Roundup: Talking About History

Conrad Black: JFK: 50 Years Later

[Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom and Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full.] Almost everyone who was of conscient age at the time remembers the buzz when John F. Kennedy was inaugurated president of the United States 50 years ago today. President Eisenhower was almost universally respected and had succeeded in the great political achievement of presenting himself simultaneously as the smiling, golfing, avuncular man who inspired the vast natio

William Galston: Why I Miss President Eisenhower

[William Galston is a former policy advisor to Bill Clinton and current senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.] As preparation for President Obama’s 2011 State of the Union address, I’ve reread two noted presidential speeches delivered days apart, half a century ago. I need not dwell on JFK’s inaugural; many of us know its stirring cadences by heart. Its cardinal virtue is courage; its mood, audacity; its ambition, not just global but galactic. It is a young man’s speech, self-

E.J. Dionne Jr.: Kennedy's Inaugural Address Presents a Challenge Still

It's remembered as a day chilled by "a Siberian wind knifing down Pennsylvania Avenue" and illuminated by "the dazzling combination of bright sunshine and deep snow." On Jan. 20, 1961, John F. Kennedy began his presidency with a speech at once soaring and solemn. Fifty years on, we have not heard an inaugural address like it. Tethered to its time and place, it still challenges with its ambition to harness realism to idealism, patriotism to service, national inter

Bono: What I Learned From Sargent Shriver

[Bono, the lead singer of the band U2 and a co-founder of the advocacy group ONE and (Product)RED, is a contributing columnist for The Times.] ...The Irish saw the Kennedys as our own royal family out on loan to America. A million of them turned out on J.F.K.’s homecoming to see these patrician public servants who, despite their station, had no patience for the status quo. (They also loved that the Kennedys looked more WASP than any “Prod,” our familiar term for Protestant.)

Robert Dallek: Why Do We Admire a President Who Did So Little?

[Robert Dallek is the author of "An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963." His latest book is "The Lost Peace: Leadership in a Time of Horror and Hope, 1945-1953.] Every year since 1990, the Gallup poll has asked Americans to assess all the presidents since John F. Kennedy. And every year, Kennedy comes out on top. In the most recent survey measuring the popularity of the nine presidents since JFK, 85 percent said they approved of Kennedy’s leadership; Ronald R

Elizabeth Abbott: The Ghosts of Duvalier

[Elizabeth Abbott is senior research associate at Trinity College, University of Toronto, and the author of Haiti: The Duvaliers and Their Legacy, to be reissued in summer 2011 as Haiti Revisted: The Duvaliers and Their Legacy in a Shattered Land.] Perhaps the best way to understand former Haitian dictator and would-be president-for-life Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier's quixotic return to his homeland after 25 years in exile in France is through William Faulkner's classic

David Davis: Reagan's Clarity, 30 Years Later

[Mr. Davis is a member of Parliament.] Today marks the 30th anniversary of the inauguration of U.S. President Ronald Reagan. One wonders how the man who, by sheer force of belief, ended the Cold War without a shot being fired would have responded to 9/11 and to the global financial crisis. Born in a rented apartment in Tampico, Illinois, few could have predicted that the son of a shoe salesman would become one of the most revered political figures of his generation. His

Ben Bradlee: Jack Kennedy -- My Friend, My President

[Bradlee, the longtime Washington Post editor, is a vice president at the newspaper and former Washington bureau chief of NEWSWEEK.] Jack Kennedy was many things when he took the oath of office on Jan. 20, 1961: a glamorous figure, the youngest man ever elected to the office, the first Catholic president. He was also my friend. He looked to me like a breath of fresh air, with his Hollywood good looks and impossibly attractive family—his wife with the velvety voice and t

Diane Mutti Burke: The Far-Reaching Tentacles of American Slavery

[Diane Mutti Burke is an associate professor of history at the University of Missouri–Kansas City and the author of “On Slavery’s Border: Missouri’s Small-Slaveholding Households, 1815-1865.”] In March 2008, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama urged Americans to begin a long overdue conversation about race. Difficult as it is, this conversation must begin with slavery. Most Americans think they understand the institution, although few have studied slavery in all it

Wil­liam S. Mc­Fee­ly: White Teacher, Black Power

[Wil­liam S. Mc­Fee­ly is an emeritus professor of the humanities at the University of Georgia and an as­so­ciate of the Humanities Cen­ter at Har­vard University. A­mong his books are Grant: A Biography (Nor­ton, 1981), which won the Pu­litz­er Prize in bi­og­ra­phy, and Fred­er­ick Douglass (Nor­ton, 1991), which won the Lin­coln Prize.] Martin Lu­ther King Jr. Day has got­ten me think­ing a­bout what teach­ing Af­ri­can-Amer­i­can his­tory was like 40 years ago. King, recently vi

Matthew Pinsker: The Underground Railroad and the Coming of War

[Matthew Pinsker is Associate Professor of History and Pohanka Chair in American Civil War History at Dickinson College. He has written two books about Abraham Lincoln and currently is working on a book about the Underground Railroad.] The Underground Railroad was a metaphor. Yet many textbooks treat it as an official name for a secret network that once helped escaping slaves. The more literal-minded students end up questioning whether these fixed escape routes were actually under

Ron Reagan: Growing Up as the Son of a President—and a Movie Star

[John Meroney is completing a book, Rehearsals for a Lead Role: Ronald Reagan in The Hollywood Wars.] Ronald Prescott Reagan is the youngest child of President Ronald Reagan. Over the weekend, excerpts of his memoir about his dad, My Father at 100, generated a firestorm because in it he speculates that the fortieth president, who passed away in 2004, may have had Alzheimer's Disease while he was in office. As Ron Reagan admits, he's not a physician. (He's actually a for

Irving Abella: Confronting Canada's Dark Past

[Irving Abella is the Shiff Chair of Canadian Jewish History at York University and co-author of None Is Too Many.] On May 15, 1939, 907 desperate German Jews set sail from Hamburg on a luxury liner, the St. Louis. They had been stripped of all of their possessions by the Nazis, hounded out of their homes, their businesses and now their country. Their most prized possession was the Cuban entry visa each carried. Yet they considered themselves lucky – they were leaving a country wher

Jeffrey Lord: John F. Kennedy and Madness of the American Left

[Jeffrey Lord is a former Reagan White House political director and author. He writes from Pennsylvania at jlpa1@aol.com.] "And so my fellow Americans; Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." -- President John F. Kennedy in his Inaugural Address on January 20, 1961 "I have to tell you, Rush Limbaugh is looking more and more like Mr. Big, and at some point somebody's going to jam

Daniel Hannan: Franklin Roosevelt? Here are ten far greater US presidents

[Daniel Hannan is a writer and journalist, and has been Conservative MEP for South East England since 1999.] Further evidence of the unwisdom of experts. A major survey of British academics has come up with a ranking of US presidents. In top place, predictably, is that old despot Franklin D Roosevelt. What a perfect illustration of how received opinion tends to be wrong. Roosevelt is praised for having rescued the US from recession through the New Deal. In fact, the New

Vincent J. Cannato: The ‘Military-Industrial Complex’ at 50

[Vincent J. Cannato is an associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.] Fifty years ago today, Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his farewell address to the nation. With the exception of George Washington’s speech, most presidential farewell addresses have been unmemorable affairs. But Eisenhower’s has had the greatest impact, all because of one phrase: “the military-industrial complex.” Eisenhower used the term only once in the speech, warni

Clarence B. Jones: On Martin Luther King Day, Remembering the First Draft of 'I Have a Dream'

[Clarence B. Jones, a scholar in residence at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, is a co-author, with Stuart Connelly, of the new book "Behind the Dream: The Making of the Speech That Transformed a Nation," from which this essay is adapted.] It was the late spring of 1963, and my friend Martin was exhausted. The campaign to integrate the public facilities in Birmingham had been successful but also tremendously taxing. In it

Adam Hochschild: An Assassination’s Long Shadow

[Adam Hochschild is the author of “King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa” and the forthcoming “To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918.”] TODAY, millions of people on another continent are observing the 50th anniversary of an event few Americans remember, the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. A slight, goateed man with black, half-framed glasses, the 35-year-old Lumumba was the first democratically chosen leader of the vas

James Ledbetter: The World According to Dwight

[James Ledbetter is the editor in charge of Reuters.com, and author of Unwarranted Influence: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Military Industrial Complex, to be published in January by Yale University Press.] This January marks the fiftieth anniversary of Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address, the speech that launched the phrase “military-industrial complex” into the English language. It will no doubt be an occasion for critics of military spending to decry not only massive wartime expe

Christopher Alexander: The Last King of Tunisia ... The Strange Rise and Fall of Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali

[Christopher Alexander is Davidson College's McGee director of the Dean Rusk International Studies Program, an associate professor of political science, and author of Tunisia: Stability and Reform in the Modern Maghreb.] As the end of his reign quickly approached this week, Tunisia's President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali attempted to conjure the spirit that buoyed his government in the months after he seized power more than 20 years ago. In a televised address to the countr