Remembering history the way they wished it had been
Not On My Watch? Â Â 
A sunny side of the Sixties is on display in the film Virtual JFK, portraying a happy time when a wise and unassassinated President Kennedy manages to avoid the Vietnam War. 
How’d he do it? Â 
 In this happy world Kennedy apparently emerged sadder and wiser from early stumbling over Cuba, which you can do if you disappear Operation Mongoose.
Still, it would have been a blessing to be spared this. 
Communism Point & Click 
So little is left of the Berlin Wall that Reuters reports authorities have resorted to handing tourists a GPS powered device if they want to recreate that closed in feeling.
We know where the Wall went: vast chunks carried off to America for victory displays. Prime offenders are Presidential Libraries, which are cluttered with the stuff.
Let’s review:
George H.W. Bush has a cheesy salute to Berlin 
and all things Texan outside his museum, and indoors 
Wall as well. And Bush Secretary of State James Baker got a 
chunk for his Rice University Institute.
Ford has a piece, 
although the Wall rested undisturbed throughout his presidency.
Nixon too.
Kennedy saw it built on his watch. 
The Hoover Library has a Wall piece, 
although he barely lived long enough to see it built, three decades after his presidency.
Truman hosted Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech at Westminister College in Fulton Missouri, and the campus now hosts both a plain chunk 
and a Wall “sculpture” – a piece with holes punched in it by Churchill’s granddaughter. 
She also sold one of these horrors to the Roosevelt library.
The greater glory of Ronald Reagan requires the most concrete, with Wall samples at his Dixon Illinois 
birthplace, alma mater 
Eureka College, at the federal Reagan 
office building in Washington, aboard 
the USS Ronald Reagan, 
at the Reagan Ranch Center, and at the Reagan Library indoors 
& out. 
And they used to sell bags of chips.
Nothing To See Here, Keep Moving 
We’ve recently seen release of ever more definitive documents showing that nothing happened in the Gulf of Tonkin, despite the use of the “Incident” as Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam War MacGuffin.
Now we learn that the Kennedy Administration’s finest hour, the storied grace under pressure of a wise beyond his years Jack Kennedy, was kind of a bust too.
Specifically, the moment of high seas drama when Soviet Missile ships turned back from the US Cuba blockade, the Eyeball to Eyeball/Other Fellow Blinked stuff – that didn’t happen either.
Happier Days 
The Washington Post’s Michael Dobbs is unleashing his account of the Missile Crisis semi-serially in the paper, with vast companion documents and excerpts available on the National Security Archives website.
Only A Mad Dream 
Scalia Speaks 
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia claims to be an “Originalist” in court decisions, but he likes his history predictable, if wrong.
Defending his 2000 Florida recount cutoff, Scalia goes with a classic, offering the legend of a noble Richard Nixon putting country above self, declining to challenge the disputed 1960 election.
“Richard Nixon, when he lost to [John F.] Kennedy thought that the election had been stolen in Chicago, which was very likely true with the system at the time,…But he did not even think about bringing a court challenge. That was his prerogative. So you know if you don’t like it, don’t blame it on me…I didn’t bring it into the courts. Mr Gore brought it into the courts.”
Others aren’t so sure about silent, selfless, sixties Nixon.
“Three days after the election, party Chairman Sen. Thruston Morton launched bids for recounts and investigations in 11 states—an action that Democratic Sen. Henry Jackson attacked as a “fishing expedition.” Eight days later, close Nixon aides, including Bob Finch and Len Hall, sent agents to conduct “field checks” in eight of those states. Peter Flanigan, another aide, encouraged the creation of a Nixon Recount Committee in Chicago. All the while, everyone claimed that Nixon knew nothing of these efforts—an implausible assertion that could only have been designed to help Nixon dodge the dreaded “sore loser” label.”
Up Where We Belong 
Gerald Ford’s former Colorado home is for sale, and the frenzy is unrestrained!
“To our knowledge, it has been generations since the home of a former President has been offered to the open marketplace…and this is the only one in history to have such a prized location.“
Well.
Ford’s own home in Alexandria Virginia has languished on the market lately. To our knowledge there have recently been two Nixons and a Kennedy sold, a Harding changed hands in 2004, a Reagan in 2000, and Eleanor Roosevelt’s former home is for rent.
No word if the Colorado Ford property includes his home x-ray machine.
