Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

Feb 16, 1962: News of Rep. Silvio Ottavio Conte (Nov 9, 1921 – Feb 8, 1991) (R-Mass for 16 terms; somehow never lost an election from 1959 till his death) complaining about junk mail clogging the congressional fallout shelter. Good thing they had a spare bunker in White Sulphur Springs, WV. Mr. Conte died one year before the Greenbrier bunker was exposed.


That little girl is probably part of the mob running the country right now.
He was a passionate advocate for federal funded health research through the National Institutes of Health, the NIH continues to honor him to this day with grants for neurological research awarded in his name.

As a member of the Republican Party, Conte was part of what was then its liberal Northern tradition. Conte was one of only three Republicans in the House that voted against U.S. involvement in the 1991 Gulf War. On social issues, Conte's record was more conservative, also reflecting his Roman Catholic faith; for instance, he was opposed to abortion. He encouraged a generation of young activists whom he hired as staff. For instance, Betty Boothroyd [Baroness Boothroyd, OM, PC (8 October 1929 – 26 Feb 2023)] worked for him as a legislative assistant between 1960 and 1962; she later became Speaker of the House of Commons of the United Kingdom.

He was somewhat famous for wearing a pig mask in a 1983 press conference, as a protest against pork barrel spending.  Pork Barrel 1983



A few years earlier in 1987


LA Times


George Frost Kennan (Feb 16, 1904 – March 17, 2005), legendary American diplomat, super intellectual, linguist, historian, realist, and the grand architect of the "containment" strategy that guided the Cold War era was born this day in Milwaukee. His containment policy was the idea that the United States should stop the global spread of Communism by diplomacy, politics, and covert action - by any means short of war.

Trivia: He hated AMERIKA, the Soviet occupation miniseries that premiered the day before his birthday in 1987.


He has a laundry list of awards and honors and also received 29 honorary degrees and was honored in his name with the George F. Kennan Chair in National Security Strategy at the National War College and the George F. Kennan Professorship at the Institute for Advanced Study.

In his historical writings and memoirs, Kennan laments in great detail the failings of democratic foreign policy makers and those of the United States in particular. According to Kennan, when American policymakers suddenly confronted the Cold War, they had inherited little more than rationale and rhetoric "utopian in expectations, legalistic in concept, moralistic in [the] demand it seemed to place on others, and self-righteous in the degree of high-mindedness and rectitude  ... to ourselves". The source of the problem is the force of public opinion, a force that is inevitably unstable, unserious, subjective, emotional, and simplistic. Kennan has insisted that the U.S. public can only be united behind a foreign policy goal on the "primitive level of slogans and jingoistic ideological inspiration".

Feb 22, 1946: The "Long Telegram", proposing how the United States should deal with the Soviet Union, arrives from the US embassy in Moscow.

The "X Article" is an article, formally titled "The Sources of Soviet Conduct", written by George F. Kennan and published under the pseudonym "X" in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine. It widely introduced the term "containment" and advocated for its strategic use against the Soviet Union. It expanded on ideas expressed by Kennan in a confidential February 1946 telegram, formally identified by Kennan's State Department number, "511", but informally dubbed the "long telegram" for its size.

From his NY Times Obit:

At the height of the Korean War, he temporarily left the State Department for the Institute for Advanced Study. He returned to serve as ambassador to Moscow, arriving there in March 1952.

But it was "a disastrous assignment," Mr. Gaddis said. Mr. Kennan was placed under heavy surveillance by Soviet intelligence, which cut him off from contact with Soviet citizens. Frustrated, Mr. Kennan publicly compared living in Stalin's Moscow to his experience as an internee in Nazi Germany. The Soviets declared him persona non grata.

Mr. Kennan had argued for "the inauguration of political warfare" against the Soviet Union in a May 1948 memorandum that was classified top secret for almost 50 years. "The time is now fully ripe for the creation of a covert political warfare operations directorate within the government," he wrote. This seed quickly grew into the covert arm of the Central Intelligence Agency. It began as the Office of Policy Coordination, planning and conducting the agency's biggest and most ambitious schemes, and within four years grew into the agency's operations directorate, with thousands of clandestine officers overseas.

A generation later, testifying before a 1975 Senate select committee, he called the political-warfare initiative "the greatest mistake I ever made."

In February 1997, Mr. Kennan wrote on The New York Times's Op-Ed page that the Clinton administration's decision to back an enlargement of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, to bring it to the borders of Russia was a terrible mistake. He wrote that "expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold war era."

"Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking," he wrote. His views, shared by a broad range of policy experts, did not prevail.

Though Mr. Kennan is often grouped among the "Wise Men" who shaped Washington after World War II, he did not share their heritage. "He was not part of the elite East Coast establishment," Mr. Gaddis said. "He was never wealthy. He worked his way through college, and he lost all his money in the Depression. He always felt he was an outsider, never an insider."

From that perch in 1993, Mr. Kennan recommended, characteristically, that the United States needed an unelected, apolitical "council of state" drawn from the country's best brains to advise all branches of government in long-term policies. He proposed the council in a very personal book, "Around the Cragged Hill" (Norton 1993), which revealed his core social conservatism as he reviewed the evolution of America.

He fretted that the population of the United States was growing too fast and that, environmentally, the country was "exhausting and depleting the very sources of its own abundance." He blamed cars and the suburban sprawl they created for the death of not only a magnificent railway network but also the "great urban centers of the 19th century, with all the glories of economic and cultural life that flowed from their very unity and compactness."

"It is not too much to say that the American people have it in their power, given the requisite will and imagination, to set for the rest of the world a unique example of the way a modern, advanced society could be shaped in order to meet successfully the emerging tests of the modern and future age," he wrote in "Around the Cragged Hill."

Later in life, Mr. Kennan turned his attention to support of Russian and Soviet studies in the United States, feeling that scholarship was one of America's most productive links with Moscow. "They are impressed by our work," he remarked in an interview. "It keeps Russian intellectuals from thinking we are all a nation of flagpole-sitters."

In 1974 and 1975, while in Washington as a Woodrow Wilson scholar, he helped to establish the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in the Smithsonian complex. Recalling the ancestor who led him to study Russian, he said, "When my colleagues gave it a name, they had in mind both George Kennans."

Quotes from his lengthy Obit at NY Times (March 18, 2005)

I'm sure Mr. Kennan is spinning in his grave right now.




A mutual acquaintance filed a FOIA/MDR with the Library of Congress 11 years ago for certain withdrawn documents in the Earl Warren papers. Yesterday he  received this document concerning the COG Emergency Evac Plan that was written during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Several noteworthy points herein...A RESORT OF THEIR OWN: The Supreme Court’s Cold War Relocation Plan:


In 1992 the Washington Post revealed to the world the surprising Cold War emergency relocation plan of the United States Congress. A remarkably detailed report told the Strangelovian story of The Ultimate Congressional Hideaway, a massive government bunker built beneath the posh Greenbrier resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia in the late 1950s. The irony of lawmakers riding out World War III under a five star hotel while the public sheltered in place was hard to miss.



RFK Jr. told journalist Megyn Kelly (former Fox news host) that during the Cuban Missile Crisis he and his siblings were all excited to get evacuated to a cool underground site, but his father nixed the idea, knowing that if the Kennedy children were being evacuated from DC, it would set off a major panic maelstrom.


The art of Ed Emswhiller, born on this day, Feb 16, 1925.




Carrie Fisher talks to the BBC, Dec 1977. STAR WARS was "the most expensive low-budget film ever made."



Shake ‘n bake, baby! Oooops!





Pre-IMDB resource...