Posts Tagged ‘John F. Kennedy’
Wendell Berry’s Elegy for John F. Kennedy: “November Twenty Six Nineteen Hundred Sixty Three.”
It is fifty-one years now since President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. It was one of the greatest shocks the American people have ever experienced, one of those beautiful sunlit days like 9/11 in which everything suddenly went wrong. In the days that followed there was a massive outpouring of commemoration and…
Read MoreNewton Minow, John Bartlow Martin, and the “Vast Wasteland.”
On this date—May 9—in 1961, Newton Minow, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, issued his famous description of television as “a vast wasteland.” It turns out that the famous words were the edited version of a phrase created by journalist and JFK speechwriter John Bartlow Martin, a Hamilton, Ohio native who spent most of his…
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