Norman Mailer is occasionally (though not often enough) given credit as one of the key engines that drove Kennedy to political success. Jackie O. was one person who recognized the fact and said so in a letter to Mailer. Anyway...this is very much worth everyones time to read, not only as amazing writing but as engaging history. The opening paragraph alone contains more wisdom than most political writing: For once let us try to think about a political convention without losing ourselves in housing projects of fact and issue. Politics has its virtues, all too many of them -- it would not rank with baseball as a topic of conversation if it did not satisfy a great many things -- but one can suspect that its secret appeal is close to nicotine. Smoking cigarettes insulates one from one’s life, one does not feel as much, often happily so, and politics quarantines one from history; most of the people who nourish themselves in the political life are in the game not to make history but to be diverted from the history which is being made.
Posted on: Sat, 02 Nov 2013 22:01:01 +0000
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