The first president born in the 20th century, he had children younger than any agent had ever had to protect. (Armed babysitting proved its value before the inauguration when three-year-old Caroline and her cousin, Christopher Lawford, 5, were playing in a Palm Beach park. Christopher flipped over a log, agitating an eastern diamondback rattler, which the agent on duty shot to death.)

Far worse than the dangers occasioned by the Kiddie Detail were those posed by the president himself. Having fissured the Democrats’ southern bastion with civil rights initiatives and a failed invasion of Cuba, by the fall of 1963 JFK was more reliant than ever on his personal charisma (and his enormously popular wife, Jackie), and he was determined to press the flesh in vote-rich Florida and Texas as often as possible. He never saw a crowd he didn’t plunge into (even after promising his minders that he wouldn’t), and he loved riding in an open-topped car in long motorcades. He had forbidden agents from riding on the back of his limo—a position from which they could, in the event of a missed first shot, throw themselves over the president before a second could be fired. The Secret Service’s confidence factor just before Kennedy’s death, Blaine notes, was a “totally unacceptable” 70 per cent.

In Dallas on Nov. 22, the 16 agents in the motorcade followed their training and their instincts—jumping out of their cars to hold people back when crowds slowed the limo, once flattening a teenager who came too close—while helplessly scanning the windows and rooftops that lined the 15-km route. They all knew, Blaine writes, that the worst could happen at any time. And then, five minutes from their destination, it did.

In 1963, the Secret Service had 300 agents nationwide and a budget of $4 million; today, its 4,000 agents are equipped with every high-tech security tool that an annual $1.6 billion can buy. There are no more open-topped presidental motorcades—the joint legacy, according to the agents of the Kennedy Detail, of Lee Harvey Oswald and John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

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Claire Folger / Exclusive Media Entertainment

This Nov. 22 will mark the 50th anniversary of an event that was the pivotal tragedy of modern America, at least until 9/11. The shots that rang out on a sunny Friday in Dallas, killing president John F. Kennedy, not only shattered the nation’s aura of postwar innocence, but inaugurated a cycle of murderous spectacle that now plays almost routinely in real time on camera—from terrorist attacks to mass shootings. The Kennedy assassination, frozen in cultural memory as a series of unforgettable frames, has become enshrined in myth and conspiracy theories.

Now Parkland jolts it back to life with a raw, vérité drama that plunges us back into the fray. The film focuses on an ensemble of characters whose lives were forever changed on Nov. 22, 1963. They range from Agent Forrest Sorrels (Billy Bob Thornton), the Secret Service chief who lost the president on his watch, to Dr. Charles Carrico (Zac Efron), the ER resident who struggled to save him, only to have a mortally wounded Lee Harvey Oswald land in his ward two days later. Named after the Dallas hospital where J.F.K. and Oswald died, Parkland is about the collateral damage to bystanders caught in the crossfire of a national tragedy.

Based on Vincent Bugliosi’s 2008 book Four Days in November, the movie marks an audacious feature debut for U.S. writer-director Peter Landesman, a former investigative journalist and war correspondent. “I wanted to take the assassination out of the murder mystery and give it back to the people,” Landesman told Maclean’s. He says he and producer Tom Hanks had two rules: “Everything is verifiably true and nothing in the movie is anything anyone’s seen before.”

Despite the film’s eye for authentic detail, the director didn’t want it to play like a period piece. “I wanted that in-our-face immediacy,” he says. “From being in south Manhattan on 9/11 to the experience I’ve had in war zones, the emotional DNA of surviving a cataclysmic event looks the same: a woman loses her husband, a doctor loses a patient, a cop loses the person he’s guarding.”

With a blood-drenched ER scene that shows Jackie Kennedy still clutching a piece of her husband’s brain, Parkland portrays the impact of the assassination in unprecedented graphic detail. Its unflinching documentary style, which tries to embed the viewer in the moment, carries the kinetic signature of British cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, who shot United 93, The Hurt Locker—and next month’s Captain Phillips, starring Hanks in the true story of a Somali pirate hijacking. But Landesman is trespassing on hallowed ground, which has offended some U.S. critics. Even after 50 years, the assassination is a loaded subject.

The last Hollywood movie to mess with it was Oliver Stone’s 1991 conspiracy thriller JFK. “It’s a fairy tale,” says Landesman, who calls himself a friend of Stone. “I don’t know what was in Oliver’s head when he wrote it. But Parkland doesn’t pick a fight with it. These two movies can live side by side: JFK is an intellectual chess game and Parkland is an emotional vortex. It’s as if you’re experiencing the assassination for the first time.”

The most poignant figures to emerge from Parkland are two decent men cursed with unwanted celebrity: Abraham Zapruder (Paul Giamatti), whose 8-mm home-movie footage of the assassination became the most historic few seconds of film ever shot, and Oswald’s brother Robert (James Badge Dale). Zapruder, who comes to resent his fame, is the unwitting forerunner of an age in which no event goes unphotographed. But the assassin’s brother emerges as the film’s unlikely hero, struggling to maintain some dignity while his diva-like mother, Marguerite Oswald (Jacki Weaver), acts like she’s auditioning for a reality show not yet invented. “Robert Oswald is us,” says Landesman. “He’s Everyman. He kissed his wife and two kids goodbye, went to work as a paper-pusher. Then he gets a phone call and realizes he’s in the middle of history and his brother is the devil.” In the film’s most moving scene, the director has the nerve to intercut J.F.K.’s funeral with that of his assassin—who’s buried at a gravesite so desolate that Robert is forced to enlist the paparazzi as pallbearers.

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Dallas 1963

By Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis

Fifty years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, people are still debating whether the killing was the product of one diseased mind (or more, depending on which story you believe) or an outgrowth of the cultural and political climate of Dallas in 1963. Minutaglio and Davis, two experienced Texas journalists, make a case for the latter view. Told in cold, clear-eyed present tense, their book is a portrait of early ’60s Dallas as a sort of Hellmouth of right-wing activism, a place where you could find John Birchers, all kinds of people who were convinced that Eisenhower and Kennedy were Communists, and that Texas, as fired army general Edwin A. Walker put it, was “a prime target of Soviet attention.” Most people know about the “Wanted for treason” signs with Kennedy’s face on them; now Minutaglio and Davis have given us a picture of the people who believed those signs.

Though framed as a month-by-month chronicle of Dallas craziness from 1960 through 1963, the book often proceeds as an almost random list of horror stories about racists, Birchers and paranoid millionaires. The dominant character in the book is Walker, who was fired by Kennedy for trying to indoctrinate his troops, and became a fanatical anti-Kennedy figure and unsuccessful gubernatorial candidate in Texas, and himself the target of an assassination attempt. He comes off as a real-life version of Jack D. Ripper from Dr. Strangelove, and that movie’s sense of dark comedy and menace permeates the real world of Dallas in this era.

What the authors have trouble doing is convincing us that this has much to do with the Kennedy assassination; they note that Oswald is proof that “the radical left is as paranoid as the radical right,” and that he feared the rise of right-wing fascism in Dallas, particularly the way many people had embraced Walker and his rhetoric. But why this would lead to the killing of the right wing’s No. 1 enemy is left extremely unclear. Still, the book is mesmerizing as a snapshot of a city in the throes of transition to modernity; it portrays the split between those who accepted change on race and politics—or who actively fought for it—and those who would do or say anything to prevent it.

Jaime Weinman

Visit the Maclean’s Bookmarked blog for news and reviews on all things literary

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In the flood of sad reminiscence on the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the question of whether he might have extricated America from Vietnam, rather than escalating U.S. involvement in the war, is among the most haunting “what ifs.”

For Kennedy’s admirers, speculating that he would have withdrawn might seem too easy—the ultimate application of hypothetical, posthumous polish to their hero’s dented image.  But for his detractors, simply dismissing the notion that JFK might have taken a different path on Vietnam is also too glib—and ignores crucial, though perhaps not definitive, evidence.

That evidence has been sifted by historians and argued about by Kennedy obsessives on both sides. James Galbraith, a professor of government at University of Texas at Austin, has neatly summarized reasons to believe that Kennedy, in the months before his death on Nov. 22, 1963, had signaled his desire to pull back from Vietnam. He draws attention to, for instance, the White House issuing, on Oct. 11, 1963, something called National Security Action Memorandum 263, which speaks of “the implementation of plans to withdraw” troops from Vietnam.

James Galbraith comes by his interest in this subject honestly. His father, the late economist John Kenneth Galbraith, was among the few key voices inside Kennedy’s charmed inner circle warning against prolonged embroilment in Vietnam.

I interviewed the senior Galbraith in the second-floor study of his Cambridge, Mass., house on Jan. 14, 2005, when at 96 he still wielded a trenchant wit and commanded an epochal memory. (He died the following year.) Our exchange on the Vietnam question now seems—with that terrible day in Dallas forced into our minds again— freshly relevant. I raised the question about halfway through a conversation that lasted a little less than an hour:

Q. May I move on to your days as John F. Kennedy’s ambassador to India? [Your biographer] Richard Parker, draws attention to your efforts to persuade JFK not to be drawn into a full-scale war in Vietnam. How do you remember that?


A. I was closely involved. I had an early adverse view of the Vietnam exercise, which became very strong in my mind from both being in India and being sent to Saigon. This was further complicated by being acquainted with military and civilian war makers and the discovery as to their incompetence, the frailty of their judgment. While I continued to be ambassador to India, I came back home, primarily to oppose the war. At one time, JFK designated me the special task of seeing if I could get Nehru to act as a peacemaker between the North Vietnamese and ourselves.

Q. How did you regard the position Kennedy found himself in?


A. He was surrounded by civilian and military cold warriors, who had listened to the military position, including the secretary of state, Dean Rusk, and the whole foreign policy establishment, or a large part of it. I came back to oppose it, once just for that purpose and once when my term was up there. There were a few fellow spokesmen, but it was a lonesome exercise.

Q .Had he lived, do you believe Kennedy would have withdrawn from Vietnam?


A. He had that fully in mind. The question was bringing the government along with him. The secretary of state, the secretary of defense and the whole military establishment had the idea that when you have a war that takes over all else and you don’t question it. Question a military exercise and that’s against patriotic duty. I’m not sure that it was entirely helpful in my case that I was a Canadian.

In asking Galbraith about Vietnam, I alluded to Richard Parker’s superb 2005 biography John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics (which I wrote about here). Parker writes of how, in the fall of 1961, Kennedy was under intense pressure from hawks in his administration to ramp up the U.S. presence in Vietnam from a few thousand military “advisers” to a full combat force of more than 200,000 troops, and sent Galbraith to Saigon to gain another perspective.

Galbraith returned from the mission deeply worried about any further American military commitment. “Incidentally,” he wrote to Kennedy, “who is the man in your administration who decides what countries are strategic? I would like to have his name and address and ask him what is so important about this real estate in the Space Age?”

To imagine that Galbraith’s gift for that sort of droll, meaningful aside might actually have made what he had to say matter just a little more in JFK’s White House is, I know, nostalgic. This week, I’m going ask for the indulgence.

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Today marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination President John F. Kennedy. To remember the event, Boston.com will provide a live experience of the event, as they would cover it today. Using archival footage and photos from the JFK Library, The Boston Globe and other sources will provide a timeline of the events as they unfolded throughout the day. The timeline will cover events that day in Houston and Dallas, and throughout the Greater Boston and Hyannisport area.

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Prime Minister John Diefenbaker is seen here with U.S. President John F. Kennedy in Ottawa in 1961. (CP PHOTOS)

John Diefenbaker had a famously toxic relationship with John F. Kennedy. John Boyko, author of the upcoming book Kennedy and the Canadians, explains why:

1. The Difference: Diefenbaker was an anti-establishment populist. As a lawyer and a politician, he devoted himself to defending the powerless against those whose family, wealth and connections afforded unearned advantages. Kennedy represented everything Diefenbaker despised. Before they even met, Diefenbaker dismissed him as shallow and over-privileged.

2. The Delay: With the razor-close presidential election decided, Diefenbaker sent Kennedy a congratulatory letter. He then waited for a response—and waited. He eventually had his ambassador in Washington ask whether the letter had been received. Only then did Kennedy reply. Diefenbaker believed he and Canada had been slighted.

3. The Name: While seeking political office in the shadow of two world wars, Diefenbaker’s German name often invited derision. He remained sensitive to slurs regarding it, so he was insulted when, at their first meeting, Kennedy called him Diefen-bawker. Upon his arrival for a visit to Ottawa, Kennedy repeated his error.

4. The French: The unilingual Diefenbaker always attempted a little French, and did so when welcoming Kennedy to Ottawa. Kennedy told the crowd he had not intended to attempt French, but, after hearing the prime minister, thought he’d try. Having been schooled by his bilingual wife, Kennedy spoke surprisingly well. Diefenbaker felt humiliated.

5. The OAS: At a private meeting, Kennedy said he wanted Canada to join the Organization of American States. Diefenbaker said no, as it would restrict Canada’s interactions in the hemisphere. Later, in his speech to Parliament, Kennedy broke protocol by urging publicly what the prime minister had already declined privately. Diefenbaker sat steaming.

6. The Tree: Diefenbaker escorted Kennedy to the governor general’s residence for a ceremonial tree planting. Inspired by Diefenbaker’s enthusiastic shovel work, Kennedy dug in and promptly reinjured his back. It led to his being distracted by intense pain during a summit with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev shortly afterward, and to enduring a brace for the rest of his life.

7. The Document: Kennedy inadvertently dropped a secret memo in Diefenbaker’s office. It listed areas where Canada should be “pushed,” and in the margin he had apparently scribbled “SOB.” Diefenbaker threatened to release it. The protocol breach angered Kennedy. He denied the doodle, saying he didn’t know Diefenbaker was an SOB—at that point.

8. The Nukes: The U.S. wanted to station nuclear weapons in Canada. Diefenbaker said he would acquire them if Canadian sovereignty and civilian control were guaranteed, and then only after exhausting attempts at global disarmament. Kennedy was frustrated by what he and many Canadians interpreted as indecisiveness.

9. The Boredom: The worst punishment one could inflict on Kennedy was boredom. After their first meeting, he told aides that Diefenbaker was tiresome. British prime minister Harold Macmillan arranged a lunch in Bermuda and kept Kennedy from fleeing only with the promise that he never be left alone with Diefenbaker.

10. The Election: Kennedy liked Liberal leader Lester B. Pearson. At an Ottawa reception, Kennedy ignored Diefenbaker to speak at length with Pearson. Diefenbaker was insulted. Later, Kennedy liked that Pearson changed Liberal party policy to support Canada’s acquiring of nuclear weapons. Kennedy’s administration helped to elect Pearson in the 1963 election. Diefenbaker was embittered.

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AUSTIN, Texas — As the U.S. and Russia reached the brink of nuclear war in 1962, President John F. Kennedy received top-secret intelligence from the CIA that a new warhead launcher was spotted in Cuba.

Amid those grave concerns, the memo ends on a different note. A U.S. agent in Moscow describes “packed houses and enthusiastic applause” during a run of Russian performances by the New York City Ballet.

That report, given to Kennedy a day before the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis, is among roughly 19,000 pages of newly declassified CIA documents from the Cold War released Wednesday. Stamped “For the President’s Eyes Only” on some pages, the dossiers were delivered daily by the spy agency to the White House.

Known as the President’s Daily Brief— President Barack Obama is the first to swipe through his on a tablet — they are tightly guarded rundowns of CIA intelligence from around the globe. For the first time, some of the oldest briefs being made public, starting with those written in the 1960s for presidents Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.

Conspiracy theorists mining for signs of nefarious CIA plots are likely to be disappointed. Many of the briefs remain partially blacked out, and what isn’t won’t rewrite textbooks.

Instead, historians say, the memos reveal the real-time intelligence that shaped pivotal decisions made in the Oval Office after the Bay of Pigs and through Vietnam.

“These are an incomparable window into how a president thinks,” said William Inboden, who worked under President George W. Bush and now leads the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin. “When we’re reading these, it’s a mirror image of what the president’s concerns were.”

On Nov. 22, 1963, Kennedy awoke in a Fort Worth, Texas, hotel to an intelligence memo that concluded that a Soviet anti-missile paraded in Moscow appeared only designed for use in the atmosphere. In Japan, meanwhile, an election didn’t change the balance of power. At least one page in the briefing remains classified.

Later that day, after Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, the CIA published a second brief. It contained no intelligence but a poem Kennedy was fond of reciting.

“Bullfight critics ranked in rows/Crowd the enormous plaza full/But only one is there who knows/And he’s the man who fights the bull.”

Even for Johnson, who as vice-president was famously kept out of Kennedy’s inner circle, the CIA briefs would have been an unfamiliar sight until being abruptly elevated to commander in chief, said Mark Updegrove, director of the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin. The briefs in the days following Kennedy’s death also say almost nothing about the assassination, except for a how it apparently “acted as a catalyst” in ending a political stalemate in Italy.

As Johnson settled into office, the briefs became heavy with intelligence from Vietnam, and by the fall of 1967, a section titled “Special Daily Report on North Vietnam” was added. Inboden said the CIA reports appear to show Johnson becoming so concerned with eroding public support that he sought updates on what Hanoi thought of war protesters back in the U.S.

The release of the briefs was paved by a 2009 executive order from Obama stating that all classified materially will automatically undergo a declassification review and release after 25 years. The full collection of briefs from the Kennedy and Johnson era are posted on the CIA’s website.

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John Diefenbaker and John F. Kennedy seated and chatting in the Oval Office, White House, Washington D.C., 20 Feb 1961.
University of Saskatchewan, University Library, University Archives & Special Collections
Canadian

COLD FIRE

John Boyko

They were an unlikely trio: John Diefenbaker, the fiery and frequently unhinged Conservative prime minister who frittered away his majority; his Liberal party nemesis, Lester “Mike” Pearson, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and a diplomat turned politician; and the charismatic John F. Kennedy, the first television American president, remembered today more because he was assassinated in 1963 at the age of 46 than for how his administration was forced to deal with one crisis after another. The three leaders and their often tumultuous interactions—especially those between JFK and Diefenbaker, who truly detested each other— when the Cold War was at its most tense period are at the focus of the latest engaging popular history by Ontario author (and sometimes Maclean’s contributor) John Boyko.

Soviet expansion in Eastern Europe, along with the construction of the Berlin Wall and then the brazen attempt to install missiles in Cuba in 1962, pushed the world to the brink of nuclear conflict. Under severe pressure, Kennedy was authoritarian; he expected Canadian politicians to salute smartly and follow his lead. Diefenbaker, however, took pride in his government’s positive nationalistic policies and was not about to be pushed around by a president he regarded as a “young pup” (it didn’t help that Kennedy mispronounced the PM’s name as “Deefunbawker”). Hence the personal animosity between the two that characterized U.S.-Canadian relations, most notably over Dief’s dithering to arm Canada’s Bomarc missiles with nuclear warheads. Following an uneasy meeting with Diefenbaker at the White House in February 1961, JFK told his brother, Robert, “I don’t want to see that boring son-of-a-bitch again.” In fact, they met again in Ottawa in mid-May for yet another awkward encounter.

No one was more delighted than Kennedy when the affable Pearson and the Liberals defeated Diefenbaker and the Conservatives in the federal election of April 1963, an outcome that the president had sought to influence. The new Liberal government’s foreign policy quickly fell into line with American wishes, though disputes about divergent economic issues did arise, annoying both JFK and Pearson.

On that 1961 trip JFK made to Ottawa, Diefenbaker insisted that Kennedy plant a tree, as was customary for visiting dignitaries. In doing so, the president reinjured his back and was forced to wear a brace. Two-and-a- half years later, on Nov. 22, 1963, when JFK was in Dallas, the brace prevented him from bending or kneeling to avoid the bullet that killed him. Boyko relates this story in his book. Yet to suggest, as he also does, that Diefenbaker was somehow to blame for Kennedy’s ongoing health problems and thus indirectly responsible for what happened in Dallas is a real stretch.

Still, Cold Fire is a well-researched political page-turner featuring penetrating portraits of the key players, behind-the-scenes manoeuvring, and backbiting comments. Boyko also shows, as others have, that in the most anxious days of the Cold War, Canada was one of America’s most trusted allies, yet Canadian leaders could not be pushed around or taken for granted.

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Book review: Camelot and Canada by Asa McKercher

The similarities between the John Diefenbaker—John F. Kennedy relationship and that of Stephen Harper and Barack Obama are striking. Both Diefenbaker and Harper were more conservative and scions of Western politics who clashed sharply with their liberal, urban-intellectual American presidential counterparts. Canadians have never paid much attention to the dynamics between Harper and Obama, but they are obsessed with the Diefenbaker–Kennedy relationship. Most Americans, meanwhile, don’t even know it existed. Asa McKercher’s book is a major contribution—and a major repudiation—of the existing scholarship on the relationship between Canada’s 13th prime minister and America’s 35th president.

McKercher outlines how, like Harper, Diefenbaker was often motivated by domestic political concerns when it came to foreign policy. Harper’s decisions to be the first G7 leader to fly to Ukraine post-revolution in 2014, to duck the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Sri Lanka in 2013 and to close the Canadian embassy in Iran in 2012 were all heavily motivated by domestic policy concerns. Harper made a point of reaching out to the Ukrainian, Jewish, evangelical, Tamil and other communities, in which he could gain votes by talking a good game on their favourite foreign policy issues.

Similarly, Diefenbaker was motivated by domestic concerns when he began selling wheat to China despite the United States having no relations with the Asian country at the time. Opening wheat sales was hugely popular in the Prairies, where Diefenbaker derived much of his support. Similarly, Diefenbaker vacillated on whether to accept nuclear weapons on Canadian soil because of domestic opposition. McKercher takes a largely sympathetic view of the Kennedy administration’s actions toward Canada, regarding them as essentially friendly despite the personal antipathy between Kennedy and Diefenbaker. He challenges J.L. Granatstein and Stephen Randall, two of the elder statesmen of Canadian–American history, for unfairly criticizing Kennedy.

McKercher’s book also contrasts with more recent scholarship. John Boyko’s Cold Fire: Kennedy’s Northern Front, released in February, is a popular history with a far less nuanced analysis (but livelier writing) than Camelot in Canada. McKercher’s work is meticulously researched. He has a 22-page bibliography including 53 primary sources covering the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations. It is the most thorough analysis of the Kennedy–Diefenbaker relationship yet. Camelot and Canada’s strength is in grounding the famous personal controversies most books dwell on (e.g., Kennedy mispronouncing Diefenbaker’s name when he visited Ottawa and saying he never wanted “to see the boring son of a bitch again” when Diefenbaker went to Washington) in the behind-the-scenes events that actually drove decision-making. McKercher has sifted through decades of half-truth and claptrap to produce an original and highly compelling analysis of the relationship.

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