Thursday, August 25, 2011

Moynihan on Kennedy (with intimations of Obama)

On the tenth anniversay of President Kennedy's assassination:

"Very little has gone well for us: almost nothing as we would have wished.  Not all bad.  The high school rhetoric has been knocked out of us: no more torches....Had he lived we would mostly by now be half ashamed and half angry at the too great submission of our own persons to his persona.  A wholly dangerous: an infantile thing."    November 22, 1973, (page 316)

The high school rhetoric, the torches, the infantile submission to a persona would return

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