#ap fall tour 2012

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Tom Cruise attends Taylor Swift's Eras Tour after skipping Suri's graduation

Tom Cruise was all smiles at Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour show in London Saturday night after skipping daughter Suri’s high school graduation in NYC just hours prior. The “Top Gun” star looked gleeful at Wembley Stadium as he traded friendship bracelets with fans ahead of the singer’s second of three sold-out performances in England’s capital city. The 61-year-old actor — who rocked dark wash jeans, a white T-shirt and a black jacket — sat among A-list attendees including Mila Kunis, Ashton Kutcher, Hugh Grant and “Barbie” director Greta Gerwig. Tom Cruise attended Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour show in London on Saturday night after skipping daughter Suri’s high school graduation the night prior. X/@tswifterastour The “Top Gun” actor was seen trading friendship bracelets with fans and dancing to “Shake It Off.” X/@martareismatias Mila Kunis, Ashton Kutcher and Hugh Grant also attended night two of three sold-out concerts. Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management Cruise appeared to be having the time of his life as he — much like Prince William the night prior — danced along to the Grammy winner’s hit song “Shake it Off” with his famous peers in the VIP tent. Swift’s beau, Travis Kelce, was also among stars as he attended his second London concert in a row with his brother and sister-in-law, Jason and Kylie. Meanwhile in the US, Cruise’s estranged 18-year-old daughter graduated from LaGuardia High School the day prior. Cruise’s 18-year-old daughter graduated from NYC’s LaGuardia High School on Friday. BrosNYC / BACKGRID Katie Holmes was on hand to support her only child. BrosNYC / BACKGRID The mother-daughter duo took pictures together after the ceremony. BrosNYC / BACKGRID A beaming Suri was photographed greeting friends outside the venue shortly after they received their diplomas. She also eagerly took pictures with mom Katie Holmes, who proudly stood by her daughter’s side on the special day. The teenager dressed for the heat in a white sundress and heels adorned with a flower. Cruise has been estranged from Suri for years. He and Holmes divorced in 2012. AP He confirmed that the “Dawson’s Creek” actress filed for divorce “in part to protect Suri from Scientology.” Getty Images She completed her summery ensemble with a red graduation robe and white sash. The 45-year-old “Dawson’s Creek” alum, for her part, looked cheerful in beige pleated trousers and a matching collared shirt. Cruise’s choice to opt out of the graduation does not come as a surprise, as he has been estranged from the teen for years. Scientology does not let its members associate with non-believers. AFP via Getty Images Cruise and Holmes were married from 2006 to 2012. Arnaldo Magnani/GettyImages Suri even dropped the “Risky Business” actor’s last name in her school’s official graduation pamphlet, opting instead to go by her first and middle names, “Suri Noelle.” Cruise confirmed in a 2012 deposition that Holmes divorced him “in part to protect Suri from Scientology.” Followers of the controversial religion are not allowed to associate with nonbelievers. Suri will attend Carnegie Mellon University in the fall. maiajwong/TikTok Suri — who revealed she will attend Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in the fall — did not let her father’s absence ruin her final days of high school. Earlier this week, she was seen having a blast with her friends as they took pictures before they went off to prom. Suri looked like a spitting image of her mother in a ’90s-inspired floral gown that featured a corseted bodice. Cruise still has a relationship with his eldest children, Connor and Isabella, who practice Scientology. WireImage He shares the adopted pair with ex-wife Nicole Kidman. Getty Images Holmes and Cruise split in 2011 nearly six years after tying the knot. The “Mission Impossible” actor shares daughter Isabella, 31, and son Connor, 29, with ex-wife Nicole Kidman, whom he separated from in 2001 following an 11-year marriage. Cruise still spends time with his eldest children as they have followed in his Scientology-practicing footsteps. Source link Read the full article

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Annals of History: The Transition! Lyndon Johnson and the Events in Dallas.

— By Robert A. Caro | Published: March 26, 2012 | Monday August 24, 2023

Lyndon Johnson and John F. Kennedy Walking Out of a Hotel! Johnson behind President Kennedy as they left the Hotel Texas, in Fort Worth, the day that Kennedy was assassinated. Photograph from Houston Chronicle/AP

Friday, November 22, 1963, began for Lyndon Johnson in Fort Worth, with the headline he saw on the front page of the Dallas Morning News: “Yarborough Snubs LBJ”

Johnson, accompanying President Kennedy on a tour of Texas, had been given an assignment that the President considered vital: since a unified Democratic front in the state would be needed to carry it in 1964, the Vice-President had been made responsible for healing the bitter Democratic Party rift between Governor John B. Connally, a former Johnson assistant, and Senator Ralph Yarborough, the leader of the Party’s liberal wing. The previous day, however, Yarborough had refused even to ride in the same car as Johnson. Assigned to accompany the Vice-President during a Presidential motorcade through San Antonio, the Senator had gotten into another car instead, and, in a procession in which the other vehicles behind the Presidential limousine were packed with people, Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, had had to sit conspicuously alone in the back seat of their convertible.

Newspapers that day chronicled every detail of Johnson’s humiliation. “Twice at San Antonio . . . Johnson sent a Secret Service man to invite Yarborough to ride with him in his car. Both times the senator ignored the invitation and rode with somebody else,” the Los Angeles Times reported. The Chicago Tribune noted the “curt wave of his hand” with which Yarborough had sent the Vice-President’s emissary packing. The feud was the main story of Kennedy’s trip not just in Texas but across the country. On the morning of the twenty-second, Lyndon Johnson sat in his suite at Fort Worth’s Hotel Texas with newspapers in front of him—there were four separate stories in the Dallas paper alone; one was headlined “nixon predicts jfk may drop johnson”—and then he had to go downstairs for a rally of five thousand labor-union members, and join Kennedy, Yarborough, Connally, and some local congressmen, all of whom had, of course, seen those stories. As they walked across the street to the rally, a light drizzle was falling. Johnson was wearing a raincoat and a hat; Kennedy was bareheaded and lithe, in an elegant blue-gray suit. Johnson hastily snatched off his hat. His assignment was to introduce Kennedy, and, as he finished, the crowd roared for the young man beside him. Explaining why Jackie wasn’t there (“Mrs. Kennedy is organizing herself; it takes longer—but, of course, she looks better than we do”), Kennedy was easy and charming. Johnson had had to ask the President for a favor: to be allowed to bring his youngest sister, Lucia, who lived in Fort Worth, to meet him. Shaking hands with Kennedy that morning, Lucia was thrilled; she had always wanted to shake hands with a President, she said.

When he had gotten dressed early that morning, Kennedy had strapped a canvas brace with metal stays tightly around him and then wrapped over it and around his thighs, in a figure-eight pattern, an elastic bandage for extra support for his bad back; it was going to be a long day. Now it was nine o’clock, time for him to deliver a breakfast speech to the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce in the hotel’s ballroom. “All right, let’s go,” he said.

Nine o’Clock in Texas was ten o’clock back in Washington. At ten o’clock in Washington that Friday morning, at about the same time that Kennedy was entering the Fort Worth ballroom, a Maryland insurance broker named Don B. Reynolds, accompanied by his attorney, walked into Room 312 of the Old Senate Office Building, on Capitol Hill, to begin answering questions from two staff members of the Senate Rules Committee: Burkett Van Kirk, the Republican minority counsel, and Lorin P. Drennan, an accountant from the General Accounting Office who had been assigned to assist the committee.

Reynolds was there because the Rules Committee had begun investigating a scandal revolving around Johnson’s protégé Robert G. (Bobby) Baker, whom Johnson, during his years as Senate Majority Leader, had made Secretary for the Majority. During the preceding two months, the scandal had been escalating week by week. In a desperate attempt to head off the investigation, Baker had resigned (he later said that if he had talked “Johnson might have incurred a mortal wound by these revelations. They could have . . . driven him from office”), but the resignation had only ignited a media firestorm that broke on newspaper front pages across the country and in sensational cover stories in major news magazines. The scandal had thus far concentrated on the man known in Washington as “Little Lyndon,” but the stories were beginning to focus more and more on Johnson himself. On the Monday of the week that Kennedy left for Texas, a lengthy and detailed article had appeared in Life—“scandal grows and grows in washington,” based on the work of a nine-member investigating team headed by a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, William G. Lambert. It had gone beyond a recounting of Baker’s personal financial saga to make clear that, in distributing campaign contributions and in his other Senate activities, Baker had simply been “Lyndon’s bluntest instrument in running the show.” And the focus was about to sharpen that morning. Reynolds, who was Baker’s former business partner, had come to Room 312 to tell the Senate investigators about a number of Baker’s activities, one of which—the purchase of television advertising time and an expensive stereo set, in return for the writing of an insurance policy—Baker himself later called “a kickback pure and simple,” to Johnson. On the advice of his attorney, Reynolds had brought with him documents—invoices and cancelled checks—that he said would prove that assertion. Another of Baker’s activities that Reynolds began describing that morning would also turn out to be related to Johnson: an overpayment by Matthew McCloskey, a contractor and major Democratic funder, for a performance bond—an overpayment of a hundred and nine thousand dollars for a bond that had cost only seventy-three thousand dollars, with twenty-five thousand dollars of that overpayment, Reynolds later said, going to “Mr. Johnson’s campaign.”

In New York, there was also going to be a meeting that morning—of about a dozen reporters and editors in the offices of Life’s managing editor, George P. Hunt. During the past week, reporters who had been sent to Texas to investigate the Vice-President’s finances had found areas ripe for inquiry. For one thing, they had begun searching through deeds and other records of recent land sales and had found that the real-estate and banking transactions of the Johnson family’s L.B.J. Company were on a scale far greater than had previously been suspected. And other reporters were digging into the advertising sales and other activities of KTBC, the cornerstone of the Johnsons’ extensive radio and television interests, and they, too, were turning up one item after another that they felt merited looking into. “With every day that week,” the story “kept getting bigger and bigger,” Lambert said later, and it was no longer a Bobby Baker story but “a Lyndon Johnson story”: after thirty-two years “on the [government] payroll . . . he was a millionaire many times over.” But, Lambert said, so many reporters were working in Johnson City, Austin, and the Hill Country that “they were tripping all over each other.” An article laying out some of their new findings had already been written, by Keith Wheeler, a staff writer. A decision had to be made on whether to run his story in the magazine’s next issue or whether the material already in hand should be held until more was available, and combined into a multi-part series on “Lyndon Johnson’s Money”—what Lambert termed a “net worth job”—and a meeting to decide this, and to divide up the areas of investigation in Texas, had been scheduled for 11:30 a.m. on November 22nd.

As Don Reynolds was providing the Rules Committee staff with information that might shortly produce headlines, and as Life was mapping out assignments for an investigation that might produce even bigger headlines, the Presidential motorcade was pulling away from the hotel in Fort Worth for the airport, and the flight to Dallas.

In Lyndon Johnson’s lapel was a white carnation that had been pinned on him at the Chamber of Commerce breakfast, and in his car was Ralph Yarborough. “I don’t care if you have to throw Yarborough into the car with Lyndon,” Kennedy had told his chief legislative aide, Larry O’Brien, that morning. “Get him in there.” He told Ken O’Donnell, his appointments secretary, to give Yarborough a message: “If he doesn’t ride with Lyndon today, he’ll have to walk.” The President himself had had a few words with the Senator that morning, telling him, in a quiet voice, that, if he valued his friendship, he would ride with Johnson.

On the thirteen-minute flight to Dallas, the President took care of another public aspect of the feud. O’Donnell, taking Connally by the arm, pushed him into Kennedy’s cabin and closed the door. “Within three minutes,” he was to recall, the Governor had agreed to invite Yarborough to the reception at the Governor’s Mansion and to seat him at the head table at dinner. Emerging, Connally said, “How can anybody say no to that man!”

As Air Force One was heading for Dallas, the last of the clouds cleared. “Kennedy weather,” O’Brien called it.

It seemed as if it was going to be a Kennedy day. As Air Force One touched down at Dallas’s Love Field, at 11:38 a.m., everything seemed very bright under the brilliant Texas sun and the cloudless Texas sky: the huge plane gleaming as it taxied over closer to the crowd pressing against a fence; the waiting, open Presidential limousine, so highly polished that the sunlight glittered on its long midnight-blue hood, which stretched forward to two small flags on the front fenders. There was a moment’s expectant pause while steps were wheeled up to the plane, and then the door opened and into the sunlight came the two figures the crowd had been waiting for: Jackie first (“There’s Mrs. Kennedy, and the crowd yells!” a television commentator shouted), youthful, graceful, her wide smile, bright-pink suit, and pillbox hat radiant in the dazzling sun; behind her the President, youthful, graceful (“I can see his suntan all the way from here!” the commentator announced), the mop of brown hair glowing, one hand checking the button on his jacket in the familiar gesture, coming down the steps turned sideways just so slightly, to ease his back. A bouquet of bright-red roses was handed to Jackie by the welcoming committee, and it set off the pink and the smile.

No time had been built into the schedule for the President and the First Lady to work the crowd, but who could have resisted, so adoring and excited were the faces turned toward them, so imploring the hands reaching out toward them, and they walked along the fence basking in the smiles and the sun, grinning, laughing, even, at things people shouted as they stretched out their hands, in the hope of a touch from theirs. “There was never a point in the public life of the Kennedys, in a way, that was as high as that moment in Dallas,” a reporter who covered the Kennedy Presidency said later.

Taking his wife, Lady Bird, by the arm to bring her along, Lyndon Johnson walked over to the fence and started to follow the Kennedys, but the faces remained turned, and the arms remained stretched, toward the Kennedys, even after they had passed, and Johnson quickly moved back to the gray convertible that had been rented for him. Yarborough sat on the left side in the back seat, behind the driver, a Texas state highway patrolman named Hurchel Jacks, the Vice-President on the right side, behind Rufus Youngblood, a Secret Service agent assigned to him. Lady Bird, sitting between Yarborough and her husband, tried to make conversation but soon gave up. The two men weren’t speaking to each other or looking at each other—the only noises in the car came from the walkie-talkie radio that Youngblood was carrying on a shoulder strap—as the motorcade pulled out.

Senate Hearings Normally Break for Lunch, but at 12:30 p.m. Washington time Reynolds, after two and a half hours of explaining his over-all business relationship with Bobby Baker, had begun telling his Rules Committee questioners, Van Kirk and Drennan, specifically about the pressures that he said had been brought on him to purchase advertising time on Lyndon Johnson’s television station, and they didn’t want him to stop. “Don presented a good case,” Van Kirk said later. “He could back it up. Everything he said, he had a receipt for. It’s hard to argue with a receipt. Or a cancelled check. Or an invoice. It’s hard to argue with documentation.” The committee staffers sent a secretary out for sandwiches and milk, and Reynolds continued talking. The first few miles of the Presidential procession followed an avenue lined with small light-industrial factories, and relatively few people were watching as the motorcade swept past: in the lead an unmarked white police car, and helmeted motorcycle-police outriders; then the Kennedys and Governor and Mrs. Connally, in the Presidential limousine with the flags fluttering from its fenders and four motorcycle escorts flanking it at the rear; then a heavily armored car that the Secret Service agents referred to as the Queen Mary, with four agents standing on the running boards, and Ken O’Donnell and Dave Powers, a White House special assistant, sitting on the jump seats; then, after a careful, seventy-five-foot gap, came the gray Vice-Presidential convertible and the Vice-Presidential follow-up car, the press cars and buses, and the rest of the long caravan. But then the motorcade reached Dallas’s downtown, and turned onto Main Street. For a while, Main was lined on both sides by tall buildings, so that the cars, driving between them, might have been driving between the walls of a canyon, and the windows of the buildings were filled, floor after floor, building after building, with people leaning out and cheering, and on the sidewalks the crowds were eight people, ten people deep. Overhead, every fifty yards or so, a row of flags hung from wires stretched across the street, and at the end of the canyon, where the buildings stopped, was a rectangle of open sky.

As the procession drove farther into the canyon, the noise swelled and deepened, becoming louder and louder, so that the motorcade was driving through a canyon of cheers. Every time the President waved, the crowd on the sidewalk surged toward him, pressing back the lines of policemen, so that the passage for the cars grew narrower, and the lead car was forced to reduce its speed, from twenty miles an hour to fifteen, to ten, to five. Every time Jackie waved a white-gloved hand, shrieks of “Jackie!” filled the air. As Governor Connally waved his big Stetson, revealing a leonine head of gray hair, the cheers swelled for him, too. The four passengers in the Presidential limousine kept smiling at one another in delight. “Mr. President, you certainly can’t say that Dallas doesn’t love you!” Nellie Connally said. The President’s “eyes met mine and his smile got even wider,” she later recalled.

Trailing Them in the Rented Car, driving between crowds of people cheering but not for him, sharing a seat with a man who had humiliated him, Lyndon Johnson was far enough behind the Presidential limousine that the cheering for the Kennedys and the Connallys—for John Connally, some of it, for his onetime assistant, who had become his rival in Texas—was dying down by the time his car passed, and most of the faces in the crowd were still turned to follow the Presidential car as it drove away from them. So that, as Lyndon Johnson’s car made its slow way down the canyon, what lay ahead of him in that motorcade could, in a way, have been seen by someone observing his life as a foretaste of what might lie ahead if he remained Vice-President: five years of trailing behind another man, humiliated, almost ignored, and powerless. The Vice-Presidency, “filled with trips . . . chauffeurs, men saluting, people clapping . . . in the end it is nothing,” as he later put it. He had traded in the power of the Senate Majority Leader, the most powerful Majority Leader in history, for the limbo of the Vice-Presidency—“what ever happened to lyndon johnson?,” a mocking headline in The Reporter had asked—because he had felt that at the end might be the Presidency. Now there was another man who might want the Presidency: the younger brother, Robert F. Kennedy, the Attorney General, whose dislike and contempt—“hatred” is not too strong a term—for him was well known in Washington. And in five years Bobby Kennedy would have had time to build up a record, to hold other positions besides Attorney General: Secretary of Defense, perhaps—whatever positions he wanted, in the last analysis. For more than a year now, the desolation Lyndon Johnson felt about his position had shown in his posture—in the slump of his shoulders—and in his gait, the slow steps that had replaced the old long Texas stride with which he had walked the corridors of Capitol Hill, and in his face, on which all the lines ran downward, his jowls sagging, so that reporters mocked in print his “hangdog” look. His former aide Bill Moyers, who had become the publicity director for the Kennedy in-law Sargent Shriver’s Peace Corps, felt that Johnson had become “a man without purpose . . . a great horse in a very small corral.”

And what if his Vice-Presidency wasn’t five years longer but only one? What if he was dropped from the ticket in 1964?

He had been saying for some time—had apparently convinced himself—that that was the probability. In recent months, he had begun advising aides he would have wanted to keep with him were he to run for or become President to leave his staff. “My future is behind me,” he told one staffer. “Go,” he said to another. “I’m finished.” That belief—that fear—may or may not have been justified before Bobby Baker appeared on magazine cover after magazine cover, before Don Reynolds entered the picture, and before this trip to Texas. Given what the President was seeing for himself in Texas—that Johnson was no longer a viable mediator between factions of his party in his own state—and what was happening at that very moment in the Old Senate Office Building, the President’s assurances that he would be on the ticket might start to have a hollow ring. “Finished ”: whether or not he was given another term as Vice-President, it was beginning to seem, more and more, as if there might be some justification for the adjective that he had been applying to his prospects.

Leaving Behind the Crowds on Main Street, the lead car, the motorcycle police, and the Presidential limousine swung right onto Houston Street and then left onto Elm, which sloped slightly downhill toward a broad railroad overpass through a grassy open space, with scattered spectators standing in it, called Dealey Plaza. In Washington, Don Reynolds was showing the Rules Committee investigators the papers that he said proved his charges about Lyndon Johnson, pushing the documents, one by one, across the witness table. In New York, the Life editors were assigning reporters to investigate specific areas of Johnson’s finances while still debating whether the magazine should run a story on Johnson’s wealth in its next issue. Ahead of the Vice-Presidential car, the spectators in Dealey Plaza began to applaud the Kennedys and the Connallys as Johnson followed in their wake.

There Was a Sharp, cracking sound. It “startled” him, Lyndon Johnson later said; it sounded like a “report or explosion,” and he didn’t know what it was. Others in the motorcade thought it was a backfire from one of the police motorcycles, or a firecracker someone in the crowd had set off, but John Connally, who had hunted all his life, knew the instant he heard it that it was a shot from a high-powered rifle.

Judge Hughes administers the oath of office in the stateroom of Air Force One. Photograph by Cecil Stoughton/LBJ Library. Photograph by Cecil Stoughton / LBJ LIbrary

Rufus Youngblood, the Secret Service agent in Johnson’s car, didn’t know what it was, but he saw “not normal” movements in the Presidential car ahead—President Kennedy seemed to be tilting toward his left—and in the Queen Mary, immediately ahead of him, one of the agents was suddenly rising to his feet, with an automatic rifle in his hands. Whirling in his seat, Youngblood shouted—in a “voice I had never heard him ever use,” Lady Bird recalled—“Get down! Get down! ” and, grabbing Johnson’s right shoulder, yanked him roughly down toward the floor in the center of the car, as he almost leaped over the front seat, and threw his body over the Vice-President, shouting again, “Get down! Get down! ” By the time the next two sharp reports had cracked out—it was a matter of only eight seconds, but everyone knew what they were now—Lyndon Johnson was down on the floor of the back seat of the car. The loud, sharp sound, the hand suddenly grabbing his shoulder and pulling him down: now he was on the floor, his face on the floor, with the weight of a big man lying on top of him, pressing him down—Lyndon Johnson would never forget “his knees in my back and his elbows in my back.”

He couldn’t see anything other than Lady Bird’s shoes and legs in front of his face—she and Yarborough were ducking forward as far as they could. Above him, as he lay there, he heard Youngblood yelling to Hurchel Jacks, “Close it up! Close it up!” The Secret Service agent still wasn’t sure what had happened, but he knew that the best hope of protection was to stay close to the car ahead of him, which was packed with men and guns. Lying on the floor with Youngblood on top of him, Lyndon Johnson felt the car beneath him leap forward as Jacks floored the gas pedal, and he felt the car speeding—“terrifically fast,” Lady Bird later said, “faster and faster”; “I remember the way that car . . . zoomed,” Johnson recalled—and then the brakes were slammed on, and the tires screamed almost in his ear as the car took a right turn much too fast, squealing up the ramp to an expressway, and hurtled forward again. “Stay with them, and keep close!” Youngblood was shouting above him. The shortwave radio was still strapped to Youngblood’s shoulder, so that it was almost in Johnson’s ear. The radio had been set to the Secret Service’s Baker frequency, which kept Youngblood in touch with the Vice-Presidential follow-up car, but now Johnson heard the agent’s voice above him say, “I am switching to Charlie”—the frequency that would connect him with the Queen Mary, ahead of him. For a moment there was, from the radio, only crackling, and then Johnson heard someone say, “He’s hit! Hurry, he’s hit!,” and then “Let’s get out of here!”—and then a lot of almost unintelligible shouting, out of which one word emerged clearly: “hospital.”

He still couldn’t see what Youngblood was seeing. As the third shot rang out, a little bit of something gray had seemed to fly up out of Jack Kennedy’s head. Then his wife, in her pink pillbox hat and pink suit, which seemed suddenly to have patches of something dark on it, was trying to climb onto the long trunk of the limousine, and then clambering back into the car, where her head was bent over something Youngblood couldn’t see. A moment after the first shot, one of the agents on the Queen Mary’s running board, Clint Hill, had sprinted after the limousine as it was accelerating, leaped onto its trunk, and grabbed one of its handholds. He was now lying spread-eagled across the trunk of the speeding vehicle, but he managed to raise his head and look down into the rear seat. Turning to the follow-up car, he made a thumbs-down gesture.

The agents in the Queen Mary were waving at Jacks to stay close. The patrolman, a laconic Texan—“tight-lipped and cool,” Youngblood called him—pulled up within a few feet of the armored car’s rear bumper, and kept his car there as the two vehicles, with the Presidential limousine not many feet ahead of them, roared along the expressway and then swung right onto an exit ramp.

The man underneath Rufus Youngblood was lying very quietly, except when his body was jolted forward or back as the car braked or accelerated or swerved. His composure would have surprised most people who knew him, but not the few who had seen him in other moments of physical danger, including moments when he was under gunfire. Johnson’s customary reaction to physical danger, real or imagined, was so dramatic, almost panicky, that in college he had had the reputation of being “an absolute physical coward.” During the Second World War, he had done everything he could to avoid combat. Realizing, however, that, “for the sake of political future,” as one of Franklin Roosevelt’s aides wrote, he had to be able to say he had at least been in a combat zone, he went to the South Pacific and flew as an observer on a bomber that was attacked by Japanese Zeroes. And as the Zeroes were heading straight for the bomber, firing as they came, its crew saw Lyndon Johnson climb into the navigator’s bubble so that he could get a better view, and stand there staring right at the oncoming planes, “just as calm,” in the words of one crew member, “as if we were on a sightseeing tour.” Although his customary reaction to minor pain or illness was “frantic,” “hysterical”—he would, the Texas lobbyist Frank (Posh) Oltorf said, “complain so often, and so loudly,” about indigestion that “you thought he might be dying”—when, in 1955, in Middleburg, Virginia, a doctor told Johnson that this time the “indigestion” was a heart attack, which he had always feared, because his father and uncle had died young of heart attacks, Johnson’s demeanor changed. Lying on the floor of Middleburg’s “ambulance”—it was actually a hearse—as it was speeding to Washington, he was composed and cool as he made decisions: telling the doctor and Oltorf, who were riding in the ambulance, what hospital he was to be taken to, which members of his staff should be there when he arrived; telling Oltorf where he thought his will was, and how he wanted its provisions carried out. It was a major heart attack—when he arrived at the hospital, doctors gave him only a fifty-fifty chance of survival—and at one point during the trip Johnson told the doctor that he couldn’t stand the pain. But when the doctor said that giving him an injection to dull it would require stopping for a few minutes, and “time means a lot to you,” Johnson said, “If time means a lot, don’t stop.” There were even wry remarks; when the doctor told him that if he recovered he would never be able to smoke again, Johnson said, “I’d rather have my pecker cut off.” Lady Bird was always saying that her husband was “a good man in a tight spot.” Oltorf had never believed her—until that ambulance ride. He had thought he knew Johnson so well, he recalled; he realized on that ride that he didn’t know him at all.

Lying on the floor of the back seat with Youngblood still on top of him, Johnson asked what had happened. Youngblood said that “the President must have been shot or wounded,” that they were heading for a hospital, that he didn’t know anything, and that he wanted everyone to stay down—Johnson down on the floor—until he found out.

“All right, Rufus,” Johnson said. A reporter who asked Youngblood later to describe the tone of Johnson’s voice as he said this summarized the agent’s answer in a single word: “calm.”

A moment later, the voice on the shortwave radio told Youngblood that they were heading to Parkland Memorial Hospital, and the agent, shouting, he later recalled, against the noise of the wind and the wail of police sirens, told Johnson what to do when they arrived: he was to get out of the car and into some area that the Secret Service could make secure, without stopping for anything, even to find out what had happened to the President. “I want you and Mrs. Johnson to stick with me and the other agents as close as you can,” he said. “We are going into the hospital and we aren’t gonna stop for anything or anybody. Do you understand?”

“O.K., pardner, I understand,” Lyndon Johnson said.

There Was Another Squealing Turn—left onto the entrance ramp to the Parkland Emergency Room; the car skidded so hard that “I wondered if they were going to make it,” Lady Bird said—and then the brakes were jammed on so hard that Johnson and Youngblood were slammed against the back of the front seat. Then Youngblood’s weight was off him: hands were grabbing his arms and pulling him roughly up out of the car and onto his feet. The white carnation was still in his lapel, somehow untouched, but his left arm and shoulder, which had taken the brunt of Youngblood’s weight, hurt. There were Secret Service men all around; police all around; guns all around. Then Youngblood and four other agents were surrounding him, the hands were on his arms again, and he was being hustled—almost run—through the hospital entrance and along corridors; close behind him was another agent, George Hickey, holding an AR-15 automatic rifle at the ready. Johnson said later that he was rushed into the hospital so fast, his view blocked by the men around him, that he hadn’t even seen the President’s car, or what was in it. Lady Bird, rushed along right behind him by her own cordon of agents, had seen, in “one last look over my shoulder,” “a bundle of pink, just like a drift of blossoms, lying on the back seat. I think it was Mrs. Kennedy lying over the President’s body.”

Lyndon Johnson was being hustled, agents’ hands on his arms, down one hospital corridor after another, turning left, turning right; his protectors were looking for a room that could be made secure. Then he was in what seemed like a small white room—it was actually one of three cubicles, in the Parkland Minor Medicine section, that had been carved out of a larger room by hanging white muslin curtains from ceiling to floor. Two of the cubicles were unoccupied; in the third, a nurse was treating a patient. The agents were pushing nurse and patient out the door; they were pulling down the shades and blinds over the windows. Then he and Lady Bird were standing against a blank, uncurtained wall at the back of the cubicle farthest from the door. Youngblood was standing in front of them, telling another agent to station himself outside the door to the corridor, and not to let anyone in—not anyone—unless he knew his face. Two other agents were stationed in the cubicle between this one and the corridor. Someone was saying that Youngblood should get to a telephone and report to his superiors, in Washington; Youngblood was saying, “Look here, I’m not leaving this man to phone anyone.” Remembering that a Vice-President’s children did not normally receive Secret Service protection, he asked Lady Bird where the Johnson daughters were (Lynda Bird was at the University of Texas, Lucy at her high school, in Washington), and told one of the agents to call headquarters, have guards assigned to them immediately, and then get back to the cubicle as fast as possible.

Someone brought two folding chairs into the cubicle, and Lady Bird sat down in one. Lyndon Johnson remained standing, his back against the far wall. As had been the case in every crisis in his life, a first consideration was to have people loyal to him around him, aides and allies who could be counted on to take his orders without question. He knew that the Texas congressmen who had been in the motorcade must be nearby, and he asked Youngblood to have them found, and Homer Thornberry was brought in and, after a while, Jack Brooks. Johnson’s aide Cliff Carter came in, and handed him a container of coffee.

And then, for long minutes, no one came in. Lyndon Johnson stood with his back against the wall. It was very quiet in the little curtained space. “We didn’t know what was happening,” Thornberry recalled later. “We did not know about the condition of the President. . . . I walked out once to try to see if I could find out what was going on, but either nobody knew or they didn’t tell me.” Johnson asked Youngblood to send an agent to get some news, and he returned with Roy Kellerman, the acting chief of the White House Secret Service detail, but Kellerman didn’t provide much information. “Mr. Johnson asked me the condition of the President and the Governor,” he recalled. “I advised him that the Governor was taken up to surgery, that the doctors were still working on the President. He asked me to keep him informed of his condition.”

There was more waiting. “Lyndon and I didn’t speak,” Lady Bird Johnson recalled. “We just looked at each other, exchanging messages with our eyes. We knew what it might be.” Johnson said very little to anyone, moved around very little, just stood there. Asked to describe him in the hospital, Thornberry used the same word that Youngblood used to describe him in the car: “Very calm. All through the time he was just as calm.” Kellerman’s deputy Emory Roberts came in and said that he had seen Kennedy, and, as he later recalled, that he “did not think the President could make it”—and that Johnson should leave the hospital, get to Air Force One, and take off for Washington. Youngblood agreed. “We should leave here immediately,” he said. The word “conspiracy” was in the air. Not merely the President but the Governor had been shot; who knew if Johnson might himself have been the next target had not Youngblood so quickly covered his body with his own? The Secret Service wanted to get Johnson out of Dallas or, at least, onto the plane, which would, in their view, be the most secure place in the city.

But Johnson did not agree. No one had yet given him any definite word on the President’s condition; no one had yet made, in that little curtained room, any explicit statement. In Brooks’s recollection, Johnson said, “Well, we want to get the official report on that rather than [from] some individual.” He wouldn’t leave without permission from the President’s staff, he said, preferably from the staff member who was, among the White House staffers in Dallas, the closest to the President: Ken O’Donnell. Youngblood and Roberts continued, in Youngblood’s phrase, to “press Johnson” to leave the hospital “immediately”—they “suggested that he think it over, as he would have to be sworn in”—but Johnson didn’t change his mind “about staying put until there was some definite word on the President.”

And there was still, for minutes that seemed very long, no definite word. “Every face that came in, you searched for the answers you must know,” Lady Bird Johnson said later. Lyndon Johnson still stood against the wall in that small, curtained space, his wife sitting beside him, two or three men off to one side, standing silent or occasionally whispering among themselves; standing in front of him “always there was Rufe,” Mrs. Johnson said. Johnson stood there for about forty minutes. Then, at 1:20 p.m., O’Donnell appeared at the door and crossed the room to Lyndon Johnson, and, seeing the stricken “face of Kenny O’Donnell, who loved him so much,” Lady Bird knew.

“He’s gone,” O’Donnell said, to the thirty-sixth President of the United States.

When the First Calls Came into George Hunt’s office at Life reporting “that Kennedy had been shot—at first, that’s all: just that he had been shot,” Russell Sackett, an associate editor, recalled, the meeting broke up immediately, with editors and reporters running back to their offices.

During the next few minutes, while the news was trickling in from Dallas, one decision was made quickly: Keith Wheeler’s article on Lyndon Johnson would not run in the next issue of the magazine: there would be no room for it. About a week later, William Lambert went in to see the magazine’s assistant managing editor, Ralph Graves, and told him that any further investigation into Johnson’s finances should be postponed. “I told him I thought we ought to give the guy a chance,” he said. Graves agreed, saying, in Lambert’s recollection, “If you hadn’t said that, I was going to tell you that.” (When the Life series finally ran, in August, 1964, it put the Johnson family’s “total accumulation of wealth” at approximately fourteen million dollars. Johnson associates hotly disputed this, putting the figure at about four million.)

No One Thought to Notify the four men meeting behind closed doors in Room 312 of the Old Senate Office Building about what was happening in Dallas, and Don Reynolds continued giving his account, and pushing his checks and invoices across the table to Van Kirk and Drennan. According to the most definitive account of the Bobby Baker case, it was shortly after 2:30 p.m. Washington time—about ten minutes after O’Donnell told Lyndon Johnson, “He’s gone”—when Reynolds finished, and, just as he did, a secretary “burst into the room . . . sobbing almost hysterically” and shouting that President Kennedy had been killed. Reynolds, saying that, since Johnson was now President, “you won’t need these,” reached for his documents, but Van Kirk refused to let him take them, saying that they now belonged to the Rules Committee.

(The committee’s investigation would drag on for nineteen months of bitter partisan wrangling. During this time, Reynolds made other charges against Johnson and Bobby Baker that, unlike his charges about the insurance kickback and the McCloskey performance bond, were not supported by documentation, and the committee’s majority report, vehemently disputed in the minority report, stated that Reynolds’s “credibility” had been “destroyed.” But, while Baker disputed Reynolds’s later allegations, he said that Reynolds had “told the truth with respect to the LBJ insurance policy” and the performance bond. “I was the man who had put Reynolds and McCloskey together”—on the bond—“so I know what the understandings were,” Baker said. In 1967, Baker himself was convicted of larceny, fraud, and tax evasion in an unrelated campaign-funds case and served sixteen months in prison.)

At the Moment the News From Dallas reached the office of Abe Fortas, Johnson’s chief legal adviser, he was conferring with Bobby Baker, who had retained him as his attorney in the Rules Committee investigation, and in any criminal prosecutions that might follow.

“As soon as” the news came, Baker recalled, he realized that, if Fortas continued to represent him, the attorney might find himself in “a conflict-of-interest situation.” Telling Fortas, “I know Lyndon Johnson will be calling on you for many services,” he released him as his attorney.

“He’s Gone,” Ken O’Donnell Said. And “Right Then,” Homer Thornberry Later Said of Johnson, “He Took Charge.”

Even before O’Donnell came in, as Johnson was standing against the back wall of that curtained cubicle in Parkland Hospital, there had been something striking in his bearing, something that had first shown itself that day in the tone of his voice as he lay on the floor of a speeding car, with a heavy body on top of him and frantic voices on a shortwave radio crackling in his ears. Johnson’s aides and allies knew that, for all his rages and his bellowing, his gloating and his groaning, his endless monologues, his demeanor was very different in moments of crisis, in moments when there were decisions—tough decisions, crucial decisions—to be made; that in those moments he became, as his secretary Mary Rather recalled, “quiet and still.” He had been very quiet during the long minutes he stood there in the cubicle. “Very little passed between us,” Homer Thornberry recalled; no words from Johnson even to Lady Bird. As he stood in front of that blank wall, the carnation still in his buttonhole, there was a stillness about him, an immobility, a composure that hadn’t been seen very much during the previous three years.

And the hangdog look was gone, replaced by an expression—the lines on the face no longer drooping but hard—that Jack Brooks described as “set.” Lyndon Johnson’s oldest aides and allies, the men who had known him longest, knew that expression: the big jaw jutting, the lips above it pulled into a tight, grim line, the corners turned down in a hint of a snarl, the dark-brown eyes, under the long black eyebrows, narrowed, hard, piercing. It was an expression of determination and fierce concentration; when Lyndon Johnson wore that expression, a problem was being thought through with an intensity that was almost palpable, a problem was being thought through—and a decision made. That expression, set and hard, was, his aide Horace Busby said, Lyndon Johnson’s “deciding expression,” and that was his expression now. To Lady Bird Johnson, looking up at her husband, his face had become “almost a graven image of a face carved in bronze.”

What was going through Lyndon Johnson’s mind as he stood there history will never know. The only thing that is clear is that if, during those long minutes of waiting, he was making decisions—this man with the instinct to decide, the will to decide—by the time O’Donnell spoke and the waiting was over, the decisions had been made.

O’Donnell and the Secret Service agents were still urging him to leave the hospital and fly back to Washington at once. The possibility of “conspiracy” was looming larger, because, Johnson learned, six members of the Cabinet—including Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon—together with the White House press secretary, Pierre Salinger, were not in Washington but on a plane, en route to a conference in Japan. Johnson, as one account puts it, was “disturbed to learn that more than half the cabinet [was] five time zones away, somewhere over the vast Pacific Ocean,” and all together on the same plane. The Dallas motorcade was one of the rare occasions when President and Vice-President were not only both out of Washington but both in the same motorcade: with so many other officials away from Washington at the same time, and bunched together on the same plane, the shots at the President had been fired at a moment when the government of the United States was unusually vulnerable. Was that fact only a coincidence, or was it the reason the moment had been chosen? The possibility that the shooting was “part of a far-ranging conspiracy that had not yet run its course” was “in the thoughts of everyone,” Youngblood recalled. Among the reporters being herded into a nurses’ classroom at the other end of Parkland Hospital, which was going to serve as the press briefing room, there was, as Charles Roberts, Newsweek’s longtime White House correspondent, recalled, “a fear that—perhaps a lot of people thought, as I did, of Lincoln’s assassination, where not only Lincoln but four or five of his Cabinet were marked for assassination, that it might be, just might be, an attempt to literally wipe out the top echelon of government. We certainly had no way of knowing that it was a lone . . . gunman.” The urging from the three men standing in front of Johnson intensified. “Sir,” Youngblood said, “we must leave here immediately.” O’Donnell told him “that in my opinion he ought to get out of there as fast as he could.” “We’ve got to get in the air,” Emory Roberts said.

But Johnson reached a different decision—and he announced it as quickly as if he had already thought through all the options and decided what he would do. When O’Donnell kept pressing him to leave Dallas, he asked him, “Well, what about Mrs. Kennedy?,” and when O’Donnell said that she was determined not to leave her husband’s body (at that moment, she was standing, shocked and silent, in a corridor outside the room in which the body was lying), and that Johnson should fly back without her, while she and her husband’s body and his aides followed in another plane, Johnson said that he wasn’t going to do that—that he would take her back on the same plane with him. O’Donnell said that she would never leave the hospital without the body. Johnson said that in that case he would leave the hospital but not Dallas; he would go to the plane, but he would wait aboard it for the coffin, and the widow, to arrive. A contrary course continued to be urged. A new adjective entered the descriptions of Lyndon Johnson. He was, Youngblood said, “adamant.”

He wasn’t ignoring the conspiracy possibility; in fact, he “mentioned . . . the attempt on the life of the Secretary of State, Seward, at the time of Lincoln’s assassination,” Malcolm Kilduff, the press secretary on the Texas trip, recalled. Therefore, Johnson said, since they were going to leave the hospital, they should leave immediately. Exchanging quick sentences, he and Youngblood agreed that, because of the possibility of another assassination attempt, the trip back to Love Field should be made in as much secrecy as possible: by different hospital corridors from the ones they had run through on the way in; in different cars from the ones they had arrived in; by a different route from the one the motorcade had taken into the city. Youngblood said that when they started moving they should move fast, and should use unmarked cars, with Johnson and Lady Bird in separate cars, and Johnson told him to get the cars ready, and Youngblood sent an agent to do so, telling him to have the cars waiting, with their motors running, in the ambulance bays at the emergency-room entrance, and to make sure the drivers knew back-street routes to the airport, so that they could use them if necessary. “Quick plans were made about how to get to the car. Who to ride in what,” Lady Bird said later. Her husband “was the most decisive person around us. Not that he wasn’t willing to listen . . . but he was quick to decide.”

A Moment Later, another decision had to be made. Kilduff came into the curtained room to ask Johnson’s permission to announce Kennedy’s death to the press corps, waiting in the nurses’ classroom.

“Mr. President,” he began. It was the first time anyone had ever called Lyndon Johnson that, but, when he answered Kilduff, it was a President answering, firm and in command. “He reacted immediately,” Kilduff recalled. Immediately, and unequivocally. “No,” he said, “I think I had better get out of here and get back to the plane before you announce it. We don’t know whether this is a worldwide conspiracy, whether they are after me as well. . . . We just don’t know.” And get in touch with that plane carrying the Cabinet, he said. Get that plane turned around. The Cabinet plane, notified of the assassination by a news bulletin, which was confirmed by the White House, had already turned around, but neither Johnson nor anyone in the room with him was aware of it.

He made his dispositions. There hadn’t been many allies in the motorcade; three whose loyalty he could count on were the Texas congressmen, and he told the two who were in the room, Homer Thornberry and Jack Brooks, to ride back to the plane with him. He wanted every one of the few aides who had accompanied him to Dallas rounded up; he told Cliff Carter to find his executive assistant Liz Carpenter and his secretary Marie Fehmer and bring them to the plane. That still wasn’t much staff. Among the handful of people in his party was a Houston public-relations man, Jack Valenti, who had caught Johnson’s attention a few years earlier by writing favorable newspaper columns about him, and who had worked with him on arrangements for a dinner tribute to the Houston congressman Albert Thomas. He told Carter to find Valenti, and bring him along. Carter and his crew would need a driver, he told Youngblood, and Youngblood assigned an agent to wait at the ambulance bays until they arrived. Then he was ready. “Homer, you go with me,” he said. “Jack, you go with Bird.”

In a rush—not running, because that would call attention to them, but walking as fast as they could—they left the cubicle, through hospital corridors, following a red stripe on the floor, to the emergency-room exit, where the cars were waiting: Youngblood first, his head turning ceaselessly from side to side as he searched for danger; Johnson second, his eyes down as if he didn’t want to catch the eye of anyone who might be watching; then the two congressmen, and then two more Secret Service agents, and Lady Bird, who kept breaking into a trot as she tried to keep up. “Getting out of the hospital into the cars was one of the swiftest walks I have ever made,” she recalled.

The White House press corps was gathered in the nurses’ classroom at the other end of Parkland Hospital, waiting for word on Kennedy’s condition. As the new President of the United States headed out of the hospital, Robert Pierpoint, of CBS News, caught a glimpse of him, but didn’t follow. No other reporter followed him, or, apparently, even knew that he was leaving. “We weren’t thinking about succession,” Newsweek’s Charles Roberts explained later. “I don’t remember anybody saying, ‘My God, Johnson is President. . . . There was almost no focus of attention on him, and this was true as they left the hospital. . . . Nobody made any attempt to follow him, although he was then President of the United States.” A single photographer, the official White House photographer, Captain Cecil Stoughton, of the Army Signal Corps, happened to be standing by the emergency-room reception desk at the moment the little procession hurried by. Suspecting that Kennedy was dead, he decided to follow and caught a ride a few minutes later with Carter and Valenti.

Getting into the back seat of the first car, Johnson sat behind the driver, with Youngblood by the window on the other side of the back seat, in the place where the Vice-President normally sat, so that if someone fired at the person in that seat, thinking it was the Vice-President, the bullet would hit him instead of Johnson. Thornberry sat in front. Youngblood told Johnson to keep below window level, and he slouched down on his shoulder blades.

As they were pulling away from the hospital, another piece of protection was added. Albert Thomas, the Houston congressman, standing near the ambulance bays, saw the cars and motioned for them to stop for him. Youngblood told the driver to keep going, but Johnson said, “Stop and let him get in.” Thomas got in the front seat, beside Thornberry. As the car started moving again, Johnson told Thornberry to climb across the back of the front seat and get in the rear. Thornberry did, but did not wind up sitting in the vacant space between Johnson and Youngblood. Instead, Youngblood reported later, he “took a position on the window side” behind the driver, where Johnson had been sitting. Johnson was now in the middle. Whether he had changed seats by accident or by design, he now had a human shield on both sides.

One of the motorcycle policemen in front of them began to sound his siren. “Let’s don’t have the sirens,” Johnson said. As they sped through the Dallas streets, Lady Bird, following in the second car, saw, atop a building, a flag at half mast: “I think that is when the enormity of what had happened first struck me.” And then they were on the Love Field tarmac, and, Youngblood recalled, “suddenly there before us was one of the most welcome sights I had ever seen”—Air Force One. The staircase to the rear door and the Presidential quarters was in place, and he and Lyndon Johnson “practically ran up” the steps.

Entering the Plane, Johnson walked forward down a narrow aisle, past a sitting area with six first-class-type plane seats, and then past a small bedroom that contained beds for the President and his wife—“I want this kept strictly for the use of Mrs. Kennedy, Rufus,” Johnson said; “see to that”—and into the President’s stateroom, a compartment sixteen feet square with a small sofa attached to a wall; a small desk, with a high-backed armchair, for the President; and a small conference table with four chairs. A handful of crew members and White House staff, including two secretaries, were watching the television. Back at Parkland Hospital, Kilduff had announced Kennedy’s death, and Walter Cronkite, of CBS News, was reporting it to the country. Youngblood was shouting to everyone to pull down the window shades; the possibility of a conspiracy, and of snipers at the airport, still seemed “very real indeed,” the agent said later. From the secretaries came the sound of weeping.

The stateroom was already warm. Having been alerted to prepare for an immediate takeoff, Air Force One’s pilot, Colonel Jim Swindal, had disconnected the air-conditioning unit, mounted on a mobile cart, that kept the plane cool on the ground. The plane’s own air-conditioning functioned only when the engines were running. Swindal had only one engine running, at a low speed that provided electricity for lights in the cabins but not air-conditioning.

For a few minutes, there was a hurried conference between Johnson and the three Texas congressmen. There were more decisions to be made: when and where to take the oath of office, whether here, in Dallas, or in Washington, where there could be a formal ceremony, in an appropriate setting, with the oath administered by Chief Justice Earl Warren, as Warren had administered it to John F. Kennedy at his Inauguration. Harry Truman, another Vice-President brought to the Presidency by the sudden death of his predecessor, was not sworn in until two hours and twenty-five minutes after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death (and almost two hours after he had been notified of it), waiting until most of the Cabinet, congressional leaders, and several other key government officials could be assembled in the Cabinet Room, at the White House, to watch Chief Justice Harlan Stone swear him in. Thornberry argued for Washington, Thomas and Brooks for Dallas, so that the country would immediately see that the succession had taken place: “Suppose the plane is delayed?” Thomas asked. But the discussion lasted only a few minutes. There were reasons for the swearing in to take place quickly: the fact that the President had been assassinated, and that a wider conspiracy might be involved, made the need to establish a sense of continuity, of stability, more urgent; if the Russians tried to take advantage of the situation, there should not be the slightest doubt about who was in command. On Wall Street, a panic was already under way. It wiped out more than ten billion dollars in stock values within slightly more than an hour. Although the taking of the oath was a merely symbolic gesture—no one but a Vice-President had ever ascended to the Presidency when a President died, so precedent had established that a Vice-President became President automatically, immediately upon a President’s death—it was a powerful symbol. To Johnson, it seemed particularly meaningful, as if, despite the fact that he had actually been President since the moment Kennedy died, it was the taking of the oath that would truly make him President; later, recalling November 22nd, he said, “I took the oath. I became President.” During the discussion, a crew member saw that Johnson was “very much in command,” and, as soon as Thomas finished arguing for taking the oath in Dallas, Johnson said, “I agree.”

If Coolness and Decisiveness under pressure were components of Lyndon Johnson’s character, however, there were, as always with Johnson, other, contrasting components.

Aware though he was of considerations that militated against anyone’s entering the Presidential bedroom, that it should be kept “strictly for the use of Mrs. Kennedy,” as he had instructed Youngblood, there now arose another consideration. He had telephone calls to make, including one of a particularly delicate nature, and he wanted privacy while he made them.

Privacy was available in the stateroom where he was standing (as it happened, he was standing right beside a telephone); doors on either side of the room could close it off completely from the rest of the plane; he could have asked the people in the room to leave and closed the doors. But he had in mind greater privacy than that. Leading Marie Fehmer—and Youngblood, who had said that he would not leave his side until the plane was in the air—into the Kennedys’ bedroom, he closed the door, pulled off the jacket of his suit, and sprawled on one of the beds.

And these other components were demonstrated also by the identity of the person to whom the delicate phone call was made, and by the questions Lyndon Johnson asked during the call.

Objective, rational reasons can explain why Lyndon Johnson called Robert Kennedy. One of the purposes of the call was to obtain a legal opinion on a matter of governmental policy, and Kennedy was the country’s chief legal officer. And, the decision to take the oath having been made, the wording of the oath was needed, and there was also the question of who was legally empowered to administer it, and these pieces of information could be obtained most authoritatively from the same source.

And there were strategic reasons for him to call Bobby. Even in this first hour after John F. Kennedy’s death, Lyndon Johnson seems to have had feelings that would torment him for the rest of his life—feelings understandable in any man placed in the Presidency not through an election but through an assassin’s bullet, and feelings exacerbated, in his case, by the contrast, and what he felt was the world’s view of the contrast, between him and the President he was replacing; by the contempt in which he had been held by the people around the President; and by the stark geographical fact of where the act elevating him to office had taken place. Recalling his feelings years later, in retirement, he said that, even after he had taken the oath, “for millions of Americans I was still illegitimate, a naked man with no presidential covering, a pretender to the throne, an illegal usurper. And then there was Texas, my home, the home of . . . the murder. . . . And then there were the bigots and the dividers and the Eastern intellectuals, who were waiting to knock me down before I could even begin to stand up.” He seems to have felt even in this first hour that the best way to legitimatize his ascent to the throne, to make himself seem less like a usurper, would be to demonstrate that his ascent had the support of his predecessor’s family. The decision to be sworn in immediately, in Dallas, instead of waiting until he returned to Washington, had been made, but he wanted that decision to be approved by the man whose approval would carry the most weight.

There were, of course, reasons for him not to call Robert Kennedy, reasons for him to obtain the information he wanted from someone else—from anyone else. The questions he asked—could the swearing in take place in Dallas? what was the wording of the oath? who could administer it?—were not complicated questions, and could have been answered by any one of a hundred government officials. One of them, in fact, was an official he had already dealt with extensively on questions of Vice-Presidential procedure, and whom he trusted and even felt a rapport with: the No. 2 man in the Justice Department, Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach.

And there were other—non-governmental—considerations that might have led him to telephone Katzenbach or some other official rather than the one he called, considerations of humanity rather than of politics. But, whatever the reasons, not long after Robert Kennedy had been told that the brother he loved so deeply was dead his telephone rang again, and when Kennedy picked it up he found himself talking to a man he hated—who was asking him to provide details of the precise procedure by which he could, without delay, formally assume his brother’s office.

Robert Kennedy had been having lunch with his wife, Ethel; Robert Morgenthau, the U.S. Attorney in New York; and Morgenthau’s deputy Silvio Mollo beside the swimming pool at Hickory Hill, his home in Virginia. It was a bright, sunny day, warm for November. At the top of the lawn sloping up from the pool, workmen were painting a new wing that had been added to the rambling white house. Suddenly, Morgenthau saw one of the workmen start running toward them. He was holding a transistor radio in his hand, and he was shouting something that no one could understand. Just then, a telephone rang on the other side of the pool, and Ethel walked around the pool to answer it, and said it was J. Edgar Hoover. Bobby walked over to take the call, and Morgenthau saw him clap his hand to his mouth and turn away with a look of “shock and horror” on his face. “Jack’s been shot,” he said. “It may be fatal.” He walked back to the house and tried to get more news, and about twenty minutes later he got it, from a White House aide, and a few minutes after that it was confirmed by Hoover, and then, at 2:56 p.m., Lyndon Johnson was on the phone.

This call—and a second one between Johnson and Robert Kennedy, six minutes later—was not recorded, and their recollections differ. The only witnesses—Rufus Youngblood and Marie Fehmer—heard just one side of the calls, and their impressions of what occurred differ markedly from those of Katzenbach, to whom Robert Kennedy spoke both between the two calls and immediately afterward. But, whatever the differences, there emerges from the recollections and impressions a picture of two conversations between a man who knew exactly what he wanted and what to say in order to get it and a man so stunned by grief and shock that he hardly knew what he was saying, or even, to some extent, what he was hearing.

Johnson gave accounts of the telephone calls several times, both in the months immediately following the assassination and in 1967, when the dispute over the conversations grew so public and so bitter that it became a crucial element in the great blood feud between him and Robert Kennedy, perhaps the greatest blood feud of American politics in the twentieth century, and one that played a role, small but not insignificant, in decisions that shaped the course of American history. By Johnson’s account, he telephoned Kennedy because “I wanted to say something that would comfort him.” And, by his account, he succeeded in this purpose, bringing Kennedy’s mind around to practical matters. “In spite of his shock and sorrow,” Johnson said, Kennedy “discussed the practical problems at hand with dispatch”; he was “very businesslike.” They discussed “the matter of my taking the oath of office,” and “the possibility of a conspiracy,” Johnson asserted. Kennedy, he asserted, “said that he would like to look into the matter of” when and where the oath should be administered, and “call back,” and when Kennedy called back “he said that the oath should be administered to me immediately.” Kennedy’s accounts of the conversations, including one he gave that evening to Ken O’Donnell after O’Donnell arrived back in Washington, were different. Johnson, Bobby said, had told him that “a lot of people down here had advised him to be sworn in right away.” When there was no immediate reply, Johnson pressed him, asking, “Do you have any objection to that?” Bobby said he hadn’t replied to the question. “I was too surprised to say anything about it. I said to myself, ‘What’s the rush? Couldn’t he wait until he got the President’s body out of there and back to Washington?’ ” Johnson, in this account, took—or used—silence as assent. “He began to ask me a lot of questions about who should swear him in. I was too confused and upset to talk about it.” In a later conversation, which Bobby taped for posterity, he said that he had never told Johnson that the oath should be administered immediately. “I was sort of taken aback at the moment because . . . I didn’t think—see what the rush was.” In fact, he said, his wishes were the opposite of what Johnson portrayed: “I thought, I suppose, at the time, at least, I thought it would be nice if the President came back to Washington [as] President Kennedy.” The only aspect of the conversation that is agreed on is that Kennedy said he would look into the matter and call Johnson back.

Kennedy called Katzenbach, saying, “They want to swear him in right away, in Texas. That’s not necessary, is it?” “No, not necessary,” Katzenbach replied. And when Kennedy asked who could swear him in, Katzenbach said, “Anyone who can administer an oath,” a category that included any federal judge or hundreds of other government officials; the place or the exact time of the swearing in didn’t matter. “You become President when the President dies—that’s accepted. It’s not a question.”

Katzenbach later said that he agreed that an immediate swearing in, while not necessary, was desirable, “given its symbolic significance.” But he was “absolutely stunned” that Johnson had made the call to Bobby Kennedy so soon after his brother’s death. Any number of federal officials could have given Johnson the information he was seeking, he said. “He could have called me. I was in my office.” He felt that Johnson might have made the call because “he may have wanted to be absolutely sure that there wouldn’t be an explosion from Bobby’s end”—wanted to insure that Bobby would not later say that the immediate swearing in showed a lack of respect for the dead President. But, he said, given Bobby’s “feelings about Johnson, and about his brother,” the fact that Johnson called Bobby so soon after his brother’s death “frankly appalled” him. “Calling Bobby was really wrong.”

Then there was a second call—the return call from Robert Kennedy to Lyndon Johnson—about which, as William Manchester writes, “the facts are unclear, and a dispassionate observer cannot choose.” Johnson said later that during this call Kennedy advised him “that the oath should be administered to me immediately, before taking off for Washington, and that it could be administered by a judicial officer.” During the call, however, it became clear that the questions of when and where the oath should be administered were in fact now moot, and that all Johnson wanted from Kennedy was the oath’s precise wording. Kennedy said he would have Katzenbach dictate it; telephoning his deputy again, he said, “They’re going to swear him in down there, and he needs the oath.” Katzenbach pulled a copy of the Constitution off his bookshelf, and read the thirty-seven-word declaration in Article II, Section 1:

“I Do Solemnly Swear (or Affirm) That I will Faithfully Execute The Office of President of the United States, and will to The Best of My Ability, Preserve, Protect and Defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Johnson had told Marie Fehmer to go out to the staff section of the plane and take down the wording. “Bobby started it and turned the phone to Katzenbach,” she recalled. (Katzenbach apparently patched in to this second call.) What was Katzenbach’s voice like at that time? “It was controlled; he was like steel,” Fehmer said. “Bobby’s was not when he started. I kept thinking, You shouldn’t be doing this.” When Katzenbach finished, she asked him, “ ‘May I read it back to you?’ Which I afterward thought may have been a little cruel, but yet I wanted to check it.” As for her own emotional state at the time, “I was all right. I broke up later that night, but I was all right. You got that feeling from him”—Johnson. “He taught you that, by George, you can do anything. . . . There was a job to be done.”

Whatever the disputes over the telephone calls, the oath was dictated, and typed out, and if the desired assent by Bobby Kennedy to its immediate administering was not obtained, at least he had been asked whether he objected to it, and had not replied, so it would be difficult for him to criticize it later; the possibility of public criticism from the President’s brother had been muted (only for a short time, as it turned out). The call to Hickory Hill had achieved its purpose. Whatever the details of the conversation between Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy, when Johnson hung up the phone he had gotten enough of what he wanted so that he could go ahead.

Hanging up the Phone, he began giving orders. Any federal judge could swear him in, he had been told. He knew what judge he wanted—and she was right in Dallas.

“As much as any single person possibly could,” a historian has written, this judge “personified Johnson’s utter powerlessness” during his Vice-Presidency. He had proposed Sarah Hughes, a long-time political ally from Dallas, for a judgeship on the Federal District Court in that city, but had been unable as Vice-President to secure her appointment; she had been named to the bench only after the Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn, intervened, a fact that had made Johnson feel, he said, like “the biggest liar and fool in the history of the State of Texas.” “Get Sarah Hughes,” he told Marie Fehmer.

Judge Hughes’s law clerk told Fehmer that he didn’t know the Judge’s whereabouts—the last he knew, he said, she had been at the Trade Mart luncheon waiting for the President to arrive—and Fehmer told Johnson that.

He told her to call the clerk back, and he picked up the receiver himself. “This is Lyndon Johnson,” he said. “Find her.”

She was found, and she hurried to Love Field.

He Wanted something more from the Kennedys, and he got that, too.

No single gesture would do more to legitimatize the transition in the eyes of the world—to demonstrate that the transfer of power had been orderly, proper, in accordance with the Constitution; to remove any taint of usurpation; to dampen, as far as possible, suspicion of complicity by him in the deed; to show that the family of the man he was succeeding bore him no ill will and supported him—than the attendance at his swearing-in ceremony of the late President’s widow. It would demonstrate, as well, continuity and stability: show that the government of the United States would function without interruption despite the assassination of the man who sat at its head.

Were these considerations part of the reason—in addition to the humanitarian consideration that he didn’t want her left behind in Dallas—that when the Secret Service and Ken O’Donnell told him that Jacqueline Kennedy would follow in another plane he had refused to leave Dallas without her? Certainly some of the Kennedy loyalists harbored that suspicion. “Some of us did feel that he was using Mrs. Kennedy and the Kennedy aura when he [staged] his oath-taking ceremony . . . with her present, and so he could arrive in Washington with her and President Kennedy’s casket,” O’Donnell wrote later. History will never know the answer to that question. All history can know for certain is that now, on Air Force One, Johnson moved with determination to obtain her presence.

His Efforts were almost derailed at the start by a moment of awkwardness.

While he was making phone calls—not only to Bobby Kennedy but to his administrative assistant, Walter Jenkins, and to the national-security adviser, McGeorge Bundy—in the plane’s bedroom, hammering began on the other side of the bulkhead that separated the bedroom from the rear seating compartment, and when Fehmer went out into the corridor and asked what it was, a crew member told her that four of the six seats in the compartment were being removed to make room for Kennedy’s heavy bronze coffin, which was about to be brought on board through the rear door, followed by Jackie and Kennedy’s aides.

Kennedy’s aides said later that they weren’t aware at that moment that Johnson and his party were aboard the plane, that they had assumed he had returned to Air Force Two and, in fact, had already taken off for Washington.

In the confusion, they hadn’t noticed that Air Force Two was still parked nearby. As soon as the Kennedy party was on board, Jackie, seeking a few moments alone while the coffin was being lashed to the floor, walked past it and opened the door to the bedroom, thinking that it would be empty—and, instead, encountered Lyndon Johnson. Whether, when she opened the door, Johnson was, as Manchester wrote after talking to her, “reclining on the bed,” in his shirtsleeves, or whether, as Fehmer later stated (in an effort to “clear up the bedroom thing”), he had already risen from the bed and was about to leave the bedroom and, “as he opened the door, there was Mrs. Kennedy,” she was evidently shocked; hastily retreating to the rear compartment, she told O’Donnell, he relates, “something that left me stunned: when she opened the door of her cabin, she found Lyndon Johnson.” She wasn’t the only one who retreated. “She was entering her private bedroom,” Fehmer recalled. “She . . . saw a stranger, in his shirtsleeves yet . . . in the hallowed ground. . . . We, of course, scurried out of that bedroom. It was really embarrassing.”

Returning to the rear compartment, Jackie sat down in one of the two remaining seats, across the aisle from the coffin. In a moment, Lyndon, having collected Lady Bird from the stateroom, came back to see her. “It was a very, very hard thing to do,” Lady Bird Johnson recalled. “Mrs. Kennedy’s dress was stained with blood. One leg was almost entirely covered with it and her right glove was caked—that immaculate woman—it was caked with blood, her husband’s blood. She always wore gloves like she was used to them; I never could. And that was somehow one of the most poignant sights . . . exquisitely dressed, and caked in blood.” Shocked though she was at Jackie’s appearance, Lady Bird found the right things to say: “Dear God, it’s come to this . . . ,” and Jackie responded, making “it as easy as possible. She said things like, ‘Oh, Lady Bird . . . we’ve always liked you two so much.’ She said, ‘Oh, what if I had not been there. I’m so glad I was there.’ ” Only once did Jackie’s voice change: when Lady Bird asked her if she wanted to change clothes. Not right then, Jackie said. “And then . . . if with a person that gentle, that dignified, you can say had an element of fierceness, she said, ‘I want them to see what they have done to Jack.’ ”

And Lyndon finally raised the subject. “Well—about the swearing in,” he said. According to Manchester, he had to use the phrase twice before Jackie responded, “Oh, yes, I know, I know.” “She understood the symbols of authority, the need for some semblance of national majesty after the disaster,” Manchester wrote; whether she agreed explicitly or not, there was an understanding that when Johnson took the oath she would be present.

His Work with the Kennedys done, Lyndon Johnson headed back to the stateroom.

It was crammed now with people: Secret Service agents; the three Texas congressmen; Kennedy’s aides and secretaries who had come aboard with the coffin; a Kennedy military aide, Major General Chester V. Clifton; Johnson’s aides Carter, Valenti, Fehmer, and Liz Carpenter; Moyers, who, hearing of the assassination while in Austin to advance the President’s Texas trip, had chartered a plane, flown to Dallas, and come aboard Air Force One; two Presidential valets, Kennedy’s George Thomas and Johnson’s Paul Glynn—all crowded together in a sixteen-by-sixteen-foot square that was so dimly lit (with the shades still drawn across the windows, the only lighting came from dim fluorescent bulbs overhead) that the General’s gold braid glinted only faintly in the gloom, and that, with no air-conditioning, had become so hot and stuffy that, one man said, “it was suffocating in there; it was hard to think.” The low, penetrating whine of the single jet engine that was operating never stopped. There was weeping in the room, and whispering—and confusion. Kennedy’s aides had been able to remove the dead President’s coffin from the hospital only after an angry confrontation with the Dallas County medical examiner, who, insisting that an autopsy had to be performed first, had stood in a hospital doorway to block them, backed by policemen. They had literally shoved the examiner aside to get out of the building, and now, on the plane, O’Donnell recalled, he “kept looking out the window, expecting to see the flashing red lights” of police cars, “coming with a court order to stop our takeoff.”

Not knowing when they came aboard that Johnson had decided to wait for Judge Hughes and take the oath on the ground (not knowing for some minutes, in fact, that Johnson was even on board; he was at that time behind the closed door of Kennedy’s bedroom), Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh, another Kennedy military aide, had gone to the cockpit and ordered Colonel Swindal to take off immediately. Swindal couldn’t—the plane’s forward door was still open, with the ramp still pushed up against it—and by the time the door was closed Malcolm Kilduff had come to the cockpit to tell him that the plane wouldn’t be taking off until after the swearing-in ceremony. When McHugh realized that the plane wasn’t taking off, he rushed back to the cockpit to repeat his order, and Kilduff countermanded it. O’Donnell, “in a highly desperate strait,” he said, headed for the cockpit himself, and only then learned of Johnson’s plans. The conflicting orders were less the bitter series of confrontations between Kennedy and Johnson aides that were later pictured than a misunderstanding, but they added to the confusion. McHugh and other Kennedy aides were still pushing back and forth down the crowded aisle in the passenger portion of the plane, and in the stateroom men and women were asking one another what was happening, what was going to happen. No one really knew.

And then, in the narrow doorway that led back toward the Presidential bedroom, there suddenly appeared, in Jack Valenti’s words, “the huge figure of Lyndon Johnson.”

The carnation was gone; the dark gray of his suit, which appeared black in the dim light, was relieved only by the tiny Silver Star bar in his lapel and a corner of a white handkerchief peeking out from the breast pocket. His thinning hair was slicked down smooth, so that as he turned his head from side to side, surveying the cabin, checking on who was there, there was nothing to soften that massive skull, or the sharp jut of the big jaw and the big nose, and his mouth was set in that grim, tough line.

Seeing him standing there, Valenti, who had known Lyndon Johnson mainly during his Vice-Presidency, was startled. “Even in that instant, there was a new demeanor” in him, he recalled. “He looked graver.” The restless movements were gone. “Whatever emotions or passions he had in him, he had put them under a strict discipline,” so that “he was very quiet and seemingly very much in command of himself.” There had been “a transformation,” Valenti said. “He was in a strange way another man, not the same man I had known.”

Other Johnson aides, who had known him longer, saw, after he returned to Washington that night, the same transformation, but found nothing strange in it. The Lyndon Johnson whom Horace Busby, having worked for him since 1947, saw in Washington that night was a Lyndon Johnson he hadn’t seen for three years, but it was a Lyndon Johnson he remembered very well. The Johnson he saw—and whom George Reedy and Walter Jenkins and other longtime aides saw—was simply the old Lyndon Johnson, the pre-Vice-Presidential Lyndon Johnson. And Busby understood why he had changed back, and why he had been able to change back so quickly. “You see, it was just that he was coming back to himself,” he explained. “He was back where he belonged. He was back in command.”

As the people in the stateroom noticed Johnson standing in the doorway, the ones who had been sitting rose to their feet. The whispering stopped—even, for a moment, the weeping.

“When I walked in, everyone stood up,” Johnson wrote in his memoir. “Here were close friends like Homer Thornberry and Jack Brooks; here were aides. . . . All of them were on their feet. . . . I realized nothing would ever be the same again. . . . To old friends who had never called me anything but Lyndon, I would now be ‘Mr. President.’ ” In the memoir, he said that this “was a frightening, disturbing prospect.” But if it was he gave no sign of that at the time. In the silence, Albert Thomas said, “We are ready to carry out any orders you have, Mr. President.” Walking into the stateroom, as people made way before him, he sat down in the high-backed President’s chair. Beckoning over Kilduff, he told him to make sure a photographer and reporters were aboard to record the swearing-in ceremony. “Put the pool on board,” he told him. He beckoned over Valenti. “I want you on my staff,” he said. “You’ll fly back with me to Washington.” And when an order was challenged, no challenge was entertained. When O’Donnell and O’Brien came over to him and asked if the plane could take off immediately, he said, “We can’t leave here until I take the oath of office. I just talked on the phone with Bobby. He told me to wait here until Sarah Hughes gives me the oath.” (Then he added a line with connotations. “You must remember Sarah Hughes,” he said.) O’Donnell didn’t believe him—“I could not imagine Bobby telling him to stay”; Johnson had become President the moment Kennedy died; “the oath is just a symbolic formality”; “there is no need to hurry about it.” (And later that night his skepticism was confirmed: “Bobby gave me an entirely different version of his conversation with Johnson.”) Whether O’Donnell believed him or not no longer signified, however. Johnson’s expression hardly changed as he spoke; his voice was so low that, one observer said, “he was almost whispering.” But if the voice was soft, that was not the case with the message. “Johnson was adamant that the oath be administered by Judge Hughes,” Larry O’Brien recalled. “There was adamancy. It became clear that the oath was going to be administered on the ground.” General McHugh was still pushing up and down the aisle, trying to get the plane to take off, not having talked to Johnson directly, but O’Brien and O’Donnell stopped arguing.

Standing up, Johnson moved to the center of the crowded little room (as was the case in most rooms he was in, he was the tallest person in it), and through the recollections of people present in that room there runs a common theme: a sense that, out of aimless confusion, order was quickly emerging.

If one reason for his insistence that the swearing in take place at the earliest possible moment was to demonstrate, quickly, continuity and stability to the nation and the world, then it was important that the nation and the world see that a new President had taken office. Luckily, Cecil Stoughton, the White House photographer, had come aboard, and, almost as soon as Johnson told Malcolm Kilduff to make sure a photographer was present at the ceremony, Kilduff bumped into him in the aisle. “Thank God you’re here,” Kilduff said. “The President’s going to take the oath.” And when Stoughton, carrying two cameras, entered the stateroom, seeing “Johnson in there, standing tall,” Johnson asked him, “Where do you want us, Cecil?” Stoughton told him that the room was so small that he would have to place his own back against a wall, and, to gain height for a better view, stand on the sofa, and that Johnson and the Judge should be directly in front of him but back a few feet: Johnson began moving people around, directing them to their places with jerks of his thumb—“taking command,” in Stoughton’s words. Witnesses were important; Kilduff asked Johnson whom he wanted present. “As many people as you can get in here,” he replied. Witnesses whose presence—whose photographed presence—would be testimony of continuity and legitimacy, of the Kennedy faction’s sanction of his assumption of Kennedy’s office, were particularly desirable; two of Jackie’s secretaries, Mary Gallagher and Pamela Turnure, were in the forward cabin, crying. He dispatched Kilduff to get them, and they came in, and so did General Clifton.

And he wanted from the Kennedy people another, more durable demonstration of continuity. Judge Hughes had not yet arrived; there were a few minutes to spare; he used them.

Sitting down again, he changed both his chair (to one at the conference table; the fact that he was not in the President’s chair “in itself did not go unnoticed” by the two men he beckoned over to sit with him) and his tone—a change so abrupt and dramatic that it would have been startling to anyone who had not witnessed, over the years, Lyndon Johnson’s remarkable ability to alter tone completely and instantaneously to accomplish a purpose. Where, just a few minutes before, in his conversations with O’Donnell and O’Brien, there had been “adamancy,” in full measure, now—in a new conversation with the same two men—there was humility, and in the same measure.

He wanted them to remain in their White House posts, he told the two Irishmen, still in the first throes of grief for their dead leader, because the best tribute that could be paid to President Kennedy would be passage of the programs he had believed in. They and he should fight for them together, he said, “shoulder to shoulder.” And, he said, leaning across the table and looking into their eyes, they should stay on because he needed them. He had so much to learn about his new responsibilities, and he just didn’t absorb things as quickly as Jack had. Jack had had not only the experience but the education and the understanding; he didn’t. “I need your help,” he said. “I need it badly. There is no one for me to turn to with as much experience as you have. I need you now more than President Kennedy needed you.”

He had only a few minutes to make the plea—he had hardly finished when Judge Hughes arrived. O’Donnell and O’Brien made no response at the time—“We can talk about that later,” O’Brien said; O’Donnell later described himself as “noncommittal”—but events were to prove that his plea had softened their feelings toward him.

Judge Hughes Arrived, a tiny woman in a brown dress decorated with white polka dots, and Johnson showed her to the place Stoughton had selected, in front of the sofa on which the photographer was standing. O’Brien put a small Catholic missal in her hands. Three reporters—Newsweek’s Roberts; Merriman Smith, of U.P.I.; and Sid Davis, of Westinghouse Broadcasting—also came on board, after a wild ride to Love Field in an unmarked police car, with the uniformed officer who was driving them speeding through red lights, avoiding tie-ups by bumping over median strips and driving against oncoming traffic. Despite their pleas, the driver had refused to notify their editors of their whereabouts, telling them, Davis recalled, that radio silence had to be maintained, because “they don’t know whether this is a conspiracy or not.” “We were speculating on . . . ‘Are they going to try for Johnson, and where have they taken him?’ ” Roberts recalled. “ ‘Are the Russians trying to take over Berlin?’ ” Seeing them enter the stateroom, Johnson said, “We’ve got the press here, so we can go ahead.” He made his final arrangements. Crowded though the stateroom was, a few more witnesses could still he crammed in. Raising his voice so that he could be heard in the forward cabin, he said, “Now we’re going to have a swearing in here, and I would like anyone who wants to see it to come on in to this compartment,” and, Judge Hughes recalled, “in they came until there wasn’t another inch of space”—until twenty-seven people were wedged into the stateroom, among the desk and the table and the chairs.

The Kennedy presence was still not all he wanted it to be. Johnson “particularly asked that . . . Evelyn Lincoln, President Kennedy’s secretary, be present,” Judge Hughes recalled, but when she came in she stood in the midst of the crowd behind him, so that she was not sufficiently prominent; he made a gesture and she squeezed forward until she was standing directly behind him. He made sure his position in front of the Judge was precisely where Stoughton wanted him, and placed Lady Bird on his right. He had Kilduff, who had obtained a Dictaphone machine, kneel on the floor next to the Judge to record the ceremony.

One Witness Was Still Missing, the most important one. As Judge Hughes recalled, he told her that “Mrs. Kennedy wanted to be present and we would wait for her.” To O’Donnell and O’Brien he said, “Do you want to ask Mrs. Kennedy if she would like to stand with us?” When they didn’t respond at once, the glance he threw at them was the old Johnson glance, the eyes burning with impatience and anger. “She said she wants to be here when I take the oath,” he told O’Donnell. “Why don’t you see what’s keeping her?”

The scene was still eerie: the gloom, the heat, the whispering, the low, insistent whine of the jet engine, the mass of dim faces crowded so close together. But one element had vanished: the confusion. Watching Lyndon Johnson arrange the crowd, give orders, deal with O’Donnell and O’Brien, Liz Carpenter, dazed by the rush of events, realized that there was at least one person in the room who wasn’t dazed, who was, however hectic the situation might be, in complete command of it. “Your mind was so dull, but one of the thoughts that went through my mind . . . was ‘Someone is in charge.’ . . . You had the feeling when you went into that cabin that things were well in hand.” Carpenter, like Valenti, was an idolater, but the journalists had the same feeling. On the ride out to the airport, Sid Davis, who, as he recalled, “had not known this man except as Majority Leader, and as someone who was . . . thought of by some . . . as ‘Colonel Cornpone,’ ” had said to his colleagues in the car, “It’s going to be hard to learn how to say President Lyndon B. Johnson.” As Davis watched Johnson in the stateroom now, it was, suddenly, no longer hard at all: “Soon—immediately . . . we started to see the measure of the guy and his leadership qualities.” Part of the feeling stemmed from his size. As Johnson stood in front of Judge Hughes, towering over everyone in the room, Stoughton realized for the first time how big he was: “Big. Big. He loomed over everyone.” But part of it was something harder to define. As Lyndon Johnson arranged the crowd, jerking his thumb to show people where he wanted them, glancing around with those piercing dark eyes, Valenti’s initial feeling that this was a different man intensified; Johnson was suddenly “something larger, harder to fathom” than the man he had thought he knew. In fact, for the first time in three years, he looked like the Lyndon Johnson of the Senate floor. Now he had suddenly come to the very pinnacle of power. However he had got there, whatever concatenation of circumstance and tragedy—whatever fate—had put him there, he was there, and he knew what to do there. When O’Donnell, obeying his order, went to Mrs. Kennedy’s bedroom and asked her if she wanted to be present at the swearing in, she said, “I think I ought to. In the light of history, it would be better if I was there,” and followed O’Donnell out, to the door of the stateroom.

“A hush, a hush—every whisper stopped,” Stoughton recalled. She was still wearing the same suit, with the same bloodstains. Her eyes were “cast down,” in Judge Hughes’s phrase. She had apparently tried to comb her hair, but it fell down across the left side of her face. On her face was a glazed look, and she appeared to be crying, although no tears could be seen. Johnson placed her on his left side. The Judge held out the missal. He put his left hand on it—the hand, mottled and veined, was so large that it all but covered the little book—and raised his right hand, as the Judge said, “I do solemnly swear . . .”

Valenti, watching those hands, saw that they were “absolutely steady,” and Lyndon Johnson’s voice was steady, too—low and firm—as he spoke the words he had been waiting to speak all his life. At the back of the room, crowded against a wall, Marie Fehmer wasn’t watching the ceremony, because she was reading the oath to make sure it was given correctly. (“He taught you that, by George, you can do anything.”)

The Oath was over. His hand came down. “Now let’s get airborne,” Lyndon Johnson said. ♦

[sagehaleyofficial]

HERE’S WHAT YOU MISSED THIS WEEK (11.20-11.26.19):

NEW MUSIC:

·     Blink-182 drummer, Travis Barker, revealed in a new interview that the band have recorded a new Christmas song. Last year, he posted a photo of his drum kit on Instagram with the caption “currently recording Christmas music,” paired with a Christmas tree emoji.

·     After teasing the “most political song Palaye Royale has released to date” early last week, the trio have dropped their new song “Massacre, the New American Dream.” Proceeds made from sales will be donated to March of Our Lives and Giffords: Courage to Fight Gun Violence.

·     Creeper launched a live premiere on YouTube for their new music video of the hot single, “Born Cold.” The band will soon be supporting BABYMETAL on the UK leg of next year’s Metal Galaxy World Tour.

·     The 1975 gave fans little waring with the music video debut of recent hit, “Frail State of Mind.” The track is set to appear on the band’s upcoming album, Notes on a Conditional Form, due out February 21, 2020.

·     A Day to Remember released their latest single, “Resentment,” just two weeks after postponing their seventh studio album, You’re Welcome. The band is currently wrapping up the Degenerates Tour with I Prevail and Beartooth before teaming up with Underoath in Florida.

·     Panic! At The Disco dropped a new music video for their rendition of “Into the Unknown,” taken from Disney‘s Frozen 2 soundtrack. The song was first released with a lyric video on November 4th.

·     A year and a half after his death, XXXtentacion‘s final album Bad Vibes Forever, which features blink-182, Lil Wayne and more, has a release date. The late rapper’s team dropped the title track from the album, along with the news it will be arriving on December 7th.

·     Twenty One Pilots’ new music video for their song “Pet Cheetah” offers fans a closer look at their tour set up with a virtual reality view from the stage. The video shows them performing live offering a really close look at the fire, smoke and lights they intricately use on set.

·     Neck Deep put two of their B-side songs from their 2017 album The Peace and the Panic on streaming services for the first time. They recently took to Instagram to announce that they will be taking the rest of 2019 off, they will be back in 2020 and will be playing at Rock for People.

·     Go Radio shared their first single since 2012 with upbeat new track, “Say It Again.” In July, the band’s fans were sent into a frenzy of hope and pure panic as they released a photo sparking rumors of their return.

TOUR ANNOUNCEMENTS:    

·     We Came as Romans revealed their plans for a 10-year anniversary tour in celebration of their album, To Plant a Seed. The band announced they’ll be hitting the road this spring in honor of the record with support from the Devil Wears Prada, Gideon and Dayseeker.

·     Post Malone revealed a second leg of his Runaway Tour, as well as that he is bringing along support from the first leg, Swae Lee and Tyla Yaweh. Posty will continue the run in support of his best-selling 2019 album Hollywood’s Bleeding.

·     The Wonder Years took to Twitter last Tuesday to announce a very special tour for the winter of 2020. The band will be performing two sets nightly, one acoustic and one electric, and will be supported by Free Throw, Spanish Love Songs and Pool Kids.

·     Coheed and Cambria are taking their progressive-rock, sci-fi hits on the high seas next fall on the S.S Neverender, and announced they are bringing Taking Back Sunday with them. The band partnered with Sixthman and Norwegian Pearl to bring fans an intimate cruise experience.

·     Post Malone and Ozzy Osbourne made their recent live debut of their newest collab “Take What You Want” on the last night of the rapper’s tour. The two also performed the Hollywood’s Bleeding track at the American Music Awards, alongside Travis Scott.

·     New Found Glory canceled the last two dates of their From the Screen to Your Stereo to Your Town Tour with Hawthorne Heights. The band tweeted that the cancellation was due to guitarist Chad Gilbert dealing with a “family emergency.”

·     Green Day celebrated 25 years of Dookie by performing “Basket Case” during the 2019 American Music Awards. “Growing up, there was no band more important to me or my brother,” Billie Eilish said while introducing the band.

·     Shania Twain gave a subtle shout out to Post Malone, Twenty One Pilots and more during her 2019 American Music Awards performance. The iconic country artist did a rendition of “Stressed Out,” “Rockstar” and more during her set.

OTHER NEWS:  

·     Bring Me the Horizon have released a behind-the-scenes look at the making of their latest track, “Ludens.” For the majority of the video, we see Oli Sykes and keyboardist Jordan Fish in a hotel room in Ukraine, while the former states how limited of a time they had to submit the song.

·     The nominees for the 2020 Grammy Awards arrived, with Billie Eilish up for Album of the Year and the 1975 up for Best Rock Song. Bring Me the Horizon are further in the running for Best Rock Album against I Prevail, who are also up for Best Metal Performance for “Bow Down.”

·     Oh, Weatherly vocalist Blake Roses took to the band’s social media accounts to announce their breakup. The band account shared the statement with the caption, “Love you all. Thank you for this journey.”

·     In the wake of the 15-year anniversary of her debut solo album, Love. Angel. Music. Baby., Gwen Stefani addressed accusations of cultural appropriation as it relates to single “Harajuku Girls” and more. Stefani recently sat down with Billboard to address the topic.

·     A new event on Facebook called “Storm My Chemical Romance Reunion, They Can’t Stop All of Us” was created last Thursday, and the event already shows 567 going and 1.2k interested. The page information isn’t joking around, but it also slips in some great MCR puns.

·     Vans added to their Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas inspired shoe line, with a pair appropriately named “Christmas Town.” For its design, they took imagery from the scene where Jack Skellington comes across the Holiday Doors while singing “What’s This?”

·     Kevin Jonas poked fun at his own band, the Jonas Brothers, when he joined in on a trend that’s making its way through Twitter with his own blink-182-inspired meme. The punk band responded to the pop singer with the iconic lyrics from their song “What’s My Age Again?”

·     Paramore opened up about a track off their most recent album, After Laughter, with Billboard. Frontwoman Hayley Williams recently sat down with for the outlet’s essays on “100 Songs That Define the Decade,” this time discussing their hit “Hard Times.”

·     Alternative Press put Panic! at the Disco on the cover of their Poster Issue, the publication’s seasonal 68-page collection. In addition, this year’s Poster Issue sums up the last decade of AP as they ready themselves for their 35th anniversary.

·     On a new episode of Bloody Disgusting‘s “The Boo Crew” podcast, Poppy revealed she is working on an original horror movie with frequent collaborator Titanic Sinclair. The artist also discussed everything from Texas Chainsaw Massacre being her first horror movie experience.

·     While The Umbrella Academy is preparing for its upcoming second season, the cast took a moment to appreciate their smaller toy counterparts. The cast shared a photo of them holding their Funko Pops all together, as well as a video showing their reactions to receiving the toys.

·     At this year’s American Music Awards, Billie Eilish won for the Favorite Artist in the Alternative Rock category and Halsey won for Best Pop/Rock Song for her track “Without Me”. Eilish also performed “All the Good Girls Go to Hell” and Halsey with “Graveyard.”

·     Twenty One Pilots updated their Trench logo on two social media accounts, causing fans to speculate new content and the possible end of an era. The logo has gone through several makeovers since the band’s inception.

___

Check in next Tuesday for more “Posi Talk with Sage Haley,” only at @sagehaleyofficial!

[theeverlastingshade]

Favorite EP of the 2000s: Fall Be Kind- Animal Collective

                By the time that Animal Collective released their fourth EP, Fall Be Kind, there was a little over a month left in the 2000s, and in that time no other band even came close to matching their creative output that spanned their 2000 debut, Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They've Vanished up through FBK. Their progression was remarkable; no single two releases sounded anything like each other, and each was unmistakably the sound of their work alone. With their eighth LP, Merriweather Post Pavilion they had come full circle, having transformed from an abrasive, neo-psychedelic freak-folk act into synth-pop festival headliners while molding the sound of independent music into their image. FBK follows directly in the wake of MPP, with the same lineup from that album which included David Portner aka Avey Tare, Noah Lennox aka Panda Bear, and Brian Weitz aka Geologist, with Ben H. Allen returning to produce. What could have been an easy, effortless victory lap that simply aped the advances of their populist breakthrough instead finds the group continuing to flex their chops for studio experimentation while continuing to challenge themselves. During this period Animal Collective simply couldn’t miss. FBK is far from a simple MPP retread, and it caps off one of the most rewarding creative periods from any band ever.

                 FBK consists of five songs, the first three of which are sublime vocal collaborations between Dave and Noah, while the last two are songs led by each one of them respectively. The most striking thing about the EP on the whole is the masterful back and forth between the band’s vocalists. On MPP, assisted by an ideal amount of reverb, the abrasive qualities of Dave’s voice were smoothed over for a newly invigorated emphasis on melody, and their voices complemented one another in a disarmingly seamless interplay. This continues here, and with the first song “Graze” it’s remarkable just how well their voices continue to play off of one another. “What Would I Want? Sky” and “Bleed” continue this streak, with the former achieving one of their greatest feats of melodicism to date by making their voices almost function as one while the latter has Dave actually taking the weightless, droning croon typically reserved for Noah to spellbinding results. “On a Highway” and “I Think I Can”, while featuring the vocals of just Dave and Noah respectively and therefore compromising their glorious interplay, both revel in intense introspection, ranking as two of the most heartfelt songs that the band have released to date.

                 While FBK on the whole follows in the vein of the sample-based template that the band had been executing on Strawberry Jam and MPP, the songs here still exist within their own orbit and hardly scan as diminishing returns. Opener “Graze” begins with a swirling vat of synths, a verse from Dave about their songwriting process and one from Noah about his concerns with heightened expectations placed on them before a pan flute sample cribbed from “Ardeleana (Zamfir avec Amfir)” by Gheorghe Zamfir and Simion Stanciu transitions the song into its spring-loaded, bass heavy second half. The transition is jarring and unexpected, but it works nonetheless. Split between the two sharp vocal collaborations and the standalone vocal songs comes the haunting, ambient breather “Bleed”. More of an extended interlude than a standalone song, “Bleed” exudes an ethereal beauty that the band captured on the lengthy, droning songs that exist on their more challenging releases in a far more succinct form while packing a surprising amount of melody. As previously mentioned, Dave takes the role traditional reserved for Noah’s angelic croon as he chants “That I must bleeeeeeeed” throughout the outro, and his delivery is nothing short of chill-inducing.

                 After setting the tone with “Graze” the band then transition into “What Would I Want? Sky”, the first song to have gotten a licensed Grateful Dead sample, here in the form of a repurposed vocal line from “Unbroken Chain”. The first two and a half minutes of the nearly seven-minute song feature wordless crooning from Noah and the word “melody” sung repeatedly by Dave over what begins as a blistering kick drum beat that slowly incorporates their characteristically dense wall of sound propelled by what I presume are field recordings courtesy of Brian. A synth melody emerges, the wall of noise begins to dissipate, and we’re brought to the song’s lovely second half that features the “Unbroken Chain” sample grounded by a simple kick/snare rhythm and one of the most cathartic vocal collaborations between Noah and Dave to date. Their voices seem to swell with pure joy. On the flip side, Dave’s “On a Highway” is the darkest song of the bunch. The minor organ chords and ominous rumbles of bass perfectly frame Dave’s feelings of anxiety in the wake of having to support their most successful record to date. All of the songs on FBK are sonic marvels, but the highlight here is without a doubt Noah’s “I Think I Can”. Most of the seven-minute march consists of a stomping kick drum, clanging synths, sleigh bells, and his signature choirboy tenor before transitioning into an extended outro filled with brass synths and marimba that finds him surmounting his insecurities and pressing forward, self-doubt be damned.

                 The lyrics throughout FBK build on the concerns of prior records of theirs such as growing up, dealing with change, and general existential malaise, now coupled with the burdens of having to navigate the unlikely success they garnered in the wake of MPP. “On a Highway” addresses the exhaustion of unrelenting touring directly “On a highway/I let the bad things taunt me/Why do they want to haunt me?/I don’t know how they find me” and sneaks in a few surprisingly personal lines that give a glimpse of the band’s dynamic “On a highway/Sick of too much reading/Jealous of Noah’s dreaming/Can’t help my brain from thinking”. “Graze” also finds them extrapolating on the rigors of touring “Why can’t I reach you?/When I most need you?/You’re at the beach and/I’m in some strange bed” in addition to pondering the irony of how being in a band that becomes sustainable perpetuates displacement “And to have a band/That cracks the point of fame/Why does a band make me/Less settled in?”. Amidst all of their looming anxiety, resolution finally sneaks in towards the end of “I Think I Can”. The song begins with Noah contemplating the allures of complacency “What’s in the way?/And, and, and/What’s nice about staying on the same pace?” but towards the end he becomes firm in his conviction not to become stunted by things that are outside of his control and seize the opportunities that are “Can ruin the day from good ways/Will I get to move on soon?/I think I can, I think I can, I think I can”.

                 FBK was the last proper record that Animal Collective released until 2012’s underrated Centipede Hz, which while still good wasn’t quite on the level of their past releases. This decade found the collective primarily splintering to focus on their respective solo careers and side projects, only having gotten together since for 2016’s severely underwhelming Painting With and the meandering 2018 documentary soundtrack, Tangerine Reef. FBK marked the last time that the band were truly at the top of their game and miles ahead of their contemporaries. It’s remarkable to hear how, despite being almost a decade into their career at that point, the music still sounds so effortless, and was simply flowing with ideas. As we reach the end of the 10s it’s striking that despite there being so much exceptional music that’s come out since FBK, there hasn’t been a single band, or even a single artist for that matter, that’s accomplished so much within such a short span of time. Dave and Noah dropped solo records this year in the form of Cows on Hourglass Pond and Buoys respectively, and even though they mark low points for their solo work it’s still inspiring to hear the two of them push themselves creatively and refuse to simply go through the motions like so many other artists. Although the lyrics address their fears directly, the music on FBK suggests that Animal Collective were completely unhindered by their success, and still striving to create something honest, unfazed by trends or expectations. A decade later, and nothing on that front has changed. May we all strive to live so boldly.

Essentials: “I Think I Can”, “What Would I Want? Sky”, “Bleed”

[scifigeneration]

How SpaceX lowered costs and reduced barriers to space

by Wendy Whitman Cobb

Minutes after launching the Falcon Heavy rocket, SpaceX was livestreaming footage from the Tesla Roadster it released into space. SpaceX, CC BY-NC-SA

On March 2, SpaceX plans to launch its first test of an unmanned Dragon vehicle which is designed to carry humans into low Earth orbit and to the International Space Station. If the test is successful, later this year, SpaceX plans to launch American astronauts from United States soil for the first time since 2011.

While a major milestone for a private company, SpaceX’s most significant achievement has been in lowering the launch costs that have limited many space activities. While making several modifications to the fuel and engines, SpaceX’s major breakthroughs have come through recovering and reusing as much of the rocket and launch vehicle as possible.

Between 1970 and 2000, the cost to launch a kilogram to space remained fairly steady, with an average of US$18,500 per kilogram. When the space shuttle was in operation, it could launch a payload of 27,500 kilograms for $1.5 billion, or $54,500 per kilogram. For a SpaceX Falcon 9, the rocket used to access the ISS, the cost is just $2,720 per kilogram.

I’m a space policy analyst, and I’ve observed that cost has been a major hurdle limiting access to space. Since the 1950s, the high cost of a space program has traditionally put it beyond the reach of most countries. Today, state and private actors alike have ready access to space. And while SpaceX is not the only private company providing launch services – Orbital ATK, recently purchased by Northrop Grumman, United Launch Alliance and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin are also players – it has emerged as the most significant.

SpaceX’s achievements

Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX, speaks at a news conference after the Falcon 9 SpaceX heavy rocket launched successfully from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral. AP Photo/John Raoux

Frustrated with NASA and influenced by science fiction writers, Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002. Though it suffered several setbacks, in 2008 it launched the first privately funded liquid-fueled rocket, the Falcon 1. Falcon 9 flew for the first time the next year, and in 2012, the Dragon capsule became the first privately funded spacecraft to dock with the ISS. SpaceX has since focused on recovering key parts of the Falcon 9 to enhance reusability and reduce costs. This includes the Falcon 9’s first stage which, once it expends its fuel, falls back through the atmosphere reaching speeds of 5,200 miles per hour before reigniting its engines to land on a drone recovery ship.

In 2018 alone, SpaceX made 21 successful launches. The new Falcon Heavy rocket – a more powerful version of the Falcon 9 – launched in February. This rocket can lift 63,800 kilograms, equivalent to more than 27 Asian elephants, to low Earth orbit and 16,800 kilograms to Mars for just $90 million. The test payload was Musk’s own red Tesla Roadster, with a mannequin named Starman in the driver’s seat.

In addition to the crewed Dragon tests this year, SpaceX is continuing development of its Starship, which will be designed to travel through the solar system and carry up to 100 passengers sometime in the 2020s. Musk has also suggested that the Starship could serve as the foundation for a lunar base.

Impact on space exploration

SpaceX’s technical advances and cost reductions have changed the direction of U.S. space policy. In 2010, the Obama administration moved away from NASA’s Constellation program, which called for the development of a family of rockets that could reach low Earth orbit and be used for long-distance spaceflight. With NASA falling significantly behind schedule, because of technological difficulties and budget cuts, the Obama administration was left with a choice of whether to boost funds for NASA or change direction.

SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy first stage falls back to Earth and is reused to boost cost savings.

In 2010, then-President Barack Obama toured Kennedy Space Center and even met with Elon Musk to get a firsthand look at SpaceX’s facilities. The administration chose to reorient the program to focus solely on deep space. For missions closer to home, NASA would purchase services from companies like SpaceX for access to low Earth orbit. Critics objected to budget cuts to NASA as well as concerns about whether the private sector would be able to follow through on providing launch services.

While NASA has struggled to develop its Space Launch System, an analysis from NASA’s Ames Research Center found that the dramatically lower launch costs SpaceX made possible offered “greatly expanded opportunities to exploit space” for many users including NASA. The report also suggested that NASA could increase its number of planned missions to low Earth orbit and the ISS precisely because of the lower price tag.

In addition to substantially affecting human spaceflight, SpaceX has also launched payloads for countries including Kazakhstan, Bangladesh, Indonesia and, most recently, Israel. On Feb. 21, 2019, a Falcon 9 launched a privately built Israeli lunar lander which, if successful, will be the first privately built lunar probe.

Overall, SpaceX has significantly reduced the barriers to space, making it more accessible and democratizing who participates in space-based commerce and exploration.

Challenges ahead

Despite SpaceX’s successes, it faces significant challenges. Earlier this year, SpaceX laid off 10 percent of its workforce to reduce costs. NASA remains suspicious of some of the launch procedures SpaceX plans to use, including the fueling of the rocket with astronauts on board, which was linked to an explosion of a Falcon 9 on the launchpad. The Department of Defense’s inspector general has also announced an investigation into how the Air Force certified the Falcon 9, though it is not clear what initiated the probe.

Among some in NASA, the concern is with Musk himself. In a video last year, Musk was seen smoking marijuana, which prompted NASA to initiate a safety review of SpaceX as well as Boeing, another company aiming to provide launch services. Musk has also found himself in hot water with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission regarding his tweets about another one of his companies, Tesla. In recent days, the SEC has asked a judge to hold Musk in contempt for apparently violating a settlement deal reached last year. While he is undoubtedly the driving force behind both Tesla and SpaceX, erratic behavior could make potential customers wary of contracting with them.

Musk, regardless of his personal missteps, and SpaceX have aggressively pushed technological boundaries that have changed minds, my own included, about the potential of private companies to provide safe and reliable access to space.

About The Author:

Wendy Whitman Cobb is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Cameron University

This article is republished from our content partners at The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. 

[onestowatch]

6 Ones to Know If You’re a Fan of BROCKHAMPTON

Rap is expanding. New sub-genres, especially alternative hip hop, have come out of the shadows and into the mainstream. Shout out to “America’s Favorite Boyband,” Brockhampton, for being at the forefront of all of this awesomeness. With their cult-like impact and ability to capture younger demographics, those that fall into this genre (or lack thereof) make some wonder where this music has been their entire life. 

With the recent release of Brockhampton lead man Kevin Abstract’s latest track & video, we curated 6 rappers (or groups) who are also ready to make a splash in the world of hip-hop. These six artists are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of pushing the current boundaries, and we must say the future of rap looks pretty good. Go on, read on!

Injury Reserve

The trio that makes up Injury Reserve hails from the unexpected city of Tempe, Arizona. Formed in 2013, the group consists of producer Parker Corey and rappers Stepa J. Groggs and Ritchie With a T. Reminiscent of A Tribe Called Quest and Black Sheep, Injury Reserve pushes the boundaries of hip hop, not only with their beats but also with their lyrics. Their song topics range from criticism of the music industry, to racism in America, and even to hype-beast culture. Since releasing Live From the Dentist Office in 2015, the group has released two more full projects and singles while captivating the ears of many. Their most recent single, “Jawbreaker,” which dropped in 2019, featured Rico Nasty. Plan to dedicate a lot of your time getting to know Injury Reserve.

PNTHN

There’s something about Texas and its ability to produce highly talented rap groups. Pronounced Pantheon, the 10-man rap collective from San Marcos is building off groups like Wu-Tang Klan, A$AP Mob, Odd Future and of course Brockhampton. Although those groups opened the gates, PNTHN only further widens them. They have hit the ground running since forming in March 2017. The collective has already released two EPs and has toured with acts like Vince Staples and Freddie Gibbs. Their diversity and ability to produce both chill and hype beats has put them on the radar. Recently, the group showcased their live performance abilities at SXSW. If you want to say “I told you so” to your friends in the future, peep these dudes.

Dre’es

Not that much is known about Dre’es, which adds to his mystique. Born Dre’es de la Pena, he grew up in Wilmington, California. Dre’es is signed to Futile Sounds, which had led him to collaborate with artists such as Mia and Pontiac. The first single Dre’es released was in 2017 and since then, it has gone on to reach nearly 7 million streams. His songs are wavy, yet he still maintains an amazing ability to turn it up and tear into a verse. Dre’es is not only different, but also exciting. It is clear that Dre’es is influenced by pioneers Frank Ocean and Tyler, The Creator. Although he currently raps about being a struggling rapper, don’t be surprised if 2019 is a huge year for Dre’es.

JPEGMAFIA

Sophisticated is a good place to start when talking about JPEGMafia. JPEG, AKA Peggy, often greets listeners with “damn Peggy” in his intros. Hailing from East Flatbush, New York, JPEGMafia is one the newest rapper to embrace the role of genre expander. At the age of 13, JPEG had his first experience with racism which not only affected his mindset, but also his future music endeavors. JPEG later enlisted in the military where he served time in Iraq and also started to let his creative juices flow. Between 2009 and 2015, JPEG released 7 mixtapes and since 2016, he has released 3 studio albums. JPEG’s most recent project Veteran will leave you wanting more. Buckle down and dive deep into the gifted brain of JPEGMafia.  

Mick Jenkins

Born in Alabama but raised in Chicago, Mick Jenkins was exposed to other Chicago rappers Chance the Rapper and Vic Mensa as early as 2013 -- but his rise has been slow and steady. Many are familiar with his hit single “Jazz,” but Jenkins is more than that. Collectively, he has released 4 mixtapes, 3 EPs, and 2 albums since 2012. His bars are smooth, filled with meaning, and draw emotion from listeners. As he has grown, he also has become more confident. His true capabilities shine through on his newest project, Pieces of a Man, which further prove that Mick’s rapping is true talent. As he rounds out his international tour, don’t be surprised if his popularity continues to rise. 

KOTA the Friend

Brooklyn based KOTA the Friend is crafty. Growing up listening to the likes of Ms. Lauryn Hill, Jay-Z, Nas, and Eminem, it’s no surprise KOTA got into rapping. As he grew, music became a way for the artist to communicate with those who previously misunderstood him. KOTA would now describe his music as a fusion between Jay-Z, Jimi Hendrix, D’Angelo, Bob Dylan, Ingrid Michelson and more. Not many other rappers can say that they incorporate Dylan into their bars. KOTA is the complete package, and his music not only inspires but also unites his listeners. His unique voice melts over the beats making it impossible to not bop along to the music. His vibe is simplistic, but don’t be shocked when he’s the next one to get stuck in your head.

[thanksariel]

We Liked You Better Fat: Confessions Of a Pariah

February 28th, 2012 at 9:54 PM

(I couldn’t find it anywhere. Patrick deleted it and it was posted to AP but they also deleted it. Luckily I had it somewhere. Ariel: 1 internet: 0)

There’s this really nice piece at underthegunreview.net by Jacob Tender that a friend forwarded me today. It’s about how important Fall Out Boy’s album “From Under the Cork Tree,” was to him. After reading it though, nostalgic and well-written as it was, I really found myself more depressed than anything. It’s a complicated feeling, one that I’ve been incapable of explaining to anyone and have them fully understand. In spite of this though, I suppose I will give it the old-I-didn’t-go-to-college-try:

Tender had one line that really hit home for me. I related to it in terms of my feelings towards other artists, but I also winced at the profound implications it touched on in my own professional life:

“I didn’t like those pretentious assholes who didn’t like anything after Take This To Your Grave. I now recognize that I’m one of those assholes, but I still fume when some of my favorite records are so easily discredited by ignorant semi-listeners.”

The reality is that for a certain number of people, all I’ve ever done, all I ever will do, and all I ever had the capacity to do worth a damn was a record I began recording when I was 18 years old. That I can live with. That’s fine and fair; I have those records in my collection that seem to stand out far above the rest of my favorite artists catalogues (and especially for artists in whom I only have a passing interest). I suppose there’s nothing wrong in thinking I’m at a point in my life where it seems I’ll never catch up: If anyone’s going to appreciate the work I’m making, it won’t be until long after I’m done doing it. Again, this is fine: I’m insanely lucky to even imagine anyone ever appreciating anything I ever do, let alone in real time. Countless artists far better than I have only achieved posthumous acclaim. If I am to be obscure and financially unsuccessful, there’s nothing disheartening in that. The thing that’s more disheartening is the constant stream of insults I’m enduring in my financially unsuccessful obscurity.

Fall Out Boy’s last album Folie A Deux was our most critically panned and audiences openly hated it (it was also our poorest selling major label album even if one adjusts for the changing music economy). Now, that’s not to say it didn’t have its fans, but at no other point in my professional career was I nearly booed off stages for playing new songs. Touring on Folie was like being the last act at the Vaudville show: We were rotten vegetable targets in Clandestine hoodies.

That experience really took the wind out of the band’s sails; It stopped being fun. I suppose I’m just not that thick skinned. So perhaps it was even more ill-advised when I went out and did something I’d always wanted to do; make my album and have it released by Island Records [my solo record Soul Punk]. I coincidentally happened to achieve another goal which was to lose the weight I’d been carrying around since a month-long drinking binge after a bad breakup. Those accomplishments were happy things. Living in the moments of achieving them were perhaps among the happiest in my life.

So when I went out into the world to show off the self I felt like I was happiest and most comfortable being, I suppose I knew there would be the “Haters” [I loathe the clumsy/insufficient word but it seems the most universal]; The elitists that would always prove impossible to please. I had always been prepared for “Haters,” because there’s never been a moment since I graduated high school where I haven’t been the guy in “That Emo band.” First said emo band was dismissed as third rate pop-punk played by hardcore kids…a pale imitation of Saves the Day. Then we were swept up in the emo backlash [I really didn’t know we were an emo band…that’s not what the word meant a decade ago]. To this day my favorite writer at cracked.com will occasionally take swipes at my band as one of the worst things to come out of the 2000’s. We were a (albeit funny) running joke on an episode of Children’s Hospital.

Those examples of “Haters,” were people who never liked me (or at least never liked my music) and, by all rights, never really should. Such is the way of things. Different strokes for different folks as it were. What I wasn’t prepared for was the fervor of the hate from people who were ostensibly my own supporters (or at least supporters of something I had been part of). The barrage of “We liked you better fat,” the threatening letters to my home, the kids that paid for tickets to my solo shows to tell me how much I sucked without Fall Out Boy, that wasn’t psomething I suppose I was or ever will be ready for. That’s dedication. That’s real palpable anger. Add into that the economic risk I had taken [In short: I blew my nest egg on that record and touring in support of it] the hate really crushed me. The standard response to any complaints I could possibly have about my position in life seems to be “You poor sad multi-millionaire. I feel so sorry for you.”

Quite right, I still have access to enough money to live on in order to avoid bankruptcy for at least a few years as long as I stick to my budget, but money really isn’t everything and it never was. Perhaps those are the words of a privileged man who doesn’t really know what poverty really feels like. Again, that would be a fair rebuttal; I wasn’t raised rich, but lower middle class upbringing in early 90’s Midwest US of A is still a far way from the bread line. Still, there’s no amount of money in the world that makes one feel content with having no self respect. There’s no amount of money that makes you feel better when people think of you as a joke or a hack or a failure or ugly or stupid or morally empty.

This of course isn’t Tender’s fault. He never said anything negative and indeed only said great/supportive things. I guess I’m just angry because he illuminates why I’m a 27 has-been. I’m a touring artist and I feel I’ve become incapable of touring anymore with any act…whether I were to go out as a solo artist or do some Fall Out Boy “Reunion” [nope: Still never broke up] or start a new band…there will still be 10-20 percent of the audience there to tell me how shitty whatever it is I’m doing is and how much better the thing I used to do was. Not only that, but that 10-20 percent combined with whatever notoriety Fall Out Boy used to have prevents me from having the ability to start over from the bottom again. I can’t even go back to playing basement shows. As the saying goes: I couldn’t get booked at the opening of a letter.

It’s as though I’ve received some big cosmic sign that says I should disappear. So I’ve kind of disappeared. I know a lot of you have wondered where I’ve been. I’m sure others of you are disappointed to hear I’m still kicking around somewhere (kidding…sort of). But the truth is wherever and whoever I am, whoever I am whenever I release whatever release is my next, whoever said recording is recorded with: I will never be the kid from Take This To Your Grave again. And I’m deeply sorry that I can’t be, I truly am (no irony, no sarcasm). I hate waking up every morning knowing I’m disappointing so many people. I hate feeling like the awkward adult husk of a discarded once-cute child actor. I’m debating going back to school and learning a proper trade. It’s tempting to say I won’t ever play/tour/record again, but I think that’s probably just pent up poor-me emotional pessimism talking (I suppose can be excused of that though right? I am the guy from That Emo Band after all).

I’ve managed to cobble together some work…I’ve been moonlighting as a professional songwriter/producer for hire and I’ve even been doing a bit of acting here and there. I have no interest (and evidently that sentiment is reciprocated) in performing music publicly any time soon but as I’ve said I’m sure that will happen when it happens. I have been debating releasing the unfinished follow-up to Soul Punk. We’ll see what happens there. Still no word on Fall Out Boy…I know Joe’s working on his new record and Pete’s mixtape just came out so I don’t expect anything on that front in the near future. I, as always, would be super psyched to do the band again though. I’ve been watching a lot of Downton Abbey and I’ve finally caught up on the Office. Friends have been turning me on to all the records I’ve been too busy to listen to over the past couple years.

I do suggest reading Tender’s column if it sounds interesting to you; He’s a great writer and it’s a fun/relatable little story regardless of who the band is within it (film adaptations of Nick Hornby novels should be proof of that).

[afrovewor]

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Minecraft Latest Version Game File Size: 442 MB Installation Requirements: OS: Windows XP, 2000, 2003, 7, 8, 8.1, 10 OS RAM: 2 GB Sound card: Yes Hard Disk Free Space: 400 MB CPU: Intel core i3 64. You should go to Stony Peaks, located on the hills for valuable resources.

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Minecraft Java Edition is a free trial game. It is also worth exploring the karst and lush caves rich in unusual vegetation.

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ASAP ROCKY LIVE LOVE ASAP ALBUM SHAREBEAST FULL VERSION

#Download minecraft full version free new windows 10# For example, there, you can find luminous vines. FrogsĪlready familiar to many Minecraft 1.18.12, the inhabitants of swamp biomes continue to acquire new features. In addition to the previously added sound effects, in the game’s latest build, frogs began to jump more often, and tadpoles were born faster.

ASAP ROCKY LIVE LOVE ASAP ALBUM SHAREBEAST PC

Minecraft PC Offline Download Full Version Game (Java) In this article you can get Minecraft PC Offline freeload Full Version Java Edition for Windows with crack. Players can still see the entire life cycle by watching the transformation of tadpoles into adult amphibians. You can play Minecraft PC game offline or online, single-player and multiplayer, and all settings are unlocked without any restrictions. #Download minecraft full version free new Pc# The developers of Mojang did an excellent job on the animation of the frogs and the reservoirs themselves. They managed to improve the jumping animation of the swamp mobs and the movement of the tongue. The animation of water in rivers and swamps has become smoother. The first new creature you will have to meet in the game, if you decide to download Minecraft 1.17 for Android. The game authors have fixed several bugs and optimized the gameplay in Minecraft 1.18.12. Mountain goats will inhabit the very tops of the mountains, they have reduced damage from falling, and therefore are not afraid of heights. Mountain goat attacks will throw the player to a small height, and the animals themselves will. Many improvements relate to the behavior of mobs.įor example, creatures will now pass through Azalea blocks and blocks with spiky drops. #Download minecraft full version free new Pc#.#Download minecraft full version free new windows 10#.In 2006, Mayers served two weeks in Rikers Island for drug dealing, where he shared a cell with future rapper Casanova.Rocky dated Australian rapper Iggy Azalea in 20.ASAP Rocky was featured on The Tonight Show, where he performed the song “L$D” with The Roots, in 2015.His net worth is estimated to be $12 million, as of 2021. How much is the net worth of ASAP Rocky? He joined Kendrick Lamar as the opening act for Drake’s Club Paradise Tour, in 2012. He appeared in the Lana Del Rey music video for “National Anthem,” where he played a character inspired by John F. He turned his focus to rapping at the age of 13, after his older brother was killed. He has mustered 13 million followers on Instagram and 2.7 million followers on Twitter.ĪSAP Rocky joined the A$AP Mob crew, a Harlem-based collective of rappers, producers, music video directors, fashion designers, and bikers who shared similar interests in music, fashion, style, and art, in 2007. ASAP Rocky Social Media ProfileĪSAP Rocky is pretty active on all of his social accounts. He served two weeks in Rikers Island for drug dealing, where he shared a cell with future rapper Casanova, in 2014. Mayers started rapping at age nine, when he moved to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

[wackantonoff]

Americana

July 4th, 1999. I’m 7 years old, very small and very. fucking. cute. I’m sitting on the sidewalk watching the town parade go by. I hear the thunderous roar of tiny motors approaching from the distance at a moderate pace — it’s them; the clowns on go-karts. They ask me if I want to be sprayed with water. I say no. They spray me anyway. The first time my consent was violated.

July 4th, 2004. I’m 12 years old, hormonal and pubescent, switching from public to private school because I was “being bullied”. In reality, a kid pushed me, and immediately upon my tiny body hitting the floor, I saw my opportunity. Cry and run, the perfect crime. Between this and a burgeoning acting career only just beginning to peak (Editor’s Note: it stalled), it’s safe to say I have a flair for the dramatic. I’m going for a bike ride around my block and realizing that I don’t have any friends here. The dramatic in me comes crashing back to reality, which coincidentally has screeched to a halt in concert with the tires beneath me.

July 4th, 2008. I’m 16 years old, hormonal and pubescent, still in private school, this time an all-boys one. I’m taking AP English and learning how much I love writing. Nothing noteworthy happened on this particular date in time, which is shocking considering how noteworthy this year ended up being. But we all have our secrets!

July 4th, 2015. I’m 23 years old, fully grown and on tour with my band. I’m happy, healthy, doing what I love…Things finally feel like they’re falling to place — I even say, out loud, “it feels like things are falling into place” while we’re practicing for an upcoming tour. I have no complaints. (Editor’s Note: the band would break up two weeks later, mid-tour; I had complaints.)

July 4th, 2017. ‘What even is America?’ I wonder aloud to my 25-year-old self, lying in my bed on my back while my eyes disappear into the piercing blackness of the void that seems to have replaced my ceiling. America, O Beautiful country founded by brilliant yet bigoted minds that had a chip on their shoulder and a penchant for shirking intellectualism, why are you the way that you are? New house, new surroundings, despite having moved to the town where my mother taught middle school for more than half my life. This town, with its conservative roots and its glacial pace of marginal social progress, albeit social progress, is largely all I’ve known; as long as I’ve been relatively sentient, my memories are of this town. That giant sprawling park that functions by day as a runner’s paradise and by night as a peril for drug dealers from the city next door…The teenagers that are literally always too loud, whom I’ve concluded are immune to laryngitis or vocal nodes…That quaint little downtown area with its legacy bagel shops full of grumpy old men talking far too loudly considering the size of the venue….Both the best and the worst Dunkin Donuts I’ve ever been to only a few blocks away from one another (all this in one town? And how!)

Yet, it occurs to me that maybe, just maybe, it’s this noteworthy lack of noteworthiness that makes this town like so many others in this Beautiful country of ours. It’s small, visually nondescript, quiet…in a way, maybe, forgotten. Forgotten by its representatives, forgotten by its neighboring municipalities, forgotten at the polls. Maybe, myriad Constitutional vagaries aside, that thinning-yet-very-present film of conservative rage that blankets the town is born out of something.

A husband-and-wife team of social scientists named James and Deborah Fallows conducted an experiment between 2012 and 2016 where they flew their two-passenger biplane to small towns across the country and spent a week to a month at any given location ingratiating themselves into the daily lives of the people who lived there. Their goal was to show how our country is developing, and, depending on how you look at it, re-developing themselves, and therefore the country, from the ground up. The people in these towns all want their neighbors to do well, because when they do well, the town does well, and when the town does well, they do better. I think that’s inspiring, and could explain more, though I’ve already talked enough and have also conveniently avoided answering the question I was initially asked, much as I do in real life. Can you tell that my love of written word paid off? Didn’t they teach me not to ask rhetorical questions in academic writing? Can you also tell that I tend to disregard traditional formatting rules and style guidelines whenever I’m given the chance?

All of this is my very Dickensian way of saying that I don’t really know what America is…though unlike Dickens, I’m not being paid by the word, nor even the installment! (Apparently, I’m not even being paid at all?)

What I do know is that my America is my town, my home. They’re the people I know and love, and have since the day I met them. They’ve watched me grow and never turned me away when my truest colors showed. They’re the people that I agree and disagree with, on many things, and they’re the people that I want by my side when the day of judgment comes…

Which the hapless poetic in me hopes happens on July 4th.

[orbemnews]

Raul Castro Fast Facts - CNN Pool/Getty Images South America/Getty Images HAVANA, CUBA – Former president Raul Castro addresses the National Assembly after Diaz-Canel was elected as the nation’s new president at Convention Palace on April 19, 2018, in Havana, Cuba Diaz-Canel will be the first non-Castro Cuban president since 1976. Raul Castro steps down after 12 years in power. (AP Ramon Espinosa/Pool/Getty Images ) (CNN) —   Here’s a look at the life of Raúl Castro, former President of Cuba. Birth date: June 3, 1931 Birth place: Birán, Cuba Birth name: Raúl Modesto Castro Ruz Father: Ángel Castro, a wealthy Spanish landowner Mother: Lina Ruz, a cook and maid to Angel Castro’s first wife Marriage: Vilma Espin (1959-2007, her death) Children: Mariela, Nilsa, Deborah and Alejandro Education: Attended the University of Havana 1953 – Attempts, along with his older brother Fidel Castro, to overthrow the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, after which both are sentenced to 15 years in prison. They are released less than two years later as part of an amnesty for political prisoners. Both go into exile in Mexico. January 1, 1959 – The Castros successfully overthrow the Batista government. January 1959 – Three weeks after taking power, Fidel Castro states that his brother is to be his successor, telling supporters, “Behind me are others more radical than I.” October 1959 – Fidel appoints Raul to several prominent roles in his government including defense minister. April 1961 – Castro’s troops defeat the CIA-led Bay of Pigs invasion. 1962 – Becomes deputy prime minister. July 1962 – Visits the Soviet Union and signs a draft treaty agreeing to allow Soviet nuclear missiles to be installed in Cuba. This development leads to the US-Cuban Missile crisis. 1970s – Is involved in the military conflicts in Angola and Ethiopia. 1972 – Appointed first deputy prime minister (later called vice president). 1991 – Helps Cuba navigate a severe financial crisis after the fall of the Soviet Union. October 1997 – Cuba’s Communist Party officially designates Raul as Fidel’s successor should he die or be unable to perform his duties. 2001 – In an interview with Cuban state television, Castro says he’d like to see Cuba improve its relationship with the United States: “I am among those who believe that it would be in imperialism’s interest to try, with our irreconcilable differences, to normalize relations as much as possible during Fidel’s life.” July 31, 2006 – Fidel temporarily hands over power to Raul while undergoing intestinal surgery. February 19, 2008 – Fidel, in a letter, resigns from office. This paves the way for the National Assembly to select Raul as Cuba’s new leader. February 24, 2008 – Castro is chosen by Cuba’s National Assembly to be the country’s new president. December 2008 – Makes first international trip as president, visiting Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez. March 2, 2009 – Reorganizes his Cabinet, replacing long-time aides to Fidel. April 6, 2009 – Meets with visiting members of the US Congressional Black Caucus. April 19, 2011 – Elected to succeed Fidel as first secretary of the Communist Party. March 2012 – Pope Benedict XVI visits Cuba and meets Castro. The pontiff prays for “those deprived of freedom” and talks about human rights throughout his tour of the country. February 24, 2013 – After being reelected by the National Assembly, Castro announces he will step down in 2018, at the end of his second five-year term. December 17, 2014 – Cuba and the United States announce plans to renew diplomatic relations after a half-century of tension. April 12, 2015 – Castro meets with US President Barack Obama during the Summit of the Americas in Panama. May 10, 2015 – Meets Pope Francis. They talk for 50 minutes at the Vatican. Castro thanks the Pope for facilitating talks between Cuba and the United States. He later says he may rejoin the Catholic Church. March 20-22, 2016 – During a historic trip to Cuba, Obama visits Castro to discuss human rights and ending the economic embargo. Obama is the first sitting president to visit Cuba since 1928, when Calvin Coolidge traveled to the island via boat. November 25, 2016 – Announces the death of Fidel. December 21, 2017 – Cuban officials announce that Castro will not retire as planned when his presidential term ends on February 24, 2018. Due to ongoing issues related to recovery from Hurricane Irma, the naming of Castro’s successor will be delayed until April 19, 2018, according to Cuban state-run media. April 19, 2018 – Castro steps down as president of Cuba. After handing over the presidency to Miguel Díaz-Canel, Castro gives a speech at the Cuban National Assembly and says that presidential terms in Cuba should be limited to two 5-year terms. April 10, 2019 – Speaking at a government event to ratify a new constitution, Castro criticizes increased US sanctions against Cuba and its ally Venezuela. Source link Orbem News #Castro #CNN #Facts #Fast #Raul

[letterboxd]

Sean Baker Q&A.

“Don’t ever fall in love on set. It totally ruins everything. It’s so distracting and stupid.”

The Florida Project director Sean Baker, an esteemed member of Letterboxd, agreed to answer some of your questions. We didn’t get through all those you asked, because he’s a bit busy with ongoing publicity for the film, but we reckon we did you proud. Here, Baker discusses the male gaze, finding his incredible cast, the privilege of being a storyteller, and the ending everyone seems obsessed with (includes mild spoiler). Baker also gave us three film lists to accompany this article.

Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) and Halley (Bria Vinaite) in The Florida Project (2017)

Hi Sean, we’re so happy to talk to you. We had around 200 questions submitted via our Q&A, but you’ll be relieved to hear we’ve whittled these down to some central themes. First, some adorable concern from Joseph: How’s life?

Really?! Aw. It’s all good. You know. It’s just … this has been an exhausting press tour with this film, but at the same time I’m happy to be doing it and getting the word out there about the movie so I can’t complain. I’m very happy with the response that the film is getting, so I’m in good spirits.

A follow-up from Berry: How are you, really?

If anything, the one bad thing about this is you can’t keep up your health, you know what I mean? When you’re on the road, you start eating garbage and you can’t work out as much. That’s the only drawback. This is the one time when you’re actually asked to go in front of cameras and you look and feel the worst!

It also is the one time where they ask you to actually be articulate and to talk, and this is the time that you can’t because of the fact that you’re so tired. So it’s kinda weird. It’s the only chance for you to try to make an impression, but it’s the one time in your life that you’re not equipped to.

Besides that, everything is fine!

We had many, many questions about your casting of The Florida Project, so we chose Jacko’s: How did you manage to find such talent with Bria and Brooklynn, and were there certain moments in their auditions that made you go with them?

Well, Bria, I discovered her on Instagram. We had [Stranger Things casting director] Carmen Cuba on board for our casting, so we were considering a Hollywood name for that role. And we were thinking about all of the young women who could possibly play that role. But I came across her Instagram page one hundred percent by accident.

I wasn’t looking through Instagram or even any social media to cast that role. I was keeping an open mind to it because I had luck with it in the past; with Tangerine I cast some of our supporting roles on Vine and YouTube. And when I saw her Instagram page I was just really intrigued. I thought that she had that youthful, rebellious energy I was looking for and she didn’t take herself too seriously. I knew she wouldn’t have any problems with confidence because she was already putting herself out there and her physicality worked for us. And then talking with her on the phone—I made contact with her—I realised that she had the motivation and the enthusiasm.

[Sean is now talking to his dog] Hey stop it Bunsen, stop it! It’s Bunsen, like bunsen burner. I didn’t name him!

So she came down and she auditioned with the kids and I saw the potential. She had a long ways to go because she was green, and I knew that she would need to be going through intensive workshops to get her to the place where she would be ready—and she was willing to do that, so everything was great.

And when I saw her with Brooklynn, it did feel like they were related, they had a real close connection.

Brooklynn, she came through the local casting company called CROWDshot. She had some previous experience. She had more experience than Bria, she had done some commercials. Within seconds of seeing her in the room, she won me over because she had all of that everything I was looking for, you know, the cuteness and the wit and the energy.

We could also tell that she had a lot of heart, meaning that she wore her emotions on her sleeve. The way she answered questions, we kind of knew that she had a sensitive side and that we would be able to work with her and her parents to get her to a place where she would be able to have that emotional scene at the end of the movie.

She was also just real. Even though she had experience and her mother was an actor, she didn’t feel like one of those hollywood kids that are all dolled up. She had a very casual feel about it, and just wise beyond her years. Without being too much like an adult, it also felt like she was six going on forty! Very intelligent.

Sean Baker with The Florida Project’s Brooklynn Prince and Willem Dafoe (Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP)

We had several great questions—from Dante, Darren, Marisa and MangeyMaggie—all curious about the places and people you choose to film, who are outside of the so-called mainstream, often marginalized. We really like their questions, actually, for how they speak to privilege: both your privilege (white, male) and your position as someone who gets to tell stories. So tell us how you manage to find the balance between an empathetic representation of these specific demographics, and a universally relatable story.

It’s just a response to what I’m not seeing enough of. It’s very simple. It’s just that the reason that there are marginalized communities and subcultures and groups of people is because they’re ignored, and so the antidote to that is in just stop ignoring. That’s how I see it. It’s as simple as starting to look outside of the groups that normally have stories told about them and for them. It’s really that simple.

The balance is really just approaching the way you would approach any other story. I mean, this is the way that I would tell a story about anybody. Basically humanizing them, trying to find empathy in our characters. This is just the way I would normally do this to anybody, so I guess that’s how you strike a difference.

It’s weird because I’m bad at self-analyzing, but I think what it comes down to is if you’re telling a story about a group of people that you’re not really a part of, I guess the question is why would you approach it in any sort of a different way? If you do do that, you’re basically saying that you consider them different from you. You know what I mean? It’s just as simple as, it feels to me the only ethical way of doing something like this is all about equality, so you approach it the same exact way.

If you’re telling a story about two transgender women of color who happen to be sex workers but the ultimate story, the universal theme in this is friendship, why would you tackle it in any different way?

Alexandra (Mya Taylor) and Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) in Tangerine (2015)

On the ‘male gaze’ and how you work with female characters, Melissa asked: “Whenever I talk about works that avoid the male gaze, I like to point out yours. I think you handle perfectly these ‘unconventional’ women and themes that could be hard to represent (like sex workers, transgender women [of color], etc). I wonder if you’re always conscious of how important it is to do it right or if it just comes naturally. How much do you let your actresses take over?”

I have to say I am conscious of it. I mean, we’re living in an age of the think-piece, we’re living in an age where people are really looking out for this, in a good way. It’s a good thing.

You know, Hollywood for a long time has been blind to this, so when I go into any of these films I have to make sure that in a way I am very conscious of the fact that I’m a guy, I’m a straight guy making these movies, but if I’m focusing on a female protagonist, I have to make sure the representation is correct. And also just in general.

The gaze is an important thing. I look at the gaze, I really do respect when a director, like a Larry Clark, has his gaze just plastered all over the film. This is his perspective, this is what he wants to see. That’s great. That’s one thing. But with my films, because they’re sometimes tackling issues and it’s something that has to appeal to an audience that spans, you know, race, gender, creed etc, I have to be a little more middle of the road. And when I’m middle of the road, I have to determine whether I’m falling into too much of the male gaze. My own gaze.

So what I try to do is I try to balance it out. And so for example I have to make sure that the camera stays objective, or is equally balanced. So if I’m gonna show female nudity, I’m gonna show male nudity, and that was very important for me, especially with Starlet. Because Starlet is focusing on an industry that is all male gaze, when I went about showing that industry I wanted to make sure that it wasn’t falling into that. We’re an outside view of that industry and therefore it should be so much more objective. So I made sure my male nudity was more explicit than female nudity in that film.

It’s also important because a lot of my characters are female characters, and so the great thing about that is I usually work with actresses who I have a very good relationship with in terms of our communication. I turn to my actresses and ask them their opinions and ask them whether representation is correct here and how they would do it and what they would like to see. Or how the scene is being played out and is this reaction accurate? Is this line believable? So I think there’s a lot of collaboration and a lot of turning to my female actors to help me figure out whether the male gaze is appropriate.

Sadie (Besedka Johnson) and Jane (Dree Hemingway) in Starlet (2012)

There were so many questions about the ending of The Florida Project that it’s safe to say we should ask a question about the ending of The Florida Project. A lot has already been written about why you chose to film the final scene the way you did, but what do you make of all this obsession with the ending?

I did not know it was going to be as polarizing as it is. It was one of our first visions that Chris [Bergoch, Sean’s co-writer] and I had, so we’ve been tied to this ending to a certain degree since 2012 or 2011 when we first thought of the idea.

It’s something that we never wavered from, but at the same time I was a little surprised at how polarizing it has become because if you think of the alternative, what is the alternative? Little Moonee in the back of an ACS car crying and being taken away? Because if that’s what people want they can watch CSI or Law and Order or something!

It’s obvious what we’re saying. It’s the first time in the movie where there is an actual score. So we’re obviously saying that it might not be real, what they’re watching, but at the same time we really do want to leave it up to interpretation, because the whole movie has been about little Moonee using her sense of imagination and wonderment to make the best of the situation she’s in.

How does your process with Chris work?

Chris and I have written the last three films together, and our sensibilities are the same, yet not. He comes heavily influenced by mainstream cinema—meaning Hollywood—Spielberg, Disney, etc. I don’t. I mean I do, but that was when I was seven years old! I think that that is actually a good thing, the fact that we come from opposite sides in terms of how structured sometimes we wanna keep a screenplay. We come to it with different thoughts and we meet somewhere in the middle.

Chris and I, we have our initial talks on the phone where we do a lot of our initial brainstorming, and then we slowly break it down into a treatment, and then a “scriptment”—which is like half a script, half a treatment—and then the final screenplay.

There is that research period in which we usually take trips together, if we can, to wherever we have to go in order to do this, but most of the writing actually is done separately. You know, we will choose the scenes that we feel that we have the best hold on—meaning the ones that we feel that we’re confident that we can do on our own—and then we share them. We do a lot of writing online, like Google documents where we just share. It’s very simple.

Sean Baker (second from left) directing on the set of The Florida Project (Marc Schmidt/A24)

Finally, many Letterboxd folk wanted advice on how to become a filmmaker, how to get experience, how to network, should they make an iPhone feature, can they work for you, and so on.

Here’s one question from Leonardo that perhaps might focus you in: What was the most important lesson you had to learn that has had a positive effect on your filmmaking?

Well, I guess it’s a very “big picture” sort of thing. I think that it has to do with just perseverance. Just continuing to make the film, until eventually it got attention. So I guess the biggest lesson has been just to continue working.

What I keep telling people is that there’s not going to be anybody who just comes and dumps money in your lap. It doesn’t work that way. You have to prove yourself. You can prove yourself these days with all the tools that are out there. You can use your iPhone. You can use so many platforms now to put films up on.

I found Mela Murder, who plays Ashley in the movie, because I was going through Vimeo and watching Staff Picks, and there was that wonderful film called Gang. Now I talk about that movie, and Mela, she’s got a great opportunity out of this just because that film was put out there on that platform.

I just tell people: don’t wait, just do it. You can make films for so little money these days that if for some reason it unfortunately doesn’t go the way you want, it’s not that big of a money loss, it’s not that big of a disaster.

And then, I guess if there was another lesson… Oh oh oh!

Don’t ever fall in love on set. It totally ruins everything. It’s so distracting and stupid.

I learned that on my first film, ’cause I kind of semi fell in love with my assistant director and it really is distracting. You’re only thinking about your movie 50% of the time and you’re thinking of this person the other 50% of the time.

If you’re about to make a movie, just be a celibate, get it off your mind, and go into those 30 days without any sort of… don’t be tempted! Or go in there already in a relationship, but do not form a new relationship while you’re shooting a film!

Noted! Thanks, Sean. We would do our best not to fall in love, but it’s too late: Letterboxd loves you.

I love Letterboxd! I actually didn’t start using it until earlier this year and up till this point I’ve always been writing my films down in a journal, and I stress out because I might lose that journal. So I have to say it’s been wonderful! I get a lot of followers now who seem to be intrigued with what I’m watching. It’s very cool.

Our thanks to Sean. Check out his five favorite neo-realist directors, some of his most influential films, and the five filmmakers he thinks you should watch next.

[vacationsoup]

New Post has been published on https://vacationsoup.com/?p=275494

[Duplicated:275491] Favorite Daytona 500 Thrills and Memories

What is your favorite Daytona 500 memory? Even non-race-car-fans have favorite Daytona 500 thrills and memories.

The Thunderbirds flyover as President Donald Trump, accompanied by first lady Melania Trump, stands during the national anthem before the start of the NASCAR Daytona 500 auto race at Daytona International Speedway, Sunday, Feb. 16, 2020, in Daytona Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Thunderbirds

Just prior to announcing the start of the race, the famous US Air Force Thunderbirds flyover the race track. Tucked 18 inches apart at 500 mph, the six F-16 falcons scream across the sky in their signature Delta formation above the World Center of Racing. Jaws drop in awe. American hearts swell with pride.

Danica Patrick, driver of the #7 GoDaddy Chevrolet, stands on the grid during qualifying for the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series Daytona 500 at Daytona International Speedway on February 11, 2018 in Daytona Beach, Florida. (Photo by Sarah Crabill/Getty Images)

DRIVERS START YOUR ENGINES

The anticipation and excitement builds and builds as the 101,000 fans await the famous words. Finally, after the famous words " DRIVERS START YOUR ENGINES", the thunderous roar of the 40 racing machines is visceral - you physically feel it. The crowd goes wild. A moment and a "feeling" not ever forgotten. The world famous words "Gentlemen Start Your Engines" is a trademark phrase owned by Indianapolis Speedway since 1995. The famous phrase at the beginning of Formula One and NASCAR races has been replaced by a more gender neutral phrase "Drivers Start Your Engines" since 2017. Ladies Janet Guthrie in 1977 (Formula One) and Danica Patrick in 2012 (NASCAR) became the first women drivers to compete at the top levels of racing.

Dale Sr and Dale Jr

Everyone knows the story of Dale Earnhardt and his son Dale Jr. Dale, the legendary #3, "The Intimidator", was a famous top driver , winning 69 Winston Cup races over his career until his horrific crash at age 49. . On the last lap of the Daytona 500 in 2001, he collided with two other cars and crashed into the wall of the 4th (final) turn. He died from head injuries. His son, Dale Jr, finished the race in second place, not knowing at the time of his father's fatal injuries. Dale Jr. continued racing to his own successful career, one of the most popular drivers ever. He won his second Daytona 500 ten years later. His fans appreciated his emotional courage in following in his father's footsteps while making his own mark, and dealing with the intrepidation he had to feel each time he raced that same 4th turn over his career. Another of Dale Sr.'s legacies, was the NASCAR organization's serious improvements made for driver safey after his death. The seatbelt and restraint harness systems were improved, and the tracks were upgraded with impact absorption barriers at key crash points. Of note, no driver has died during a NASAR race since that time.

https://youtu.be/Zfo88N2PFdc

Link to Video

1976 Final Two Laps of Daytona 500

Limping across the Finish Line

In 1976, Pearson and Petty crashed battling for the lead coming out of the fourth turn on the last lap of the Daytona 500. When both cars came to a rest, they had still not crossed the start/finish line. Petty’s car wouldn’t start but Pearson dumped the clutch and kept the car in neutral to slowly cross the finish line to capture the only Daytona 500 of his career. The finish was the slowest under green flag conditions in race history.

Crashes

The 2016 race was the only Daytona 500 since 2010 that did not have at least one wreck involving at least seven cars. The 2014 and 2017 races each had two wrecks with at least 10 cars each. There were 8 multi-car wrecks in the last three Daytona 500s — and 18 multi-car wrecks in the last nine Daytona 500s. In the final 10 scheduled laps of last year’s race, a wreck involving 21 cars unfolded, and the race was red-flagged — stopped. The race was restarted, and after one green-flag lap, there was a seven-car wreck, and the race was red-flagged again. Then there was an eight-car wreck. At speeds of 180-200 MPH (pole qualifier speeds) with inches separating the cars on a bumpy track, and drivers jockeying for position and drafting inches from the bumper in front of them - it is no wonder there are massive wrecks. As I write this today, we are waiting and hoping for a good outcome for Ryan Newman who wrecked and was seriously injured in the last lap of the race this year.

From Sand to Asphalt

Daytona Beach became the unofficial “Birthplace of Speed” in 1903 when two men argued over who had the fastest horseless carriage and decided things in a race on the white, hardpacked sand along the Atlantic Ocean. The speed competitions along the beach by 1958 had graduated to stock cars, which used a 3.2-mile course that combined both the beach and the city of Daytona. Bill France, then a local mechanic, entered the inaugural race on March 8, 1936, and finished fifth. France dabbled in racing for 10 years, became a promoter and founded NASCAR in 1947. By 1953, France recognized that development was going to make it nearly impossible to continue racing a course that utilized the city and the beach so he began plans on a permanent speedway. He signed a $2.5 million agreement a year later for what he decided would be a 2.5-mile tri-oval circuit with 31-degree banking. It was a wildly ambitious plan. “The World Center of Racing” was completed in 1959 and hosted the first Daytona 500 on Feb. 22. A crowd of more than 41,000 watched a field of 59 cars race for a purse of less than $70,000. The finish was so close it took three days to determine Lee Petty had edged Johnny Beauchamp. Here is a link to a fun article about the history of the race.

Riding on the track!

Take a spin on the famous track yourself

You can add to your favorite Daytona 500 thrills and memories by actually riding on the track! Tours of the track are available. When you walk on the track and try to climb up the 31 degree second turn, you will gain a new perspective of the amazing race. If you were in a car racing around the track, you would have to be going faster than 60 MPH to even make it around this turn without falling down to the infield. You can ride with a driver in a real race car or even drive a race car. Depends on how adventurous you are and how much money you are willing to spend. I can say, after having ridden shot gun in a race car at 160 mph up next to the wall, and picturing two other cars crammed close beside me on the 3 wide turn, I am amazed at how they race at all. By the way, this was the best $199 I ever spent. It was really a trill of a lifetime. I am still grinning! Here is the link for the NASCAR RACING EXPERIENCE.

Mark your calendars

Mark your calendars for the next Sunday before President's Day - the traditional date for the Daytona 500 each year. The race has sold out over the last 6 years so don't wait til the last moment! You will likely add to your favorite Daytona 500 thrills and memories!

[crarsports]

26 Simple (But Important) Things To Remember About Cars By Toyota | cars by toyota

USA TODAY’s Chris Woodyard break bottomward the best advancing announcements advanced of the Los Angeles Auto Show. USA TODAY

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Toyota alien the all-new 2019 RAV4 at the New York International Auto Appearance on Wednesday, March 28, 2018.(Photo: Toyota)

Years ago, adopted automakers disrupted the U.S. auto industry with their fuel-sipping baby cars – a class of cartage that American car companies had continued neglected.

That affected American automakers General Motors, Ford Motor and Chrysler to comedy catch-up.

That’s age-old history.

These days, foreign automakers – namely the above Japanese, Korean and German car companies – are rushing to accomplish up for absent time adjoin the Americans by introducing SUVs and crossovers as U.S. preferences shift back to beyond vehicles.

An ballsy slump for passenger cars forced companies such as Toyota, Honda, Volkswagen, Kia and Hyundai into a aeon of body analytic that has culminated in a bright axis against bigger rides.

Passenger-car sales accept plunged 12 percent in the aboriginal 10 months of 2018 and represent alone 32 percent of absolute cartage awash in the U.S., according to Kelley Blue Book.

That’s bottomward from 44 percent in 2015 and 51 percent in 2012, according to Autodata Corp.

So adopted automakers accept little best but to change.

“We’re seeing the bazaar shifting,” IHS Markit auto analyst Stephanie Brinley said. “They need to body the cartage bodies appetite to buy.”

Take Toyota, for example. Once accepted abundantly for its athletic commuter sedans – such as the Camry, Corolla and Prius – the aggregation is now capitalizing on the trend abroad from those types of models.

About 63 percent of Toyota U.S. cartage awash in the aboriginal 10 months of 2018 were SUVs, crossovers or pickups, compared with 42 percent in the aforementioned aeon of 2012.

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The RAV4 SUV, for example, is now Toyota’s acknowledged vehicle. Five years ago, it was No. 4. And beforehand this year, Toyota appear a redesigned adaptation of the RAV4, authoritative it alike added competitive.

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  “The exchange continues its about-face from cars appear ablaze trucks,” Toyota North America CEO Jim Lentz said Nov. 5 on a appointment call. “That about-face over the aftermost three years has been quite, absolutely large, and it’s absolutely confused abroad from what our amount backbone has been.”

Honda appear this brain-teaser angel of the 2019 Honda Passport, an SUV that will be beyond than the CR-V but abate than the Pilot. (Photo: Honda)

At Los Angeles Auto Appearance columnist previews this week, the trend will continue:

• Honda is accepted to acquaint a SUV alleged the Passport. 

• Hyundai is accepted to acquaint a flagship ample SUV alleged the Palisade.

•BMW will appearance off its new X7 SUV.

It’s a advantageous trend. For example, the boilerplate amount of a new, nonluxury bunched SUV in October was $28,700, compared with $20,408 for the boilerplate bunched car, according to Kelley Blue Book.

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And the boilerplate full-size SUV amount $62,833, compared with $34,875 for the boilerplate full-size car.

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The Honda Passport reflects a austere comedy by the Japanese automaker to allure barter as its sales of passenger cars fall. Sales of the company’s alarmingly acclaimed Accord and Civic sedans accept collectively slid 12.8 percent so far this year, in allotment because the cast has banned to allow in abundant discounting or sales to rental-car companies for use in their fleets.

Overall, Honda’s car sales accept beneath 14.5 percent, while its sales of crossovers, SUVs and pickups accept added 6.5 percent.

The two-row Passport is beyond than the accepted Honda CR-V but abate than the three-row Honda Pilot, which has been baking in the showroom.

“I like this a lot,” Kelley Blue Book analyst Rebecca Lindland said of the move to barrage the Passport. “Not anybody has three or four kids. Not anybody needs a agent the admeasurement of the Pilot, but some bodies appetite article bigger than the CR-V.”

The Passport will address to one of Honda’s best important customers – Generation X buyers who are “very family-oriented” and “very responsible,” Lindland said.

“Gen X has consistently been a actual SUV-oriented demographic. And Honda has consistently been one of the admired brands of that demographic,” she said.

Meanwhile, the Hyundai Palisade is accepted to attempt with the Pilot by appealing to ancestors buyers in charge of a reliable three-row SUV.

“The approaching Palisade SUV will back a adventurous exoteric that commands absorption and has able inherent adumbration of assurance and security, abnormally important with parents with growing families and alive lifestyles,” Hyundai said in a statement.

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The Korean cast is in atrocious charge of added SUVs afterwards it bootless to acclimate bound to the changes in appeal amid American customers. 

Hyundai appear this brain-teaser angel of the Hyundai Palisade 3-row SUV. (Photo: Drew Phillips)

Hyundai capitalized on $4-a-gallon gasoline in 2008 as GM, Ford and Chrysler flailed while they lacked fuel-efficient baby cars. That’s back the Hyundai Elantra bunched auto and Sonata midsize car started to booty off.

But sales of those commuter cars accept cooled considerably. The eight-passenger Palisade reflects Hyundai’s advance correction. It’ll dwarf the Elantra and Sonata in size.

Similarly, German automotive cast Volkswagen has fabricated a cogent axis against SUVs and crossovers over the aftermost two years.

Long accepted for its baby cars, such as the Beetle and the Jetta, VW alien its own three-row SUV alleged the Atlas in 2017, and it has angry into one of the brand’s best important vehicles.

The 2018 Volkswagen Atlas sits on the exhibit attic at the company’s New York flagship abundance during a media examination for the New York International Auto Appearance in New York. Starting with the 2018 archetypal year, Volkswagen offers a six-year or 72,000-mile basal warranty. This advantage finer angled the assurance from the above-mentioned archetypal years and is the longest-lasting amid all brands. (Photo: Julie Jacobson, AP)

Now, the Beetle is actuality discontinued, and VW has said it will abide its “SUV offensive” in the advancing years.

Even passenger-car admirers are alpha to amend their charge to their low-riding cartage as they get older.

“Frankly if you’re a customer and you’re in the marketplace, you’re seeing crossovers and SUVs everywhere,” IHS Markit analyst Tom Libby said. “So you’re activity to artlessly be curious.”

Follow USA TODAY anchorman Nathan Bomey on Twitter @NathanBomey.

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Who made it into the first 2020 Democratic primary debate?

WASHINGTON – The names are in. 

The 20 Democratic presidential candidates who met the criteria for the first Democratic primary debate of the election cycle have been announced. To qualify, the candidates had to poll at 1% or more in at least three qualified polls or receive donations from at least 65,000 individual donors, with a minimum of 200 individual donors per state in at least 20 states. 

The first debate is being held in Miami on June 26 and 27, with 10 candidates on stage each day. NBC News, MSNBC and Telemundo will broadcast the two-night event. Which candidates appear on which nights will be announced Friday.

For some who make the debate stage, both in Miami and at next month’s debate in Detroit, it could mark a make-or-break moment to define their candidacy in one of the largest and most diverse presidential fields ever. For those who failed to make the cut, the missed opportunity could be a devastating blow, denying them a chance to define themselves and their candidacy before a national audience. 

Who’s out: What happens when a candidate doesn’t make the debate stage?

Catch up: What you need to know about the 2020 election so far

An interactive guide: Who is running for president in 2020?

While it’s still early in the campaign, only eight candidates – former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Kamala Harris, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, Sen. Cory Booker and Sen. Amy Klobuchar – are consistently breaking 1% in multiple national and early-state polls.

The stakes only continue to rise for the fall debates. Under new criteria set by the Democratic National Committee, many candidates polling in the lower tier could find themselves locked out of an opportunity for a spot on the national stage. Candidates will have to hit 2% in four qualifying polls and tally at least 130,000 individual donors to make it on stage for the debates in September and October, according to DNC guidance.

Only three major Democratic candidates didn’t qualify for the first debate later this month: Montana Gov. Steve Bullock; Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton; and Miramar, Florida, Mayor Wayne Messam.

Here are the candidates who will be in the first 2020 Democratic primary debate:

Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo.

Experience: Senator from Colorado, 2009-present

Fast facts: Bennet was born in New Delhi, India, where his father worked as an aide to the U.S. ambassador.

Former Vice President Joe Biden

Experience: Vice president, 2009-2017; senator from Delaware, 1973-2009

Fast facts: This is the third time Joe Biden has run for president. He also sought the Democratic nomination in 1988 and 2008

Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J.

Experience: Senator from New Jersey, 2013-present; mayor of Newark, 2006-2013 

Fast facts: New Jersey’s first African American senator, Booker has hinged his career on his efforts at overhauling the criminal justice system. 

South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg 

Experience: Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, 2012-present

Fast facts: Buttigieg would be the first openly gay nominee for a major political party if elected as the Democratic nominee.

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Former HUD Secretary Julian Castro

Experience: Housing and Urban Development secretary, 2014-2017; mayor of San Antonio, 2009-2014

Fast facts: Castro is the grandson of a Mexican immigrant and son of a Latina activist. His twin brother, Joaquin Castro, is a Democratic congressman from Texas. 

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio

Experience: Mayor of New York City, 2014-present; New York City public advocate, 2010-2013; New York City Council, 2002-2009

Fast facts: The mayor, along with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, called for the dismantling of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in response to President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy.

Former Rep. John Delaney, D-Md.

Experience: Representative from Maryland, 2013-2019; entrepreneur 

Fast facts: Delaney was one of the first Democrats to announce his bid and has been a 2020 presidential candidate since July 2017.

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii

Experience: Representative from Hawaii, 2013-present; Honolulu City Council, 2010-2012; State representative, 2002-2004.

Fast facts: Born in Leloaloa, American Samoa, Gabbard is the first Hindu member of Congress. She served in the Hawaii National Guard and was deployed to Iraq in 2004. 

Poll: Biden leads Trump by 13 percentage points nationally in head-to-head matchup

Trump: If foreign governments have dirt on 2020 election rivals, ‘I think I’d take it’

Meet the moderators: Rachel Maddow, Savannah Guthrie, Lester Holt will moderate first debate

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.

Experience: Senator from New York, 2009-present; representative from New York, 2007-2009

Fast facts: Gillibrand is the mother of two boys and was the sixth woman ever to give birth while serving in Congress. 

Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif.

Experience: Senator from California, 2017-present; California attorney general, 2011-2016; San Francisco district attorney 2004-2011

Fast facts: Harris – whose mother emigrated to the U.S. from India – is the first South Asian American and the second African American female senator in U.S. history.

Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper

Experience: Governor of Colorado, 2011-2019; Denver mayor 2003-2011; restaurateur

Fast facts: Hickenlooper suffers from prosopagnosia, or face blindness, which makes it difficult for him to recognize people.

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee

Experience: Governor of Washington, 2013-present; representative, 1993-1995, 1999-2012; state representative, 1988-1992.

Fast facts: Inslee is an avid cyclist and hiker and has made climate change a central part of his campaign.

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Elections are confusing. Learn what the Electoral College is in under a minute. USA TODAY NETWORK

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.

Experience: Senator from Minnesota, 2007-present; Hennepin County prosecutor, 1999-2006

Fast facts: Klobuchar is positioning herself as a Midwest moderate who can work with Republicans. According to GovTrack, she introduced the most pieces of legislation in the 115th Congress of any Democratic senator and her bills had the most non-Democratic co-sponsors. 

Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-Texas

Experience: Representative from Texas, 2013-2019; El Paso City Council, 2005-2011

Fast facts: O’Rourke is a lover of punk rock, and co-founded the band Foss during his college years. The band toured during his summer break and put out a single in 1993 titled, “The El Paso Pussycats.” 

Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio

Experience: Representative from Ohio, 2003-present; state senator, 2000-2002

Fast facts: Ryan, a moderate Democrat, launched an unsuccessful bid in 2016 to unseat Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., as his party’s leader in the House.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

Experience: Senator from Vermont, 2007-present; representative from Vermont, 1991-2000

Fast facts: Sanders previously sought the Democratic nomination in 2016, but he has run as an independent for other offices he has sought.

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Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif.

Experience: Representative from California, 2013-present

Fast facts: Swalwell, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, has said he believes there is evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Russians trying to interfere in the 2016 election.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.

Experience: Senator from Massachusetts, 2013-present; Congressional Oversight Panel Chair for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, 2008-2010; former Harvard Law School professor

Fast facts: Warren came into the national spotlight for criticizing Wall Street, banks and large corporations after the 2008 financial crisis. 

Activist Marianne Williamson

Experience: Motivational speaker, New Age spiritual guru and self-help author

Fast facts: Williamson spent the past 35 years as a spiritual guide and author with connections throughout the celebrity world, including Oprah Winfrey. 

Entrepreneur Andrew Yang 

Experience: Entrepreneur; founder of nonprofit fellowship program Venture for America

Fast facts: Yang’s platform includes providing every American 18 and older with a basic income of $1,000 a month. 

Contributing: William Cummings, Sean Rossman and James Sergent

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President Donald Trump slammed reports Wednesday that his internal reelection campaign polls show him trailing Democratic front-runner Joe Biden as well as other candidates in the 2020 presidential race. (June 12) AP, AP

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