Bush Medal for Nixon Felon

In one of his last presidential acts, the Compassionate Conservative pinned a medal yesterday on Richard Nixon's Watergate hatchet man, Chuck Colson, for "sharing the message of God’s boundless love and mercy with prisoners, former prisoners, and their families."

In the season of Scrooge and redemption, it would be surly to see anything autobiographical in the gesture, but...

Just as Bush himself discovered God after half a lifetime of hell-raising, Colson in a jailhouse epiphany rehabilitated himself into Religious Right respectability after a career as Nixon's White House counsel, the brains behind the Watergate break-in and countless other assaults on the rule of law.

William F. Buckley, the now sainted conservative, summed up the general skepticism about Colson's conversion thus: "Those among us who consider themselves most worldly...treat [it] as a huge joke, as if W. C. Fields had come out for the Temperance Union. They are waiting for the second act, when the resolution comes, and W. C. Fields is toasting his rediscovery of booze, and Colson is back practicing calisthenics on his grandmother's grave."

But Bush is a True Believer in redemption for such as the holy man who rallied support for the war in Iraq, condemned the outed Deep Throat as a traitor to the FBI and recently signed a full-page ad backing Proposition 8 and accusing gays of "anti-religious bigotry."

Colson's rehabilitation is a family thing: In 2000, Jeb Bush as Florida Governor reinstated the rights taken away by Colson's felony conviction, including the right to vote.

In the award of the Presidential Citizens Medal, Colson is cited "for his good heart and his compassionate efforts to renew a spirit of purpose in the lives of countless individuals."

It's not hard to see why the Bushes would want to honor that.

Obama vs. "The Bubble"

Even before he moves into the White House, the new President is feeling hemmed in and planning to do something about it.

Asked by Chicago reporters about his face painted on sides of buildings and lamp posts, Barack Obama complained that "because I'm in this bubble, I don't get to see all this stuff...I don't get a chance to wander around neighborhoods," saying that he missed encounters like the one on Thanksgiving handing out food at a local church.

But the President-Elect is resisting being cut off: "M)y Kennebunkport is on the South Side of Chicago. We own one piece of property, and that is our home in Chicago...10 minutes away from where Michelle grew up and where her mother still has a house...we're going to try to get back here at least once every six weeks or couple of months."

At the beginning of his campaign two years ago, Obama expressed worries about staying grounded in the face of all the hype, and he apparently still has those concerns.

In the interview, he revealed he will be sworn in by his full name, Barack Hussein Obama, and that, while he hasn't had time to settle on a church in Washington ("right now we're just trying to make sure that we don't lose anything in the move, including our children"), he has been getting spiritual support every morning from "a prayer circle" of pastors from all faith and denominations, some of whom "get on the phone and pray for me...

"I'm not even sure that all of them voted for me. But they were willing to pray for me."

With the country in the shape it's in, starting January 20th, there will be no shortage of Americans doing that.

Impeachment, Treatment or Exorcism?

That goofy vacant look, the Elvis combover and, above all, over-the-top arrogance are pushing the Blagojevich brouhaha into mental-health territory as the Illinois governor announces his intention of returning to work today.

“I’m not sure he’s playing with a full deck anymore,” says Mike Jacobs, a Democratic state senator and former friend quoted by the New York Times, as suggesting that "Blagojevich may have lost his grip on reality."

The Times backgrounder is replete with diagnostic terms such as "grandiosity," "pathology" and "no feedback loop or reality check" to suggest that Blagojevich's legal team may be planning to cop a psychiatric plea.

We are back in "disorder" territory to explain very bad, eventually self-defeating behavior by public officials (see Clinton, Bill: sex addiction), but labeling Blagojevich a sociopath is too easy an out.

That diagnosis, in the era of a new president's emphasis on personal responsibility, won't wash. It may pigeonhole the Illinois governor's odd antics to relieve us of thinking too hard about the corrupting effects of power, but straight arrows like Patrick Fitzgerald are more socially useful in expressing public outrage and disgust.

Nowadays, every exposed rogue (see Foley, Mark: rehab clinic) opts for treatment rather punishment but, at the risk of sounding insufficiently postmodern, the focus should be, not of explicating or exorcising Blagojevich's demons, but getting him out of office and into jail.

Update: This afternoon Barack Obama joined the chorus for a Blagojevich exit as his spokesman announced: "The president-elect agrees with [Illinois] Lt. Gov. [Pat] Quinn and many others that under the current circumstances it is difficult for the governor to effectively do his job and serve the people of Illinois."

Adios, Elvis.

The Spreading Blagojevich Blot

Illinois' governor has gone on a “political corruption crime spree” with actions that have “taken us to a truly new low. The conduct would make Lincoln roll over in his grave,” US Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said at his press conference today as the scandal unfolds with multiple questions about Barack Obama's replacement in the Senate.

Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn, who ironically pushed the state's Whistleblower Law, calls on Blagojevich to step aside and urges the General Assembly to enact legislation removing his power to fill the Obama seat.

Sen. Dick Durbin, the Senate’s second-ranking Democratic leader, agrees and suggests the legislature schedule a special election, effectively pushing Blagojevich aside.

Meanwhile, there are reports that Obama's designated chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, another Illinois politician, may have blown the whistle on Blagejovich, while the President-Elect says today:

"I had no contact with the governor or his office and so I was not aware of what was happening. And as I said, it's a sad day for Illinois. Beyond that, I don't think it's appropriate to comment."

With everything else going on in the transition, it now looks as if Illinois may be without a second Senator for a while, but one political prediction looks safe: In the next gubernatorial election, Republicans will be putting pressure on Patrick Fitzgerald to accept their nomination on a platform of cleaning up the mess.

Selling Obama's Senate Seat

The prosecutor who took out Scooter Libby is flummoxed today by the antics of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich in trying to auction off Barack Obama's vacant Senate seat.

"The breadth of corruption laid out in these charges is staggering," US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald says in a statement. "They allege that Blagojevich put a 'for sale' sign on the naming of a United States Senator; involved himself personally in pay-to-play schemes with the urgency of a salesman meeting his annual sales target; and corruptly used his office in an effort to trample editorial voices of criticism."

Someone who spent months in the muck of Libby's, Dick Cheney's and Karl Rove's campaign to discredit Joe Wilson by outing his wife Valerie Plame should not be easily shocked by political arrogance, but Fitzgerald is shaking his head over allegations that the Illinois governor tried to sell Obama's seat in return for:

(1) a high-paying non-profit job for himself and (2) putting his wife on corporate boards for as much as $150,000 a year and (3) promises of campaign funds in cash and (4) a Cabinet job or ambassadorship.

If even half of the charges are true, he should be indicted for breaking all records for greed and stupidity in the state that houses the Chicago Political Corruption Hall of Fame. And, if he goes down, unlike Libby, Blagojevich won't be able to count on a presidential pardon.

No Thomas Jefferson Bailout

With Congress preparing a $15 billion Christmas tip for Detroit, a more basic American industry is slowly going under.

"If I had to choose," Thomas Jefferson famously said, "between government without newspapers, and newspapers without government, I wouldn't hesitate to choose the latter."

The "latter" is in the grip of the financial squeeze and advertising losses in a failing economy as the company that owns the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Baltimore Sun files for bankruptcy protection today, and the New York Times is reportedly planning to borrow up to $225 million against its mid-Manhattan headquarters building to ease its cash crunch.

Some bloggers who hate the MSM will no doubt show little more sympathy for newspaper makers than the most of the public does for the car industry. Yet their downfall threatens us all in an age when we are awash in tip-of-the-iceberg news, while fewer and fewer journalists are helping us see what's going on under the surface.

As we are threatened with drowning in repetitious cable TV and online headline-chasing and opinionizing, we learn less and less about hard news that might help us with the informed consent that Jefferson wanted us to have and depend more and more on the government he did not trust in its absence,

As far back as 1922, in "Public Opinion," Walter Lippmann pointed out that "the citizen will pay for his telephone, his railroad rides, his motor car, his entertainment. But he does not pay openly for his news,"

There won't be a Washington bailout for newspapers, so they will have to figure out new answers to who is going to pay for what we urgently need but expect to get free.

Enter Obama, Exit Brokaw

Today's Meet the Press was a scene of passage between the 21st century president-to-be and a media giant of the past, less striking for what was said than the display of intelligence and grace that has been so rare on the public stage for many years.

A month after his election and more than that before taking office, Barack Obama seems effortlessly presidential as he discusses the failing economy, corporate bailouts as well as military and diplomatic challenges in a dangerous world.

In his first months, Obama will face a balancing act--to jump-start the economy in ways consistent with "long-term, sustainable economic growth...investing in the largest infrastructure program--in roads and bridges and, and other traditional infrastructure--since the building of the federal highway system in the 1950s; rebuilding our schools and making sure that they're energy-efficient; making sure that we're investing in electronic medical records and other technologies that can drive down health care costs...down payments on the kind of long-term, sustainable growth that we need."

Doing that will take unprecedented leadership skills working with a Congress of competing interests and ideologies, but the new administration starts with a good deal of hope and good will aroused by a new president who can communicate with the public.

Seeing him interviewed by Brokaw, who took over Meet the Press when Tim Russert died suddenly in June, is a reminder of the media obligation to focus on what politicians are saying and doing and hold them to account with tough but fair questioning.

Both sides of the equation are in transition as David Gregory takes over the Sunday morning talkfest for a new era, but watching Obama with Brokaw was a reminder of how useful the process can be.

December 7, 1941

Each year there are fewer of us to remember and bear witness to the day the Japanese attack changed us from children of the Depression to what Tom Brokaw called the Greatest Generation.

On the anniversary this year, Americans are thinking more about the hard times of the 1930s than World War II, but with the terror of Mumbai fresh in our minds, the shock of Pearl Harbor has resonance as well.

I was 17 that day, standing next to a young man with a dazed grin, staring through the picture window of a hospital nursery as a nurse in white mask held up a sleeping baby. A minute later, she drew the curtain.

Newborns were kept isolated then and, as a college student, my part-time job was to hand the new father a hospital gown and lead him to the window. The babies all looked alike. The real show was on our side of the glass: a man’s eyes flooding with pride, wonder and worry.

But then sudden death six thousand miles away shattered those tableaus of new life. Happy faces at mothers’ bedsides turned to stone, nurses and doctors looked lost behind their masks of composure.

The next day, I was in the Great Hall of City College of New York, my eyes on a huge mural, a black-robed graduate amid flying cherubs and, in togas, the figures of Wisdom, Discipline and Alma Mater pointing to a bright future.

From a loudspeaker the voice of the only President I could remember (FDR took office on my ninth birthday) was telling of a day that will live in infamy and saying we are at war.

There was no 24/7 news but every night at 8:55, the chilling radio voice of Elmer Davis told of battles in Europe and the Pacific. We saw and heard so little news then, but we never for a minute forgot that our young people were dying in distant places.

Caroline Kennedy's Genetic Conflict

News that she is interested in being appointed to Hillary Clinton's Senate seat is coming as a surprise to those who have always seen Caroline Kennedy as an essentially private person, temperamentally more like her mother than her father.

“I believe that she is considering it,” her cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tells the New York Times. “A lot of people the last couple of weeks have urged her to do it.” She apparently called New York Gov. David Paterson this week to discuss the position.

That would represent a drastic midlife switch for the 51-year-old wife and mother of three who has kept a low profile in her career as a lawyer, writer and philanthropist, very much like her mother, Jacqueline Kennedy, in her widowhood.

She emerged last January with a Times op-ed piece titled, "A President Like My Father," to endorse Barack Obama and then actively campaign for him and serve on his vice-presidential search team.

If Caroline Kennedy were to replace Sen. Clinton, she would be committing herself to run in a special 2010 election and for reelection in 2012, two grueling political campaigns for someone who has spent a lifetime so far in relative privacy.

But it's also easy to understand what has led her to consider such a change. A year after JFK's death, I asked Jacqueline Kennedy to become a contributing editor of McCalls. She was still too deep in mourning for that, but she talked about wanting to find a way to keep alive her husband's "ideas and ideals."

It's a measure of the difference between then and now that she could conceive of doing that only through a man. "Robert Kennedy would be perfect," she said, "but that's not possible."

Now her daughter, even with the same tendencies toward privacy, seems to be ready to step out and emulate her father in the Senate.

Caroline Kennedy may have given us a clue when she wrote that OpEd about Obama:

"I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president--not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans."

Post-Partisan Depression

With Democrats ascending, the wordplay in Washington is improving even if the economy isn't. Pressuring Barack Obama to be more aggressive, Congressman Barney Frank said yesterday, "At a time of great crisis with mortgage foreclosures and autos, he says we only have one president at a time. I'm afraid that overstates the number of presidents we have."

He also chided the President-Elect's policy of reaching across party lines: "Having lived with this very right-wing Republican group that runs the House most of the time, the notion of trying to deal with them as if we could be post-partisan gives me post-partisan depression."

No worries about an excess of wit or a partisanship gap, however, on the part of Democratic Congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, who sent George W. Bush a gotcha letter on the Detroit bailout, urging him to use "the TARP funds, or to work with the Federal Reserve to make available assistance through its existing lending programs, or both."

Translation: We can't or won't do anything until our man takes over the White House, so if the situation gets worse, it's your fault if you don't do something but, if you do, we get credit for pushing you into doing it.

When President Obama is finally in charge, he will have more than one kind of partisanship to overcome.

Ambivalence Over Obama's Inaugural

January 20th will be a dicey day. It represents a joyous celebration of Change but also a reminder of how much we have suffered in the last eight years and the pain that now has to be eased.

Such uncertainty has clouded the triumph of Barack Obama, starting with Election Night when he cancelled a fireworks display in Grant Park as inappropriate. As he takes office, what's the right balance of celebration and dedication, of raising hopes and calming fears, of soaring rhetoric and sad reality for this American moment?

As Inaugural planners brace themselves for an estimated 3 million or more attendees, spokeswoman Linda Douglass acknowledges, "These are tough times, and certainly we are mindful of the struggles that Americans are going through in their own lives right now."

At a time when unprecedented numbers of Americans are losing their homes, the Obamas will be moving into the White House as the Bushes relocate to their new $2 million hideaway in Dallas. Obama and his administration will be assuming their new jobs as millions across the country are losing theirs.

"A Birth of New Freedom" is the official inauguration theme, taken from the Gettysburg Address, expressing Lincoln's hope that sacrifice would lead to "a new birth of freedom," coupled with an appeal in his inaugural address to "the better angels of our nature."

Balancing the solemnity of the times with Washington's penchant for glitz and glamour won't be easy for Obama.

He has the dubious example of Jimmy Carter, who tried to show his earthiness by passing up a limousine and walking a freezing mile and a half from his swearing-in to the White House and insisted on serving pretzels and peanuts at the inaugural balls.

Barack Obama is too sophisticated for that kind of cornball symbolism, but he will have to find his own tone for a January 20th filled with ambivalence.

Beating Up on the Big Three

Hard times bring out the worst in everyone, and politicians and the public are venting their unhappiness on Detroit automakers with a vengeance.

In a new poll, six out of ten Americans oppose using taxpayer money to save General Motors, Chrysler and Ford after Congress' trashing of their chief executives for flying to Washington in separate corporate jets to ask for billions in bailouts.

This week they are arriving in hybrid cars with restructuring plans, but the lame-duck Congress is not inclined to relent even as the President-Elect expresses hope for "maintaining a viable auto industry" while stressing the need for "a more serious set of plans" for restructuring.

Even the Wall Street Journal is urging "tough love" for Detroit but, behind all the posturing, there is the reality that allowing the American auto industry to crash and burn would make a failing economy even worse than it already is.

As they debate the specifics of reform this week--more fuel efficiency, union concessions, fewer dealerships--members of Congress should stop taking cheap shots at the automakers' chief executives and start negotiating and taking responsibility for their terms of surrender to the economic crisis.

Unlike the financial houses that are being propped up with much less pressure to mend their ways, the auto industry actually makes something besides money.

Nixon and Bush Come Into a Bar...

A decade and a half after he died, the ghost of Bad Presidents Past keeps reappearing, rattling his chains to remind us that, as George W. Bush leaves, he did not invent bad behavior in the White House.

The latest batch of released Nixon tapes provokes a headline: "Ruthless, Cynical, Profane."

In contrast to the President Present, Nixon was never someone you would want to have a beer with, more like the weird guy who comes into the bar and inspires everyone to move to the other end.

With Nixon we are beyond politics, deep into the personal pathology of a man who saw himself surrounded by a world of enemies yet hungered for their approval even while hatching plots against them and, throughout it all, secretly recording every word in the Oval Office that would come back to destroy his presidency and, beyond that, haunt and puzzle generations to come.

By contrast, in his farewell media tour, starting this week with Charlie Gibson, we get a genial, somewhat befuddled Bush, prompting us to speculate about when he is lying to himself as well as us.

In one of the new Nixon revelations, he orders an aide to make sure that pictures of all previous presidents are removed from White House Offices, only to discover that an employee of 41 years still has a signed photo of JFK on her wall.

The episode has a happy ending when the Leader of the Free World receives a memo: "On January 14th, the project was completed and all 35 offices displayed only your photograph."

Mission Accomplished.

Moishe Holtzberg of Mumbai

The two-year-old, in Israel now after his parents were gunned down last week, evokes tears and stirs a childhood memory.

One day when I was ten, in a Bronx park, a band of kids from another neighborhood suddenly attacked half a dozen of us. In the melee, I was pinned against a tree by a bigger boy. He held me with one hand and kept driving a fist at my head as hard and fast as he could. I warded off most of the blows with my arms, but I couldn’t take my eyes off his furious face. While struggling to escape, I was transfixed by a rage I had never seen before--it was like being caught in a storm.

When it was over, I asked an older boy from our neighborhood why.

"They hate us because we're Jews," he said. "They say we killed Christ."

"Did we?"

"How the hell should I know? It happened a million years ago."

From then on, I lived in a world among those who despised people like me enough to inspire special words for our slaughter--pogrom, genocide, Holocaust--and by those with euphemisms for killing the spirit, if not the body: “restricted” and “gentlemen’s agreement,” and those on the streets and in barracks where the expressions were raw but honest--kike, sheenie, Hebe.

They made it clear I belonged to a people fated to be despised and driven, their names their crime, the shape of their noses their destiny. Faced with such hatred of a religion I could never feel in my heart, it would have been unthinkable to stop being a Jew or calling myself one.

Last week in Mumbai, the killers were apparently Muslims motivated by murderous hatred of Hindus, but they took the time for a detour to slaughter Jews in a Hasidic headquarters. An Indian nanny saved Moishe as his parents Gavriel and Rivka died.

The boy is in a village near Tel Aviv now, where during a memorial service, a rabbi told him, "You don't have a mother who will hug you and kiss you. You are the child of all Israel."

As he grows up, someone will have to explain to him why his parents died.

Search Engines Can Make You Sick

In the latest example of information overload, a new study suggests that surfing the Web can cause "cyberchondria," needlessly escalating medical concerns and causing anxiety leading to physical harm.

Sponsored by Microsoft, researchers found that online seekers of medical information often attribute innocuous symptoms to serious diseases, which are the unlikely causes, as a result of web sites ranking diseases by the clicks of worried users rather than likelihood of relevance, as a doctor would in making a diagnosis.

"On the Web, larger amounts of indexed content about serious disorders can make these disorders more available to search engines as well as people who browse content. Similar or larger amounts of content may be devoted to rare yet serious illnesses compared to content on more common explanations for symptoms.

"For example, headaches are far more often caused by caffeine withdrawal than by cerebral hemorrhage or brain tumors, but there is a great deal more written about headaches and the link to serious, albeit rare diseases."

Add this to the well-established human tendency to exaggerate the possibility of rare outcomes, and online seekers of medical information can work themselves into a lather over very little.

To prevent such cyberchondria, the researchers suggest developing more ways to detect whether search engine users are practicing self-diagnosis and, if so, ranking possible causes more realistically.

Meanwhile, it might be well to recall the folk wisdom: "He who treats himself has a fool for a doctor."

All-in-the-Family Politics

The colonists who left England to escape hereditary rule would be surprised to find so much of it in American politics two centuries later as jockeying begins to fill Senate seats vacated by members of the Obama Administration.

Name recognition has been important in contested elections, but it seems to be a major factor in appointed positions as well.

For Hillary Clinton's Senate seat, those being considered include former New York Governor Mario Cuomo's son Andrew, Robert Kennedy Jr., Caroline Kennedy--and even Bill Clinton. For Obama's vacated position in Illinois, the front runner is Jesse Jackson Jr. and, in Delaware, the newly appointed Ted Kaufman is widely believed to be keeping the seat warm for Joe Biden's son Beau in 2010.

Nepotism has produced mixed results in recent American politics, as the histories of George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton suggest, but it's disconcerting to find inherited star quality playing so big a part in naming members of Congress' upper chamber.

Barack Obama's success this year was an important victory for meritocracy in American life, but the aftermath is showing that family connections still count.

Debriefing Bush

"I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess." That, in a nutshell, is George W. Bush's valedictory thought about invading Iraq, in interviews with Charlie Gibson on ABC this week.

"A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is [sic] a reason to remove Saddam Hussein," Bush added.

But the historical record shows that the "lot of people" consisted mainly of Dick Cheney and his henchman, relying on a swindling Ahmad Chalabi and torturing CIA intelligence into a false case against the Iraqi regime he was salivating to replace.

"We've really got to make the case" against Hussein, Bush told Secretary of State Colin Powell in January 2003, "and I want you to make it" at the UN.

A few days later, according to the Washington Post, Powell was "taken aback" by "a 48-page, single-spaced compilation of Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction program, replete with drama, rhetorical devices and a kitchen sink full of allegations. The most extreme version of every charge the administration had made about Hussein, the document had been written, Powell concluded, under the tutelage of Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, who shared all of his boss's hard-line views and then some."

In blaming faulty intelligence for a misbegotten war, Bush is exposing himself to history's choice of branding him either a fool or a lethal liar.

He would have done much better by looking back to George Washington's farewell words as he left the presidency:

"The Nation, which indulges towards another an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest."

Clintons Front and Center Again

Barack Obama unveils a new national security team today with old faces, not least of which is the ghostly presence of Bill Clinton hovering in the background.

After weeks of negotiation, the former First Lady will be named Secretary of State, but where Obama vetting leaves off, the Senate confirmation process will take up untangling the former President's private foreign policy empire.

Sen. Dick Lugar, ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee indicated yesterday that "there will be questions raised, and probably legitimate questions” about Bill Clinton's "cosmic ties."

The New York Times reports Clinton will disclose names of more than 200,000 donors to his foundation, refuse contributions from foreign governments to the Clinton Global Initiative, his annual charitable conference, stop holding its meetings overseas, let his speaking schedule be reviewed by the State Department and White House counsel and submit new sources of income to an ethical review.

“It’s a big step,” Senator Lugar says of the agreement, but there will almost certainly be Republican efforts to dig deeper for potential conflicts of interest.

During the primary campaign, there was widespread resentment about continuing the Clinton/Bush dynasties in Washington but, now that W's Neo-Cons are being sent off to the national security nursing home, here are the Clintons front and center again in the era of Change.

Michelle Obama Is No Jacqueline Kennedy

The comparisons were inevitable: two charismatic presidents in their forties and their dazzling wives moving into the White House with young children.

"When Michelle Obama took to describing her new role as mom in chief," Ruth Marcus wrote in the Washington Post last week, "my first reaction was to wince at her words...What does it say about the condition of modern women that Obama... sounded so strangely retro--more Jackie Kennedy than Hillary Clinton?"

Marcus recalled that Cherie Blair "who managed to keep her barrister job while her husband was in office, grandly decreed that Tony, prime minister or not, would be taking paternity leave after the birth of their fourth child." But in advice to Michelle Obama, Mrs. Blair has now changed her tune:

"You have to learn to take a back seat, not just in public but in private. When your spouse is late to put the kids to bed, or for dinner, or your plans for the weekend are turned upside down again, you simply have to accept that he had something more important to do."

When Jacqueline Kennedy was about to become First Lady, she sounded like a Stepford wife, telling a reporter I sent to interview her, "The most important thing for successful marriage is for a husband to do what he likes best and does well...If the wife is happy, full credit should be given to the husband because the marriage is her entire life."

But when the reporter put away his notebook, Mrs. Kennedy looked him in the eye and said, "But I'm smarter than Jack, and don't you forget it."

The difference between now and then is that Michelle Obama, unlike her predecessor, has had a successful career and put it on hold voluntarily to help her husband get elected and now to govern the country.

As the Kennedys entered the White House, there was obvious tension between them. I spent an hour with JFK waiting for her to appear for a cover shoot and, when I had to leave, he asked, "What do you do when your wife is always late?"

"You can't win, Senator," I answered. "If you let it pass, you're accused of not caring that something might have happened to her. If you complain, you're a brute."

"I'd rather," he said, his jaw tightening, "be a brute."

When Mrs. Kennedy arrived, the resulting pictures showed them looking less like a couple ready to move into the White House than a pair of prisoners posing for a joint mug shot. The shoot was rescheduled.

The Obamas' easy interplay during their Barbara Walters interview last week made it clear there was nothing "retro" about their roles in a relationship that others will be theorizing about during their years in the spotlight.

The Math of Mass Murder

They are at the counting stage in Mumbai. As of now, the toll is that ten men killed almost 200 innocent people, but the numbers are only tentative until the fate of hundreds of wounded is clear.

These murderers were not as cost-efficient as the nineteen who caused almost 3000 deaths on 9/11. They didn't have airliners as weapons, although they did use such high-tech help as mobile phones, GPS and satellite phones in what an Indian official says was their objective of killing 5000 at random.

But the evidence is that they were less skilled than the 9/11 killers, some of whom took flying lessons while preparing to do their work. The one surviving Mumbai attacker is a 21-year-old Pakistani laborer with a fourth-grade education.

The human balance sheet is lopsided as it always is--among the victims, an American art professor and his 13-year-old daughter, a local bank chairman, the sister of a Bollywood actor, a young Brooklyn rabbi and his wife, and the head of an Indian antiterrorism squad.

Bullets and bombs outweigh all civilized accomplishments in such situations, and that is exactly the point the attackers want to make. In past times, a lone loser like Lee Harvey Oswald could deprive the world of a John F. Kennedy, but now the triumph of darkness comes in numbers.

The shock and horror are already starting to fade from TV screens and internet sites but, in days to come, it will become clearer to what extent Mumbai was intended to derail any political detente between India and Pakistan, just as terror attacks have so often sabotaged impending progress toward peace between Israel and the Palestinians and have stalled sectarian reconciliation in Iraq..

In the Middle East, mass murder is political, the larger the numbers the better.