in a not especially pleasant time

 

                                               Arthur Goldberg

Today's Hall & Oates song

(play it from You Tube - the original album version is available)

"She's Gone"

♪♪ ♫

Song is a mood.  Different sections have different tempos - the pace changes with the sentiments expressed in the lyrics.

That opening - transcendent feeling that captures your attention, and the mesmerizing beginning phrase:

"Everybody's high on consolation..."

_____________________________

-------------------- [excerpt from the book of Moynihan's letters]

Moynihan's growing disappointment in the Johnson administration is expressed here to former Labor Secretary and Supreme Court Justice Arthur J. Goldberg, now ambassador at the United Nations.

25 AUGUST 1967

HIS EXCELLENCY ARTHUR J. GOLDBERG

UNITED STATES MISSION TO THE UNITED NATIONS

799 UNITED NATIONS PLAZA

NEW YORK, N.Y.

Dear Ambassador:

        What a very generous note, in a not especially pleasant time.  Somehow nothing works.  

I wrote that article that appears in the Washington Post because Bill Moyers asked and urged me to do so, and in just the terms that finally appeared.  

The response from the White House?  That it was a tasteless thing to suggest that if President Kennedy were alive we would have no problems.  

However, one thing the past two years have taught me was how to live without being popular.  Actually, the mail on the Post article has been extraordinarily favorable.  The nation wants leadership.  They want an administration that will be seen and candid and try to explain as much as can be explained.  

Instead, we are getting utterly transparent evasions and pieties. ...

{Daniel Patrick Moynihan:  A Portrait In Letters Of An American Visionary.  Edited by Steven R. Weisman.  PUBLIC AFFAIRS.  New York.  2010.}

__________________________

Vice President Lyndon Johnson; President John Kennedy

-30-