JEAN KENNEDY SMITH: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obit of Jean Kennedy Smith, the last of the Kennedy siblings, went online yesterday at the Guardian, you can link to it here. It should appear in the paper paper soon.

I had written it a few years ago for stock, and there was little to change. I added some details and clarified the Northern Irish peace process a bit, but basically it was as written. I would have liked to have spent more time on her childhood, and the aura of privilege which she enjoyed, but with the space I had, the issues more important to our British audience were paramount. I'm not sure her bit part in Michael Collins was as important as it seems to be the way I wrote it, but it was a nice bit of trivia to include.I did think the Barack O'Bama endorsement was a great way to conclude, especially with the references to John Hume.

ARETHA FRANKLIN: AMERICA'S NATURAL WOMAN

It's not surprising. Aretha Franklin did one, maybe two or three, of the greatest versions of the Star Spangled Banner I'd ever heard. My memory tells me it was in Detroit, at the Cobo Arena, before the Thomas Hearns/Dennis Andries light-heavyweight title fight, which was on ABC, for whom I was working, though I think I was watching back in London. I recall our announcer Jim Lampley calling it a world record. I found a recording of it on you tube, you can listen to it here. I thought she had a piano round her neck, which she doesn't. The piano playing is almost discordant, partly the acoustics, maybe the piano, or maybe she wanted a Monk-like effect, not pretty, but jarring. It wasn't as long as I recall, and the video cuts out before I can hear Lamps. But I did find another video, Branford Marsalis and Bruce Hornsby, doing the anthem at the 1991 NBA All-Star Game; if you listen closely you can hear my Screensport commentary, saying it's the best version I've heard since Aretha's. And as I say, you can listen to several more great renditions.

I bring this up because it seems appropriate that we listen to Aretha do the National Anthem, because she did it more than justice, and she represented so much of the nation, and the fight of black people, the fight of women, the fight of almost everyone one step or more removed from the American Dream. And she was also part of our American Dream, the great singer with the string of hits, who took her place in the public eye seriously, even when it hurt her.

I remember playing Otis Blue when I first got a record player. The big attraction was his hit 'I've Been Loving You Too Long'. He covered Smokey's 'My Girl' brilliantly, some British band's 'Satisfaction', William Bell's 'You Don't Miss Your Water', BB King's 'Rock Me Baby' Solomon Burke's 'Down In The Valley', and three songs by the recently-killed Sam Cooke: 'Shake', 'Wonderful World' and 'A Change Is Gonna Come'. Some of those names meant nothing to me at the time, but they soon would. He also sang a song he'd written, called 'Respect'. I may have been a little to young to understand fully, but it was a a song of pleading by a man who was doing what he thought was everything for his woman, and all he wanted was some respect for that.

It was probably only a year later that Aretha Franklin's version burst out on the airways. It was a different song, a different point of view, a different delivery. This was a woman issuing a wake-up call, asking for something --not like Otis asking for something he was stunned and hurt he didn't get--she expected against expectation to get. It's one of those automatic choices when people ask for covers better than the original, not just because it is so powerfully sung, but because she pulls every ounce of pain and meaning from the song.

It was her second number one R&B chart single. The first was 'I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Loved You)' which had 'Do Right Woman, Do Right Man' as the B side. Her mainstream success with producer Jerry Wexler at Atlantic records was immediate: 'Respect' was number one in the pop charts too. Look at what followed, 'Baby I Love You', '(You Make Me Feel Like ) A Natural Woman', 'Chain Of Fools', '(Sweet Sweet Baby) Since You've Been Gone' and 'Think': all but Natural Woman (no2) were number one in the R&B charts; all were Top 10 hits in the pop charts. And all before I'd finished high school. Then Atlantic started searching for other material;  her biggest hits were covers, not just songs like 'Spanish Harlem' or the magnificent 'Bridge Over Troubled Water' and this was all before I'd finished college.

Her voice touched the soul, the spirit, almost like a physical presence. She sang with joy, even when she was
singing about pain, when that strength seemed directed at areas we all knew we might someday reach, but probably hoped we didn't. And then she would revive us with that incredible sense of life that speaks back to gospel and speaks too of the immense joy of using that gift you've brought out in yourself.

I could link you to any number of her songs, but I surely don't need to. I will remind you, though, that she sang at Barack Obama's inauguration, a moment when I felt great pride in my country. She had also sung at Bill Clinton's; he had grown up with her as I did, and knew her singing spoke to struggle, that she was an icon of civil rights as much as music, saying accept us, not just me, for what we are. And I will give you this link: to when the Obamas went to see the musical about Carole King's early years, and the songs she wrote with Gerry Goffin. King was in the audience, and when the actress playing her introduces 'Natural Woman', Aretha came out, wearing a full-length fur coat, and sat down at the piano and sang it. Watch it here and note King's surprise and joy. And watch the President of the United States moved to tears. As I was when I watched it again, and as I defy you not to be. RIP Aretha Franklin.

TRUMP AND THE EMBASSY ACROSS THE RIVER

Former US Secretary of State of John Kerry once complained that the United States was 'building some of the ugliest embassies in the world...we're building fortresses'. It was a telling metaphor. If form follows function, these buildings were designed to provide a modicum of safety for Americans often unappreciative, if not hostile, countries. In fact, much the same function as the State Department and its colleagues in intelligence perform on behalf of US 'interests' in those countries.

It is thus odd that Donald Trump should cancel his appearance to dedicate the new US Embassy in Nine Elms, given the 'special relationship' between the US and the UK, a relationship so special Trump failed to include the UK in his catalogue of 'shithole' countries from which he'd like to bar immigration. But since arrangements for the official state visit that Theresa May rushed to offer him after his election have not yet manifested themselves, any visit by Trump now ran the risk of being seen by the world as a sort of consolation prize. Especially because Britain cannot guarantee a protest-free Vauxhall, not as much to protect the President physically as to protect his fragile self-esteem, but in essence denying both the form and function of the new building.

Trump's own objections to the embassy, as voiced on twitter, are as easy to decipher as his fear of being met with demonstrations of mass disapproval. He called the Grosvenor Square embassy 'the best located and finest embassy in London', and said the new one was in 'an off location'. Donald Trump is a child of Queens, the New York City outer borough located on Long Island. He is one of the 'bridge and tunnel' people who see Manhattan as the centre of earthly delight. When he took over the family business from his father, his first moves were to rename it the Trump Organization and move it into Manhattan. To Trump, being on the 'wrong side' of the river is literally slumming, especially when the new embassy lies in a bleak development area south of the Thames River, reminiscent of the New Jersey marshlands across the Hudson from Manhattan.

Trump was also quick to blame Barack Obama for the move, saying he'd sold the Grosvenor Square location 'for peanuts' and spent the money on the new one in a 'bad deal'. Trump remains at heart a real estate hustler, and he could not pass up the opportunity to remind his followers of his own business acumen. Never mind that the move of the embassy was a product of the Bush administration, including the sale of the lease that runs until 2953 to the Qatar Sovereign Wealth Fund. The symbolic figurehead, the golden eagle, will remain on the building overlooking the square, to people that once this was the seat of the American presence in Britain, and was back to the days of Johan Adams, but it will also confirm a shrinking specialness for that special relationship.

The old embassy, opened in 1960, was designed by Eero Sarinen. Its fortress appearance is more the result of recent renovation than original design; it never really fit Grosvenor Square, but it did squeeze itself in without claiming domination. The structure was low and sweeping, and many years ago, quite pleasant and relaxed to use, more like a modern town hall than a fortress.

Of course it's probably best remembered for the 1968 demonstrations against the Vietnam War, which infamously featured a young Bill Clinton. This year is the 50^th anniversary of those demos, as well as the ones in France, Mexico, America and elsewhere that will provide acres of fodder for ageing pundits.

But the threat posed by those demonstrations seems placid compared to the fears that fueled the Bush administration's flight from Mayfair. In the wake of the President's 'Global War On Terror', the US government was selling fear, and the Grosvenor Square building was a vulnerable branch of the store. It wasn't large enough to house the extra bureaucracy needed to 'protect' America by making the visa process more of a trial, nor could it house the huge increase in intelligence personnel, nor could it be protected adequately from the busy traffic that still passed nearby everyday.

To its credit, the new building manages to avoid the look of a fortress, though the Kieran Timberlake design has met with criticism in British architectural circles. It certainly doesn't do anything to spoil the landscape in Nine Elms, blending in with the graceless luxury flats with river views springing up in the emptiness of the neighbourhood. Its security is guaranteed by the large open spaces and moat that surround it, as well as invisible high tech equipment. Given the penchant for nicknaming London buildings, in the spirit of the Gherkin, it most resembles an artichoke. Or perhaps an armadillo. Or indeed a kind of Star Wars death-star: one expects those glass windows to open like gun portals, and laser weaponry to emerge. And while it lacks the Stalinist-modern menace of the MI6 headquarters, also in Vauxhall, but in the 'on location' side of the Thames, it also falls short of the state department' idea that it 'gives form to core democratic values of transparency, openness and equality. Just you try to get in, and try to open one of those windows.

The Michael Wolff book Fire and Fury would suggest quite strongly that the primary concern of the Trump White House is protecting the image and self-regard of its occupant. In such a situation, the idea that he would travel to Vauxhall, which he'd probably describe as a 'shithole', to cut a ribbon on a modernist fortress in disguise rather than accept a lift round Knightsbridge in a golden carriage with Her Majesty the Queen should surprise absolutely no one. The Trump team are probably drawing up architectural plans for the new 'special relationship' as we speak.

BASEBALL DIPLOMACY IN HAVANA HAPPENED BEFORE: THE LOST 1999 FT ARTICLE

President Obama's trip to Havana to watch the Tampa Bay Rays take on the Cuban national team was a huge news story, with the predictable condemnation from the right. Cuba remains a contentious issue in the USA, just as the US remains contentious in Cuba. But the visit reminded me that this baseball diplomacy had actually begun March 28, 1999, when the Baltimore Orioles went to Havana and played the Cubans, and another Democratic President was being vilified for allowing it to happen. Note it did not happen again for 17 years. 

Of course the real story this time was Obama, not the baseball team, going to Cuba. In retrospect it's an interesting study in role reversal: right-wing presidents can indulge in rapprochement with enemies that they would condemn were it done by a Democrat; Democrats like Clinton can indulge in financial or welfare 'reform' that would draw weak howls from the center were a Republican to try them. Certainly Obama looked a lot more relaxed doing the wave at the stadium with Raul Castro, than either then-baseball commissioner Bud Selig or Oriole owner Peter Angelos had looked with Fidel in 1999. Note too, there aren't any luxury boxes in Havana's biggest stadium.

In March, 1999 I was in Melbourne, Florida, where the story was big news, with the invective often being the lead. The piece I wrote was commissioned by the Financial Times' sports page, meant to appear on Friday 26th, two days before the game. But it was killed when their news pages decided to send a staff reporter to Havana for the Saturday paper. The perspective was somewhat different, and the history somewhat absent. 

The Orioles won that game 3-2, but the game's star was Jose Contreras, who came in to pitch in the second inning, after Jose Ibar allowed a two-run homer by Charles Johnson. Contreras pitched eight innings of two-hit ball and struck out ten; scouts noticed. He would also start the return match in Baltimore; he got shelled but Cuba won that 12-6. In 2002 Contreras left the Cuban national team at a tournament in Mexico; he was signed immediately by the New York Yanquis. 

BASEBALL DIPLOMACY: CAN THE US AND CUBA STOP PLAYING HARDBALL?

Last season Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa both smashed the Major League Baseball home run record of 61 set by Roger Maris in 1961. This Sunday, a different sort of mark, two years older than Maris’, will fall, when the Baltimore Orioles take the field in Havana’s Estadio Latinoamericano against a Cuban national selection. It will be the first time in forty years that a major league team has visited Cuba, the first time since the Los Angeles Dodgers and Cincinnati Reds played an exhibition game there in 1959, only weeks after Fidel Castro's revoilution had ousted the dictator Fulgencio Batista, the American-backed man in charge of keeping the island safe for sugar companies and mafia casinos. 

 

The game will mark the first major break in the embargo the United States has maintained against Cuba since 1962. Set up under pressure from Cuban exiles in the wake of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, it prohibits trade and even travel between the two countries, less than 90 miles apart. This series (the Cubans will play a return match in Baltimore in May) has already been compared with Nixon’s “ping pong diplomacy” which launched the normalizing of US relations with China. But Bill Clinton’s “baseball diplomacy” has met with fierce opposition in South Florida, where Cubans exert considerable political clout in an electorally crucial state.

Protestors picketed two of the Orioles’ spring training games in Fort Lauderdale, both against Miami’s team, the Marlins. Fewer than 200 people demonstrated against the games, but they generated a hugely disproportionate media barrage. Miami Republican Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart likened the Orioles trip to travelling to Berlin to take part in the 1936 Olympics, or going to play in apartheid South Africa. “It would be rightfully seen by history as shameful.”

Since the agreement was announced in early March, relations between the countries have done anything but improve. Cuba cut telephone links to the US in retaliation for bills unpaid by US phone companies, and the US protested the harsh sentences meted out to four Cuban dissidents under recently enacted sedition laws. But to the baseball organisers, this has nothing to do with politics. 

 

“This is really about the common ground that the two peoples have, apart from any positions taken by government entities,” said Orioles Executive Vice-President John Angelos. Angelos’ father Peter, owner of the team, spent three years laying the groundwork for the series. “It’s been a priority for Peter Angelos for years,” says Orioles press director John Maroon. “These are two countries that share a passion for baseball.”

Baseball is America’s national pastime, but it may be Cuba’s national obsession. Fidel Castro himself was a pitcher for the law faculty at the University of Havana; legend has it he was scouted by the Washington Senators, which prompted the story about the two old baseball scouts discussing how different history might have been had Castro become a baseball player. One cogitates, then says, 'no, it wouldn't have made a difference. Washington were terrible then, and he wasn't good enough to change that.' Baseball's world view can be rather narrow.

 

When America’s National League began play in the 1870s, the Troy (New York) Haymakers boasted two Cuban players. In the apartheid years when MLB was segregated, light skinned Cubans escaped the colour bar, while others played their way into baseball’s Hall of Fame in America’s Negro Leagues. More recently, Boston’s Luis Tiant and Cincinnati’s Tony Perez became heroes in their adopted communities.

Although the flow of Cuban stars dried up following the embargo, current sluggers like Jose Canseco and Rafael Palmiero were among the generation brought to the US as infants fleeing Castro. Keeping their best players at home, Cuba's own teams, meanwhile, dominated amateur play, including the Olympics. 

International play allowed some defectors to prove the current crop of Cubans were as good as ever.

Livan Hernandez, who fled the national team during a tournament in Mexico, became the most valuable player in the Marlins’ World Series championship in 1997. His brother Orlando, confined to Cuba after Livan’s defection, nearly died escaping the island in a home-made boat. Two years later, he was winning World Series games for the New York Yankees.

Though their journeys are held up as examples of those seeking 'freedom' in America, ironically neither of the Hernandez brothers actually established residency in the United States, preferring other Caribbean islands whose players remain outside the major league baseball's amateur draft. Avoiding the US meant they were free to sign with the highest bidding team.

The Cuban team that plays the Orioles reportedly will not include players from the island’s top four teams, who are still involved in the National Series playoffs. But it will boast third-baseman Omar Linares, who has been considered the best baseball player outside the major leagues for the last decade, and is still only 28. Scouts will get their first chance to see Linares play with a wooden bat, rather than the lighter and stronger aluminium generally used in amateur play. In a major concession, Cuba agreed to the visitors’ choice of weapons. Their National Sports Institute (INDER) was quick to point out this gave the Orioles a decided advantage.

But the big story, of course, is outside the ballpark. The prospect of seeing Havana from the inside has attracted over 500 accredited media. The game will be televised nationwide in the US by the cable sports giant ESPN. “We’ve organised seven charter planes, and expedited visas with the cooperation of both governments,” explains MLB Vice-President Tim Brosnan, who points out the series is just another step in baseball’s expanding international expanding activity. For the innately conservative lords of the game, this is a commercial opportuinity, not a political statement.  “We have exhibition games in Mexico and the Dominican Republic,” he says, “and for the first time two teams will open their official season outside the US or Canada, in Monterrey Mexico. We’re also close to finalizing a season opener next year in Japan.”

Cuba has played, and usually beaten, American amateur teams for decades. But their success in Olympic and World Championship events would be threatened if MLB’s plans to allow its players to represent their home countries in international play come to fruition. “At very least, the top players from the minor leagues will play in the Sydney Olympics,” says Brosnan. 

 

In the days before the revolution, Havana had a top minor league team in the International League. In 1959, the Sugar Kings won the Junior World Series. Felo Ramirez broadcast that series then, and now does Spanish radio broadcasts for the Marlins.  Like many who left Cuba in the early days, he's against the series.  “I don’t like it that the Orioles play in Cuba,” he says. “If not for Castro, Havana would have a team in the major leagues right now. We wouldn’t need exhibitions.”

In Miami the spectrum of opinion extends only as far as others, like Miami Herald writer Robert Steinbank, who favour the series only  because they sees the temptations of capitalism as the ultimate threat to Castro. But even Steinbank points out the game “reveals the limits of Miami’s Cubans to steer US policy.”Even so, on Sunday as 50,000 Cuban fans fill the stadium in Havana, in Miami many will echo the frustration of Tony Perez, now Vice President of Community Relations for the Marlins. “It’s done,” he says, “there’s nothing we can do about it.”

MICHAEL VICK AND TUCKER CARLSON (NO RELATION)

I was on the BBC World Service's World Update today, discussing President Obama's praising Philadelphia Eagles' owner Jeffrey Lurie for giving quarterback Michael Vick a second chance after he served 19 months in prison for running a dog-fighting ring and abusing his dogs. I was all set to talk about how Obama might have been trying to push his proposed expansion of the Second Chances Act in Congress (Lord knows enough Congressmen have got second chances, and more), and how Tony Dungy has mentored Vick, how Andy Reid has brought him along slowly and transformed his quarterbacking, and how both those coaches had personal tragedies with their own wayward children. I was also prepared to discuss the agenda of the animal rights advocates who use Vick as a way to generate publicity, and the right-wingers who use him as another club to beat Obama over the head with his own blackness. But the conversation was hijacked into that last direction by an unexpectedly virulent clip from Tucker Carlson, the Bow-Tie-That-Talks who plays an intellectual on Fox News.

Carlson (who is no relation to me and that is for real sure) said: 'I’m a Christian, I’ve made mistakes myself, I believe fervently in second chances. But Michael Vick killed dogs, and he did in a heartless and cruel way. And I think, personally, he should’ve been executed for that. He wasn’t, but the idea that the President of the United States would be getting behind someone who murdered dogs?'

This is fascinatingly hypocritical on so many levels it's hard to know where to start. But let's start with Tucker's so-called Christianity, which sounds a lot more like a version that ends a long time before Jesus actually came along. What happened to turn the other cheek, walk the extra mile, cast the first stone--well, maybe he thinks it's up to him to cast at least a few stones. Executed for killing dogs? Maybe we just nuke the Dominican Republic and do away with cock-fighting there once and for all. More importantly, it's easy to forgive Tucker Carlson's kind of mistakes, like selling yourself to promote the rich and powerful by using hate and fear. But as I understood Christ's message, it was that you needed to forgive people for the really hurtful, awful things they do. That never sunk in very far with Tucker. Vick, meanwhile, has done the Christian thing and not responded in kind, though the old Mike Vick might have sent the sort of message to Mr. Carlson indicated on the right.

The second, more important message, of course, is the coded reminder that Barack Hussain Obama, as Fox called him, is, uh, black. And that if you ever vote for him again he's going to release hordes of his dog murdering fellow blacks on you--Willie Horton's mutant offspring stealing your daughters, lowering property values, and integrating your Christian academies. Michael Vick is a lot easier a target than, say, Henry Louis Gates, who was merely an uppity black man who wears a bow tie and bristled when accused of breaking in to his own house.

I understand the animal rights people who say 'if he'd done this to people he'd still be behind bars' or 'abusers of dogs and children shouldn't be free to walk the streets' knowing full well that he didn't kill people or abuse children, and that there is a difference between people and animals. I know they want to get their own back. Their job is to demonise a celebrity in order to keep their issue in the news, and someone's right to pay their debt to society and return to his previous life matters little. It is interesting that PETA haven't attacked Vick at all, but his doing public service ads for them might have something to do with that.

The Second Chance Act was enacted by the George W Bush regime, who then failed to fund or enforce it. Obama wants to do something about a prison population that stands at 2.3 million, or almost 1 per 1,000 in America, and 38 per cent of them are black. Americans make up a full quarter of the world's incarcerated, although we are only one-twentieth of the world's population. Prison building and staffing is one of the few growth industries that can't be farmed out to cheaper countries. Yet.

I look at my dog Rufus and my stomach turns at the thought of what Vick did to his dogs, but so far he has done and said all the right things to make one think that his stay in prison did what it is supposed to do, punish, yes, but help rehabilitate, like the new-look Vick we see on the right. The Tucker Carlsons of the world would be happier if the black population could be moved en masse behind bars, a kind of perverse domestic version of Liberia, and maybe the turkeys voting for Christmas who believe what they see on Fox is actually true could all get jobs guarding them. It would be a lot like the ante-bellum South, come to think of it, where the Obamas were quickly put in their place.

Meanwhile, the Eagles lost on Tuesday night, giving NBC a big audience and the NFL a new idea for creating more nights of prime time football: watch the weather reports and move the games. Read my nfluk.com Friday Morning Tight End column on New Year's Eve for more on that...

DAVID HERBERT DONALD: THE GUARDIAN OBIT

My obituary of the historian David H Donald is in today's Guardian, you can find it here. Because it was trimmed somewhat, particularly in its lede, here's my original copy:

As the leader most crucial to America's psyche, Abraham Lincoln's life has been open to constant re-interpretation; all things to all people, he has been seen as everything from hallowed genius to demented fanatic. 2009, which marked Lincoln's bicentennial (he was born the same day as Charles Darwin), saw also the inauguration of Barack Obama, often compared to his Illinois predecessor, and consciously encouraging such comparisons by choosing Lincoln as a model. These factors brought new renown for historian David Herbert Donald, who has died aged 88. Donald's writing about Lincoln spanned nearly 50 years, and his 1995 biography, titled simply 'Lincoln', is considered the best, and certainly most balanced, account of the president's life. The book gained a new audience after receiving lavish praise from the historian Eric Foner, part of the Lincoln bicentennial programme on America's National Public Radio. Donald's Lincoln is a determined man struggling to find the inner reserves to cope with immense crises always threatening to overcome him; the parallels with the current president were there to be made.

Ironically, though Donald twice won the Pulitzer Prize, neither award honoured his work on Lincoln. His first Pulitzer came in 1961 for the opening part of his two-volume biography of the abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner, best-remembered today for receiving a savage beating on the floor of the US Senate during a debate on slavery. Covering Sumner's career up to the Civil War, Donald presented him as a radical whose Republican leadership placed the newly-elected Lincoln in an almost untenable position. By the time the second volume was published in 1970, by which time Donald had been influenced by changes brought on by the civil rights movement, his Sumner was more of a visionary moral leader.

He won his second Pulitzer for Look Homeward, his 1987 biography of the novelist Thomas Wolfe. It was a more personal project because, as Donald put it, 'Wolfe told my story'. Like Wolfe, Donald was a southerner transplanted to the world of Yankee intellectuals, and spent his career examining the roots and the effects of the great divide between North and South. Donald also considered himself a frustrated novelist, saying biographies ought to 'let the story tell itself and have it as ambiguous, as ambivalent as a modern novel.'

Donald was born on a farm in Goodman, Mississippi, where his mother was also a teacher. He graduated from Millsaps College, in Jackson Mississippi, then received his PhD in history in 1946 from the University of Illinois, studying under the Civil War scholar James G. Randall. He began teaching at Columbia, in New York, and in 1947 published his first book, 'Lincoln Reconsidered', a collection of essays, which was followed in 1948 by 'Lincoln's Herndon', with an introduction by the poet Carl Sandburg, a study of Lincoln's Illinois law partner and early biographer. Although he claimed he originally found Lincoln a tedious subject, Donald's studies of Lincoln's relationships to people close to him would lead him to conclude Lincoln was ambitious, politically shrewd, and 'much more sensitive and human than I had thought before'.

In 1954 Donald edited 'Inside Lincoln's Cabinet: The Civil War Diaries of Salmon Chase', and during the Civil War centennial, which began in 1961, edited 'Why The North Won The Civil War', and a revised edition of his Lincoln essays. He also revised his mentor Randall's key 1937 study 'The Civil War And Reconstruction', and followed with his own 'The Politics Of Reconstruction' (1965), breaking ground by using statistical analysis to detail how the relative safety of a Congressional seat was the prime determinant in how fiercely politicians pursued radical policies.

Donald also taught at Smith, Princeton and Johns Hopkins before joining Harvard as Charles Warren Professor of History in 1973, a post he held until assuming the emeritus title in 1991. He was Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford and also taught at University College London. In all he wrote or edited 30 books, the last of which, 'We Are Lincoln Men', a study of the president's friendships, appeared in 2004. When he died, of heart failure, he was working on a study of John Quincy Adams' life after his defeat in the 1828 presidential election.
He is survived by his wife of 53 years, Aida DiPace Donald, former editor of Harvard University Press, and a son.

David Herbert Donald, historian and biographer
born 1 October 1920 Goodman, Mississippi
died 17 May 2009 Boston, Massachusetts

DIEBENKORN DOES THE WHITE HOUSE

I discovered, reading a piece from the Wall Street Journal (accessed via Arts & Letters Daily), that the Obamas have borrowed a painting by Richard Diebenkorn to hang in the White House. Diebenkorn's one of my very favourite painters, and I've written a short essay about him, for Untitled: Perspectives. You can find it here. Or you can just read on...

DIEBENKORN DOES THE WHITE HOUSE

The Obama Effect has thus far been mostly symbolic; he seems to balance every positive move (Israeli settlements) with a negative one (Guantanamo and torture), has approached the economic crisis much more like Bill Clinton than FDR, and been very cautious with his first pick to join the Supremes. But symbolic does have impact, and I'm all in favour of his latest move, which was to borrow a new set of paintings from the Hirschorn, including Richard Diebenkorn's 'Berkeley No. 52' (pictured above right).

Diebenkorn's a fascinating painter, one of my absolute favourites. He's from the generation of the Abstract Expressionists and in one sense produced a West Coast version of AE which took a long time to get recognised. That may be because his Berkeley work, from the 50s and 60s, is more representational than one expects from Abstract Expressionism. Even his Ocean Park series, from the 60s and 70s, still features recognisable parts of landscape, more than a hint of Post-Impressionism in them. They have a relaxed, west coast feel to them; not the intensity of, say, Rothko (who did grow up in Portland, Oregon, where Diebenkorn was born, after all), whom they sometimes recall. There's also a touch of Franz Kline about some of them, in their structural, almost architectural, power; and it's interesting that the Obama's have apparently requested a Kline from Chicago, on approval, as it were. Apparently, Barack took Michelle to the Art Institute on one of their first dates.

The Obamas have also borrowed sculptures by Jasper Johns and Degas, and works by Josef Albers, Louise Nevelson, Rauschenberg and, oddly, a red painting by Edward Ruscha with words like 'I think' 'maybe' and 'yes' on it. This is Obama's Bob the Builder approach to art. Can we fix it? Maybe we can! They've also selected a couple of works by a little-known black American artist, Alma Thomas, Sky Light (left) and the Chubby Checker-inspired 'Watusi Hard Edge'. There was an interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal which, while noting the pressure to make political gestures when presidents pick art, was more concerned with the potential increase in market value for the artists. This, I suppose, would be more of a help to those who are still alive, though the works themselves need to be at least 25 years old before they can be added to the White House's permanent collection, lest presidents be seen to be playing the art market like British MPs play the property market with taxpayer funding.

Call me predictable, but I find it interesting that I immediately make connections between Diebenkorn, Rohko, and Kline--my favourites of the painters of my lifetime. There's also a nice parallel to be made with Cy Twombly (about whom I wrote last August; you can find that here), another AE artist working at a remove from the mainstream, outlasting them, and in an environment of relaxed bright light. You can see a bit of Twombly, and even more of Charles Demuth, in many of the Ocean Park paintings (right).

That Diebenkorn's work should appeal to Obama, raised in Hawaii and colleged, at first, in California, doesn't come as a great surprise. I remember in the early 90s spending a weekend in Healdsburg, mainly because Diebenkorn lived there. The Clos du Bois winery was there too, and between them and the nice little Inn I stayed in, I decided Healdsburg would be a fine place to live. I wonder if it's still the same, with a Disney 1950s feel to it. Oddly, that's the kind of feeling Diebenkorn draws from me; I find his work both contemplative and soothing, both of which I assume would be a boon to someone with Obama's job description. But the idea of having the great galleries of America as a shopping gallery makes me think the job might almost be worth it.

ON THE CHEEK: WALTER MOSLEY'S CINNAMON KISS

Another seeming relic from the Crime Time vault (we could have a show called Crime Time Team, uncovering lost reviews!), but this review of Walter Mosely's Cinnamon Kiss actually appeared first in CT48! Anyway, it has just been posted on the CT site, here. Bill Clinton made Mosely a household name (and pimped Dennis Lehane and Stephen Hunter too), but Bubba Bills' mojo didn't carry over through the eight years of the Bush regime. Maybe Barack can bring him back, though I wonder if a great Chicago writer like Eugene Izzi might be due for an Obama-boost too?