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Double Take
Introducing Double Take, our new blog from the archives. Check back over the next few days to see some of our favorite pieces from the magazine’s eighty-seven year history. Here, we take stock of a few groundbreaking investigative pieces that have significantly influenced the national discourse over the past century.
Two of these, “Hiroshima” and “Silent Spring,” are pieces that, when they were published, produced noticeable changes in the public’s thinking on the issues of nuclear war and the environment. Another, “Survival,” helped introduce the country to the man who would later become its thirty-fifth president.
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Fifty years ago today, on October 16, 1962, President John Kennedy was shown aerial photographs of offensive Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba. Thus began the Cuban missile crisis and history’s highest-stakes game of chicken.
During the following thirteen days, my grandfather, Paul Nitze, then a high-ranking official in the Defense Department, was a member of ExComm, a small group of men who debated how the United States should respond. The President secretly recorded many of the conversations, but Nitze was the only participant authorized to take notes.
A few years ago, while researching a book about Nitze and his long-time friend and rival George Kennan—“The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan and the History of the Cold War”—I came upon these notes, sitting in a box, behind a boiler, in a building at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, a school which Nitze had helped to found and where he worked when not in government. I quoted from them in the book, and donated them to the Library of Congress as part of a large collection that is now available for viewing. In honor of the anniversary, I’m also putting them all online today. Nitze’s handwriting isn’t great, and my digital photography isn’t either. But they provide a real-time glimpse at decisions made during a moment of terror.
Click-through for more from Nicholas Thompson on JFK and ExComm’s meetings about the Cuban missile crisis, and to see Nitze’s exclusive notes.
Photograph by Cecil Stoughton/White House.
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This week, the magazine publishes Robert A. Caro’s account of Lyndon Johnson’s accession to the Presidency after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The article is taken from the forthcoming book, “The Passage of Power,” which is the fourth installment in Caro’s multi-volume biography, “The Years of Lyndon Johnson.” Caro has been researching and writing about the life of our thirty-sixth President for more than three decades—and his work is not complete. A fifth volume, on the later years of Johnson’s Presidency, is still to come.
Caro began his career as a biographer with “The Power Broker,” his 1974 book about Robert Moses, which was excerpted in four parts in The New Yorker. Since 1989, seven previous portions of Caro’s biography of Johnson have appeared in our pages as well. To mark the publication of the latest, we have unlocked all of Caro’s previous pieces on Johnson in our archive. Here’s a guide:“The Johnson Years: A Congressman Goes to War,” November 6, 1989. On Johnson’s early career and military service. “For ten years he had been regarded as a winner in Washington. Now he would be going back to Washington as a loser. So going back was hard.”
“The Johnson Years: The Old and the New—The Opponent,” January 15, 1990. On Coke Robert Stevenson, Johnson’s opponent in the 1948 Senate campaign. “Coke Stevenson didn’t talk much, but when he talked, men listened.”
“The Johnson Years: The Old and the New—Whirlwind,” January 22, 1990. On Johnson’s political ambitions and the 1948 Senate race. “Presidents, he told the young aide, were known by their initials. ‘F.D.R.—L.B.J., F.D.R.—L.B.J. Do you get it? What I want is for people to start thinking of me in terms of initials.’”
“The Johnson Years: The Old and the New—All or Nothing,” January 29, 1990. On the runoff primary in the 1948 Senate race. “One month to go. One month to make up seventy thousand votes…. One month for Lyndon Johnson to save his political career.”
“The Johnson Years: The Old and the New—The Stealing,” February 5, 1990. How Johnson won the 1948 Democratic Senate primary by stealing votes. “The unwritten laws, the ethics, the morals of Texas politics were so loose and elastic that it was difficult to break them. Yet Lyndon Johnson had broken them.”
“Annals of Politics: The Orator of the Dawn,” March 4, 2002. On Hubert Humphrey and Lyndon Johnson. “No man, in 1951, would have seemed less likely to be an instrument of compromise than Humphrey; no senator, indeed, would have seemed less likely to be anyone’s tool.”
“Annals of Politics: The Compassion of Lyndon Johnson,” April 1, 2002. On Johnson’s attitudes to race and civil rights. “The victories that Lyndon Johnson won for civil rights began even before his Presidency—in 1957—and the victory he won in that year was perhaps the hardest-won victory of all.”
More: On our Photo Booth blog, James Pomerantz shares ten of his favorite Yoichi Okamoto photos from the L.B.J. Library archive.
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Slide Show: L.B.J. and the Day Kennedy Died
Robert Caro, in this week’s issue, tells the story of Lyndon B. Johnson on the day he became President—the day, that is, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Click through for a look at those events in pictures, with quotes from Caro’s piece. (The full story is available to subscribers.)
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Comment: Rick Santorum, Meet Hamza Kashgari
If only he had more powerful friends—if only Christopher Hitchens were still alive—Hamza Kashgari would be called the Saudi Rushdie. There would be a worldwide campaign to pressure the Saudis into releasing him. The United States would offer him asylum and quietly push our friends the Saudis into letting him go. But we’ve come to expect these things from our friends the Saudis. We’ve come to expect these things from the Muslim world. We expect Afghans to riot for days and kill Americans and each other because a few NATO soldiers were stupid enough to burn copies of the Koran along with other objects discarded from a prison outside Kabul. Yes, those soldiers were colossally, destructively insensitive. Yes, we should know by now. Yes, the reaction has a lot to do with ten years of war and occupation and civilian deaths and marines urinating on Taliban corpses. Still, can we have a little outrage at the outrage? Can we reaffirm that human lives are more sacred than books? Can we point out that every time something like this happens, there’s a manufactured and whipped-up quality to much of the hysteria, which has its own cold political calculation (not unlike the jihad against secularists by Sean Hannity and other Salafist mouthpieces)?
- In today’s Daily Comment, George Packer on Rick Santorum, JFK, and why Americans should know Hamza Kashgari’s name: http://nyr.kr/zZallj
