Is if she's mostly just quoting from the diaries of Arthur Schlesinger, who was apparently doing his best to avert nuclear war while nursing a hangover:In the summer of ’61, he exuberantly describes a “fantastic ball” at the Mellons’ one Friday with “an infinitude of Champagne,” like “the night before Agincourt,” where he chatted with Babe Paley; followed by a raucous Saturday wedding anniversary dinner for Bobby and Ethel at their Hickory Hill estate with “wild dancing”; Lester Lanin playing; Judy Garland, Kay Thompson and Ethel singing; Teddy plunging into the pool in his dinner jacket; and Ben Bradlee declaring it “a horror movie.” In the next entry, or “thence,” as he would say, the house intellectual is diligently writing a test-ban white paper for President Kennedy.Dowd focuses more on Jackie than LBJ, so we get Schlesinger's note about how "Ike advises a stunned Kennedy that he had been told by an official at State that Laos is 'a nation of homosexuals.'"
We have apparently always been ruled by one kind of idiot or another.
