Kennedy’s Finest Moment

MEDFORD, Mass. — JUNE 11, 1963, may not be a widely recognized date these days, but it might have been the single most important day in civil rights history.

That morning, Gov. George Wallace, in an effort to block the integration of the University of Alabama, made his futile “stand at the schoolhouse door.” That evening, Boston N.A.A.C.P. leaders engaged in their first public confrontation with Louise Day Hicks, the chairwoman of the Boston School Committee, over de facto public school segregation, beginning a decade-long struggle that would boil over into spectacular violence during the early 1970s. And just after midnight in Jackson, Miss., a white segregationist murdered the civil rights leader Medgar Evers.

But the most important event was one that almost didn’t happen: a hastily arranged speech that evening by President John F. Kennedy.

Kennedy had dabbled with the idea of going on TV should the Alabama crisis drag out, so when it ended, his staff assumed the plan was off. But that afternoon he surprised them by calling the three networks and personally requesting airtime at 8 p.m. He told his speechwriter Theodore Sorensen to start drafting the text, but shortly before he went on air the president was still editing it...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/opinion/kennedys-civil-rights-triumph.html?src=me&ref=general

"Don’t you remember what happened to Martin Luther King Jr.?"

Did Barack Obama actually tell intimates that he has betrayed his liberal supporters because he fears assassination?

That's the story we are getting from former-CIA-analyst-turned-Agency-critic Ray McGovern. He claims that a "close friend" attended an intimate dinner party with Barack Obama. On that occasion, the President explained why he reversed his well-known campaign promise to shut down the prison at Gitmo:

And I know from a good friend who was there when it happened, that at a small dinner with progressive supporters – after these progressive supporters were banging on Obama before the election, Why don’t you do the things we thought you stood for? Obama turned sharply and said, "Don’t you remember what happened to Martin Luther King Jr.?" That’s a quote, and that’s a very revealing quote...

http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2013/06/dont-you-remember-what-happened-to.html

@CBSNews: Father of CBS News' Michelle Miller long told stories of how he worked to save RFK's life; now she has proof http://cbsn.ws/ZOCKrD

https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/342285800454635521

Last night I watched "Seven Days in May". The film stands up very well. I was especially impressed with the acting and the script by Rod Serling.

The film is based on the novel by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II and published in 1962. The author, Knebel, got the idea for the book after interviewing the Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay. At the time LeMay had spoken to some of his staff about removing the President from power.

In the film the leader of the plot, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), Air Force General James Mattoon Scott, is compared to General Edwin A. Walker.

It is believed that Knebel got the idea for the book after a conversation with President Kennedy. It was Knebel's first novel. According to John Frankenheimer, the director, Pierre Salinger conveyed to him that JFK wanted the film be made, "these were the days of General Walker" and, though the Pentagon did not want the film made, the President would conveniently arrange to visit Hyannis Port for a weekend when the film needed to shoot outside the White House.

The main figure behind the film was not John Frankenheimer but Kirk Douglas and his film company, Joel Productions. It was Douglas who broke the blacklist with producing Spartacus in 1960. Joe McCarthy along with General Walker gets a mention in the film.

In the book, the secret United States Army combat unit created and controlled by Scott's conspiracy is based in Texas near Fort Bliss. However, in the film the venue is changed to San Diego. I wonder why?

Rod Serling is an interesting choice to write the script. He had very left-wing views and was very frustrated by the amount of political censorship he suffered. In 1959, he began producing The Twilight Zone. He stated in an interview that the science fiction format would not be controversial and would escape censorship unlike his earlier work on television. In reality the show gave him the opportunity to communicate social messages in a more veiled context.

Serling died of a heart-attack at the age of 50.

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/MinM/341