Communion

Posted on June 29, 2026 by smellincoffee

When J.D. Vance’s formidable grandmother died, his connection to Christianity went with it. Although he’d been raised going to church with her on occasion,  the faith had never become internalized;  as he deployed to Iraq, he was moving further and further away from the memory of it. Communion is the story of how a young man came to believe again, and a reflection on how Christianity’s eternal truths have inspired him as a father, husband, and public servant. 

Although I’ve been sold on this book as a memoir of his coming to the Catholic church – an improbable decision given his origins in Protestant hill country –  that is not strictly the case. The first half follows his faith’s decline and fall, but I noticed ambiguity.  Even in the desert, he was reading Chronicles of Narnia and wishing Jesus was more like Aslan – and  when he’s in college and identifying as an atheist, he still notices contempt for Christians as if he’s still connected to the faith.  While pursuing the  cursus Mammonae   – law school, clerking for a judge, lucrative practice –  Vance began having a crisis of meaning. What was all this for?  His coworkers were seemingly married to their jobs, with no time left for their children or the simple enjoyment of life.   He realized, with a Girard-esque start, that he was simply modeling the desires and ambitions of those around him,  just as if he were in high school again.  Around this time, he fell in love with a woman, Usha, who seemed destined for a great career in the law –  but she had little interest in getting and spending and laying waste to all her powers. She wanted an interesting job, but she wanted a meaningful life –   children to love, a husband to experience adventures with – not to be a girlboss. Her perspective, and his realization that he needed to be a worthier partner, put Vance on a quest for meaning. The more he read, the more interesting he found the wisdom of the Church – particularly its social doctrine,  which places the human person and not GDP at the center of social, economic, and political thinking. After a quiet evening reflecting in a cathedral while his son slept, he made the choice to swim the Tiber. 

Communion is an intimate work; conversion stories cannot help be. Part of the story is his learning to accept grace, to realize that as haunted as he may be by his past of violent, dysfunctional relatives,  it needn’t – won’t – define him.   It dovetails neatly with Christianity’s message of grace and redemption, of escaping sin’s power. The second half of the book is more of a reflection on Christianity’s place in the West, both historically and now, and he muses on ways that the Christian appreciation of the person can inform politics. This is not your granddaddy’s ‘moral majority’:   while no doubt agreeing that much of what is tolerated in society is destructive, like pornography, Vance focuses his thinking on other issues, particularly labor and the family.  Given how central becoming a husband and father was to Vance changing his life, making him assess the why of things, he unsurprisingly agrees with the social doctrine (and others, like Wendell Berry) that the economy exists for human needs, not the other way around. Corporations should not be  allowed to keep wages miserly by relying on illegal migrant labor, nor should apps that allow for the complete commodification of labor – calling in workers only when The Algorithm suggests they’ll deliver the most bang for the buck – be tolerated. Human beings are persons made imago Dei, not cogs to be manipulated or resources to be managed. We know what happens when those resources are wasted or those cogs are worn down in materialist societies: they are disposed of. 

I devoured this book,  staying up until the early hours of the next day and then gnawing on it all day the next.  Those of you who are familiar with what I tend to read and write about are probably not surprised –  trying to figure out what the flourishing life is, and how to guide people towards it,  has been my passion for twenty years now.   I think it’s rare, though, for someone who have this itch, this bug, this desire to break out of going with the flow, and asking – what’s it all for?   I think it’s especially rare for politicians, because as honorable as some of their intentions might be, it’s a field of human endeavour that attracts those who crave power, authority, influence, etc.   Seneca aside, I don’t think the pursuit of gold and the pursuit of wisdom overlap overmuch.  But Vance proves in this book to be an author deeply versed in Augustinian thought, and that’s not just this layman’s notion: Bishop Robert Barron, who presumably knows a thing about patristics,  said as much in his own review.  One thing Vance criticizes throughout the text is that economics  increasingly displaces morality as our default language to evaluate matters of concern to the republic –  and his rejection of that in his earnest defense of humanity against the machine, is a throughline. Unfortunately, I think this book will be judged by many simply because of Vance’s role in the Trump administration, which is doubly sad because Vance and progressives who are oriented toward family needs could have a conversation. The political parties are changing, in both good and unhinged ways, and those who genuinely care more about the body politic rather than an ideology, need to find one another instead of trolling for twitter cred. Vance, like Sasse before him, and Ralph Nader too, is raising questions that can and should be considered by everyone.

Related:
Bishop Barron’s review on First Things
Vance discussing the book in an interview at the Nixon Foundation recently
From Fire by Water, Sohrab Ahmari’s conversion

Quotations

And just as it is a sin to assume that we can control everything, so it is a sin to ignore that we can—with the help of grace—defeat the demons of the past and chart our own course. I might never escape my past. But by the grace of God, it would never consume me.

I saw one billionaire, who had nothing to do with the entertainment industry, laughing hysterically with Matt Damon and Denzel Washington. One of the minor celebrities I’d befriended at the bar turned to me and observed: “Look at them, man. It’s high school all over again. The awkward kid laughing too hard at the popular kid’s jokes. The girls floating around them. The dork paying them too much attention; the cool kid kind of ignoring them.” He was right.

“But,” he went on, giving voice to something I’d long pondered, “for most of us, grace is not something that happens in a moment. You don’t feel God’s presence and then change in an instant. Real grace comes through practice. This is why we demand that you live a sacramental life: going to church, taking Communion, doing confession. This is a process. You don’t accept Jesus into your heart—or get baptized—and fix everything. That’s not the promise of the Church. The promise of the Church is that you are lost, and the Church will provide you a road map to God.”

A college friend, Ethan, once remarked to me how easy it would be to believe in God if, like Peter the Apostle, he saw Christ walk on water and if Christ pulled him out of a lake when he was drowning. I acknowledged that, yes, everyone would believe if they saw a real live miracle. But the Christian argument is a bit more complicated: No matter what we see, we are all tempted by doubt. The Peter whom Jesus pulled out of the sea is the same Peter who denied Christ three times shortly before His crucifixion.

Indeed, one of the subtexts of the Trump rebellion in the Republican Party in 2016 was that the business elites found out the working-class members of their party cared far more about factory jobs than abstract libertarian economics.

But we now live in a society almost blinded to considerations outside of the economic. This way of thinking is inherently opposed to the Christian way, which demands more focus on people.

A Christian approach to economics would demand something different: concern for GDP, yes, but only insofar as it promotes human flourishing. The economy is a means—an important one—to enable people to live good lives. The point at which we see the economy as the end in itself is the point at which we dehumanize ourselves.

When I first made some money, I reached out to an eighty-year-old cousin to buy the family cemetery in Eastern Kentucky. I spoke about this cemetery—probably about a half acre—in my acceptance speech at the 2024 Republican National Convention. Even as vice president, I try to visit at least once a year. It’s a beautiful part of the country, my favorite part in many ways, and I still have relatives there whom I love to see. But I also visit because I find it oddly comforting to know that I’ll be buried among my ancestors. I walk in that ancient plot of land and speak to people long dead, some of them gone before my grandmother was even born. I’ve visited that cemetery before every major life decision, from proposing to Usha to running for the Senate. I listen to the birds chirp and watch the grasshoppers dance from grave to grave, and I remember that I used to chase the ancestors of those grasshoppers in these very mountains, when the people now buried were alive and breathing and watching over me. I talk to my grandparents and my great-grandparents, like patron saints of the episodes and emotions we all experience in the course of life. I talk to Mamaw when I need strength or focus and to Papaw when I need wisdom. I talk to Mamaw’s mother, Mamaw Blanton, when I need kindness or empathy and to her father, Papaw Blaine, whom I never met, when I need toughness. I bought the cemetery for selfless reasons. I wanted to preserve this outdoor temple of the dead for my family and the sake of those buried. But I bought it for selfish reasons, too: for the moments of quiet reflection I find only in this place, unique in all the world.

Posted in Politics and Civic Interest, Religion and Philosophy, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

John F. Kennedy

Posted on June 27, 2026 by smellincoffee

Despite only serving most of two years, JFK has loomed large in the memories of Americans, and his brutal assassination has much to do with that. His presidency was potential cut short; hope, aborted. In John F. Kennedy, Brinkley writes: “What made Kennedy’s image so powerful and so enduring was not the product of his own achievements; it was that so many people have imagined what might have happened had he lived.” This is a short but servicable biography of our 35th president, a man who served through the Cold War’s most dramatic moments — a man who still haunts Americans, whose life still inspires volume after volume written on what he did, what he might have done, and who killed him before he could do more.

In looking at my Hail to the Chief series, or project, ordinarily I would not be content with using this slim volume from the American Presidents series to address Kennedy. However, I have read so much around Kennedy this summer that it seemed time for more of an overview, and Alan Brinkley’s book provides that handily. The first quarter concerns his early life and rise to power; the middle half concerns his presidency; and the last quarter focuses on how he is remembered. I was pleasantly surprised by Brinkley as an author, because he does not shy away from Kennedy’s moral failings, particularly his womanizing and utter betrayal of his wife. This evidently ran in the family, with the possible exception of Bobby. (I say possible exception because the only book I’ve found that hints toward RFK having an affairs had to settle for “he was a flirt and probably had affairs”, which is about as credible as a campaign promise after the election.) That said, Brinkley is also not writing a gossip column, and keeps the focus squarely on JFK’s role as an administrator and leader. While he frequently fumbled there — the Bay of Pigs and early inaction on Civil Rights — he did have an enormous charisma that inspired people to hope for the future, despite the gloom of the Cold War. His speeches are far and and away the most recognizable in 20th century American political rhetoric.

If you are looking for an introduction to JFK, this was both well-written and quite fair.

For those weary of Kennedys, I’m presently finalizing a review that has nothing to do with them at all, and one of my Kennedy books that is forthcoming will introduce MLK Jr. I haven’t read anything on King since 2010, and since my library has a new biography on him I may check it out.

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Thirteen Days

Posted on June 26, 2026 by smellincoffee

The Cuban Missile Crisis is the closest time the Cold War came to turning into a hot war, and (presumably) a global holocaust. RFK served the President most immediately not as his attorney general, but his confidant and advisor. Thirteen Days is a memoir — in part — of the crisis from a man who was embedded in it almost as long as the president himself. RFK was one of the first people notified by the president about the new intelligence, and his closest confidant during the crisis. The book isn’t just a record of RFK’s memories, though, but contains his views on important lessons from it. RFK stresses how the United States acted within the framework of international cooperation, for instance: JFK had enlisted the support of the entire Organization of American States, which added weight to his protestations about nuclear missiles in Cuba. He also stresses how JFK labored to understand events as they might be interpreted within the Kremlin: with humanity itself at stake, he could not afford any ‘my way or the highway’ thinking. The book was not in a finished state when it was published following RFK’s assassination: RFK had intended to add to his memories of the two weeks a reflection on ethics in the nuclear age. in place of that, Richard Neustadt and Graham Allison offer their own reflection on what the Crisis meant, the futility of nuclear war, and the role of the Constitution in immediate crises like this. It’s a very short work (~100 pages or so), and best read knowing something about the context of the era, but I wanted to experience RFK as an author.

Quotations

My belief when I went to Havana was that we had over-dramatized the danger. After all, Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, was well aware that the United States had conventional superiority in the Caribbean and nuclear superiority overall. As a rational man, he would never have launched a suicidal war. This complacent view did not survive the conference. Going to war is not necessarily a rational process. – from the preface by Arthur Scheislinger Jr

Keep strong, if possible. In any case, keep cool. Have unlimited patience. Never corner an opponent and always assist him to save his face. Put yourself in his shoes—so as to see things through his eyes. Avoid self-righteousness like the devil—nothing is so self-blinding.” – Basil Hart. From the preface.

Each one of us was being asked to make a recommendation which would affect the future of all mankind, a recommendation which, if wrong and if accepted, could mean the destruction of the human race. That kind of pressure does strange things to a human being, even to brilliant, self- confident, mature, experienced men. For some it brings out characteristics and strengths that perhaps even they never knew they had, and for others the pressure is too overwhelming.

“It isn’t the first step that concerns me,” [President Kennedy] said, “but both sides escalating to the fourth and fifth step—and we don’t go to the sixth because there is no one around to do so. We must remind ourselves we are embarking on a very hazardous course.”

Opinion, even fact itself, can best be judged by conflict, by debate. There is an important element missing when there is unanimity of viewpoint. Yet that not only can happen; it frequently does when the recommendations are being given to the President of the United States. His office creates such respect and awe that it has almost a cowering effect on men. Frequently I saw advisers adapt their opinions to what they believed President Kennedy and, later, President Johnson wished to hear.

We had virtual unanimity at the time of the Bay of Pigs. At least, if any officials in the highest ranks of government were opposed, they did not speak out. Thereafter, I suggested there be a devil’s advocate to give an opposite opinion if none was pressed.

While I was there, [President Kennedy] placed telephone calls to former Presidents Truman and Eisenhower. As I was leaving, he said, making reference to Abraham Lincoln, “This is the night I should go to the theater.”

THE FINAL LESSON of the Cuban missile crisis is the importance of placing ourselves in the other country’s shoes. During the crisis, President Kennedy spent more time trying to determine the effect of a particular course of action on Khrushchev or the Russians than on any other phase of what he was doing. What guided all his deliberations was an effort not to disgrace Khrushchev, not to humiliate the Soviet Union, not to have them feel they would have to escalate their response because their national security or national interests so committed them.

As mentioned before, Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August had made a great impression on the President. “I am not going to follow a course which will allow anyone to write a comparable book about this time, The Missiles of October,” he said to me that Saturday night, October 26. “If anybody is around to write after this, they are going to understand that we made every effort to find peace and every effort to give our adversary room to move. I am not going to push the Russians an inch beyond what is necessary.”

“The fourteen people involved [in Ex-Comm] were very significant…. If six of them had been President of the U.S., I think that the world might have been blown up.”

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The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert F. Kennedy

Posted on June 25, 2026 by smellincoffee
Sad RFK walks on a beach
“I’m the only candidate who has ever united business and labor, Southerners, party bosses, and intellectuals. They’re all against me.”

David Halberstam was already a seasoned reporter when he began covering RFK’s fatal 1968 bid for the presidency. The bid itself was almost dead on arrival; RFK dragged his feet on deciding, and continually probed those around him as to whether or not he should. “No,” said the party leadership, “Wait until 1972.” LBJ still had a second full potential term to look forward to, after all, and going in 1972 would allow for a lot more groundwork than a scant few weeks RFK was giving himself before the primary season opened. RFK decided to go for it, regardless: LBJ was sinking the US deeper into the mire of Vietnam, and while Eugene McCarthy was vying for the Democratic nomination on that point alone, RFK didn’t think McCarthy had any platform besides escaping Vietnam. Unfinished Odyssey is a history of that campaign.

If I’d known the scope of the book was so narrow, I probably wouldn’t have bothered, but I’m newly curious about RFK and I’ve enjoyed Halberstam’s baseball books before. I’m interested in RFK the man — particularly the man who worked and cried for Joe McCarthy, who criticized LBJ’s Great Society for simply throwing money at problems, and yet who remains an icon of liberalism– rather than the campaigner. The book has the virtue of showing RFK in his final days, as he would be gunned down immediately after winning the California primaries, and has some additional interest in that the author was directly involved in following it. Halberstam in fact writes about himself sometimes, especially in Indiana when he and the other reporters were bored by the rubes and complained about everything from the restaurants to the accommodations. The book is presumably intended for the RFK devotee who wants to read about “Bobby’s Last Campaign”, as Halberstam doesn’t bother giving any introduction or background to RFK himself until the last third of the book where he’s reflecting on what RFK meant to him, then and now. An interesting title, but again not one I would’ve bothered with had I not recognized the author and been generally curious about its principle subject. Although a lot of this is just about the art of electioneering, we do get to see RFK’s personality at times — in particular, his genuine curiosity about, and interest in, the lower classes that DC loves to ignore.

I must admit he’s growing on me a bit.

Quotations

A well-known columnist once asked for a copy of his speech. “What do you care?” [Gene] McCarthy asked back, “You’ve never accurately reported my speeches before.”

Part of it was that he was a Kennedy, which meant that everything was bigger than life. He could not be judged like other men; more had been given to him, more was expected of him, and more would be doubted about him.

Another kid asked a belligerent question, a question filled with hate spilling over so that in the end one forgot what the question was about and remembered only the hatred and the edge and the bitterness. Kennedy, a little tired, answered, “What we need in this country is to cut down the belligerence. If we let this hatred and emotion control our lives, we’re lost.”

Bright, upper-middle-class kids, children of affluence, they believed in the doctrines of the New Left, that if a society is wrong you can do anything you want to redress it, and if someone says something you don’t like, you can drown him out and deprive him of his speech. It was an ugly hour, for one sensed that it would get worse, that this was not going to be the last such evening in American life.

Then he descended to acknowledge his victory, to talk about the violence and the divisiveness, and to let a nation discover in his death what it had never understood or believed about him during his life.

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Bad Blood

Posted on June 24, 2026 by smellincoffee
‘Cause Lyndon now we’ve got bad blood
Ya know we used to be mad love


When LBJ mentioned that Joe Kennedy’s son Robert would be excellent at leading something like NASA, RFK recorded this in his diary. The master of the Senate thought he had potential! Only a few years later, however, RFK and LBJ would stare at each other in contempt, and when LBJ inherited the Presidency following JFK’s assassination, his brother would stand down rather than serve long a man he hated. Bad Blood is the story of how Johnson and Kennedy’s relationship turned into a summer squall, black and crackling with lightning. The book is preceded by a note from the author that he feels endnotes and footnotes impede truly narrative history, but having immersed myself in presidential politics for the last two months, I saw nothing untoward — and the narrative was a cracking good read.

I rather looked forward to this book, because its stars are two men whom I dislike — but about whom I wanted to learn more. Bad Blood allowed me to start learning about LBJ and RFK without diving into a full biography, and made me intrigued about both men. LBJ was essentially a career politician: he came from a family of Texas politicos, and after a brief stint at teaching moved into the family racket himself. He developed ‘leadership’ skills early, bossing his younger siblings around, and would only grow in manipulative acumen as the years progressed. While he wasn’t exactly born into poverty, it was still a hardscrabble life. Bobby Kennedy, on the other hand, was born with a titanium spoon in his mouth — but was overshadowed by his brothers. He was the family runt, the one destined to be forgotten. It was one of his brothers, JFK, who would bring RFK and LBJ together — and make them antagonists.

After Joseph Kennedy Jr died in an experimental mission in World War 2 (flying a plane packed with explosives, with the intent of bailing out so that the plane could then be remotely-steered as a guided missile), JFK assumed the responsibility of being the family’s political face. The don of the Kennedy clan, Joe Sr, pitched the idea to LBJ of running for president and taking Jack with him as VP — but LBJ had no interest in throwing away money and energy challenging Eisenhower. By the time LBJ was ready to run for the White House, he and Jack were direct competitors — and LBJ was a hard campaigner. Smith writes that RFK was offended by LBJ not wanting to run with JFK in ’56, and outraged by LBJ’s attacks on the Kennedys during the primaries. A young idealist, he also didn’t like brother Jack contemplating bringing LBJ on as his running mate, even if LBJ would bring the South with him. LBJ was both cunning and crude, and RFK didn’t have JFK’s easy ability to work with those who differed from him. I’ve gotten the sense from other books and especially from this one that RFK had a hard personality: he wasn’t at ease with people the way his brothers were, and definitely not a natural politician. Although he’d win a senate seat — with LBJ’s help — he struggled there in a way that JFK and Ted simply didn’t. Once JFK was shot, LBJ inherited his presidency — and, Smith argues, entered into a contest with RFK over JFK’s legacy. RFK had been the number two man in DC, with LBJ sidelined despite being vice president, but on November 23, 1963, he was as Jimmy Hoffa said, “Just another lawyer”. As LBJ settled into power, RFK became more of an open critic of him, particularly on Vietnam– and while they met cordially, their relationship never had time to heal before RFK met his own end at an assassin’s bullet.

This was a riveting, fascinating, but sad read. I regard LBJ as the most vile human specimen to ever sit in the Oval Office, a man who was obsessed with his genitalia who loved physically humiliating others by forcing them to meet with him while he was on the toilet & so on — and as a libertarian I am of course against his engorgement of the federal government, good intentions or no. This book left me with the impression that his concern for the poor was sincere, however, not simply politically useful, and we’re allowed to see the poisoned flower of Vietnam burst into bloom and then completely destroy Johnson’s presidency and arguably the man himself. There’s such a sad irony that LBJ and RFK were both driven by concern for the poor, but could not tame their egos — more in RFK’s case, surprisingly — enough to realize that. RFK did bounce the idea of running as LBJ’s vice president in the ’64 election, but LBJ had no interest in running alongside a man who was a persistent critic and scold. (RFK would become more critical of LBJ’s Vietnam policy as more troops were committed.) And there’s the sadness of RFK, too — a man whose humanity is allowed to emerge after he was broken by his brother’s death. While in my other reading he is consistently a jerk — to use polite language- – after JFK’s death he appears to become more …human. And just as he’s starting to find himself, some human turdlet inflicted the shock and anguish of murder on the Kennedys yet again.

Bad Blood was unexpectedly illuminating. More RFK to come…

Quotes:

LBJ’s long-time aide and future Texas Governor, John Connally, described his mentor’s powerful personality: “There is no adjective in the dictionary to describe him. He was cruel and kind, generous and greedy, sensitive and insensitive, crafty and naïve, ruthless and thoughtful, simple in many ways, yet extremely complex, caring and totally not caring. He could overwhelm people with kindness and turn around and be cruel and petty towards those same people. He knew how to use people in politics the way nobody else could that I know of. As a matter of fact, it would take every adjective in the dictionary to describe him.”

In late August, Jackie Kennedy began hemorrhaging, and was rushed to the hospital. An emergency C-section was performed, but the baby girl was stillborn. Meanwhile, Jack was on a private yacht, thousands of miles away, enjoying the company of other women. When he received the tragic news, JFK initially refused to end his vacation and return home to his wife. Two days later, Senator George Smathers, who had accompanied Jack on the pleasure cruise, convinced the seemingly insensitive and uncaring husband to return home: “You’d better haul your ass back to your wife, if you ever want to run for President.”

On March 15, 1958, JFK addressed the annual Gridiron Dinner in Washington D.C., and joked about his political future: “I dreamed about 1960 the other night, and told Stuart Symington and Lyndon Johnson about it yesterday. I told them how the Lord came into my bedroom, anointing my head, and said, ‘John Kennedy, I hereby anoint you President of the United States.’ Stu Symington said, ‘that’s strange, Jack, because I had a similar dream last night, in which the Lord anointed me President of the United States and outer space.’ Then Lyndon Johnson said, ‘that’s very interesting, gentlemen, because I, too, had a similar dream last night, and I don’t remember anointing either one of you!’”

Jackie Kennedy was refreshingly honest: “I think it’s so unjust of people to be against Jack because he’s a Catholic. He’s such a poor Catholic. Now, if it was Bobby, I could understand it.”

On Inauguration Day, a photographer for United Press International, who had known RFK for many years, jokingly asked: “Well, Bobby, what are we supposed to call you now? Is it Bobby, or Attorney General, or General, or Sir?” “Just call me son of a bitch, because that’s what everybody else is going to be doing,” Bobby replied.

In the weeks following JFK’s assassination, RFK exhibited a dark sense of humor. On one occasion, Bobby asked a friend: “Been to any good funerals, lately? I don’t like to let too many days go by without a funeral.”

While the credibility gap ultimately exposed LBJ’s duplicity to the world, those who observed him closely (advisers, fellow politicians, and reporters) had long been aware of his propensity to stretch the truth. Some of the lies were harmless—such as his preference for bourbon (like all good Texans), when he really drank scotch. Other falsehoods achieved whopper status—LBJ claimed his uncle fought at the Alamo, and that he had earned his Silver Star for “helping shoot down twenty Zeros.” Editing a speechwriter’s draft, LBJ scratched out the name Socrates in a quotation, and replaced it with “my Granddaddy.”

“A man can fight if he can see daylight down the road, somewhere. But, there ain’t no daylight in Vietnam. There’s not a bit.”

Kennedy made light of his campaign’s strengths, in a conversation with Ted Sorensen: “I’m the only candidate who has ever united business and labor, Southerners, party bosses, and intellectuals. They’re all against me.”

“It must be quite something to land at an airport named for your brother,” the newsman opined. “I wish it was still called Idlewild,” RFK softly replied.

In New York City, Jackie Kennedy was awakened by a telephone call from her brother-in-law, Stas Radziwill: “Jackie? How’s Bobby?” “He’s fine, terrific. You heard that he won California by (with) 53 percent, didn’t you?” the former First Lady replied, having retired for the evening, after RFK was projected the winner in the primary contest. “But Jackie, he’s been shot. It happened just a few minutes ago,” Radziwill informed her. “No! It can’t have happened!” Jackie exclaimed, realizing that her shocking premonitions about RFK’s fate had come to fruition, “No! It can’t have happened!”

Related:
“Why Don’t You Like Me?” Woody Harrelson’s LBJ confronts RFK in the Oval Office.

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WWW Wednesdays and High School Reunions

Posted on June 24, 2026 by smellincoffee

Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is, “Have You Ever Attended Your High School Reunion? Why or why not?”

Be true to your school
Like you would to your girl
Be true to your school
Let your colors fly
(“Be True To Your School”, Beach Boys)

Well…no. I graduated in 2003: by 2013 we were all facebook friends. My high school class didn’t even talk about a ten-year reunion; it simply wasn’t on our radar. We see pictures of each other and our kids every day; we’re part of group chats where people talk about politics and substance abuse problems and getting along with spouses and share recipes. I have literally seen kids grow up on facebook, from pregnancy bumps to senior photos.The closest thing we had to a real reunion was a rally/fundraiser for a classmate who had been stricken with a rare cancer. Our class has had numerous deaths, so there have been funerals over the years — far, far more than we would expect, even if we are ‘geriatric millennials’. An attempt was made at a 20-year reunion, but it was a small group (under ten, mostly the organizer’s friends) and sadly one of the few attendees has since passed away. These days our big class event chat is mostly used to share links to each other’s fundraisers, gofundmes, that kind of thing. Robert Putnam would not be surprised. Working at the library, whenever I see class reunion adverts it’s always for classes that preceded social media: I wonder if they’ll just stop being a thing once the Boomers pass away It’s a morbid thought, but Boomers really do prop up a lot of society that people don’t realize. Mainline Protestantism, for instance, is half-Boomer.

And on that chipper note, WWW Wednesday!

WHAT have you finished reading recently? Bad Blood. A narrative history of the RFK/LBJ relationship, which was fairly acrimonious.

WHAT are you reading now? Need to focus on Angle of Repose.

WHAT are you reading next? Need to give Rupture some attention.

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Ten Books on my Summer TBR

Posted on June 23, 2026 by smellincoffee

Today’s TTT is books on our summer reading list; as I normally do, I’m going to look back at the last quarterly TBR to see how I did. As it turns out, I batted .500 again! The ones I missed were a Cory Doctorow title on the internet getting worse, a book on black baseball in Alabama, GIRLS, a biography of Polk, and “something by Annie Jacobsen”. But first, the tease!

“How are you, Lyndon?” the physician inquired, as the boy dramatically writhed in pain. “Oh, I’m killed! I’m killed!” Lyndon cried. When the doctor suggested administering a “shot” for pain, his young patient’s hysterics escalated: “Oh, please doctor, don’t shoot me! I want to live awhile longer!” BAD BLOOD: LBJ, RFK, AND THE TUMULTUOUS 1960s. Jeffrey Smith.

Ten Books on my Summer TBR

(1) GIRLS, Freya India. I support her brilliant substack and ordered the book, so I definitely plan on reading this.It’s a reflection by a Gen-Z woman on the commodification of girlhood — how growing up on social media made them turn themselves into brands. Her writing is really good and I’m sure I’ll love the book once I can escape the clutches of Mr. Nixon & Mr. Kennedy.

(2) Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner. Working away at this one.

(3) Inventing a Nation, Gore Vidal

(4) Bad Blood, Jeffrey Smith. RFK vs LBJ. I’ll have a review posted for this one before the week is out. It’s a fast read and I’m so familiar with the context at this point that I recognize practically all the quotes being pulled.

(5) Rupture, Regina Kay. Dark urban fantasy, I think. Outside my usual range, and definitely outside the scope of my current obsession, but it’s a debut book from a friend.

(6) Black Baseball in Alabama: Rough Diamonds of Dixie, Shane Earnest. Somewhat similar, but in this case baseball and local history are definitely in my wheelhouse. The only reason I haven’t started this yet is because because 2026 is The Year of Presidents, apparently.

(7) End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers, Gord McGill. This is of both personal and academic interest to me; my family is full of OTR drivers, including my father, and I love reading about transportation. McGill writes on Substack at Autonomous Truckers.

(8) Communion, J.D. Vance. A memoir of coming back to Christianity via the Catholic Church. I should preface this by saying I read Hillbilly Elegy back in 2016, well before J.D. was a politician, let alone the vice president, so I’m reading this out of personal interest in the man and his story rather than as a politician: my personal interest is redoubled by the fact that I have a fascination with Catholicism that dates back to 2011 and which persists today. Although I worship in a different communion, Catholic authors and priests account for the overwhelming majority of my Christian formation. It helps, of course, that a strong part of my own conversion to Christianity involved Communion or the Eucharist.

(9) Vendetta: Bobby Kennedy vs Jimmy Hoffa, James Neff.

I’ve wanted to read this since seeing Jack Nicholson playing Jimmy Hoffa giving RFK as righteous telling-off in HOFFA.

(10) Six Crises, Richard Nixon. A pre-presidential memoir. Chatgpt suggests that this may not be a healthy choice for someone trying to escape dead presidents. I actually had a dream a few weeks ago that I met Nixon in a back-country dive bar and we talked about Ike and Dick as he shook his head ruefully.

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1960: The Election that Forged Three Presidencies

Posted on June 22, 2026 by smellincoffee

As the Eisenhower administration began drawing to a close and a new decade loomed, America had a choice: stay the course, or shake things up? Although JFK would claim in his 1961 inaugural that the torch had been passed to a new generation, in truth his three successors were all from an older one. Two of those men vied with him in 1960, the race of which is plumbed in depth here. It covers not only JFK, LBJ, and Nixon, but also men like Hubert Humphrey, Adlai Stevenson, and Nelson Rockefeller, with varying degrees of details. While it gets into the weeds of JFK canvassing precinct by precinct, readers also experience the campaign through the culture, and the events of 1960 that shaped it — like the new role played by television, or Frank Sinatra’s love of Kennedy that took him off the campaign trail when he realized his mob buddies might present bad optics for Jack.Political wonks will love the detail, but casual readers should be warned that the early history, focusing on Kennedy working the primaries, is a bit of a slog with all the personalities involved.

Given how many books I’ve read recently that touched on the 1960 election, I was fairly familiar with the book’s broad topic going in. I was wholly unfamiliar with men like Stevenson and Rockefeller, though, and enjoyed my introduction, though Rockefeller and Nixon’s eventual VP pick Henry Cabot Lodge both impaired Nixon to varying degrees. (Lodge promised a black cabinet member at the same time that Nixon and JFK were trying to court both the Southern establishment and the black vote — a very fine needle to thread!). I was impressed by JFK as a campaigner; though his father’s money gave him considerable advantages, both in advertising and in mobility (JFK had a private plane, allowing him to blitz across the state while his frustrated competitors were stuck motoring through often awful roads and worse weather), the young prince was determined to connect with the people. He made a joke of his monied status rather than trying to be something he wasn’t, and his charisma allowed him to woo rough West Virginia miners as readily as he did squealing teenage girls in New York. Kennedy’s status as a Catholic (however nominal) is a recurring issue here, as the US was still a very Protestant nation suspicious of political Catholicism; part of Kennedy’s challenge was to sideline the ‘religious issue’, and one way was to use the well-practiced policy of accusing anyone who dislikes their candidate of being a bigot/sexist/racist/etc. The religious issue could also be used for laughs: when Harry Truman said that Nixon voters could go to Hell, JFK wired him and commented that he’d rather not raise ‘the religious issue’.

Another recurring part of this book is JFK trying to win over the older Democratic establishment, particularly Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Truman; Roosevelt much preferred older candidates, and Truman appears to have only voted for Kennedy because he claimed Nixon had called him a Communist. (In other books, I’ve seen Nixon being critical of Truman’s administration for being soft on communism, and even claim that Truman had fellow travelers in his Cabinet.) The book also includes well known campaign events like the first TV debate, in which Nixon appeared pale and sweaty — this didn’t just owe to makeup, though. Nixon had only recently gotten out of the hospital and then run himself ragged doing a driving campaign, whereas JFK had deliberately taken days off to rest and prepare.

Nixon had an ostensibly easier time of campaigning; he didn’t have to bother with a primary battle, and had the ‘advantage’ of being the incumbent. Eisenhower wasn’t an enthusiastic campaigner for his would-be successor, at least not until late in the campaign when the Kennedy clan mocked him for bringing in Ike as a last resort. Being the quasi-incumbent also had its disadvantages; while their policies don’t appear to me have differed much, Kennedy presented a young, fresh face against Nixon’s more tired one. One element about Nixon that I still don’t understand is why he was so actively disliked by the media and establishment : they act as though he was the devil incarnate when at this point in his career he’d done nothing dodgy. Different books suggest it was Nixon going after Alger Hiss, a member of the DC set, but that doesn’t quite satisfy me. Was he a tough campaigner? Sure, but so were the Kennedy boys — mailing anti-Catholic ads to Catholic households to get out the Catholic vote. As the author remarks, it wasn’t as though Nixon and Kennedy were that different as politicians, but JFK wore it better. He made politics feel idealistic even if his means were not, whereas Nixon and Johnson were more transparent in being manipulators of a political machine.

1960: JFK vs LBJ vs Nixon was a thorough history of a campaign that would strongly shape American history — putting JFK and then LBJ into the White House, and stirring up the energy that would develop into the Bay of Pigs, the Moon Shot, and Vietnam. It was a time when much was changing, including the role of primaries in national elections. This was a largely entertaining take on that election, though more casual readers may be overwhelmed by its detail.

As a sidenote: I was very much amused by how many people regarded RJK as a condescending jerk, even people who worked for him.

Quotations

“Joe Kennedy,” recalled Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, who would succeed JFK in that same congressional seat, “spent $300,000 on that race which was six times what I spent in a very tough congressional campaign . . . six years later.” A frustrated Mike Neville pinned a ten-dollar bill to his shirt pocket and dubbed it his Kennedy campaign button.

JFK proposed to be no timeserver, no mere Eisenhower caretaker or Stevenson pontificator. He would be the action hero of politics, the embodiment of an up-and-coming generation, too impatient for power and, yes, glory, to wait any longer in line. In the process, he would transform the nation’s politics. “America’s politics,” Norman Mailer would write in an article for Esquire in 1960, “would now be America’s favorite movie.”

And, yet, how many of the premier politicians of that era proved much better, more principled? Perhaps a Taft or a Humphrey. Certainly not an LBJ careening from left to right to left again with each change of his constituencies. And certainly not JFK, who remarked, quite frankly and quite obviously, “We were interested not so much in the ideas of politics as in the mechanics of the whole thing.” No, it wasn’t Dick Nixon’s ideological “flexibility” that separated him from his peers—it was his pronounced lack of charm in displaying that flexibility.

Once asked to reply to a British journalist’s comment that her surly husband appeared “like a Sioux brave about to take a scalp,” RFK’s wife (and mother of his eleven children) Ethel responded with a touch of humor—and truth: “Why should I, since he generally is about to be?”

And RFK remained very much a fanatically loyal McCarthyite—if not to the crusade, at least to the crusader. When Joe McCarthy died in May 1957, a distraught Bobby shuttered his Senate office for an hour. “I want to do this,” he wept. “It was the only time I had ever seen tears in his eyes,” recalled Bobby’s personal secretary.

“You can trample all over [Jack] and the next day he’s there for you with loving arms. But Bobby’s my boy,” boasted Joe to Tip O’Neill. “When Bobby hates you, you stay hated.”

While a father struggled to pay for a daughter’s wedding, favored son Jack Kennedy had everything bought for him. “I got a wire from my father:” he informed audiences. “‘Dear Jack: Don’t buy another vote, I’ll be damned if I’ll pay for a landslide.’” Hubert Humphrey wasn’t laughing.

“Did you hear the news?” a mocking LBJ inquired of Minnesota Republican congressman Walter Judd, himself a medical doctor. “What news?” “Jack’s pediatricians have just given him a clean bill of health!”

“Ninety per cent of this press corps,” contended Chicago Tribune correspondent Willard Edwards, “which ranged between 50 and 100 at various periods in the campaign, were all-out supporters of Kennedy. They were not only opposed to Nixon, they were outspoken in their hatred and contempt of him . . . it was loud and open.

Aided by H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman and a new recruit to his inner circle, Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon moved to shut down John Kennedy’s Vietnam War but not Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society (“We get the action,” crowed GOP liberal Hugh Scott, “and the conservatives get the rhetoric”).

That last one elicited some bitter laughter from me — boy, that’s one thing that’s never changed.

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Kennedy and Nixon

Posted on June 18, 2026 by smellincoffee

President Richard Nixon was a sweetie-pie who wrote letters so tender to Jackie Kennedy she cried, and she wrote him gracious letters back. The idea of Nixon being sweet and caring does not sit easily with modern readers, but that is one of the slow-blooming fruits of studying Nixon. What a piece of work is man — and what a piece of work was Nixon, this glowering political strategist whose fears and paranoias destroyed a career of absolute accomplishment. This lonely, distressed introvert who could beam like the Sun during a baseball game, who could exchange fire with the secret service — “The sonabitch is in here tying his shoes!” — and who could write lovely letters to a woman whose very soul was bleeding — he is the man we love to hate, and yet….he was a man, an enormously complicated man whose virtues and vices held hands and ushered him into history for good or ill. Kennedy and Nixon is a joint biography of two men who entered Congress together, who debated politics on train rides together, whose politics were not that different — and yet who were rivals. Yet they were more than rivals; Kennedy’s ease and charisma were envied by Nixon, and even as Nixon struggled against the Kennedy family for control of politics, he couldn’t help but admire Jack Kennedy. There was a delicious longing in Nixon to be more like Jack — to be loved, to have that ease with the people. This was quite the book.

This is not a book I would have read before this year, in large part because I regarded JFK as admirable mostly in his ability to make speeches, and I had no idea how interconnected the lives of these men were. Seeing teases of their relationship in other books, though — their debating on trains, their having offices across the hall from one another, their very similar Cold Warrior approaches and more ‘moderate’ domestic policies — intrigued me. American history typically treats Nixon as a villain, but the more I read him the more compelling he becomes. Yes, I can see his faults, his most grievous faults, and yet I keep finding a man who is unexpectedly gracious, unexpectedly courageous. He’s going to dominate this review, and I’m not sorry: JFK has no shortage of writers who lionize him, because he was genuinely inspirational. He was a war hero and a man who faced off against Khrushchev time and again and spurred America on to the moon — but part of me suspects his memory is so grand in the American imagination because he was shot, because he died young and tragically with a weeping wife trying to collect pieces of his skull from the back of a sedan. Dick Nixon didn’t get that opportunity, though he’s quoted in this book as alluding that he very well might have. Someone said that if so and so had done his TV make up in the first Nixon-JFK debate, he might be president; Nixon responded that he also might have been dead. Oswald, with his weird fetish for Castro’s Cuba, would have knocked off one Cold Warrior as easily as another.

Half the book covers Nixon and Kennedy’s rise together; Nixon outstrips Kennedy at first, but ultimately its JFK who comes from behind in his own private moonshot. What strikes me most is how really similar both men were as far as policies; they were close enough that they could swap sides when not in power. Nixon as Ike’s VP caught fire for Eisenhower not being aggressively enough anti-communist (he contemplated nuking Korea, people, what else do you want?), but once Nixon was just a lawyer it was he who could return fire against a JFK whose desire to stop Communism had to be tempered by responsibility. Where they differed almost seems a question of character: Kennedy was young, aspirational, inspiring — Nixon serious and glowering. When they began debating, Nixon was advised to “kill the assassin image” that resulted from his zealous prosecution of the suspected Communist traitor Alger Hiss: Nixon intentionally soft-pedaled on Kennedy, even agreeing with him — it didn’t help that Nixon genuinely admired and liked Jack. When Kennedy was struggling with severe back issues, Nixon told him that he could use Nixon’s ceremonial office just off the Senate, rather than having to struggle from his own office.

Ultimately, regard for the Kennedys’ charisma and political tactics would drive Nixon to poison his career: after being convinced that he’d been done in by dirty tricks, particularly potential mob influence in Chicago and the federal government spying on him on behalf of Kennedy, Nixon was increasingly willing to engage in dirty tricks of his own. That opened the road to Watergate and ruin. Even after Kennedy was shot, the Kennedys continued to haunt Nixon through RFK and then Ted Kennedy. A lot of the last quarter of this book focuses on Nixon’s increasing paranoia, linked to RFK and Ted’s aspirations, that the Beltway was out to get him. They were, but the means he chose to combat them were ultimately his undermining. One of the book’s more interesting elements is the inclusion of transcripts which show Nixon’s obsession with finding out how much the state had been spying on him — something that was in fact happening (this only recently revealed), and led to him making the decision to bug offices and entertain the idea of doing break-ins to find information that was being withheld from him.

This was a fascinating book to spend a few weeks with: it goes a long way to showing how wonderfully human Nixon was, but how sad his ejection from grace was. As a joint biography, it works wonderfully not because of the men’s rivalry, but because of the men. The book presents Nixon neither as hero nor villain, but as a profoundly human figure: ambitious, gracious, insecure, courageous, resentful, and often undone by his own fears. His fall from grace feels all the more tragic because his achievements were so substantial and his better qualities so evident. Kennedy remains the more naturally inspirational figure, but Nixon emerges as the more complicated—and perhaps more compelling—man.

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WWW Wednesday + Know Before You Go

Posted on June 17, 2026 by smellincoffee

Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is, “Something to know before visiting my country or city”.

Well, for starters, don’t come between May and October because most of the year we endure the Great Sticky Siege. As regards Selma specifically, my ladyfriend probably started giggling because she knows exactly what I’m going to say, because I have an entire rant about it, but I’m going to surprise her and say this: people visit purely for Civil Rights history, which is valid given our role in it, but Selma has a history which is far deeper and richer than 1960s politics. Selma is one of Alabama’s few original river towns to survive into the modern day, along with Montgomery; the rest, like St. Stephens, Claiborne, and Old Cahawba, all died. This owed in part to its geographical advantage: it’s a high bluff on the Alabama river in the middle of Alabama’s richest farming soil, and until the 1920s that meant it commanded agriculture commerce. Everything came to us, and then it went elsewhere. First by rivers, then by rails. Railroads obsessed Selma’s civic and business leaders after the War. The town assumed signal importance during the Civil War, being burned in the last week of the conflict, but rebounded to become so influential that at one time, both of Alabama’s US Senators hailed from here. Then came cars and highways and — well. We missed the interstate bus, and now we’re struggling to find our way in the new world. We have an impressive architectural heritage that could rival Natchez if we received cruise lines like they do. The Alabama river is so dammed up, though, we’ll have to find another way.

WWW Wednesday

WHAT have you finished reading recently? Five Days in November, Kennedy and Nixon, and SHELLI: R-Evolution. The latter releases in a few days but I read an advance copy sent to me by the author. Review for K&N is done but I’m still in ‘edit and ponder’ mode. (Happy City was in edit-and-ponder mode for several years, but I’m fairly sure K&N will be posted tomorrow.)

WHAT are you reading now? Still Angle of Repose. One of my church members said to me Sunday, “Stephen! We need to have a Wallace Stegner chat.” He was disappointed that I hadn’t finished it yet (give me time people, do you realize how many books I want to hoover up?)

WHAT are you reading next? The Rupture, Regina Kay. Dark fantasy release from a friend. I can’t even say “dark fantasy isn’t really my thing” because I’ve literally read three and a half dark fantasy westerns by Rhett C. Bruno and Jaime Castle.

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