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The Influence Of Europe On The Young Jfk, Nigel Hamilton

New England Journal of Public Policy

I think that of all twentieth-century American presidents, John F. Kennedy is considered — by Europeans at least — to be the most Eurocentric in his sympathies and political orientation. In the days ahead we shall be reexamining the history of the Kennedy administration in relation to Europe, but before we do, I think it might help to know the true genesis of JFK's personal attitudes towards Europe, so that we may better understand his eventual role in the history of the early 1960s: culminating in the Cuban Missile Crisis and his anti-Communist speech in Berlin in June 1963, as …

Searching For A Umass President: Transitions And Leaderships, 1970-1991, Richard A. Hogarty

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article traces the history of the five presidential successions that have taken place at the University of Massachusetts since 1970. No manual or campus report will reveal the one best way to conduct a presidential search. How to do so is not easy to prescribe. Suitably fleshed out, the events surrounding these five searches tell us a great deal about what works and what doesn't. It is one thing to offer case illustrations of past events, another to say how they might be put to use by other people in another era with quite different situations and concerns. In …

The Father/Mother, Leonard Bushkoff

New England Journal of Public Policy

Leonard Bushkoff's "The Father/Mother" vignette, chronicling his move from "a smug Detroit suburb to mid-Cambridge shabbiness" as "the troubled sixties turned into the confusing seventies." The counterculture for most of us now exists only in the form of dim memories of a time when the promise of America lost its spiritual luster. That generation is now shaping our future, still groping for a beacon that will renew the promise, that would truly herald the progress of "a kinder, gentler nation."

The Vision Thing, Shaun O'Connell

New England Journal of Public Policy

In "The Vision Thing," Shaun O'Connell reviews a number of books whose subject matter is not merely the presidential election of 1988, but the impact of image politics in the age of the thirty-second sound bite. He quotes Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death: "Just as the television commercial empties itself of authentic product information so that it can do its psychological work of [pseudotherapy], image politics empties itself of authentic political sustenance for the same reason."

The works discussed in this article include: All by Myself: The Unmaking of a Presidential Campaign, by Christine M. Black …

On Being A Republican In Massachusetts: Notes Of A Party Chairman, Andrew Natsios

New England Journal of Public Policy

In the 1970s the Democratic and Republican national and state parties initiated efforts at party renewal in order to reverse their declining institutional power. Between 1980 and 1987 the Massachusetts Republican Party undertook a renewal effort modeled after that of the Republican National Committee under William Brock. This model emphasized the provision to candidates and to the grassroots party organization of campaign sendees such as literature design, polling, direct mail fund-raising, telephone banks, and campaign schools. The Massachusetts Republican Party concentrated these services to candidates for the state legislature, achieving the largest net gain in seats since 1962. Campaign technology …

Jfk: The Education Of A President, Nigel Hamilton

New England Journal of Public Policy

What goes into the making of a president? To what extent are the mind and character of the American commander in chief determined by his background, his family — and his education? This article represents a transcript of two lectures Nigel Hamilton presented in the spring and fall of 1989 at the Massachusetts State Archives. They were derived from the preliminary sketches for the author's full-scale biography of John F. Kennedy, to be published by Houghton Mifflin in 1992 on the anniversary of the birth of the thirty-fifth president.

The Happy Accident, Robert Manning

New England Journal of Public Policy

In "The Happy Accident," Robert Manning's delightful memoir of his early newspaper days in Binghamton, New York, we are brought back to an earlier and seemingly more innocent time when New England — and America — stood on the threshold of change. The moral of going home, it seems, is that as much changes, much never changes — something we should perhaps remember in these last feverish days of the nineteen eighties.

Recommended Readings, 1988, Shaun O'Connell

New England Journal of Public Policy

Shaun O'Connell reviews a selection of readings for would-be presidents. None of our recent presidents — going back to Dwight Eisenhower — has been a reader of "imaginative literature." While this is not, perhaps, entirely unexpected and may be indicative of the pressures on their time rather than an intrinsic aversion to literature, it should nevertheless at least lead us to ask whether their visions of who we are and our possibilities are limited by their failure to "confront some of the implications raised by serious works of the imagination, works that force us to face mysteries in the world …

The Catholic Church And The Desegregation Of Boston's Public Schools, James E. Glinski

New England Journal of Public Policy

Recent studies of Boston 's desegregation crisis, most notably J. Anthony Lukas's Common Ground, have been highly critical of the Catholic church and its local leader, Humberto Cardinal Medeiros, archbishop of Boston. Their criticisms have been that the church, guided by the ineffective leadership of Cardinal Medeiros in an effort to save its own schools, allowed its schools to become havens for those Bostonians attempting to escape busing. This article is an account of the church's effort to develop a desegregation policy that would allow it to preserve its own schools but not at the expense of court-ordered desegregation …

The Search For A Massachusetts Chancellor: Autonomy And Politics In Higher Education, Richard A. Hogarty

New England Journal of Public Policy

Political scientists have not devoted much attention to the politics of higher education. Their reluctance is hard to explain since the material for study is close at hand and the subject offers ample research opportunities. The search for a chancellor conducted by the Massachusetts Board of Regents in 1986 aroused considerable public attention and controversy. This case study examines that controversy along with the tensions that arise when academic and political forces collide. Few searches in academia are perfect and none is a morality play. This one proved to be no exception. This article is an attempt to reconstruct the …

Roxbury, Boston, And The Boston Smsa: Socioeconomic Trends 1960-1985, Sally Brewster Moulton

New England Journal of Public Policy

Socioeconomic trends for a primarily black and poor urban area, Roxbury, Massachusetts, are compared to those of the surrounding city of Boston and the Boston Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (SMSA) for the period 1960 to 1985. Patterns in income, poverty, labor force participation, educational attainment, and racial composition are examined for each of the three areas. The chief purpose of the analysis is to determine the nature of gaps between Roxbury residents and the rest of the metropolitan area as well as the ways in which such gaps have changed over time.

The findings indicate that, despite growth in income, …

In Search Of Lost Cultures: Books 1987, Shaun O'Connell

New England Journal of Public Policy

Shaun O'Connell reviews a number of books whose focus is the "loss and tenuous preservation" of cultural values. He detects signs of a cultural crisis in which "literature and American life are increasingly detached" and disturbing indications of a loss of "national consensus," of trust, and perhaps of polity itself. Two hundred years after the signing of the Constitution, he writes, in this year of celebration, we learned in minute detail of the Iran-Contra deceits and duplicities, of government by secret White House junta having replaced the rule of law. Most dismaying of all, we did not appear to be …

Originally From Dorchester: Arrivals And Departures In A Neighborhood, Kathleen Kilgore

New England Journal of Public Policy

In "Originally from Dorchester," her portrait of a neighborhood that wrestled — and continues to wrestle — with problems of race, ethnicity, cultural values, economic development, and mobility, Kathleen Kilgore captures the nuances of the small gesture, whether of defiance or gentility, that reveal the underside of social conflict more eloquently than databases or court findings. "The neighborhood," Kilgore writes, "weakened and aged, and forcibly resisted change." But it then began to adapt, the influx of the young and the upwardly mobile providing a lifeline that facilitated a process of renewal and accommodation, in which, in the best sense, diversity …

The Clouds: A Portrait Of One Family In Wartime Cambridge, Fanny Howe

New England Journal of Public Policy

The following is a portion of a work in progress, a biography of Mark DeWolfe and Helen Howe, two Bostonians born soon after the turn of the century. The book describes the adult years of this sister and brother, each of whom participated in American life at many levels important to the social and intellectual currents of the country. This section of the biography describes Cambridge in the World War II years.

My Life With The Fbi, James Carroll

New England Journal of Public Policy

When I was a child, the FBI was everywhere in my world and I loved my world more for that. My first remembered experience of entertainment — one could even say of story — was listening on the radio in the late forties to "The FBI in Peace and War," and I can still hum its theme. My older brother Joe and I, and then Brian, too, when he came along, huddled together by the old Philco, riveted because those tales of gangbusters, spy catchers, and G-men evoked the world of our father, who was himself an FBI agent. He …

Book Reviews: Divided Houses, Shaun O'Connell

New England Journal of Public Policy

These books are an odd lot, landscapes and structures of eccentric designs: (1) a collection of stories by Frank Conroy, his first book since Stop Time (1967). Where Stop Time was a detailed, narrative autobiography that read like fiction, Midair is an often generalized, fragmented fiction with obvious autobiographical implications; (2) the weird diary of Arthur Crew Inman, over 1,600 pages of his often vile obsessions, handsomely edited and curiously published by Harvard University Press; (3) a study of nuclear anxiety over five decades, in the form of a polemical novel, by Tim O'Brien; (4) a collection of poems, also …

Professor Richardson Et Al.: A New England Education, George V. Higgins

New England Journal of Public Policy

George V. Higgins contributes to the series on the New England state of mind, identifying "a New England code of acceptable behavior" whose hallmarks are discretion "and a sense of decency, still powerful enough to prompt even those flouting it, and getting caught, to feel a sense of guilt."

Public Education In Boston, Joseph M. Cronin

New England Journal of Public Policy

Historically, Boston schools have been a source of pride and educational innovation, yet they have also been fraught with problems that are typical of urban education. Both the success achieved and the problems encountered in Boston schools bear analysis. In looking at such areas as overall quality of education, funding, and compliance with federal guidelines, specific recommendations for the future of public education in Boston can be offered. In addition, the impact of Boston's success or failure in implementing new ideas through the school committee and the mayor is not limited to the city itself. This article' s outlining of …