A wise choice and Socialist Rosenberg

Two ancient history lessons today.

During the Cuban missile crisis, Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, sent President Kennedy two messages. One was belligerent, the other was not.

Kennedy responded to the second.

The crisis was solved without shots (or missiles) being fired.

I met with an advocate this morning and attended a press conference on a related issue later in the day.

My advice to the advocate: respond to the rhetoric that was consistent with your goal. Don’t get flustered by the talk that was not.

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Legislation limiting the use of guns on college campuses will be debated on the House floor tomorrow.

Consequently, gun rights supporters were demonstrating in front of the State House today.

One yelled at me, “Socialist Rosenberg.”

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of espionage in the 1950’s and executed.

Julius was a Communist. Most historians have concluded that Ethel was framed.

I am not now nor have I ever been related to Julius Rosenberg.

Power intoxicates and it corrupts

“Precisely because the problem is one of temperament and character, it will not get better. It will get worse, as power intoxicates Trump and those around him,” former Bush administration official Eliot Cohen wrote in The Atlantic.

President Kennedy said the same thing – almost.

“When power intoxicates, poetry restores sobriety,” read the draft of his speech for the groundbreaking of the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College in October 1963.

The President edited that sentence to read, “When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.”

How do I know?

The full text of the speech, with Kennedy’s hand-written changes to Arthur Schlesinger’s draft, was on display at the Kennedy Library in Boston. I asked Kathleen Kennedy Townsend for a copy. It now hangs on my office wall.

As a student at Amherst, I studied in the Robert Frost Library.

The full text and a new low

            Perhaps his stomach discomfort prevented Senator Santorum from reading beyond the semicolon. 

            The third paragraph of then-Senator Kennedy’s speech to the Houston Ministerial Association in 1960 begins with the words that upset Mr. Santorum.

            I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute;

            The full paragraph reads as follows:

            I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute; where no Catholic prelate would tell the President — should he be Catholic — how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference, and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him, or the people who might elect him.

            The relationship between church and state in the public square is a complex one.  Before the decade is over, the Supreme Court will be asked to decide whether a religious entity’s employees are entitled to health care inconsistent with their employer’s beliefs or whether a same-gender married couple can be denied recognition or service by a religious institution or a devout individual. 

             By misleading the public as to the full content of what Senator Kennedy said and then characterizing his reaction in such a base manner, Senator Santorum has reached a wretchedly new low in campaign rhetoric.

  • My Key Issues:

  • Pimlico and The Preakness
  • Our Neighborhoods
  • Pre-Kindergarten
  • Lead Paint Poisoning