Cronkite. By Douglas Brinkley. Harper Collins, 2012, 819 pp., $35. “From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1 o’clock p.m., Central Standard Time, 2 o’clock, Eastern Standard Time, some thirty-eight minutes ago.” Last week I wrote about the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination that America commemorated last November. Among all …Continue Reading »
Lost in the news yesterday of the Super Bowl and the tragic death of Philip Seymour Hoffman was the death of another actor, one equally talented and brilliant: Maximillian Schell, dead at 83 on Saturday, February 1. If you’ve never seen him or heard of him, watch him in Judgment at Nuremberg, Stanley Kramer’s 1961 …Continue Reading »
The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson. By Robert Caro. Alfred A. Knopf, 2012, 712 pp., $35. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, continues to fascinate fifty years after that horrific Friday in Dallas. With the nation having just commemorated that milestone, I decided it was time to …Continue Reading »
One warm August evening, cloaked in darkness, a group of people toppled Elberton’s Confederate monument. The next day, they buried it. Anti–Confederate activists? Politically-correct terrorists? Nope. It was August 14, 1900. Elberton, like many Southern towns in the 1890s, wanted to honor the Lost Cause. It also wanted to promote its new granite industry as …Continue Reading »
Russell Johnson, the actor who played the Professor on “Gilligan’s Island,” died on January 16, 2014, at the age of 89. He only played Professor Roy Hinkley for three of his 89 years, but he will be forever known as the handsome fellow in the white shirt and khakis, with the blue boat shoes, who …Continue Reading »