I can sleep later on, but I'm tired now

 

Last week, typing out some of Pat Moynihan's letters here, it made me think about how learning about history is different if someone tells it to you and organizes it, from how you learn it by reading someone's letters.

The letters are a "granular" experience - it's what someone is writing about one thing, that one day.  In a way, it's extra interesting because you think, "This is someone's true, in-the-moment reaction."  

        But in another way, it's drudgery because it is just the snapshot in the moment, which may become kind of meaningless later when things change, or evolve in a different direction.

It's funny.

Some of it - "somebody said bad stuff about me, and you should be on my side."  Or, "I didn't mean it like they took it, they shouldn't have got mad - but I'm sorry."

Haha - after reading a little, you start to think, "Maybe people should just stop saying things."

Just like now - with twitter and facebook....

And then the two August 1967 references to President Kennedy -

"...that if President Kennedy were alive we would not be in our present difficulty"

"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."

[I couldn't tell if this was the same article reprinted, or two different articles.]

At any rate, it appears that President Lyndon Johnson was extra-sensitive to anyone having the idea that things would be better if JFK were still president -

~  because people might think Kennedy did a better job than Johnson?

or

~ because people might think Johnson colluded in the assassination of Kennedy?

or

both?

It reminds me of the Edgar Allan Poe short story, "The Tell-Tale Heart" - where the guy feels so guilty he believes he hears this heart beating....

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