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Queen Elizabeth II
Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary; born 21 April 1926) is the constitutional monarch of 16 of the 53 member states in the Commonwealth of Nations. She is also Head of the Commonwealth and Supreme Governor of the Church of England.
Upon her accession on 6 February 1952, Elizabeth became Head of the Commonwealth and queen regnant of seven independent Commonwealth countries: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Pakistan and Ceylon. Her coronation the following year was the first to be televised. From 1956 to 1992, the number of her realms varied as territories gained independence and some realms became republics. Today, in addition to the first four of the aforementioned countries, Elizabeth is Queen of Jamaica, Barbados, the Bahamas, Grenada, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Belize, Antigua and Barbuda, and Saint Kitts and Nevis. She is the longest-lived and, after her great-great grandmother Queen Victoria, the second longest-reigning British monarch.
Elizabeth was born in London and educated privately at home. Her father acceded to the throne as George VI on the abdication of his brother Edward VIII in 1936, from which time she was the heir presumptive. She began to undertake public duties during the Second World War, in which she served in the Auxiliary Territorial Service. In 1947, she married Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, with whom she has four children: Charles, Anne, Andrew, and Edward.
Elizabeth's many historic visits and meetings include a state visit to the Republic of Ireland, the first state visit of an Irish president to the United Kingdom, and reciprocal visits to and from the Pope. She has seen major constitutional changes, such as devolution in the United Kingdom, Canadian patriation, and the decolonization of Africa. She has also reigned through various wars and conflicts involving many of her realms.
Times of personal significance have included the births and marriages of her children and grandchildren, the investiture of the Prince of Wales, and the celebration of milestones such as her Silver, Golden, and Diamond Jubilees in 1977, 2002, and 2012, respectively. Moments of sorrow for her include the death of her father, aged 56, the assassination of Prince Philip's uncle, Lord Mountbatten, the breakdown of her children's marriages in 1992 (a year deemed her annus horribilis), the death in 1997 of her son's former wife, Diana, Princess of Wales, and the deaths of her mother and sister in 2002. Elizabeth has occasionally faced republican sentiments and severe press criticism of the royal family, but support for the monarchy and her personal popularity remain high. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabet...)
More:
http://www.royal.gov.uk/hmthequeen/hm...
http://www.biography.com/people/queen...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/people/q...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/people/q...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknew...
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Updated by Zack Beauchamp on December 18, 2014, 9:30 a.m. ET
The US has started normalizing diplomacy with Cuba, but it will take an act of congress to end the embargo. Here are seven reasons why it should.
http://www.vox.com/2014/12/18/7414659...
Source: Vox
Article:
http://www.vox.com/2014/12/17/7408743...
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/mag...
About the Author:
Roger Cohen, a columnist for The International Herald Tribune and The Times, is the author of “Hearts Grown Brutal: Sagas of Sarajevo.”
by Roger Cohen (no photo)
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Cuban writer Yoani Sanchez speaking in Mexico
Jose Castanares/AFP/Getty
Author: Max Fisher
Article link below:
http://www.vox.com/2014/12/17/7412365...
But Yoani Sánchez, a Cuban dissident writer, articulated it heart-breakingly well, in a 2008 interview with New York Times columnist Roger Cohen. When Cohen asked her why the Cubans he saw sitting on Havana's seawall never seemed to look outward to the ocean, this is how she answered:
"We live turned away from the sea because it does not connect us, it encloses us. There is no movement on it. People are not allowed to buy boats because if they had boats, they would go to Florida. We are left, as one of our poets put it, with the unhappy circumstance of water at every turn."
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Edward George de Valera was born on 14 October 1882 in New York to a Spanish father and an Irish mother. He moved to Ireland at the age of two and was brought up by relatives in Limerick. He became a teacher of mathematics and an avid supporter of the Irish language movement.
De Valera was a leader in the 1916 Easter Rising which proclaimed an Irish republic. Arrested, he was saved from a death sentence because of his American birth and instead received a prison term. On his release, he stood as a Sinn Fein Party candidate in the 1918 general election. Sinn Fein won the majority of seats outside Ulster, but refused to take their seats at Westminster, instead establishing an independent parliament (Dail Eireann) to govern Ireland. De Valera was elected president of the Dail.
The Irish Republican Army, the armed wing of Sinn Fein, began a guerrilla war against Crown forces. After two years of violence, a truce was agreed and a treaty with the British negotiated by a Sinn Fein deputation, which de Valera chose not to join. Michael Collins, who led the Sinn Fein negotiating party, described the result as 'the freedom to achieve freedom'. But de Valera opposed the agreement, because it involved the partition of Ireland and did not create an independent republic. The treaty was passed by a narrow margin in the Dail and de Valera resigned as president. He led the anti-treaty side in a bitter civil war against the government of the new Free State. Despite killing Collins, the irregulars were defeated.
De Valera reconciled himself to the new dispensation and led his party Fianna Fail into the Dail in 1927. Fianna Fail won elections in 1932. De Valera wrote a new constitution in 1937 asserting greater autonomy for Ireland, although stopping short of declaring the Free State a republic. This happened during a period in which he was in opposition in 1948. He was subsequently elected prime minister (taoiseach) three times and then president of the republic, a position he held until 1973. Under de Valera's rule, the cultural identity of the Irish Republic as Roman Catholic and Gaelic was asserted. Complete independence was secured, but a lasting accommodation with the majority Protestant and British Northern Ireland receded as a result. De Valera died on 29 August 1975.
(Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic...)
More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89am...
http://www.ireland-information.com/ar...
http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Eam...
http://www.clarelibrary.ie/eolas/cocl...
http://www.ucd.ie/archives/html/colle...
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/...
http://www.biography.com/people/eamon...
http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/B...
http://www.winstonchurchill.org/suppo...
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Haile Selassie I, original name Tafari Makonnen (born July 23, 1892, near Harer, Eth.—died Aug. 27, 1975, Addis Ababa), emperor of Ethiopia from 1930 to 1974 who sought to modernize his country and who steered it into the mainstream of post-World War II African politics. He brought Ethiopia into the League of Nations and the United Nations and made Addis Ababa the major centre for the Organization of African Unity (now African Union).
Tafari was a great-grandson of Sahle Selassie of Shewa (Shoa) and a son of Ras (Prince) Makonnen, a chief adviser to Emperor Menilek II. Educated at home by French missionaries, Tafari at an early age favourably impressed the emperor with his intellectual abilities and was promoted accordingly. As governor of Sidamo and then of Harer province, he followed progressive policies, seeking to break the feudal power of the local nobility by increasing the authority of the central government—for example, by developing a salaried civil service. He thereby came to represent politically progressive elements of the population. In 1911 he married Wayzaro Menen, a great-granddaughter of Menilek II.
When Menilek II died in 1913, his grandson Lij Yasu succeeded to the throne, but the latter’s unreliability and his close association with Islam made him unpopular with the majority Christian population of Ethiopia. Tafari became the rallying point of the Christian resistance, and he deposed Lij Yasu in 1916. Zauditu, Menilek II’s daughter, thereupon became empress in 1917, and Ras Tafari was named regent and heir apparent to the throne.
While Zauditu was conservative in outlook, Ras Tafari was progressive and became the focus of the aspirations of the modernist younger generation. In 1923 he had a conspicuous success in the admission of Ethiopia to the League of Nations. In the following year he visited Rome, Paris, and London, becoming the first Ethiopian ruler ever to go abroad. In 1928 he assumed the title of negus (“king”), and two years later, when Zauditu died, he was crowned emperor (Nov. 2, 1930) and took the name of Haile Selassie (“Might of the Trinity”). In 1931 he promulgated a new constitution, which strictly limited the powers of Parliament. From the late 1920s on, Haile Selassie in effect was the Ethiopian government, and, by establishing provincial schools, strengthening the police forces, and progressively outlawing feudal taxation, he sought to both help his people and increase the authority of the central government.
When Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, Haile Selassie led the resistance, but in May 1936 he was forced into exile. He appealed for help from the League of Nations in a memorable speech that he delivered to that body in Geneva on June 30, 1936. With the advent of World War II, he secured British assistance in forming an army of Ethiopian exiles in the Sudan. British and Ethiopian forces invaded Ethiopia in January 1941 and recaptured Addis Ababa several months later. Although he was reinstated as emperor, Haile Selassie had to recreate the authority he had previously exercised. He again implemented social, economic, and educational reforms in an attempt to modernize Ethiopian government and society on a slow and gradual basis.
The Ethiopian government continued to be largely the expression of Haile Selassie’s personal authority. In 1955 he granted a new constitution giving him as much power as the previous one. Overt opposition to his rule surfaced in December 1960, when a dissident wing of the army secured control of Addis Ababa and was dislodged only after a sharp engagement with loyalist elements.
Haile Selassie played a very important role in the establishment of the Organization of African Unity in 1963. His rule in Ethiopia continued until 1974, at which time famine, worsening unemployment, and the political stagnation of his government prompted segments of the army to mutiny. They deposed Haile Selassie and established a provisional military government that espoused Marxist ideologies. Haile Selassie was kept under house arrest in his own palace, where he spent the remainder of his life. Official sources at the time attributed his death to natural causes, but evidence later emerged suggesting that he had been strangled on the orders of the military government.
Haile Selassie was regarded as the messiah of the African race by the Rastafarian movement.
(Source:http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t...)
More:
http://life.time.com/history/haile-se...
http://www.biography.com/people/haile...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haile_Se...
http://www.ethiopiantreasures.co.uk/p...
http://www.angelfire.com/ny/ethiocrow...
http://www.libcom.org/history/article...
http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Hai...
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/gener...
by Bereket Habte Selassie (no photo)
by Haile Selassie I (no photo)
by Jeff Pearce (no photo)
by Anthony Mockler (no photo)
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Theodore M. Vestal
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Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, Earl of Merioneth and Baron Greenwich, was born Prince of Greece and Denmark in Corfu on 10 June 1921.
He was born the only son of Prince Andrew of Greece. His paternal family is of Danish descent - Prince Andrew was the grandson of King Christian IX of Denmark.
His mother was Princess Alice of Battenberg, the eldest child of Prince Louis of Battenberg and sister of Earl Mountbatten of Burma. Prince Louis became a naturalised British subject in 1868, joined the Royal Navy and rose to become an Admiral of the Fleet and First Sea Lord in 1914.
During the First World War Prince Louis changed the family name to Mountbatten and was created Marquess of Milford Haven. Prince Philip adopted the family name of Mountbatten when he became a naturalised British subject and renounced his Royal title in 1947.
Prince Louis married one of Queen Victoria's granddaughters. Thus, The Queen and Prince Philip both have Queen Victoria as a great-great-grandmother. They are also related through his father's side. His paternal grandfather, King George I of Greece, was Queen Alexandra's brother.
(Source:http://www.royal.gov.uk/thecurrentroy...)
More:
http://www.biography.com/people/princ...
http://www.infoplease.com/spot/royalb...
http://www.lifetimetv.co.uk/biography...
http://www.britroyals.com/family.asp?...
http://www.britainexpress.com/royals/...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_P...
http://www.royal.gov.uk/ThecurrentRoy...
http://www.royal.gov.uk/thecurrentroy...
http://www.biography.com/people/princ...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/artic...
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Penny Junor
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Lawrence (Larry) O'Brien was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on 7th July, 1917. As a young man O'Brien met John F. Kennedy and helped him in his various political campaigns. This included managing his successful campaigns for the Senate in 1952 and 1958. O'Brien also played a significant role in Kennedy being elected president in 1960.
Kennedy appointed O'Brien as its special assistant in 1961. O'Brien was in the Presidential Motorcade in Dealey Plaza when Kennedy was assassinated. President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed O'Brien as Postmaster General in 1965 and he held the post of three years.
O'Brien remained active in the Democratic Party and was chairman of the Democratic National Committee (1968–69 and 1970–73). He was also employed by Howard Hughes to protect his interests in Washington.
On 20th March, 1972 Frederick LaRue and John Mitchell of the Nixon's re-election committee decided to plant electronic devices in O'Brien's Democratic campaign offices in an apartment block calledWatergate. The plan was to wiretap O'Brien's conversations. Frank Sturgis, Virgilio Gonzalez, Eugenio Martinez, Bernard L. Barkerand E.Howard Hunt were later arrested and imprisoned for this crime.
O'Brien was also commissioner of the National Basketball Association (1975–84). His achievements included the merger of the ABA with the NBA, negotiating and signing a lucrative television contract with CBS, arranging a historic collective bargaining agreement with the NBA Players Association and introducing an innovative anti-drug program in 1983. In 1984, the NBA Championship Trophy was renamed the Larry O'Brien Championship Trophy.
Lawrence O'Brien died in New York on 28th September, 1990.
(Source:http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKo...)
More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_O&...
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/29/obi...
http://articles.latimes.com/1990-09-2...
http://mentalfloss.com/article/24894/...
http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Re...
http://www.masslive.com/tomshea/index...
http://millercenter.org/president/lbj...
http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/...
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t...
by W. Marvin Watson (no photo)
by Lady Bird Johnson (no photo)
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Ben Bradlee
As a reporter in the 1950s, Bradlee became close friends with then-senator John F. Kennedy, who had graduated from Harvard two years before Bradlee, and lived nearby. Bradlee's wife at the time, Jean Saltonstall, was related to Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy through her father's sister Rosamund who married Charles Auchincloss. In 1960 Bradlee toured with both Kennedy and Richard Nixon in their presidential campaigns. He later wrote a book, Conversations With Kennedy, recounting their relationship during those years. Bradlee was, at this point, Washington Bureau chief for Newsweek, a position from which he helped negotiate the sale of the magazine to The Washington Post holding company. Bradlee maintained that position until being promoted to managing editor at the Post in 1965. He became executive editor in 1968, and on October 20, 1978, he married fellow journalist Sally Quinn. Quinn and Bradlee have one child, Quinn Bradlee, who was born in 1982 when Quinn was 41 and Bradlee was 61. In 2009 they appeared with Quinn Bradlee on the Charlie Rose show on PBS and spoke of their son's having been born with Velo-cardio-facial syndrome, also known as DiGeorge syndrome and Shprintzen syndrome (named after Dr. Robert Shprintzen, who first identified the disorder in 1978 and who also diagnosed Quinn Bradlee).
Bradlee retired as the executive editor of The Washington Post in September 1991 but continued to serve as vice president at large until his death. He was succeeded as executive editor at the Post by Leonard Downie Jr., whom Bradlee had appointed as managing editor seven years earlier.
Under Bradlee's leadership, The Washington Post took on major challenges during the Nixon administration. In 1971 The New York Times and the Post successfully challenged the government over the right to publish the Pentagon Papers. One year later, Bradlee backed reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they probed the break-in at the Democratic National Committee Headquarters in the Watergate Hotel. According to Bradlee:
"You had a lot of Cuban or Spanish-speaking guys in masks and rubber gloves, with walkie-talkies, arrested in the Democratic National Committee Headquarters at 2 in the morning. What the hell were they in there for? What were they doing? The follow-up story was based primarily on their arraignment in court, and it was based on information given our police reporter, Al Lewis, by the cops, showing them an address book that one of the burglars had in his pocket, and in the address book was the name 'Hunt,' H-u-n-t, and the phone number was the White House phone number, which Al Lewis and every reporter worth his salt knew. And when, the next day, Woodward—this is probably Sunday or maybe Monday, because the burglary was Saturday morning early—called the number and asked to speak to Mr. Hunt, and the operator said, 'Well, he's not here now; he's over at' such-and-such a place, gave him another number, and Woodward called him up, and Hunt answered the phone, and Woodward said, 'We want to know why your name was in the address book of the Watergate burglars.' And there is this long, deathly hush, and Hunt said, 'Oh my God!' and hung up. So you had the White House. You have Hunt saying 'Oh my God!' At a later arraignment, one of the guys whispered to a judge. The judge said, 'What do you do?' and Woodward overheard the words 'CIA.' So if your interest isn't whetted by this time, you're not a journalist."
Ensuing investigations of suspected cover-ups led inexorably to congressional committees, conflicting testimonies, and ultimately to the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974. For decades, Bradlee was one of only four publicly known people who knew the true identity of press informant Deep Throat, the other three being Woodward, Bernstein, and Deep Throat himself, who later revealed himself to be Nixon's FBI associate director Mark Felt.
In 1981 Post reporter Janet Cooke won a Pulitzer Prize for "Jimmy's World", a profile of an 8-year-old heroin addict. Cooke's article turned out to be fiction: there was no such addict. As executive editor, Bradlee was roundly criticized in many circles for failing to ensure the article's accuracy. After questions about the story's veracity arose, Bradlee (along with publisher Donald Graham) ordered a "full disclosure" investigation to ascertain the truth. Bradlee personally apologized to Mayor Marion Barry and the chief of police of Washington, D.C., for the Post's fictitious article. Cooke, meanwhile, was forced to resign and relinquish the Pulitzer.
Bradlee published an autobiography in 1995, A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures. He had an acting role in Born Yesterday, the 1993 remake of the 1950 romantic comedy. In 1983 he gave the inaugural Vance Distinguished Lecture at Central Connecticut State University. On May 3, 2006, Bradlee received a Doctor of Humane Letters from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Prior to receiving the honorary degree, he taught occasional journalism courses at Georgetown.
In 1991 he was persuaded by then–governor of Maryland William Donald Schaefer to accept the chairmanship of the Historic St. Mary's City Commission and continued in that position through 2003. He also served for many years as a member of the board of trustees at St. Mary's College of Maryland, and endowed the Benjamin C. Bradlee Annual Lecture in Journalism there. He continued to serve as vice chairman of the school's board of trustees.
In the fall of 2005, Jim Lehrer conducted six hours of interviews with Bradlee on a variety of topics, from the responsibilities of the press to Watergate to the Valerie Plame affair. The interviews were edited for an hour-long documentary, Free Speech: Jim Lehrer and Ben Bradlee, which premiered on PBS on June 19, 2006.
At The Washington Post, Bradlee carried the title vice president at large. He and Quinn lived at the Todd Lincoln House in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. The middle part of the house was built in 1792. They also restored Porto Bello, their home in Drayden, Maryland.
Bradlee received the French Legion of Honor, the highest award given by the French government, at a ceremony in 2007 in Paris.
Bradlee was named as a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama on August 8, 2013, and was presented the medal at a White House ceremony on November 20, 2013.
In late September 2014, Bradlee entered hospice care due to declining health as a result of Alzheimer's disease. He died of natural causes on October 21, 2014, at his home in Washington, D.C., at the age of 93. His funeral was held at the Washington National Cathedral on October 29. He was buried at the Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington, D.C. afterwards. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Bradlee)
More:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/...
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/22/bus...
http://nymag.com/news/features/ben-br...
http://www.npr.org/2014/10/21/3527587...
http://time.com/3450585/ben-bradlee-2/
by Ben Bradlee(no photo)
by Benjamin C. Bradlee(no photo)
by The Washington Post (no photo)
by The Washington Post(no photo)
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Carl Bernstein
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JFK's press secretary told the story on video before his death, describing a evening mad dash to buy up the president's favorite Cuban stogies
Pierre Salinger laid his hands on 1,200 H.Upmann cigars in Kennedy's favorite size – in just one night
After JFK found out he had all the cigars he would need, he immediately signed the trade embargo declaring future purchases illegal
President Barack Obama relaxed trade sanctions against Cuba on Wednesday, allowing US travelers to Cuba to bring back up to $100 worth of cigars - That amount would buy no more than 10 of JFK's favorite smokes today on the open market
By David Martosko, US Political Editor for MailOnline
PARTNERS IN CRIME - Pierre Salinger (was a regular cigar smoker, so he asked all the stores he knew to sell him every H. Upmann 'petit' cigar they had so JFK could stock up)
Here is a very funny video with Pierre Salinger telling the story: (it is embedded in this article - just scroll down and you will see the video).
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/artic...
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John Kenneth Galbraith
John Kenneth "Ken" Galbraith (October 15, 1908 – April 29, 2006) was a Canadian and, later, American economist, public official, and diplomat, and a leading proponent of 20th-century American liberalism. His books on economic topics were bestsellers from the 1950s through the 2000s, during which time Galbraith fulfilled the role of public intellectual. As an economist, he was a Keynesian and an institutionalist.
Galbraith was a long-time Harvard faculty member and stayed with Harvard University for half a century as a professor of economics.[3] He was a prolific author and wrote four dozen books, including several novels, and published more than a thousand articles and essays on various subjects. Among his most famous works was a popular trilogy on economics, American Capitalism (1952), The Affluent Society (1958), and The New Industrial State (1967).
Galbraith was active in Democratic Party politics, serving in the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson. He served as United States Ambassador to India under the Kennedy administration. His prodigious literary output and outspokenness made him, arguably, "the best-known economist in the world" during his lifetime. Galbraith was one of few recipients both of the Medal of Freedom (1946) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2000) for his public service and contribution to science. The government of France made him a Commandeur de la Légion d'honneur.
(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ken...)
More:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1000142...
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bi...
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/30/obi...
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/aut...
http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/conv...
by Jacqueline Bloom Stanfield (no photo)
by Andrea Williams (no photo)
by Jim Dell (no photo)
by Richard Parker (no photo)
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John Kenneth Galbraith
Ho Chi Minh
Ho Chi Minh led the Vietnamese nationalist movement for more than three decades, fighting first against the Japanese, then the French colonial power and then the US-backed South Vietnamese. He was President of North Vietnam from 1954 until his death.
Ho Chi Minh (originally Nguyen That Thanh) was born on 19 May 1890 in Hoang Tru in central Vietnam. Vietnam was then a French colony, known as French Indo-China, but under the nominal rule of an emperor. Ho's father worked at the imperial court but was dismissed for criticising the French colonial power.
In 1911, Ho took a job on a French ship and travelled widely. He lived in London and Paris, and was a founding member of the French communist party. In 1923, he visited Moscow for training at Comintern, an organisation created by Lenin to promote worldwide revolution. He travelled to southern China to organise a revolutionary movement among Vietnamese exiles, and in 1930 founded the Indo-Chinese Communist Party (ICP). He spent the 1930s in the Soviet Union and China.
After the Japanese invasion of Indo-China in 1941, Ho returned home and founded the Viet Minh, a communist-dominated independence movement, to fight the Japanese. He adopted the name Ho Chi Minh, meaning 'Bringer of Light'.
At the end of World War Two the Viet Minh announced Vietnamese independence. The French refused to relinquish their colony and in 1946, war broke out. After eight years of war, the French were forced to agree to peace talks in Geneva. The country was split into a communist north and non-communist south and Ho became president of North Vietnam. He was determined to reunite Vietnam under communist rule.
By the early 1960s, North Vietnamese-backed guerrillas, the Vietcong, were attacking the South Vietnamese government. Fearing the spread of communism, the United States provided increasing levels of support to South Vietnam. By 1965, large numbers of American troops were arriving and the fighting escalated into a major conflict.
Ho Chi Minh was in poor health from the mid-1960s and died on 2 September 1969. When the Communists took the South Vietnamese capital Saigon in 1975 they renamed it Ho Chi Minh City in his honour. (Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic...)
More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ho_Chi_Minh
http://spartacus-educational.com/VNho...
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/...
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/gener...
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/honor/pe...
by Philip Steele (no photo)
by Milton E. Osborne (no photo)
by Pierre Brocheux (no photo)
by Lady Borton (no photo)
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William J. Duiker
Alan Seeger
Alan Seeger (22 June 1888 – 4 July 1916) was an American poet who fought and died in World War I during the Battle of the Somme serving in the French Foreign Legion. Seeger was the uncle of American folk singer Pete Seeger, and was a classmate of T.S. Eliot at Harvard. He is most well known for having authored the poem, I Have a Rendezvous with Death, a favorite of President John F. Kennedy. A statue modeled after Seeger is found on the monument honoring fallen Americans who volunteered for France during the war, located at the Place des États-Unis, Paris. He is sometimes called the "American Rupert Brooke."
Born in New York on June 22, 1888, Seeger moved with his family to Staten Island at the age of one and remained there until the age of 10. In 1900, his family moved to Mexico for two years, which influenced the imagery of some of his poetry. His brother Charles Seeger, a noted pacifist and musicologist, was the father of the American folk singers Peter "Pete" Seeger, Mike Seeger, and Margaret "Peggy" Seeger.
Seeger entered Harvard in 1906 after attending several elite preparatory schools, including Hackley School.
At Harvard, he edited and wrote for the Harvard Monthly. Among his friends there (and afterward) was the American Communist John Reed, though the two had differing ideological views, and his Harvard class also included T.S. Eliot and Walter Lippmann, among others. After graduating in 1910, he moved to Greenwich Village for two years, where he wrote poetry and enjoyed the life of a young bohemian. During his time in Greenwich Village, he attended soirées at the Mlles. Petitpas' boardinghouse (319 West 29th Street), where the presiding genius was the artist and sage John Butler Yeats, father of the poet William Butler Yeats.
Having moved to the Latin Quarter of Paris to continue his seemingly itinerant intellectual lifestyle, on August 24, 1914, Seeger joined the French Foreign Legion so that he could fight for the Allies in World War I (the United States did not enter the war until 1917).
He was killed in action at Belloy-en-Santerre on July 4, 1916, famously cheering on his fellow soldiers in a successful charge after being hit several times by machine gun fire.
(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Seeger)
"I Have a Rendezvous with Death"
poem by Alan Seeger
I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air-
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.
It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath-
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.
God knows 'twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear...
But I've a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.
(Source: http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Re...)
More:
http://www.english.emory.edu/LostPoet...
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-hi...
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/a...
http://net.lib.byu.edu/estu/wwi/memoi...
http://www.scuttlebuttsmallchow.com/a...
by M. Paul Holsinger (no photo)
by Ann M. Pescatello (no photo)
by N. P. Dawson (no photo)
both by
Alan Seeger
Wow. Something in that gene pool, no?
Battle of Dien Bien Phu
The Battle of Dien Bien Phu was the decisive engagement in the first Indochina War (1946–54). After French forces occupied the Dien Bien Phu valley in late 1953, Viet Minh commander Vo Nguyen Giap amassed troops and placed heavy artillery in caves of the mountains overlooking the French camp. Boosted by Chinese aid, Giap mounted assaults on the opposition’s strong points beginning in March 1954, eliminating use of the French airfield. Viet Minh forces overran the base in early May, prompting the French government to seek an end to the fighting with the signing of the Geneva Accords of 1954.
The battle that settled the fate of French Indochina was initiated in November 1953, when Viet Minh forces at Chinese insistence moved to attack Lai Chau, the capital of the T’ai Federation (in Upper Tonkin), which was loyal to the French. As Peking had hoped, the French commander in chief in Indochina, General Henri Navarre, came out to defend his allies because he believed the T’ai “maquis” formed a significant threat in the Viet Minh “rear” (the T’ai supplied the French with opium that was sold to finance French special operations) and wanted to prevent a Viet Minh sweep into Laos. Because he considered Lai Chau impossible to defend, on November 20, Navarre launched Operation Castor with a paratroop drop on the broad valley of Dien Bien Phu, which was rapidly transformed into a defensive perimeter of eight strong points organized around an airstrip. When, in December 1953, the T’ais attempted to march out of Lai Chau for Dien Bien Phu, they were badly mauled by Viet Minh forces.
Viet Minh commander Vo Nguyen Giap,with considerable Chinese aide, massed troops and placed heavy artillery in caves in the mountains overlooking the French camp. On March 13, 1954, Giap launched a massive assault on strong point Beatrice, which fell in a matter of hours. Strong points Gabrielle and Anne-Marie were overrun during the next two days, which denied the French use of the airfield, the key to the French defense. Reduced to airdrops for supplies and reinforcement, unable to evacuate their wounded, under constant artillery bombardment, and at the extreme limit of air range, the French camp’s morale began to fray. As the monsoons transformed the camp from a dust bowl into a morass of mud, an increasing number of soldiers–almost four thousand by the end of the siege in May–deserted to caves along the Nam Yum River, which traversed the camp; they emerged only to seize supplies dropped for the defenders. The “Rats of Nam Yum” became POWs when the garrison surrendered on May 7th.
Despite these early successes, Giap’s offensives sputtered out before the tenacious resistance of French paratroops and legionnaires. On April 6, horrific losses and low morale among the attackers caused Giap to suspend his offensives. Some of his commanders, fearing U.S. air intervention, began to speak of withdrawal. Again, the Chinese, in search of a spectacular victory to carry to the Geneva talks scheduled for the summer, intervened to stiffen Viet Minh resolve: reinforcements were brought in, as were Katyusha multitube rocket launchers, while Chinese military engineers retrained the Viet Minh in siege tactics. When Giap resumed his attacks, human wave assaults were abandoned in favor of siege techniques that pushed forward webs of trenches to isolate French strong points. The French perimeter was gradually reduced until, on May 7, resistance ceased. The shock and agony of the dramatic loss of a garrison of around fourteen thousand men allowed French prime minister Pierre Mendes to muster enough parliamentary support to sign the Geneva Accords of July 1954, which essentially ended the French presence in Indochina. (Source: http://www.history.com/topics/battle-...)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_o...
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t...
http://www.historynet.com/battle-of-d...
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-2724...
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/...
by Ricky Balona (no photo)
by
John Keegan
by
Pierre Langlais
by
Howard R. Simpson
by
Bernard B. Fall
Mod
Martin hard to believe they were all compatriots.
St. Matthew's Cathedral
The Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington D.C., most commonly known as St. Matthew's Cathedral, is the seat of the Archbishop (currently Donald Cardinal Wuerl) of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington. As St. Matthew's Cathedral and Rectory, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.
The cathedral is located in downtown Washington at 1725 Rhode Island Avenue NW between Connecticut Avenue and 17th Street. The closest Metrorail station is Farragut North, on the Red Line.
St. Matthew's is dedicated to the Apostle Matthew, who among other things is patron saint of civil servants, having himself been a tax collector, and was established in 1840 as the fourth Catholic parish in the District of Columbia. Originally located at 15th and H Streets, construction of the current church began in 1893, with the first Mass being celebrated June 2, 1895. Construction continued until 1913 when the church was finally dedicated. In 1939, it became cathedral for the newly established Archdiocese of Washington.
The structure is constructed of red brick with sandstone and terra cotta trim in the Romanesque Revival style with Byzantine elements. Designed by architect C. Grant La Farge, it is in the shape of a Latin cross measuring 155 ft × 136 ft (47 m × 41 m) and seats about 1,200 persons. The interior is richly decorated in marble and semiprecious stones, notably a 35 ft (11 m) mosaic of Matthew behind the main altar by Edwin Blashfield. The cathedral is capped by an octagonal dome that extends 190 ft (58 m) above the nave and is capped by a cupola and crucifix that brings the total height to 200 ft (61 m). Both structural and decorative elements underwent extensive restoration between 2000 and September 21, 2003, the Feast day of St. Matthew.
The first notable funeral Mass offered there was for Philippine President Manuel L. Quezon, who died August 1, 1944, and was intered at Arlington National Cemetery until the end of World War II. In 1957, a Solemn Requiem Mass was offered at the cathedral for the funeral of Senator Joseph McCarthy; the liturgy was attended by 70 senators and hundreds of clergymen. The cathedral drew world attention on November 25, 1963, when Richard Cardinal Cushing, Archbishop of Boston and a Kennedy family friend, offered a recited (not sung) Pontifical Requiem Low Mass during the state funeral of President John F. Kennedy. Other notable events at the cathedral include a Mass celebrated by Pope John Paul II during his 1979 visit to Washington, D.C. and the 1997 funeral of U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice William J. Brennan, Jr..
The cathedral was also the site of a Lutheran funeral service for Chief Justice William Rehnquist on September 7, 2005.
St. Matthew's is the location for one of the most famous Red Masses in the world. Each year on the day before the term of the Supreme Court of the United States begins, Mass is celebrated to request guidance from the Holy Spirit for the legal profession. Owing to the Cathedral's location in the nation's capital, the Justices of the Supreme Court, members of Congress and the Cabinet, and many other dignitaries (including, at times, the President of the United States) attend the Mass.
Near the entry of the St. Francis Chapel is a burial crypt with eight tombs intended for Washington’s archbishops. Currently two former archbishops, Patrick Cardinal O’Boyle and James Cardinal Hickey, are interred here. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedra...)
More:
http://www.stmatthewscathedral.org/
http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/wash/dc5...
http://stmatthew.webhero.com/cathedra...
http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewe...
http://www.adw.org/parishes/search/pa...
(no image) Saints Alive!: A Book of Patron Saints by Enid Broderick Fisher(no photo)
by E. Jacquier (no photo)
Jesse Russell (no photo)
by Jesse Russell (no photo)
by Mina Rieur Weiner (no photo)
Mod
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I have been to Mass there on a couple of occasions. It is quite lovely.
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Theodore C. Sorensen with President John F. Kennedy in the Oval Office in 1961 - George Thames - New York Times
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Theodore C. Sorensen, 82, Kennedy Counselor, Dies
By TIM WEINER
Published: October 31, 2010
Theodore C. Sorensen, one of the last links to John F. Kennedy’s administration, a writer and counselor who did much to shape the president’s narrative, image and legacy, died Sunday in Manhattan. He was 82.
His death, at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, was from complications of a stroke he suffered a week ago, his wife, Gillian Sorensen, said.
Mr. Sorensen once said he suspected that the headline on his obituary would read “Theodore Sorenson, Kennedy Speechwriter,” misspelling his name and misjudging his work, but he was much more. He was a political strategist and a trusted adviser on everything from election tactics to foreign policy.
“You need a mind like Sorensen’s around you that’s clicking and clicking all the time,” Kennedy’s archrival, Richard M. Nixon, said in 1962. He said Mr. Sorensen had “a rare gift”: the knack of finding phrases that penetrated the American psyche.
He was best known for working with Kennedy on passages of soaring rhetoric, including the 1961 inaugural address proclaiming that “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans” and challenging citizens: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Mr. Sorensen drew on the Bible, the Gettysburg Address and the words of Thomas Jefferson and Winston Churchill as he helped hone and polish that speech.
First hired as a researcher by Kennedy, a newly elected senator from Massachusetts who took office in 1953, Mr. Sorensen collaborated closely — more closely than most knew — on “Profiles in Courage,” the 1956 book that won Kennedy a Pulitzer Prize and a national audience.
After the president’s assassination, Mr. Sorensen practiced law and politics. But in the public mind, his name was forever joined to the man he had served; his first task after leaving the White House was to recount the abridged administration’s story in a 783-page best seller simply titled “Kennedy.”
He held the title of special counsel, but Washington reporters of the era labeled him the president’s “intellectual alter ago” and “a lobe of Kennedy’s mind.” Mr. Sorensen called these exaggerations, but they were rooted in some truth.
Kennedy had plenty of yes-men. He needed a no-man from time to time. The president trusted Mr. Sorensen to play that role in crises foreign and domestic, and he played it well, in the judgment of Robert F. Kennedy, his brother’s attorney general. “If it was difficult,” Robert Kennedy said, “Ted Sorensen was brought in.”
Mr. Sorensen was proudest of a work written in haste, under crushing pressure. In October 1962, when he was 34 years old, he drafted a letter from Kennedy to the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, which helped end the Cuban missile crisis. After the Kennedy administration’s failed coup against Fidel Castro at the Bay of Pigs, the Soviets had sent nuclear weapons to Cuba. They were capable of striking most American cities, including New York and Washington.
“Time was short,” Mr. Sorensen remembered in an interview with The New York Times that was videotaped to accompany this obituary. “The hawks were rising. Kennedy could keep control of his own government, but one never knew whether the advocates of bombing and invasion might somehow gain the upper hand.”
Mr. Sorensen said, “I knew that any mistakes in my letter — anything that angered or soured Khrushchev — could result in the end of America, maybe the end of the world.”
The letter pressed for a peaceful solution. The Soviets withdrew the missiles. The world went on.
Theodore Chaikin Sorensen was born in Lincoln, Neb., on May 8, 1928 — Harry S. Truman’s 44th birthday, as he was fond of noting. He described himself as a distinct minority: “a Danish Russian Jewish Unitarian.” He was the son of Christian A. Sorensen, a lawyer, and Annis Chaikin, a social worker, pacifist and feminist. His father, a Republican who had named him after Teddy Roosevelt, ran for public office for the first time that year; he served as Nebraska’s attorney general from 1929 to 1933.
Lincoln, the state capital, was named for the 16th president. Near the Statehouse stood a statue of Abraham Lincoln and a slab with the full text of the Gettysburg Address. As a child, Mr. Sorensen read it over and over. The Capitol itself held engraved quotations; one he remembered was “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”
Mr. Sorensen earned undergraduate and law degrees at the University of Nebraska and, on July 1, 1951, at the age of 23, he left Lincoln to seek his fortune in Washington. He knew no one. He had no appointments, phone numbers or contacts. Except for a hitchhiking trip to Texas, he had never left the Midwest. He had never had a cup of coffee or written a check.
Eighteen months later, after short stints as a junior government lawyer, he was hired by John F. Kennedy, the new Democratic senator from Massachusetts. Kennedy was “young, good-looking, glamorous, rich, a war hero, a Harvard graduate,” Mr. Sorensen recalled. The new hire was none of those, save young. They quickly found that they shared political ideals and values.
“When he first hired me,” Mr. Sorensen recalled, Kennedy said, “ ‘I want you to put together a legislative program for the economic revival of New England.’ ” Kennedy’s first three speeches on the Senate floor — late in the evening, when nobody was around — presented the program Mr. Sorensen proposed.
Kennedy made his mark with “Profiles in Courage,” published in January 1956. It was no great secret that Mr. Sorensen’s intellect was an integral part of the book. “I’ve tried to keep it a secret,” he said jokingly in his interview with The Times. But Mr. Sorensen drafted most of the chapters, and Kennedy paid him for his work. “I’m proud to say I played an important role,” Mr. Sorensen said.
He spent most of the next four years working to make his boss the president of the United States. “We traveled together to all 50 states,” Mr. Sorensen wrote in his book “Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History,” a memoir published in 2008, “most of them more than once, initially just the two of us.” There was no entourage until Kennedy won the Democratic nomination in 1960. It was not clear at the outset that he could do that, much less capture the White House.
“It was only after we had crisscrossed the country and began to build support at the grass roots, largely unrecognized in Washington, where Kennedy was dismissed as being too young, too Catholic, too little known, too inexperienced,” Mr. Sorensen said in the interview.
In those travels, Mr. Sorensen found his own voice as well as Kennedy’s. “Everything evolved during those three-plus years that we were traveling the country together,” he said. “He became a much better speaker. I became much more equipped to write speeches for him. Day after day after day after day, he’s up there on the platform speaking, and I’m sitting in the audience listening, and I find out what works and what doesn’t, what fits his style.”
The Kennedy White House was never a Camelot: “Neither Kennedy nor any of us who worked with him were mythical characters who had magical powers,” Mr. Sorensen said, “and we obviously had our share of mistakes.” But Mr. Sorensen was not ashamed to say he worshipped Kennedy. He was devastated by his assassination in November 1963.
“It was a feeling of hopelessness,” he said, “of anger, of bitterness. That there was nothing we could do. There was nothing I could do.”
For more than 40 years after he left the White House, Mr. Sorensen practiced law, mostly as a senior partner at the New York firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. He counseled leaders like Nelson Mandela of South Africa and Anwar Sadat of Egypt.
His life went on, in public and private; he was writing and making speeches well past his 80th birthday. But it was never the same.
In 1970, two years after Senator Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated on the presidential campaign trail, Mr. Sorensen ran for the Senate seat that Robert Kennedy had held in New York. The run was a mistake, he conceded. “I simply thought that if I were to carry on the Kennedy legacy, if I were to perpetuate the ideals of John Kennedy, as Robert Kennedy tried to do, that I would need to be in public office,” he said. “Frankly, it was an act of hubris on my part.”
In December 1976, out of the blue, President-elect Jimmy Carter offered Mr. Sorensen the post of director of central intelligence.
“I had to make a very quick decision,” Mr. Sorensen remembered. “I did not know whether a lawyer and a moralist was suitable for a position that presides over all kinds of law-breaking and immoral activities. But I wanted to be involved. I wanted to be back in government at a position where I could help things in a sound and progressive way, and so I said, ‘Yes, I accept.’ ”
Opponents of the nomination pointed out a potential problem. More than 30 years before, after the end of World War II, Mr. Sorensen, not yet 18, had registered with his draft board as a conscientious objector to combat. President-elect Carter’s top aide, Hamilton Jordan, placed an angry call to Mr. Sorensen, asking why he had not mentioned this suddenly salient fact before accepting the nomination.
“I said, ‘I didn’t know that the C.I.A. director was supposed to kill anybody,’ ” Mr. Sorensen recalled. “He wasn’t too happy with that answer.”
The nomination was withdrawn. That ended Mr. Sorensen’s ambition to return to work in Washington.
A stroke in 2001 took away much of his eyesight, but afterward Mr. Sorensen continued to lead “a very full life, speaking, writing, creating new enterprises and mentoring many young people,” his wife said.
Mr. Sorensen remained active in Democratic politics and took a particular liking to a freshman senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, when he arrived in Washington in 2005. When Mr. Obama began running for president two years later, Mr. Sorensen endorsed his candidacy and campaigned across the country, particularly to audiences who were opposed to the Iraq war.
“It reminds me of the way the young, previously unknown J. F. K. took off,” Mr. Sorensen said in an interview with The Times in 2007.
A year after Mr. Obama took office, Mr. Sorensen acknowledged frustration with his presidency, particularly the decision to send more troops to Afghanistan, a conflict that he called “Obama’s Vietnam.” But, Mr. Sorensen said, “The foreign policy problems are more difficult than they were in Kennedy’s day.”
“I still think it was amazing that a man with his skin color — and also he was a liberal Democrat, let’s face it — was elected,” Mr. Sorensen said in a 2009 interview in his Manhattan apartment, where a photograph of Mr. Obama joined a tableau of images from the Kennedy administration. “I haven’t the slightest doubt that there are a lot of white men who still find it difficult to accept the fact, the reality, that we have a black president in this country.”
President Obama said Sunday in a statement, “I know his legacy will live on in the words he wrote, the causes he advanced, and the hearts of anyone who is inspired by the promise of a new frontier.”
Mr. Sorensen’s 1949 marriage to Camilla Palmer and his 1964 marriage to Sara Elbery ended in divorce. In 1969 he married Gillian Martin. Besides his wife, he is survived by their daughter, Juliet Sorensen Jones; three sons from his first marriage, Eric, Stephen and Phil; a sister, Ruth Singer; a brother, Phillip; and seven grandchildren.
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Despite his stroke in 2001 and his diminishing eyesight, Mr. Sorensen worked on and completed “Counselor,” his memoir, over the next six years. “I still believe that the mildest and most obscure of Americans can be rescued from oblivion by good luck, sudden changes in fortune, sudden encounters with heroes,” he concluded. “I believe it because I lived it.”
Jeff Zeleny and Joseph Berger contributed reporting.
Trustee of The Century Foundation from 1984 until his death in 2010. He served as assistant to Senator John F. Kennedy and special counsel to President Kennedy. A senior partner of the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison, Sorenson was the author of numerous books, including Kennedy: The Classic Biography, and Watchmen in the Night: Presidential Accountability after Watergate
He wrote about The Century Foundation:
“TCF is strictly non-partisan. We are not the handmaiden of any political party, candidate or movement. But we are not neutral. We care about people, we care about our country and our planet, and we care about the power of progressive, well-reasoned, well-researched ideas. We believe, with liberalism under siege, that those ideas are needed now more than ever.”
THEODORE SORENSEN
Century Foundation Trustee, 1984-2010; Chairman of the Board, 1994 to 1999
by Theodore C. Sorensen (no photo)
by Theodore C. Sorensen (no photo)
by Theodore C. Sorensen (no photo)
by Theodore C. Sorensen (no photo)
by Theodore C. Sorensen (no photo)
Tim WeinerSource for the above two posts - The New York Times
Pablo Casals
Pau Casals i Defilló (December 29, 1876 – October 22, 1973), known during his professional career as Pablo Casals, was a Spanish Catalan cellist and conductor. He is generally regarded as the pre-eminent cellist of the first half of the 20th century, and one of the greatest cellists of all time. He made many recordings throughout his career, of solo, chamber, and orchestral music, also as conductor, but he is perhaps best remembered for the recordings of the Bach Cello Suites he made from 1936 to 1939.
Casals was born in El Vendrell, Catalonia, Spain. His father, Carles Casals i Ribes (1852–1908), was a parish organist and choirmaster. He gave Casals instruction in piano, song, violin, and organ. He was also a very strict disciplinarian. When Casals was young his father would pull the piano out from the wall and have him and his brother, Artur, stand behind it and name the notes and the scales that his father was playing. At the age of four Casals could play the violin, piano and flute; at the age of six he played the violin well enough to perform a solo in public. His first encounter with a cello-like instrument was from witnessing a local traveling Catalan musician, who played a cello-strung broom handle. Upon request, his father built him a crude cello, using a gourd as a sound-box. When Casals was eleven, he first heard the real cello performed by a group of traveling musicians, and decided to dedicate himself to the instrument.[citation needed]
In 1888 his mother, Pilar Defilló de Casals, who was born in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico of Catalonian ancestry, took him to Barcelona, where he enrolled in the Escola Municipal de Música. There he studied cello, theory, and piano. In 1890, when he was 13, he discovered in a second-hand sheet music store in Barcelona a tattered copy of Bach's six cello suites. He spent the next 13 years practicing them every day before he would perform them in public for the first time. Casals would later make his own version of the six suites. He made prodigious progress as a cellist; on February 23, 1891 he gave a solo recital in Barcelona at the age of fourteen. He graduated from the Escola with honours five years later.
Casals appeared in the 1958 documentary film Windjammer. In the 1960s, Casals gave many master classes throughout the world in places such as Gstaad, Zermatt, Tuscany, Berkeley, and Marlboro (where he also conducted and recorded unique versions of the six Brandenburg Concerti. Several of these master classes were televised.
In 1961, he performed at the White House by invitation of President Kennedy. This performance was recorded and released as an album.
Casals was also a composer. Perhaps his most effective work is La Sardana, for an ensemble of cellos, which he composed in 1926. His oratorio El Pessebre was performed for the first time in Acapulco, Mexico, on December 17, 1960. He also presented it to the United Nations during their anniversary in 1963. He was initiated as an honorary member of the Epsilon Iota Chapter of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia music fraternity at The Florida State University in 1963. He was later awarded the fraternity's Charles E. Lutton Man of Music Award in 1973.
One of his last compositions was the "Hymn of the United Nations". He conducted its first performance in a special concert at the United Nations on October 24, 1971, two months before his 95th birthday. On that day, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, U Thant, awarded Pablo Casals the U.N. Peace Medal in recognition of his stance for peace, justice and freedom. Casals accepted the medal and made his famous "I am a Catalan" speech, where he stated that Catalonia had the first democratic parliament, long before England did.
In 1973, invited by his friend Isaac Stern, Casals arrived at Jerusalem to conduct the youth orchestra and the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra. The concert he conducted with the youth orchestra at the Jerusalem Khan Theater was the last concert he conducted in his life.
Casals' memoirs were taken down by Albert E. Kahn, and published as Joys and Sorrows: Pablo Casals, His Own Story (1970).
Casals died in 1973 in San Juan, Puerto Rico, at the age of 96 and was buried at the Puerto Rico National Cemetery. He did not live to see the end of the Franco dictatorial regime, but he was posthumously honoured by the Spanish government under King Juan Carlos I which in 1976 issued a commemorative postage stamp depicting Casals, in honour of the centenary of his birth. In 1979 his remains were interred in his hometown of El Vendrell, Catalonia. In 1989, Casals was posthumously awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Ca...)
More:
http://pablocasals.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX1Yt...
http://www.notablebiographies.com/Ca-...
http://www.cello.org/casals/casals.htm
http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Bio/Casa...
http://www.npr.org/2011/11/23/1427004...
(no image) Pablo Casals by Robert Baldock (no photo)
(no image) Pablo Casals : A Biography by H. L Kirk (no photo)
(no image) Conversations with Casals by Joseph Maria Corredor (no photo)
(no image) Pablo Casals by Lillian Littlehales (no photo)
(no image) Song of the Birds: Sayings, Stories, and Impressions of Pablo Casals by Julian Lloyd Webber (no photo)
by Pablo Casals (no photo)
by David Blum (no photo)
by David Goodnough (no photo)
by Arnold Cheyney (no photo)
by
Eric Siblin
Cardinal Richard James Cushing
On Aug. 24, 1895, Mary (Dahill) Cushing, the wife of Patrick Cushing, gave birth to Richard James Cushing, the third of their five children, in South Boston. Patrick and Mary Cushing were Irish immigrants, he from the village of Glanworth, in County Cork, and she from Tooraneena, a village in County Waterford. Their marriage took place on Oct. 13, 1890 in Gate of Heaven Parish and was witnessed by Father Patrick M. O'Connor. Patrick was employed by the Boston Elevated Railway and Mary was listed as a domestic in the marriage register.
Young Richard attended Perry Public Grammar School, graduating in 1909. He then enrolled in South Boston High School, but his truancy caused him to drop out of school during his freshman year. He then enrolled in Boston College High School and graduated in 1913 with honors in Greek and Latin.
The separation of Boston College High School from Boston College took place in 1913, with the high school remaining in Boston's South End while the college moved to Chestnut Hill. Upon graduating from high school, Richard entered Boston College. He enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1915 but shortly thereafter he was given a medical discharge. Upon finishing his sophomore year at Boston College, he entered St. John's Seminary in September 1915 to begin his studies for the priesthood.
Richard James Cushing was ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of Boston on May 26, 1921 in the Cathedral of the Holy Cross by William Henry Cardinal O'Connell, Archbishop of Boston. Among his assignments, he served briefly as parochial vicar at St. Patrick Church in Roxbury. He also served as parochial vicar at St. Benedict Church in Somerville and, when auxiliary bishop, as pastor of Sacred Heart Church in Newton.
Barely a year after ordination, Father Cushing approached Cardinal O'Connell with a request to become a missionary. Cardinal O'Connell's reply was to name him assistant director of the archdiocesan office of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. He served in that position from 1922 to 1929 when he was appointed the director, a position he retained even after his nomination as auxiliary bishop.
The year 1939 was a year of immense change for Father Cushing. On May 14, 1939 he was named a domestic prelate with the title of Right Reverend Monsignor. Less than a month later, Msgr. Cushing was appointed Titular Bishop of Mela and Auxiliary Bishop of Boston. He received episcopal ordination on June 29, 1939 in the Cathedral of the Holy Cross from the hands of Cardinal O'Connell who was assisted by Bishop John Bertram Peterson of Manchester and the Most Reverend Thomas Addis Emmet, SJ, Titular Bishop of Tuscamia and Vicar Apostolic of Jamaica.
Bishop Cushing chose Ut cognoscant Te (That they may know Thee) from Jesus' discourse at the Last Supper as recorded in the Gospel of St. John (John 17:3) as his episcopal motto. As priest, bishop, and cardinal, he constantly strove to enable others to know God, spreading the Gospel at home and abroad.
Upon the death of Cardinal O'Connell in April 1944, Bishop Cushing was elected administrator of the Archdiocese of Boston, sede vacante. On Sept. 25, 1944, Pope Pius XII promoted Bishop Cushing to the Metropolitan See of Boston. He was installed as Archbishop of Boston on Nov. 8, 1944 and received the pallium on April 7, 1946. On June 11, 1954, Pope Pius XII bestowed a further honor on Archbishop Cushing, naming him an Assistant at the Pontifical Throne.
Blessed Pope John XXIII created him a cardinal priest in the consistory of Dec. 15, 1958. Cardinal Cushing received the red hat and was assigned the title of the Church of Santa Susanna on Dec. 18, 1958 and took possession of Santa Susanna on Dec. 20, 1958.
He served as papal legate to national Eucharistic congresses in Peru (1960) and Bolivia (1961) and for the consecration of the Cathedral of the Diocese of Galway in March 1965.
Cardinal Cushing attended all four sessions of the Second Vatican Council. He was a key figure in the drafting and passage of the conciliar Declaration Nostra Aetate, the Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, especially section four on relations with the Jews. He was committed to ecumenism and supported the renewal in the Church as enunciated in the documents of the Council.
During the years of his service as Archbishop of Boston, he authored several works. Among them were ''Sing to the Lord;'' a collection of approved Catholic hymns and prayers (1946); ''That they may know Thee:'' selected writings on vocations (1956); ''Eternal Thoughts from Christ the Teacher'' (1961); and three biographical tomes: ''Pope Pius XII'' (1959); ''St. Martin de Porres'' (1962); and ''Blessed Mother Seton'' (1963).
Cardinal Cushing's well-known love for the missions was evidenced by his founding of the Missionary Society of St. James the Apostle in 1958. It is an international organization of diocesan priests who volunteer for a minimum of five years of service in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru.
During his episcopate, he was the principal ordaining bishop of at least nineteen bishops. Among them were nine missionary bishops including Archbishop George Hamilton Pearce, SM, and Bishop William John McNaughton, MM. He was also principal co-ordaining bishop of at least five bishops.
Among the many priests he ordained, at least six were raised to the episcopacy including Archbishop Pearce and Bishops John Boles, Francis X. Irwin, John McCormack, and John Dooher.
Cardinal Cushing was a personal friend of the Kennedy family. He witnessed the marriage of John. F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier in 1953. He attended President Kennedy's inauguration in 1961 and delivered the invocation. In November 1963, he had the sad duty of celebrating the funeral Mass for President Kennedy at Washington's St. Matthew Cathedral.
Cardinal Cushing's resignation as Archbishop of Boston was accepted on Sept. 8, 1970. He died of cancer in Boston on Nov. 2, 1970 and is buried in the Portiuncula Chapel at St. Coletta School for Exceptional Children in Hanover.
(Source: http://www.thebostonpilot.com/article...)
More:
http://www.ccwatershed.org/blog/2013/...
http://www.catholic-hierarchy.org/bis...
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.co...
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/edit...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_...
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/197...
(no image) Salt Of The Earth, An Informal Portrait of Richard Cardinal Cushing by John H. Fenton (no photo)
(no image) Cushing of Boston: A Candid Portrait by Joseph Dever (no photo)
by Christopher Andersen (no photo)
by Richard James Cushing (no photo)
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Edward M. Kennedy
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Theodore C. Sorensen
Source: National Endowment for the Humanities
Speechwriter Samuel Rosenman helped coin Franklin Roosevelt’s phrase, “a new deal.” Speechwriter Peggy Noonan assisted Ronald Reagan in drafting his 1984 Pointe du Hoc speech and his farewell address to the nation in which he described his vision of “the shining city.” But no speechwriter and president have been more closely linked together than Theodore Sorensen and John F. Kennedy.
Sorensen began working for Kennedy when he was a senator in the 1950s, and became one of his most trusted confidants and his most talented wordsmith. On the surface, Kennedy and Sorensen were a bit of a mismatch.
Sorensen had arrived in Washington from Lincoln, Nebraska; a Unitarian with a Jewish mother, he was also a progressive activist. He had helped organize a branch of the Congress of Racial Equality in Lincoln and fought to integrate Lincoln’s municipal swimming pool and the dormitories at the University of Nebraska.
Kennedy, an Irish-Catholic Bostonian, had family money, and his father, Joe, had groomed him to run for national office. More cautious and pragmatic than Sorensen, Kennedy nonetheless embraced his young aide’s sharp mind, skilled pen, and fierce loyalty. In 1957, Sorensen emerged as what author and journalist Robert Schlesinger called JFK’s “chief political strategist and main traveling companion.”
Sorensen became a political jack-of-all-trades—building an extensive list of Kennedy’s supporters while laying the foundation for his 1960 White House run. While visiting all fifty states, the men formed an intense bond. As Sorensen later told Schlesinger, when reporters claimed that Sorensen was inside Kennedy’s mind and could finish his sentences, they weren’t completely exaggerating. Sorensen replied, “There is something to that. That’s a tremendous advantage for a speechwriter to know his boss’s mind as well as I did.”
When Kennedy won the White House, he asked Sorensen to assemble suggestions for the inaugural address. Ultimately, the speech, as author Thurston Clarke has argued, represented “a distillation of [JFK’s] experiences, philosophy, and character”; Kennedy was the speech’s chief author and its most important architect. Sorensen, however, also helped shape the address now regarded as one of the twentieth century’s most inspiring pieces of presidential oratory.
He drew ideas from John Kenneth Galbraith, Adlai Stevenson, and others—and provided Kennedy with drafts of the address. More importantly, as Schlesinger astutely says, the inaugural speech had “campaign antecedents” and reflected the influence of Sorensen, speechwriter Richard Goodwin, and their countless conversations with and observations of Kennedy on the trail.
“It isn’t all that important who wrote which word or which phrase in Kennedy’s inaugural,” Sorensen told Schlesinger. “What’s important are the themes and the principles that he laid out.”
Kennedy’s inaugural established Sorensen’s reputation as a brilliant scribe; the language and themes of that address have resonated through the decades down to our own times. Kennedy sketched a vision of America’s idealistic role in the world as the great defender of freedom—a nation eager to “pay any price, bear any burden” to stop communism from spreading across the globe.
Kennedy’s inaugural also included an eloquent call to serve America: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country” was the speech’s historic, inspiring line. Kennedy declared that “a new generation of Americans” had taken the torch and would carry it in defense of “freedom in its hour of maximum danger.”
Kennedy and Sorensen’s address featured soaring optimism and a message of national unity and international strength. Sorensen’s historical importance shouldn’t be diminished or underestimated. He was then, and remains now, one of Kennedy’s most loyal defenders—the keeper of the flame. In addition to practicing international law as a senior partner at a private firm based in New York for thirty-six years, Sorensen published a 1965 bestseller, Kennedy, and seven other books, including his memoirs, Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History, in 2008. He recounts working with JFK on Profiles in Courage, advising him on the Cuban Missile Crisis and other challenges, and observing the president grapple with issues ranging from civil rights to arms control.
But Sorensen’s speechwriting achievements remain possibly his most crucial legacy. Early criticism of mass politics in the 1950s predicted that television would demean the importance of rhetoric in public life. Critics often fretted that politicians’ use of television would weaken the grip of reason and rationality on the body politic; television would prioritize images, artifice, and deception above all else, thereby staining America’s democracy.
Sorensen’s words clearly demonstrate that even at the dawn of the television age, language had the capacity to inspire hope, calm public concerns, frame policy choices, and rally Americans in support of a cause. Television—and other modern communication tools—have heightened instead of diminished the political impact of presidential oratory, and Sorensen’s career highlights this.
Finally, Sorensen’s role as Kennedy’s alter ego and chief speechwriter reveals White House speechwriting as an influential craft. Since at least Sorensen’s time, all presidents have benefited from having close-knit relationships with their speechwriters. Working together, presidents and their scribes have communicated to the American people about wars in Vietnam and Iraq, economic crises at home, the September 11 terrorist attacks, health care, energy, and countless other issues, crises, national challenges and opportunities. As possibly the most successful and influential speechwriter in modern times, Sorensen has inspired his successors in that office, set the bar high for them and their bosses, and provided a model of how a president and a speechwriter can use language to shape the nation’s agenda—and influence the course of history.
By Matthew Dallek
Matthew Dallek, a former speechwriter for Richard A. Gephardt, is a visiting scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center and the author of The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan’s First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics.
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by
Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief
(last edited Dec 24, 2014 07:35AM)
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rated it 4 stars
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Ireland mourns for Kennedy
President John F. Kennedy’s funeral took place on 25 November. While the Irish cadets were in Washington at the Kennedy graveside, a national day of mourning was declared in Ireland. Businesses, shops and schools were closed, and religious services took place across Ireland.
Crowds outside the Pro-Cathedral in Dublin for the Kennedy memorial service 25 November 1963
In Dublin, the main service took place in the Pro-Cathedral. Among the mourners were Bean Sinead De Valera, the Taoiseach Seán Lemass, Jack Lynch, and Col. Sean Brennan, Aide-de-Camp. A US flag was flown at half-mast outside the Pro-Cathedral as a mark of respect.
A video from the RTÉ archive shows that it was not just the Catholic majority of the Irish society that participated in the mourning, but all sections of society. The video shows people filing into the Irish Hebrew Centre for a memorial service there.
Afterwards, the Kennedy homestead became a museum dedicated to Kennedy’s visit and the Kennedy family. A memorial park was set up in New Ross, and a bust was unveiled in US Embassy by Ted Sorensen, Kennedy’s speechwriter, and his wife, Sara Elbery, then just newly married. It was Sorensen that worked with Kennedy on the landmark speech he gave to both Houses of the Oireachtas during his visit in June 1963.
Ted Sorensen and his wife Sara, with the US ambassador Matt McCluskey, for the unveiling of the Kennedy bust 7 June 1964 (note this Ted Sorensen's second wife - it appears his first marriage fell apart at the time Kennedy was assassinated)
Source: Irish Archives - http://irishphotoarchive.blogspot.com...
For anyone interested, I love using the Miller Center at UVA as I read through history books. They have an archive of speeches for each President, and it helps me to picture that time when I can watch the speech. Here is the archive for LBJ, which covers our time period in this book:
http://millercenter.org/president/spe...
And here is their comprehensive page on LBJ, with links to other resources:
http://millercenter.org/president/lbj...
Jason wrote: "For anyone interested, I love using the Miller Center at UVA as I read through history books. They have an archive of speeches for each President, and it helps me to picture that time when I can wa..."What a great resource, Jason! So glad you shared it.
Thank you, Jason. I agree; the picture completes the speech.
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Lyndon Johnson was a very complex human being, with lots of faults but also great talents. This is an interesting article from the magazine of the University of Texas alumni association, titled "Cruel to Be Kind, LBJ Behind the Scenes:"http://alcalde.texasexes.org/2012/02/...
The article contains excerpts from Indomitable Will: LBJ in the Presidencyby Mark Updegrove, the director of the Johnson library and museum.
It contains many quotes from the people who worked for Johnson. He was a Type A workaholic who drove himself night and day. He expected the same hours from his staff, and he could be crude and rude. However, his staff also felt exhilarated to be working on his very important legislative program. Several said that he treated them like family, and at times he could be very generous.
by Mark Updegrove (no picture)
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http://history.house.gov/Exhibitions-...
Source: The House of Representatives Archive
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http://history.house.gov/Exhibitions-...
Eugene McCarthy
McCarthy, Eugene (29 Mar. 1916-10 Dec. 2005), politician, was born in Watkins, Minnesota, to Michael J. McCarthy, a farmer, and Anna Baden. The family was staunchly Roman Catholic, and the bookish young McCarthy was educated at Catholic institutions in nearby Collegeville: first at St. John's Preparatory School and then at St. John's University, where he studied philosophy and social science. As a youth McCarthy excelled both in sports--ice hockey and baseball--and as a student. Early on he displayed the thoughtful persona and somewhat aloof and often moody demeanor that would later characterize his years in public life.
After graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1935, McCarthy taught social science in secondary schools while pursuing graduate work in sociology at the University of Minnesota. In 1940 he was awarded a master's degree and returned to St. John's University as an instructor of economics and education. As a young man McCarthy had often expressed a desire to become a monk, but he finally chose not to after spending nine months as a novitiate at St. John's Abbey in Collegeville during the early 1940s.
In 1945 McCarthy married Abigail Quigley, a writer; they had four children. The couple separated in the late 1960s but apparently never divorced. The marriage ended with Quigley's death in 2001.
At the time of his marriage McCarthy joined the sociology faculty at the College of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. He also became active in local politics as a member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, a liberal group in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. By 1948 McCarthy had emerged as a likely candidate for public office, and that year he was named by the party to run as its candidate for the Fourth Congressional District. He won the election in November and went on to serve five terms in the U.S. House of Representatives.
McCarthy's decade-long tenure as a Minnesota congressman was marked by his outspoken opposition to U.S. senator Joseph McCarthy, a demagogic anticommunist crusader from neighboring Wisconsin. Congressman McCarthy's willingness to stand up to Senator McCarthy and to criticize his tactics earned him widespread admiration and political support, as did his firm endorsement of legislation to aid farmers and wage earners. In 1958 he was elected to the U.S. Senate, joiningHubert H. Humphrey, the senior senator and fellow liberal from Minnesota. His supporters' campaign chant, "Gene, not Joe!"--to differentiate the liberal McCarthy from the eponymous anticommunist crusader--would remain associated with him throughout his political life.
At the 1960 Democratic National Convention, held in Los Angeles, McCarthy attracted national attention when he made a riveting speech nominating Adlai E. Stevenson for president. McCarthy's stirring rhetoric did not succeed in gaining Stevenson a third nomination, but it was one of the most memorable events of the convention.
As a U.S. senator McCarthy initially established a reputation as a dependable liberal who could be counted on by the Democratic leadership to vote with the party. He was a declared supporter of moderate social reform and focused on evergreen domestic issues, including unemployment. However, his professorial demeanor and wry wit, as well as a penchant for writing poetry, set him apart from other politicians in Washington, D.C. In 1964 President Lyndon Johnson briefly considered choosing McCarthy as his running mate but opted instead for McCarthy's fellow senator, the far more gregarious Hubert Humphrey. McCarthy easily won reelection to the Senate in the Democratic landslide that year.
By 1965 the United States was becoming more deeply involved in the escalating civil war in Vietnam. McCarthy increasingly criticized the Johnson administration for its pro-war policies, and in doing so he became something of a maverick within the Democratic Party. In 1966, as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he was especially critical of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, controversial legislation passed in 1964 by both houses of Congress that gave the president unlimited authority to use U.S. military force in Southeast Asia.
As a nationwide antiwar movement gained momentum, McCarthy emerged as a thoughtful critic of a broad spectrum of issues related to U.S. foreign policy. He deplored Johnson's failure to work with the Senate on international issues and voiced concern over what he viewed as the excessive influence of the Central Intelligence Agency. He also tried to reduce American arms sales to foreign nations. In his 1967 book, The Limits of Power: America's Role in the World, McCarthy urged the United States to act with greater prudence and caution in international affairs and called for an end to repeated American intervention abroad.
The Limits of Power may have been an early signal that McCarthy himself had presidential aspirations, though he made no overt effort to become a candidate. By early 1968, however, he had emerged as the undeclared leader of a national "Dump Johnson" movement among antiwar activists. McCarthy somewhat diffidently acceded to the wishes of his supporters and a national campaign was organized.
McCarthy duly allowed himself to be entered in several state presidential primaries, beginning with New Hampshire on 12 March. Cadres of college students volunteered for his campaign and went door-to-door seeking support. The self-styled "Children's Crusade" adopted "Clean for Gene" as its motto: bandannas, tie-dyed T-shirts, torn jeans, and other hippie attire were exchanged for ties and pressed khakis or trim skirts and sweaters. McCarthy went on to win 42 percent of the vote to Johnson's 49 percent, convincing skeptics that he could secure the nomination. Several weeks later, on 31 March, Johnson stunned much of the country with his announcement that he would not seek reelection.
On 2 April McCarthy's candidacy received another boost when he won the Wisconsin primary. However, he was soon being challenged by Vice President Humphrey and by Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York. Kennedy, unlike Humphrey, also declared himself an antiwar, anti-Johnson candidate. As a former attorney general and a younger brother of the assassinated President John F. Kennedy, he was able to assemble an extensive and well-funded campaign network virtually overnight.
Humphrey chose not to enter the primaries, resulting in what became a personality contest between McCarthy and Kennedy. McCarthy could not come close to matching Kennedy in either financial support or charismatic appeal, and he lost the Indiana primary to Kennedy on 7 May. A week later he lost to Kennedy in Nebraska.
Disgruntled McCarthy supporters accused Kennedy of being an underhanded spoiler who had entered the presidential race only after McCarthy's efforts had revealed Johnson's vulnerability and provoked him to withdraw. McCarthy supporters nevertheless soldiered on and managed to defeat Kennedy in the Oregon primary, held on 15 May.
Over the next few weeks the two candidates vied for votes in the crucial California primary, scheduled for 4 June. McCarthy supporters were disappointed when their candidate did not react more vigorously to Kennedy's aggressive--and, many thought, ethically questionable--attacks during a televised debate on 1 June. Kennedy won the primary three days later, though only by 5 percentage points, but shortly after delivering a victory speech in Los Angeles he was shot; he died on 6 June.
McCarthy went on to win the New York primary on 18 June, but he seemed increasingly disengaged on the campaign trail. Humphrey, meanwhile, was steadily increasing his support among rank-and-file Democrats who continued to back U.S. participation in the Vietnam conflict. By the time of the Democratic convention in Chicago in August, Humphrey had amassed enough delegate votes to virtually assure his victory over McCarthy, and he was nominated on the first ballot.
The convention was marked by violent confrontations between police and antiwar demonstrators, and ill will between the pro- and antiwar factions within the Democratic Party continued during the fall campaign. McCarthy refused to declare his support for Humphrey until 29 October, only after Humphrey announced that he would, as president, stop bombing North Vietnam. Five days later Humphrey was narrowly defeated by Richard M. Nixon.
By this time McCarthy had announced he would not run for reelection to the Senate in 1970. During his remaining two years in office he wrote another book, The Year of the People (1969), an account of the 1968 presidential campaign. After leaving office he remained active as a lecturer and writer while still keeping a hand in politics. In 1972 he tried again, halfheartedly and ultimately unsuccessfully, to secure the Democratic nomination for president. In 1976 he ran for president as an independent candidate but received less than one percent of the vote.
McCarthy tried and failed to be reelected to the U.S. Senate in 1982. Six years later he made another failed bid for the presidency as a candidate of the Consumers Party. In 1992 he announced that he was once again a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, but he attracted only minor support.
McCarthy wrote more than two dozen books during his lifetime, beginning with Frontiers in American Democracy (1960). Many were about politics; he also published children's books and volumes of poetry. Up 'til Now: A Memoir appeared in 1987. In his final years McCarthy suffered from Parkinson's disease. He died at an assisted-living facility in Washington, D.C.
(Source: http://www.anb.org/articles/15/15-013...)
More:
http://www.csbsju.edu/mccarthy-center...
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/rfk/peop...
http://www.jofreeman.com/photos/McCar...
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/st...
http://www.legacy.com/ns/eugene-mccar...
(no cover)Almost to the Presidency: A Biography of Two American Politicians by Albert Eisele(no photo)
by George Rising(no photo)
by
Dominic Sandbrook
by
Eugene J. McCarthy
by
Eugene J. McCarthy
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The Great Depression
The Great Depression (1929-39) was the deepest and longest-lasting economic downturn in the history of the Western industrialized world. In the United States, the Great Depression began soon after the stock market crash of October 1929, which sent Wall Street into a panic and wiped out millions of investors. Over the next several years, consumer spending and investment dropped, causing steep declines in industrial output and rising levels of unemployment as failing companies laid off workers. By 1933, when the Great Depression reached its nadir, some 13 to 15 million Americans were unemployed and nearly half of the country’s banks had failed. Though the relief and reform measures put into place by President Franklin D. Roosevelt helped lessen the worst effects of the Great Depression in the 1930s, the economy would not fully turn around until after 1939, when World War II kicked American industry into high gear.
THE GREAT DEPRESSION BEGINS: THE STOCK MARKET CRASH OF 1929
The American economy entered an ordinary recession during the summer of 1929, as consumer spending dropped and unsold goods began to pile up, slowing production. At the same time, stock prices continued to rise, and by the fall of that year had reached levels that could not be justified by anticipated future earnings. On October 24, 1929, the stock market bubble finally burst, as investors began dumping shares en masse. A record 12.9 million shares were traded that day, known as “Black Thursday.” Five days later, on “Black Tuesday” some 16 million shares were traded after another wave of panic swept Wall Street. Millions of shares ended up worthless, and those investors who had bought stocks “on margin” (with borrowed money) were wiped out completely.
As consumer confidence vanished in the wake of the stock market crash, the downturn in spending and investment led factories and other businesses to slow down production and construction and begin firing their workers. For those who were lucky enough to remain employed, wages fell and buying power decreased. Many Americans forced to buy on credit fell into debt, and the number of foreclosures and repossessions climbed steadily. The adherence to the gold standard, which joined countries around the world in a fixed currency exchange, helped spread the Depression from the United States throughout the world, especially in Europe.
THE GREAT DEPRESSION DEEPENS: BANK RUNS AND THE HOOVER ADMINISTRATION
Despite assurances from President Herbert Hoover and other leaders that the crisis would run its course, matters continued to get worse over the next three years. By 1930, 4 million Americans looking for work could not find it; that number had risen to 6 million in 1931. Meanwhile, the country’s industrial production had dropped by half. Bread lines, soup kitchens and rising numbers of homeless people became more and more common in America’s towns and cities. Farmers (who had been struggling with their own economic depression for much of the 1920s due to drought and falling food prices) couldn’t afford to harvest their crops, and were forced to leave them rotting in the fields while people elsewhere starved.
In the fall of 1930, the first of four waves of banking panics began, as large numbers of investors lost confidence in the solvency of their banks and demanded deposits in cash, forcing banks to liquidate loans in order to supplement their insufficient cash reserves on hand. Bank runs swept the United States again in the spring and fall of 1931 and the fall of 1932, and by early 1933 thousands of banks had closed their doors. In the face of this dire situation, Hoover’s administration tried supporting failing banks and other institutions with government loans; the idea was that the banks in turn would loan to businesses, which would be able to hire back their employees.
FDR ADDRESSES THE GREAT DEPRESSION WITH THE NEW DEAL
Hoover, a Republican who had formerly served as U.S. secretary of commerce, believed that government should not directly intervene in the economy, and that it did not have the responsibility to create jobs or provide economic relief for its citizens. In 1932, however, with the country mired in the depths of the Great Depression and some 13-15 million people (or more than 20 percent of the U.S. population at the time) unemployed, Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt won an overwhelming victory in the presidential election. By Inauguration Day (March 4, 1933), every U.S. state had ordered all remaining banks to close at the end of the fourth wave of banking panics, and the U.S. Treasury didn’t have enough cash to pay all government workers. Nonetheless, FDR (as he was known) projected a calm energy and optimism, famously declaring that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
Roosevelt took immediate action to address the country’s economic woes, first announcing a four-day “bank holiday” during which all banks would close so that Congress could pass reform legislation and reopen those banks determined to be sound. He also began addressing the public directly over the radio in a series of talks, and these so-called “fireside chats” went a long way towards restoring public confidence. During Roosevelt’s first 100 days in office, his administration passed legislation that aimed to stabilize industrial and agricultural production, create jobs and stimulate recovery. In addition, Roosevelt sought to reform the financial system, creating the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to protect depositors’ accounts and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to regulate the stock market and prevent abuses of the kind that led to the 1929 crash.
THE GREAT DEPRESSION: HARD ROAD TO RECOVERY
Among the programs and institutions of the New Deal that aided in recovery from the Great Depression were the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which built dams and hydroelectric projects to control flooding and provide electric power to the impoverished Tennessee Valley region of the South, and the Works Project Administration (WPA), a permanent jobs program that employed 8.5 million people from 1935 to 1943. After showing early signs of recovery beginning in the spring of 1933, the economy continued to improve throughout the next three years, during which real GDP (adjusted for inflation) grew at an average rate of 9 percent per year. A sharp recession hit in 1937, caused in part by the Federal Reserve’s decision to increase its requirements for money in reserve. Though the economy began improving again in 1938, this second severe contraction reversed many of the gains in production and employment and prolonged the effects of the Great Depression through the end of the decade.
Depression-era hardships had fueled the rise of extremist political movements in various European countries, most notably that of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime in Germany. German aggression led war to break out in Europe in 1939, and the WPA turned its attention to strengthening the military infrastructure of the United States, even as the country maintained its neutrality. With Roosevelt’s decision to support Britain and France in the struggle against Germany and the other Axis Powers, defense manufacturing geared up, producing more and more private sector jobs. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 led to an American declaration of war, and the nation’s factories went back in full production mode. This expanding industrial production, as well as widespread conscription beginning in 1942, reduced the unemployment rate to below its pre-Depression level.
(Source: http://www.history.com/topics/great-d...)
More:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexper...
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/...
http://history1900s.about.com/od/1930...
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/era....
http://www.ushistory.org/us/48.asp
http://www.hyperhistory.com/online_n2...
by Benjamin Roth (no photo)
by Gene Smiley (no photo)
by
Russell Freedman
by
Amity Shlaes
by
Pierre Berton
Joseph Alsop
Joseph Alsop, the son of Joseph Wright Alsop (1876–1953) and his wife Corinne Douglas Robinson (1886–1971), was born in Avon, Connecticut, on 11th October, 1910. He attended Groton School and after graduating from Harvard University in 1932 he joined the New York Herald Tribune as a staff reporter.
Alsop began a political column in 1937 under the title “The Capital Parade”. It was later renamed “Matter of Fact.” In 1945 his brother, Stewart Alsop, helped him with the column. Stewart concentrated on domestic politics, whereas his brother traveled the world to cover foreign affairs. Arthur Schlesinger has compared their work to Walter Lippmann and James Reston: "In the age of the column, an era long since passed, Joe Alsop and his brother Stewart ranked in style and influence with Walter Lippmann and James Reston."
Alsop lived in Washington where he associated with a group of journalists, politicians and government officials that became known as the Georgetown Set. This group included Frank Wisner, George Kennan,Dean Acheson, Richard Bissell, Desmond FitzGerald, Stewart Alsop, Tracy Barnes, Thomas Braden, Philip Graham, David Bruce, Clark Clifford, Walt Rostow, Eugene Rostow, Chip Bohlen, Cord Meyer, James Angleton, William Averill Harriman, John McCloy, Felix Frankfurter, John Sherman Cooper, James Reston,Allen W. Dulles and Paul Nitze.
Frances Stonor Saunders, the author of Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War? (1999) has pointed out: "In long exchanges, heated by intellectual passion and alcohol, their vision of a new world order began to take shape. Internationalist, abrasive, competitive, these men had an unshakeable belief in their value system, and in their duty to offer it to others. They were the patricians of the modern age, the paladins of democracy, and saw no contradiction in that. This was the elite which ran American foreign policy and shaped legislation at home. Through think-tanks to foundations, directorates to membership of gentlemen's clubs, these mandarins were interlocked by their institutional affiliations and by a shared belief in their own superiority."
Alsop worked closely with the CIA. According to Carl Bernstein: "In 1953, Joseph Alsop, then one of America’s leading syndicated columnists, went to the Philippines to cover an election. He did not go because he was asked to do so by his syndicate. He did not go because he was asked to do so by the newspapers that printed his column. He went at the request of the CIA. Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty-five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters."
Evan Thomas, the author of The Very Best Men: The Early Years of the CIA (1995), argues that the Alsop brothers worked very closely with Frank Wisner, the director of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), the espionage and counter-intelligence branch of the CIA. He points out that he "considered his friends Joe and Stewart Alsop to be reliable purveyors of the company line in their columns". In 1953 the brothers helped out Edward Lansdale and the CIA in the Philippines: "Wisner actively courted the Alsops, along with a few other newsmen he regarded as suitable outlets. When Lansdale was manipulating electoral politics in the Philippines in 1953, Wisner asked Joe Alsop to write some columns warning the Filipinos not to steal the election from Magsaysay. Alsop was happy to comply, though he doubted his columns would have much impact on the Huks. After the West German counterintelligence chief, Otto John, defected to the Soviet Union in 1954, Wisner fed Alsop a story that the West German spymaster had been kidnapped by the KGB. Alsop dutifully printed the story, which may or may not have been true."
Joseph and Stewart Alsop's articles appeared in over 300 newspapers. Both were Cold War warriors but were critics of Joseph McCarthy. It has been argued by Arthur Schlesinger: "That paradox is the alleged contradiction between Joe's hatred of communism in the world and his hatred of McCarthyism at home, as shown by his brave and undaunted defense of dissenters with many of whose policy recommendations he vigorously disagreed. But did not his passionate advocacy of the Cold War sow the seeds from which McCarthyism sprang?"
Robert W. Merry, the author of Taking on the World: Joseph and Stewart Alsop: Guardians of the American Century (1996), has pointed out that they viewed McCarthy as "a heartland populist stirring up passions against the country's foreign policy elite... They also viewed his attack on the State Department as an attack on the internationalist philosophy that had guided American foreign policy since the end of the war. Nobody was saying it explicitly, but it seemed clear to the brothers that if McCarthy succeeded in bringing down the Department's internationalists, the result would be a new wave of isolationism".
Richard Bissell, the head of the Directorate for Plans (DPP), was also a close friend of the Alsops. He later recalled: "The Alsops were fairly discreet in what they asked, but I was not as discreet as I should have been. They could usually guess." Bissell admitted to Jonathan Lewis, who was helping him with his memoirs, that the Alsops were the only journalists who he provided with secret information. In 1955 the Alsops reported details of what had taken place in a National Security Council meeting. Allen W. Dulles was so angry that he ordered Wisner to cancel a meeting with the Alsop brothers that weekend at his farm in Maryland. On another occasion, Paul Nitze was so upset that they published the contents of a sensitive cable, that he told them, "You're not the Alsop brothers! You're the Hiss brothers!"
In 1957, during his first and only visit to the Soviet Union, Joe was entrapped by the KGB in a Moscow hotel room. According to Evan Thomas: "Alsop foolishly allowed himself to be caught in a honey trap by the KGB on a trip to Moscow in 1957. The Russians took photos of Alsop in the midst of a homosexual act with a KGB agent and tried to blackmail him into becoming an agent." Edwin Yoder has argued in his book, Joe Alsop's Cold War: A Study of Journalistic Influence and Intrigue (1995), that the existence of these photographs did not stop Alsop from continuing to denounce the Soviet Union. However, twelve years later Alsop discovered that the photographs had come into the possession of J. Edgar Hoover.
Alsop held liberal views on domestic issues and became a supporter of John Kennedy. According to Katharine Graham, Alsop told her in 1958 that he had the potential to become president. When she stated: "Joe, surely you're not serious." He replied, "Darling, I think he will certainly be nominated and quite probably be elected." In 1960 Kennedy did win the Democratic Party nomination. Alsop now joined forces with Philip Graham to persuade Kennedy to make Lyndon Johnson, instead of Stuart Symington, his running-mate. It is claimed that Alsop commented to Kennedy: "We've come to talk to you about the vice-presidency. Something may happen to you, and Symington is far too shallow a puddle for the United States to dive into. Furthermore, what are you going to do about Lyndon Johnson? He's much too big a man to leave up in the Senate." Graham then added that not having Johnson on the ticket would certainly be trouble.
In her autobiography, Personal History (1997) Katharine Graham revealed that her husband and Alsop lobbied for President John Kennedy to appoint their friend, Douglas Dillon, as Secretary of the Treasury.Arthur Schlesinger points out in A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (1965) that the Kennedy team "were distressed by (Graham and Alsop) impassioned insistence that Douglas Dillon should and would-be made Secretary of the Treasury. Without knowing Dillon, we mistrusted him on principle as a presumed exponent of Republican economic policies."
Alsop was conservative on foreign issues and supported the war against Vietnam. This brought him into conflict with Noam Chomsky who he accused of being pro-Soviet. Chomsky replied in the New York Review of Books: "If he were to turn to the written word, rather than indulge in private fancy, he could also discover my actual views regarding Russian totalitarianism and its roots in Bolshevik ideology, a matter that I have discussed more than once, in some detail... Alsop knows that I condemn the criminal violence in Vietnam of which he has long been a leading advocate, and he therefore concludes, with a weird but characteristic logic, that I must be tolerant of Russian tyranny. The facts are otherwise, as I have made clear many times. But Alsop is not one to be troubled by mere fact. I mention these facts not to enlighten Joseph Alsop, who has long since passed beyond the reach of fact or reason, but for the benefit of those who may still believe that when they read an Alsop column they are being given a glimpse of the real world."
Frances Stonor Saunders, the author of Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War? (1999) has argued that a high-level CIA official told her that Stewart Alsop was a "CIA agent". Saunders discussed this issue with Joseph Alsop. He dismissed this claim as "absolute nonsense" but admitted that both men were very close to the agency: "I was closer to the Agency than Stew was, though Stew was very close... I dare say he did perform some tasks - he did the correct thing as an American... The Founding Fathers of the CIA were close personal friends of ours... It was a social thing. I have never received a dollar, I never signed a secrecy agreement. I didn't have to... I've done things for them when I thought they were the right thing to do. I call it doing my duty as a citizen... The CIA did not open itself at all to people it did not trust... Stew and I were trusted, and I'm proud of it."
Joseph Alsop died in Washington on 28th August, 1989. His autobiography, I've Seen the Best of It, was published posthumously in 1992.
(Source: http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKa...)
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http://www.nytimes.com/1989/08/29/obi...
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1000142...
(no image) American White Paper: The story of American diplomacy and the second world war by Joseph W. Alsop (no photo)
by Robert W. Merry (no photo)
by Edwin M. Yoder Jr. (no photo)
by Gregg Herken (no photo)
by Joseph W. Alsop (no photo)
by Joseph W. Alsop (no photo)
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Pierre Salinger
Pierre Salinger served as presidential press secretary to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. In the 1970s, he resumed his career as a journalist in Europe.
Synopsis
Born on June 14, 1925, in San Francisco, California, Pierre Salinger worked as an investigative journalist before serving as presidential press secretary for both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. He briefly filled a vacancy in the U.S. Senate, then returned to journalism in the early 1970s, eventually becoming the Paris bureau chief for ABC News. He died in France on October 16, 2004.
Early Life
Pierre Emil George Salinger, known as Pierre Salinger, was born June 14, 1925, in San Francisco, California. One of four boys, Salinger was the product of smart, driven parents. His father, who died when Salinger was in his teens, worked as a mining engineer, while his mother, a native of France, was an acclaimed journalist.
A bright and precocious child, Salinger became fluent in his mother's native tongue as a boy, and never lost his ability to speak French. His first love was music and his talent on the piano was such that he was widely considered a prodigy. By the time he was 6 years old, he had given his first recital.
Concerned that a high-pressure concert schedule might adversely affect his young mind, Salinger's parents prohibited further public performances. Instead, he continued with private lessons. He also concentrated on his studies, and started high school when he was 11 years old.
Life in Journalism
Following his graduation from high school, Salinger briefly studied at San Francisco State College before enlisting in the U.S. Navy at the age of 17. He became the commander of a submarine chaser in the Pacific, then returned to California after the war. He enrolled at the University of San Francisco, where he graduated with a degree in journalism.
In 1947, the San Francisco Chronicle hired Salinger as an investigative journalist. He later worked for Collier's magazine. Salinger thrived in undercover work, most notably pretending to be homeless in order to get arrested so he could do a series of stories about prison abuses.
Part of Camelot
In 1956, Salinger researched and wrote several stories that exposed some of the dealings of Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa. The pieces attracted the attention of Robert Kennedy, who soon hired Salinger to work as an investigator on the U.S. Senate's anti-racketeering committee.
Salinger's tenaciousness appealed to Robert Kennedy, while his oversized personality served as a point of attraction for Senator John F. Kennedy. Worldly, witty, with a preference for fine cigars and a weakness for women, Salinger shared many common interests with the future president.
In 1959, Salinger went to work for John F. Kennedy; in 1961, at the age of 35, he became the youngest-ever presidential press secretary. Salinger's understanding of television's increasing influence on the world of politics helped set the tone for the Kennedy administration.
Salinger traveled with the president on several high-level trips, including the 1961 meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna. Throughout the Cuban Missile Crisis, Salinger stayed involved in the meetings that outlined the difficult choices the United States was facing.
Political Campaigns
Following Kennedy's assassination in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, Salinger served as President Lyndon B. Johnson's press secretary for several months. In 1964, he resigned to run for the U.S. Senate.
After winning the Democratic primary in California, Salinger was appointed to fill the vacancy left when Senator Claire Engle died. In the fall of that year, however, he was defeated in a general election by George Murphy, his Republican opponent.
In 1968, Salinger worked on Robert Kennedy's presidential campaign, and was nearby when the candidate was assassinated. Salinger briefly stepped back into the world of politics when he joined the presidential campaign team of George McGovern in 1972.
(Source: http://www.biography.com/people/pierr...)
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by Pierre Salinger (no photo)
by Pierre Salinger (no photo)
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Robert Dallek
Everett Dirkson 
Everett McKinley Dirksen (1896-1969) served as a Republican congressman and senator from Illinois for over three decades.
Everett McKinley Dirksen was born in Pekin, Illinois, on January 4, 1896, the son of Johann and Antje Dirksen who had immigrated from the Ostfriesland district of Germany in 1866. Dirksen and his twin, Thomas Reed, were named after prominent Republicans. The father died in their youth, and their mother supported her family on a small farm she purchased just inside the city limits of what was commonly referred to as "Beantown." Strong Calvinists, the family belonged to the Second Reformed Church. His mother encouraged his interest in reading, and he was the only one of her children who finished high school.
He considered becoming a teacher, actor, or lawyer and attended the University of Minnesota for three and one-half years studying liberal arts and law. He quit the university, in part because of the scorn heaped on German-Americans, to join the army to prove his Americanism during World War I. Trained at Camp Custer in Battle Creek, Michigan, Dirksen served in France and rose to the rank of second lieutenant. Forced to abandon his plans to finish his education at the university because of his mother's illness, he had several jobs but finally went into business with his brother in a wholesale bakery, which prospered. Active in local civic theater he met and married Louella Carver in 1927, and they had one daughter, Joy, who married Howard Baker.
Active in local politics, Dirksen decided he should act to combat the effects of the Depression and ran unsuccessfully against the local Republican congressman William Hull in 1930. Two years later he won the nomination and, cleverly eschewing any association with the Herbert Hoover administration, won despite the Franklin D. Roosevelt landslide.
From the outset of his career in the House of Representatives Everett Dirksen exhibited certain characteristics which would dominate his government career. He was pragmatic rather than doctrinaire, studied each piece of legislation carefully, worked hard, attended both committee and congressional sessions, and was a good speaker. For example, he voted with much of the New Deal to bring the country out of the Depression, supporting the banking acts of 1933 and 1935, federal emergency relief, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the National Industrial Recovery Act; social security, the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act, and the Civilian Conservation Corps. In foreign policy matters, however, he was an avowed isolationist and opposed all legislation which might lead to war until September 18, 1941, when he made a dramatic about-face and called for complete support for the Roosevelt foreign policy and unity to defeat the Nazis.
For 16 years Dirksen was easily reelected to the House of Representatives. Sought as a political speaker, he also headed the Republican National Congressional Committee from 1938 through 1946. Throughout World War II, he supported the movement towards international cooperation after the war and worked to help pass the Fulbright Resolution. He served on the Post War Advisory Council of the Republican Party which met at Mackinac Island, Michigan, in the summer of 1943. Both the resolution and the council called for participation in an international peace-keeping organization after the war. He voted for the Legislative Reorganization bill in 1946. While in Congress Dirksen finished his law degree at George Washington University in the evenings and was active in the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion, Eagles, Elks, Moose, Masons, and Shriners.
In mid-1943 he caught the presidential bug and, after 31 House members signed Illinois Congressman Leslie Arends' petition to nominate Dirksen on the GOP ticket, he formally announced his candidacy on December 2, 1943. He failed to form a political alliance with Governor Earl Warren of California and tried to secure the vice presidential nomination with New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey. However, that nomination went to Governor John Bricker of Ohio. An early advocate of economic aid to war-torn Europe, Dirksen advocated bipartisan foreign policy and voted for most of the Harry S. Truman policies, including aid to Greece and Turkey and the Marshall Plan; but he voted against nearly all of Truman's domestic legislation.
His physician in 1948 diagnosed blurred vision as cancerous and recommended surgery, which Dirksen rejected. Instead, he announced that he would not seek reelection. Retiring briefly for rest to a Chesapeake Bay cottage where his eyesight improved, he decided to oppose his old friend Senator Scott Lucas in the 1950 general election. After a campaign in which both sides engaged in highly questionable practices and aided by a scandal in the Cook County sheriff's race, Dirksen defeated the Democratic majority leader by slightly less than 300,000 votes to become the junior senator from Illinois.
Upon entering the Senate in 1950, Dirksen became a close ally of Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, attracted by his isolationist stance in foreign affairs and his conservative opposition to the Truman Fair Deal; he also became a firm supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.
In 1952 Dirksen made the two most memorable speeches of the GOP convention: in the first he accused Governor Thomas E. Dewey of taking "us down the path of defeat" in 1944 and 1948, and in the other he formally (but unsuccessfully) placed the name of Senator Taft in nomination. However, Dirksen the eternal pragmatist soon made peace with Dwight D. (Ike) Eisenhower, the successful nominee, and campaigned vigorously for the ticket. Although loyal to both Taft and McCarthy until their deaths, Dirksen gradually gravitated to Ike and became by 1955 one of his strongest allies in the Senate.
Vigorously endorsed by Eisenhower for reelection in 1956, Dirksen won and replaced William Knowland as Republican minority leader in 1958. Dirksen fought hard for Ike's legislative program and championed the cause of civil rights, Irish self-determination (with Sen. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts), the state of Israel, equal rights for women, and, eventually, under Ike's persuasion, the St. Lawrence Seaway. He also voted for federal aid to education, increased social security benefits, and minimum wage levels and embraced Eisenhower's notion of modern Republicanism.
Dirksen got on particularly well with Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, who genuinely liked the Illinois senator, paid ample homage to his enormous ego, and needed his legislative support. His assistance was indispensable to the passage of the United Nations bond issue of 1962, the nuclear test-ban treaty, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As he said at the time, quoting Victor Hugo, "Stronger than all the armies is an idea whose time has come." With the advent of the Richard M. Nixon presidency in 1969, Dirksen found his status considerably diminished. Beset by multiple illnesses, he died in Washington on September 7, 1969.
(Source: http://biography.yourdictionary.com/e...)
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http://time.com/2896598/the-congress-...
(no image) The Long, Hard Furrow: Everett Dirksen's Part in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by Frank H. MacKaman (no photo)
by Edward L. Schapsmeier (no photo)
by Byron C. Hulsey (no photo)
by Everett Dirksen (no photo)
by Louella Dirksen (no photo)
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The Wrong War
Why We Lost in Vietnam
By JEFFREY RECORD
Naval Institute Press
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/r/...
Source: The New York Times Book Review
by Jeffrey Record (no photo)
The History Book Club
Books mentioned in this topic
Agent Orange: History, Science, and the Politics of Uncertainty (other topics)Matterhorn (other topics)
The Naked and the Dead (other topics)
The Thin Red Line (other topics)
A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Edwin A. Martini (other topics)Karl Marlantes (other topics)
Norman Mailer (other topics)
James Jones (other topics)
Neil Sheehan (other topics)
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Edward VII, born November 9, 1841, was the eldest son of Queen Victoria. He took the family name of his father, Prince Consort Albert, hence the change in lineage, although he was still Hanoverian on his mother's side. He married Princess Alexandra of Denmark in 1863, who bore him three sons and three daughters. Edward died on May 6, 1910, after a series of heart attacks.
Victoria, true to the Hanoverian name, saw the worst in Edward. She and Albert imposed a strict regime upon Edward, who proved resistant and resentful throughout his youth. His marriage at age twenty-two to Alexandra afforded him some relief from his mother's domination, but even after Albert's death in 1863, Victoria consistently denied her son any official governmental role. Edward rebelled by completely indulging himself in women, food, drink, gambling, sport and travel. Alexandra turned a blind eye to his extramarital activities, which continued well into his sixties and found him implicated in several divorce cases.
Edward succeeded the throne upon Victoria's death; despite his risqué reputation, Edward threw himself into his role of king with vitality. His extensive European travels gave him a solid foundation as an ambassador in foreign relations. Quite a few of the royal houses of Europe were his relatives, allowing him to actively assist in foreign policy negotiations. He also maintained an active social life, and his penchant for flamboyant accouterments set trends among the fashionable. Victoria's fears proved wrong: Edward's forays into foreign policy had direct bearing on the alliances between Great Britain and both France and Russia, and aside from his sexual indiscretions, his manner and style endeared him to the English populace.
Social legislation was the focus of Parliament during Edward's reign. The 1902 Education Act provided subsidized secondary education, and the Liberal government passed a series of acts benefiting children after 1906; old age pensions were established in 1908. The 1909 Labour Exchanges Act laid the groundwork for national health insurance, which led to a constitutional crisis over the means of budgeting such social legislation. The budget set forth by David Lloyd-George proposed major tax increases on wealthy landowners and was defeated in Parliament. Prime Minister Asquith appealed to Edward to create several new peerages to swing the vote, but Edward steadfastly refused. Edward died amidst the budgetary crisis at age sixty-eight, which was resolved the following year by the Liberal government's passage of the act.
Despite Edward's colorful personal life and Victoria's perceptions of him as profligate, Edward ruled peacefully (aside from the Boer War of 1899-1902) and successfully during his short reign, which is remarkable considering the shifts in European power that occurred in the first decade of the twentieth century.
(Source:http://www.britannia.com/history/mona...)
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