Like John Kennedy in 1960, Obama combines youth, vigor, and good looks with the promise of political change. Like Kennedy, he grew up in unusual circumstances that distance him from ordinary American life.
Virginia Postrel
Related In 1960, John F. Kennedy rode a superior televised debate performance to victory over Richard Nixon. FABRIZIO MOREIRA In the case of Marilyn and John Kennedy, I think they did affect change. SALLY KIRKLAND When President Kennedy was elected, many black Americans, like so many Americans, were captivated by... MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN John Kennedy really did extend the reach of the American people and said, like Lincoln said in a way... RICHARD DREYFUSS As Wyatt explains, it's clearly John F. Kennedy. But he also was reminded of Robert Kennedy when he ... ANN SCANLON JFK apparently felt genuine sympathy for his 1960 presidential opponent Richard Nixon. He felt that,... DAVID PIETRUSZA Each of these three young people -- Lauren Bessette, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy and John F. Kenne... FAMILY TREE I would like to see 'A Confederacy of Dunces' by John Kennedy Toole adapted. TAMARA FELDMAN The world of TV debates is antiquated. What looked smart and modern in 1960, with Kennedy versus Nix... RUZWANA BASHIR I'm actually following the advice that Tom Dewey (who lost the 1948 presidential election to Harry T... BILL BRADLEY When Johnson decided to fight for passage of the law John F. Kennedy had put before Congress in June... ROBERT DALLEK John F. Kennedy went to bed at 3:30 in the morning on November 9, 1960, uncertain whether he had def... ROBERT DALLEK Certainly I think the election of John Kennedy and all he stood for was one that really was an inspi... BIRCH BAYH By every measure, John Kennedy's sex life was compulsive and reckless. At one level, it had clea... JEFF GREENFIELD I took Bobby Kennedy through the delta and he cried like a baby. CHARLES EVERS Now this state [that] gave us John Adams and John Kennedy has now given us John Kerry , a good man, ... BILL CLINTON John F. Kennedy, the man I had thought would define the political ideal for the rest of my days, was... TOM BROKAW John Kennedy led us on a journey to discover the moon. Obama needs to lead us on a journey to redisc... THOMAS FRIEDMAN When I was a kid, Eisenhower had been President forever, and all of a sudden, everything in the worl... JAMES ELLROY Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy, I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator... LLOYD BENTSEN Would you say that your views are the same as those expressed by John Kennedy when he was a candidat... ARLEN SPECTOR Ever since John Kennedy, Democrats have had a weakness for dashing younger men like Bill Clinton and... JOE KLEIN been more wrong, more loudly, more often than the two Senators from Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy and J... ZELL MILLER Dear God, please take care of your servant John Fitzgerald Kennedy. JACKIE KENNEDY I am just a humble worker. Commander Chavez decided I should be president. To President Obama, we re... NICOLAS MADURO John Kennedy has worked with the pack this week. He has not done any contact stuff but he has been w... GORDON STRACHAN If Obama's vision of the public sector is socialism, then so too were the visions of Theodore Ro... JEFF GREENFIELD Jamal looks like he's in shape and prepared, considering his offseason circumstances. He looks like ... DERRICK MASON I believe Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill John Kennedy. I believe that. JESSE VENTURA Kennedy was like a rock star. Carter was the earnest outsider at the height of Washington cynicism. ... FABRIZIO MOREIRA The argument that John F. Kennedy was a closet peacenik, ready to give up on what the Vietnamese cal... RICK PERLSTEIN In two months Joseph Kennedy had taken over my entire life, and I trusted him implicitly to make the... GLORIA SWANSON I've been a conservative in West Virginia before that was popular. I've seen a change in Wes... JOHN RAESE I liked Kennedy. So far, he is the only American president who could talk with me and with whom I co... SUKARNO All non-incumbent campaigns promise hope and change, but Obama took the promise to a new level of ab... JOHN PODHORETZ He was definitely fouled. And Kennedy was, in fact, shot. MARC IAVARONI In publishing 'JFK: Reckless Youth' almost twenty years ago, I had gotten into trouble mysel... NIGEL HAMILTON The most intimidating world leader was Lyndon Johnson, who became U.S. President when John Kennedy w... PAUL JOHNSON In the end, Ted Kennedy was a politician, plain and simple. Yet he embodied how politics and public ... CHUCK TODD John F. Kennedy responded, as he often did when at his best, skillfully mixing dollops of wit with, ... DAVID PIETRUSZA What does it take to live like a Kennedy KENNETH WATERS JR Barack Obama is not Harry Truman, who dropped the A-bomb on Japan to stop World War II. Barack Obama... MONICA CROWLEY Show me a man who plays a good game of golf and I'll show you a man who is neglecting something - Jo... JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY Ted Kennedy is endorsing John Kerry and I'm wondering, do you really want the endorsement of a guy w... DAVID LETTERMAN He caught the eye of Bobby Kennedy. ROBERT WEAVER At the time of his death, John Kennedy had a national security establishment that was a writhing bal... CHARLIE PIERCE Kids in the '60s, you know, are disillusioned. There is no question about that. They feel that John ... THOMAS FORAN I have concluded that Anthony Kennedy was being ultra-careful in his testimony, with the entrails of... GORDON HUMPHREY I grew up in the '90s, so I've definitely resurrected many looks from my youth lately, inclu... DEVIN KELLEY Ted Kennedy will go down in history as one of the giants of the U.S. Senate and one the most accompl... BERNIE SANDERS It sounds like Senator Kennedy is echoing President Bush's State of the Union message. KEVIN HASSETT Any receiver that says they don't think about going over the middle when you have a guy like a John ... FERNANDO BRYANT He is still learning to cope with the pressures of being a Kennedy. DARRELL WEST The CIA's official history of the Bay of Pigs operation is filled with dramatic and harrowing de... ROBERT DALLEK Frank was a sort of anthropologist in that sense. He really celebrated these lives, and these people... BARRY MILES In my lifetime, we've gone from Eisenhower to George W. Bush. We've gone from John F. Kennedy to Al ... LEWIS BLACK That's the precedent from Justice Kennedy. WALTER DELLINGER The grand jury, composed of 12 eminent New Orleans citizens, heard our evidence and indicted the def... JIM GARRISON I did meet Sen. Robert Kennedy, and it taught me something about political charisma. MICHAEL KORDA I have serious doubts about the value of debates in a presidential election. They tend to be a test ... DWIGHT D EISENHOWER When Ted Kennedy found that out, he said, ORRIN HATCH The first year after [President John] Kennedy announced the Apollo program, the NASA budget was doub... BILL NELSON Eleanor Roosevelt on the changes in John F. Kennedy that led her to drop her opposition to his nomin... DAVID PIETRUSZA The biggest difference between Kennedy and Nixon, as far as the press is concerned, is simply this: ... BEN BRADLEE You know, it's very clear, as one looks back on history again of the Cold War that, following th... ALEXANDER HAIG We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising. ZELDA FITZGERALD There is always a solution to any problem. Find opportunities in any circumstance. Never become... LAILAH GIFTY AKITA Unlike with Kennedy, there was no honeymoon period for conservatives, ... Souter relatively quickly ... MARK TUSHNET Fortunately, President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy disagreed with the estimate and chose a course of ... DAVID KAY I like to prowl ordinary places and taste the people- from a distance. CHARLES BUKOWSKI In early 1961 a new president, John F. Kennedy, was told by military leaders and civilian officials ... JEFF GREENFIELD I think Kennedy has done a wonderful job and he has handled his situation very professionally, and e... MARK DANTONIO He was kind of cheering me on. He has always had an interest in Edgar Kennedy. BILL CASSARA There was a man who was an associate of jimmy Hoffa, who testified against Hoffa in his trial down i... LOUIS STOKES It's pretty impressive to come in like that and do what he does. One swing of the bat with him up th... BRAD HENNESSEY The first time I met (Kennedy) was when he came to the Post for a meeting with the editorial board. ... ARTHUR MASSOLO Ray really looks like a stroll in the park. He looks like he could do it the rest of his life. JOE GIBBS Whatever the long-term legal prospects for same-sex marriage, President Obama's willingness to p... ROBERT DALLEK I believe history will come to view 9/11 as an event on par with November 22, 1963, the date on whic... JON MEACHAM We all lined up to meet Kennedy. TOM KATUS It is personal connections and relationships. And if you look back to a Franklin Roosevelt, a John K... DAVID GARROW It’s hard to deny that an alarming number of those who stood for peace, not war, were either kille... JAMES MORCAN I think Democrats made a mistake running away from liberalism. Liberalism, uh, Franklin Roosevelt, H... THEODORE C. SORENSEN People don't realize what they had till it's gone. Like President Kennedy, there was no one ... MUHAMMAD ALI Much as I cared for Joseph Kennedy, he was a classic example of that person in the arts with lots of... GLORIA SWANSON In my lifetime, we've gone from Eisenhower to George W. Bush. We've gone from John F. Kenned... LEWIS BLACK The work I did on 'Killing Kennedy' was very meticulous and, in some ways, actually tedious.... KELLY MASTERSON With the NDAA, his failure to close Guantanamo Bay and the ramping use of drones, President Obama lo... JUSTIN SANE I covered Kennedy when she was three years old and the darling daughter of President Kennedy who dot... HELEN THOMAS Here's an interesting form of murder we came up with: assassination. You know what's interesting abo... GEORGE CARLIN I enjoyed working with Ted Kennedy. SAM BROWNBACK The problem, gentlemen, is that Obama is right: The promise of upward mobility is dying in America, ... RON FOURNIER It's more unusual than you'd think. He grew up in Malibu ... not exactly the home of country music. ROGER MALINOWSKI Candidate Obama was either exceptionally naive or willfully disingenuous when he vowed to change the... REINCE PRIEBUS Nobody understood how to use television for his own purposes better than Nixon, despite his poor sho... MICHAEL KORDA He wouldn't be seen as a Dukakis or a Kennedy, but it doesn't go that far. They've never heard of hi... MERLE BLACK Jacqueline Kennedy rented and then built homes in the horse country of Virginia where she would take... CARL ANTHONY Jacqueline Kennedy rented and then built homes in the horse country of Virginia where she would take... CARL SFERRAZZA ANTHONY This is our first time out. This is much more like Kitty Hawk than Kennedy. MARC SCHWAGER President Kennedy loved the entertainment world, ... We were asking him -- he was newly in office --... ANGIE DICKINSON
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VIRGINIA WOOLF If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people. VIRGINIA WOOLF I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It exp... VIRGINIA WOOLF Books are the mirrors of the soul. VIRGINIA WOOLF I will not be "famous," "great." I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, re... VIRGINIA WOOLF To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father. VIRGINIA WOOLF Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the... VIRGINIA WOOLF Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever ... VIRGINIA WOOLF Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the... VIRGINIA WOOLF Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night. VIRGINIA WOOLF Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems. VIRGINIA WOOLF The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages. VIRGINIA WOOLF Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills ... VIRGINIA WOOLF Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I'm never not thinking of you. VIRGINIA WOOLF One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. VIRGINIA WOOLF Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of... VIRGINIA WOOLF A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her c... VIRGINIA WOOLF The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as s... VIRGINIA WOOLF But it is just when opinions universally prevail and we have added lip service to their authority th... VIRGINIA WOOLF The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only... VIRGINIA WOOLF Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do. VIRGINIA WOOLF There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intell... VIRGINIA WOOLF I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and w... VIRGINIA WOOLF I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure. VIRGINIA WOOLF Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before... VIRGINIA WOOLF