Quote of the Day (F. Scott Fitzgerald, on an Invitation to an Early June Wedding)

“There was the usual insincere little note saying: ‘I wanted you to be the first to know.’ It was a double shock to Michael, announcing, as it did, both the engagement and the imminent marriage; which, moreover, was to be held, not in New York, decently and far away, but here in Paris under his very nose, if that could be said to extend over the Protestant Episcopal Church of the Holy Trinity, Avenue George-Cinq. The date was two weeks off, early in June.”—American novelist and short-story writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), “The Bridal Party,” originally printed in Saturday Evening Post (August 9, 1930), reprinted in The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli (1989)

F. Scott Fitzgerald and a June wedding—how could I resist blogging about this? Well, as you see, I couldn’t.

But “The Bridal Party” is of interest for another reason: it was Fitzgerald’s first piece of fiction to take into account the Great Crash of the prior autumn. Though the bridegroom in the story, we are told, is “heavily involved” in the stock market, nobody knows how much he had lost on Wall Street: “Anyhow, nobody ever tells you the truth.”

Fitzgerald would later address this financial and cultural cataclysm more fully and piercingly in several essays that form the heart of his posthumous collection The Crack-Up.

This Day in Cold War History (Tensions Spike at JFK-Khrushchev Vienna Summit)

June 3, 1961—Any hopes that John F. Kennedy harbored for easing superpower tensions were quickly discarded when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev badgered and bullied the inexperienced American President in their first and only face-to-face meeting.

The importance of the Vienna Summit did not lie in any agreements concluded, but instead in the attempt made by the cool, aristocratic, 43-year-old JFK and the volatile, 67-year-old former peasant to take the measure of the other. The differences between the democracy and the Communist dictatorship they headed were heightened by their temperaments.

When the talks, conducted in the US and Soviet embassies in this nonaligned Central European city, ended the following day, Kennedy noted carefully to the pack of reporters that no issues had been settled. Privately, to those he trusted more, he was blunter.

“He just beat the hell out of me,” JFK told influential New York Times columnist James Reston. “It was the worst thing in my life. He savaged me.”

Kennedy was unprepared for this diplomatic drubbing. Suffering from intense back pain and Addison’s Disease (an adrenal insufficiency that causes persistent fatigue and muscle weakness), he had brought with him to the summit a physician to celebrities, Dr. Max Jacobson.

Injections administered by “Dr. Feelgood” temporarily relieved the President’s symptoms (even giving him such a sense of euphoria that he bounded down steps to greet Khrushchev on the first day).

But the mixture of “vitamins” may have contained amphetamines, which, diplomatic historian Michael Beschloss observed in his superb The Crisis Years, can cause “nervousness, garrulousness, impaired judgment, overconfidence, and, when the drug wears off, depression.” 

Did Khrushchev, who had risen into Joseph Stalin’s inner circle by staying alert to threats and weaknesses of rivals, notice any of these signs of the drug in the man facing him?

While Kennedy carried with him to Vienna physical problems that could have hampered his performance, Khrushchev brought psychological ones that complicated the talks.

Psychiatrists have formulated “the Goldwater rule” to warn against assessing the mental health of a candidate without examination by a professional.

But, given totalitarian regimes’ barriers to unfettered access to information, the US Central Intelligence Agency may have come as close as anyone ever will in a 1961 “personality sketch” which concluded that Khrushchev suffered from “hypomania,” associated with “lability of mood and with rapid shifts to anger or depression.”

That condition would explain many, if not all, of Khrushchev’s shifts from earthy humor to violent outbursts like his notorious shoe-banging episode at the United Nations, as well as impulsive tactical moves that caught both Western adversaries and ostensible Kremlin colleagues off guard.

The failed American-backed invasion of Cuba only six weeks before the summit furnished Khrushchev with a cudgel against Kennedy—a pointed reminder that the U.S. had not only interfered with another country in the Western Hemisphere but that it had been inept and impotent in doing so.

But Khrushchev also sought to convert a Soviet disadvantage—a swelling exodus of refugees from Communist-controlled East Berlin to the Western-oriented sector of the city—into yet another weapon against JFK. The US must either agree to a settlement favorable to East Berlin in six months, he insisted, or the USSR would forge its own agreement with it that would leave it free to cut off Western access to the city.

"Force will be met by force. If the US wants war, that's its problem. It is up to the US to decide whether there will be war or peace,” Khrushchev told JFK.

“Then, Mr. Chairman, there will be war,” Kennedy answered. “It will be a cold winter."

Khrushchev’s ultimatum and loose talk about nuclear weapons stunned the American. I wrote earlier that no agreement was reached in Vienna, but it would be a mistake to say there were no consequences. JFK went home and, after consulting with advisers, delivered a televised address to the American people in which he called for:

*an additional $3.25 billion in defense spending,
*doubling and tripling of draft calls,
*calling up reserves,
*raising the Army's total authorized strength,
*increasing active duty numbers in the Navy and Air Force,
*reconditioning planes and ships in mothballs, and
*minimizing the number of Americans that would be killed in a nuclear attack through a new civil defense program.

Under intense internal pressure from the Politburo, Khrushchev erected the Berlin Wall and resumed above-ground nuclear testing after the summit. The most dangerous period of the Cold War, climaxing over a year later in the Cuban Missile Crisis, ensued.

Quote of the Day (Susan Sontag, on Compassion, ‘An Unstable Emotion’)

“Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question of what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing 'we' can do—but who is that 'we'?—and nothing 'they' can do either—and who are 'they'—then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic.” — American critic, novelist, filmmaker, philosopher, teacher, and political activist Susan Sontag (1933-2004), Regarding the Pain of Others (2002)

Quote of the Day (William James, on Pragmatists)

“A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power. That means the empiricist temper regnant, and the rationalist temper sincerely given up. It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality and the pretence of finality in truth.”— American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910), Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907)

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Burns and Allen Show,’ As Gracie Receives Friendly Advice)

[Fearful for her son Ronnie’s safety over the news that he wants to move to Greenwich Village, Gracie concocts a plan: to visit his apartment disguised as beatnik model “Mona Lisa.”]

Gracie Allen [played by Gracie Allen, right]: “I think I know a way of finding out about Ronnie without him knowing I'm there.”

Blanche Morton [played by Bea Benaderet, left]: “Look, Gracie, before you do whatever it is you're thinking of doing, would you take a little friendly advice?”

Gracie: “Well, sure.”

Blanche: “I think it's going to be silly.”

Gracie: “Oh, Blanche, this is no time to give me silly advice when I'm worrying about Ronnie!”— The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, Season 6, Episode 7, “Ronnie Moves to the Village,” original air date Nov. 14, 1955, teleplay by Harvey Helm, Keith Fowler, Norman Paul, and William Burns, directed by Frederick De Cordova

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Gorman Beauchamp, on the Vatican Amid ‘A Veritable Tsunami of Apology’)

“We live amid a veritable tsunami of apology. The Catholic Church, which, of course, has much to apologize for, has, of late, offered mea culpas to Galileo, the Jews, the gypsies, Jan Hus, whom it burned at the stake in 1415, even to Constantinople (now Istanbul) for its sacking 800 years ago by the knights of the Fourth Crusade, an event for which the late John Paul II expressed ‘deep regret.’ No wonder that a group in England, claiming descent from the medieval Knights Templars, is asking the Vatican to apologize for the violent suppression of the order and for torturing to death its Grand Master Jacques de Molay in 1314, an apology timed to commemorate the 700th anniversary of that fell deed.”— American literary critic and scholar Gorman Beauchamp, “Apologies All Around,” The American Scholar, Autumn 2007

Almost lost in the hoopla over last week’s release of Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical about AI (which I will try to discuss sometime in the near future), was his apology for the Catholic Church’s role in legitimizing slavery and centuries-old slowness over condemning the practice.

A couple of days later, I came across Beauchamp’s appraisal of expressions of regret by major nations and institutions over past injustices. If he took in the pontiff’s more recent statement, I can’t imagine he regarded it with anything other than cynicism.

To some extent, Beauchamp’s outburst was understandable, as he wrote it when cries for reparations, most notably for slavery, began to gain steam in legislatures across the country. Still, there seemed something altogether too categorical with his concluding sour plea, “No more apologies.”

Within a couple of years, the Grouchy Gus persona adopted by Beauchamp spread through American conservative circles. Although Barack Obama never used any form of the words “apology” or “sorry,” his remarks to foreign countries about America’s past tangled history in his first term fed a myth that he had done so.

It all climaxed in Mitt Romney’s charge during his 2012 debates with the President that he had been on an “apology tour”—a phrase that Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in a different context, would have called “boob bait for the bubbas,” or tough-sounding rhetoric meant to turbo-charge populist hordes. It was not one of the shining moments of Romney's career, and one that I'm sure he would prefer that people forget.

During his first year at the Vatican, Pope Leo was extremely cautious, making some moves that helped mollify the Church’s right wing that had smarted over the more spontaneous Pope Francis (e.g., calling for “generous inclusion” of those attached to the Latin Mass). But I’m afraid that President Trump’s increasingly intemperate outbursts (including, this weekend, his third) about Leo have neutralized that effort toward internal unity.

One sign of the end of this era of good feeling came in Christopher Tremoglie’s essay a few days ago in the conservative Washington Examiner, which posited that the pope and other liberals should have saved their breath, because it was African chiefs, waging war on fellow rulers and selling as chattel to whites, who were really responsible for the African slave trade.

Leo is not engaging in the “woke culture” or “white guilt” that has led Trump, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and other GOP politicians to interfere in how Americans learn about the greatest stain in our history.

Instead, experience—in dealing with emerging Third World countries considering their relationship to Catholicism, and in tracing mixed-race Black creoles on his mother’s side of the family—has taught Leo how complicated and wounding the Church’s attitude towards slavery has been over the centuries.

It started with ecclesial institutions owning slaves themselves in the Middle Ages, and continued with Renaissance popes legitimizing the quest of Spanish and Portuguese conquerors to subjugate and seize the lands of “Saracens, and pagans, and other infidels, and enemies of the name of Christ" anywhere, according to Nicole Winfield's article for the National Catholic Reporter.

Africans now account for roughly 20% of the Church’s population worldwide. Moreover, it is growing rapidly not just in overall numbers but also, in contrast to what has been happening in the U.S. and Western Europe, in terms of seminarians, priests, and nuns.

For conservatives holding the line against any changes, if the Church hopes to retain its ban on clerical celibacy, it will have to import to the U.S. many of these African-trained religious personnel. And to appeal to these people entering the ranks of the religious, the church must own up to its past terrible mistakes related to the continent.

But another aspect of acknowledging past injustices, whether the Vatican’s or the West’s in general, is being lost. Formally admitting these mistakes not only has the potential to heal the wounded but to remind others why they would feel this way in the first place.

Slavery perpetrated over centuries, for instance, permeated virtually every aspect of culture and commerce over much of the world. Given that all-pervasive influence, nobody should imagine that it would not leave psychic stains on those it injured.

All the same, don’t be surprised if the pope’s right-wing critics begin to resurrect that “apology tour” bit. Only the next time, I want that “tour” to be comprised of Donald Trump and his supporters displaying proper penitence for denouncing a not-at-all-radical pontiff trying to speak plainly about the facts of history.

Quote of the Day (Plutarch, on ‘Uneducated Generals and Leaders’)

“Uneducated generals and leaders are oftentimes tripped up and toppled over by their innate foolishness. For they establish their lofty power upon a pedestal that has not been leveled, and so it cannot stand upright. Moreover, just as a builder’s rule is first established straight and unbending, and then is used to correct the alignment of everything else through adjustments and juxtapositions with respect to it, in the very same way those who govern must first achieve governance of themselves, straighten out their souls, and set their character aright, and then they should assimilate their subjects to themselves. For the one who is tipping over cannot straighten up someone else, nor can the ignorant person teach, the disorderly establish order, the disorganized organize, the ungoverned govern.”— Greek historian, biographer, and essayist Plutarch (c. 46-120 AD), "To an Uneducated Leader," in How To Be a Leader: An Ancient Guide to Wise Leadership, translated by Jeffrey Beneker (2019)