Odds and Ends

Of No Particular Importance... Most major league baseball teams have pitchers and catchers report to spring training round about Feb. 14. It doesn't mark the end of winter, but perhaps the beginning of the end and that is something. Boston has had 50 inches of snow this winter. Do you think Red Sox fans are anxious for spring? I'm still nursing the hurt over the Diamondbacks and Rockies abandoning Tucson in favor of another spring training outpost in the Phoenix suburbs. So much for old school. Baseball in the spring has been a fixture in Tucson since 1946. Not this year. The D-backs and Colorado will share a spanking new ballpark - Salt River Fields. I'm boycotting and plan on seeing the hapless Cubs in Mesa, the A's in their venerable little band box in Phoenix and the World Champions in downtown Scottsdale. Hope springs eternal in the spring. Everyone is in first place on opening day. Kennedy Memories My old friend Joel Connelly had a nice piece recently at the Seattle P-I's online site on memories of John Kennedy in the Northwest. Joel, a great recorder of the region's political lore, relates a wonderful story about JFK and legendary Washington Sen. Warren Magnuson. The Times on the Times I've long believed the single most difficult thing for "the media" to do is to report on itself. Most reporters and editors are generally loathe to criticize each other, unless its someone like Bill O'Reilly tweaking Keith Olbermann. That makes this story in the New York Times reporting on dissatisfaction in Los Angeles with the L.A. Times so interesting. Here's the money quote. The NYT's media critic quotes a long-time LA Times reader as saying: “We need a paper that’s more, and this is less. I think it’s just not a world-class paper, no matter how you cut it. It used to be a world-class paper.” Analysis and comment at the Columbia Journalism Review site further dissects the Times coverage of the Times. My take: I have long admired both papers and have had my gripes with each, but the LA Times is today a far cry from what it was when Otis Chandler was in charge. Sargent Shriver Lots of memorials, appropriately, to the first man JFK put in charge of the Peace Corps - Sargent Shriver. The wake for the very Catholic Shriver was a classic sad and hilarious recalling of his quite remarkable life. The serious side of Shriver is well summarized in a nice piece by Richard Reeves and the funniest story was told in Adam Clymer's tribute at the Daily Beast. Clymer told a story he attributed to Democratic consultant Bob Shrum, a longtime friend of Shriver's. "One afternoon [Shrum] and Shriver arrived at the Shriver home as Eunice was running a Special Olympics event. She had put out a wine punch for the athletes' parents. Sarge sampled it and asked what wine was used. A servant said Eunice had told them to just take anything handy. They had opened a case of Chateau Lafite Rothschild '48, a gift from Giscard d'Estaing, president of France when Shriver served as ambassador. Shrum reports that Shriver was momentarily nonplussed, but then smiled and said, 'Then we'd better drink a lot of it.'" I have no idea what a bottle of Chateau Lafite Rothschild '48 is worth, but a bottle of '82 sold at a wine auction in 2009 for $3,300. The 1948 vintage is rated as a "moderate to good vintage." That was some wine punch.

Fifty Years Ago...

Kennedy Library Launches Website The Kennedy Presidential Library has launched a fabulous new website - http://www.jfk50.org/ - to mark the 50th anniversary of the inauguration of our 35th president - a half century ago this very day. The site is organized by both subject matter and by a timeline of the Kennedy presidency. Take a minute to visit and walk through the historic events of 50 years ago. This is a great presentation of history and a remarkable use of the tools of modern communication. Two words: great stuff.

And more...

Kennedy's best biographer, Robert Dallek, has a great piece at the Salon website today. Dallek asks "why do we admire a president who did so little?"

His answer, in part, is to compare Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, two masters of communication.

Says Dallek: "Like T.R.'s bully pulpit and FDR's fireside chats, Kennedy’s press conferences, which underscored his personal charm, wit, youth and intelligence, and Reagan’s talents as the 'great communicator' are enduring parts of their legacies.

"Unlike Washington and Lincoln, whose reputations rest respectively on building and preserving the nation, Kennedy and Reagan, to borrow a phrase from the historian Richard Hofstadter, were and remain the master psychologists of the middle classes."

Great Speeches Week

Eisenhower, Kennedy and King It is Martin Luther King, Jr, Day, a good day to remember Dr. King's remarkable impact on the evolution of American notions about civil rights and to acknowledge the work that remains. And, even though King made his most famous speech in August, no MLK Day is complete without remembering one of the great speeches ever delivered in the English language, his "I Have a Dream Speech" from 1963. This week also marks the 50th anniversary of two other truly memorable speeches - Dwight Eisenhower's farewell were he warned of the rise of the "unwarranted influence" of the "military-industrial complex" and John F. Kennedy's inaugural where he summoned the nation to "ask not" what the country can do for us. Remarkably these two speeches - delivered just three days apart in January 1961 - speak to us still across half a century. Eisenhower, the popular president and former five star general, it is now clear, labored at length over his final speech from the White House considering it, as his grandson says, a significant part of his legacy of public service. Fifty years later, with the American military engaged in two wars and the nation's enormous power projected in every corner of the world, Eisenhower's words speak an enduring truth and, like Kennedy, he called the country to informed, engaged citizenship. As David Eisenhower told NPR over the weekend, his grandfather's "farewell address, in the final analysis, is about internal threats posed by vested interests to the democratic process. But above all, it is addressed to citizens — and about citizenship." Kennedy's great speech, delivered on January 20, 1961, can be read as a companion piece to the speech of his predecessor and it was also about citizenship and responsibility. Speaking in the context of the nuclear arms race with the then-Soviet Union, Kennedy said: "So let us begin anew -- remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate." Those words, in the context of our domestic politics today, certainly ring true. In the age of Twitter and text messages some might argue that the spoken word or political rhetoric has lost its power to inform and stimulate. Three classic speeches we remember this week leave us with an entirely different message. Enduring truth, delivered with genuine conviction and deeply imbuded with knowledge, is always powerful. As Dr. King so powerfully said: "The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy." All three great Americans spoke in their most famous speeches to "the ultimate measure of a man" and their words live on.