The problem, of course, is that the Tea Party’s power resides in Republican primaries, where conservative purists wreaked considerable havoc in the past two election cycles. This included, famously, McConnell’s home state of Kentucky, where the minority leader’s protégé was crushed in a 2010 GOP Senate primary by Rand Paul. Now McConnell has to worry about suffering a similar fate in two years, especially if his handling of the current fiscal impasse evokes cries of treason from the base. How could this square with claims of fading clout for the Tea Party?

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If there could have been a nationwide soundtrack for late 1964, it would have been especially upbeat, featuring hit songs by the Supremes (“Baby Love,” “Come See About Me”), the Beatles (“A Hard Day’s Night,” “I Feel Fine”), and the Beach Boys (“I Get Around”).

John F. Kennedy’s eloquent calls for a New Frontier had raised expectations his death could not dim. Liberals, led by President Johnson, redoubled their efforts for reform. In May, speaking before some eighty thousand enthusiastic listeners (including Republican governor George Romney) at the University of Michigan’s football stadium, Lyndon Johnson had called for congressional approval of a Great Society — a hugely ambitious set of domestic reforms and programs. That August, Congress appropriated $1 billion to support the Economic Opportunity Act, which promised to wage a “War against Poverty.”

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Just about the whole vocabulary of current international dealings were used in that conflict half a century ago. Blockades, showing strength, drawing a red line — all part of Monday’s debate — were at the center of the Cuban Missile Crisis. And the war porn that got us all into it – annotated aerial spy plane photos of construction sites and alleged warmaking plans — along with show-and-tell demonstrations at the U.N., were part of the process of invading Iraq a decade ago.

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The image of the world standing still is the turn of phrase of Sheldon Stern, former historian at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, who published the authoritative version of the tapes of the ExComm meetings where Kennedy and a close circle of advisers debated how to respond to the crisis. Those meetings were secretly recorded by the president, which might bear on the fact that his stand throughout the recorded sessions is relatively temperate compared to other participants, who were unaware that they were speaking to history.

Stern has just published an accessible and accurate review of this critically important documentary record, finally declassified in the late 1990s. I will keep to that here. “Never before or since,” he concludes, “has the survival of human civilization been at stake in a few short weeks of dangerous deliberations,” culminating in “the week the world stood still.”

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An American U-2 spy plane flying high over Cuba had snapped aerial photographs of Soviet ballistic missile sites that could launch nuclear warheads with little warning at the United States, just 90 miles away. It was the height of the Cold War, and many people feared nuclear war would annihilate human civilization.

Soviet ships carrying nuclear equipment steamed toward Kennedy's "quarantine" zone around the island, but turned around before reaching the line. "We're eyeball-to-eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked," U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk famously said, a quote that largely came to be seen as defining the crisis.

In the five decades since the nuclear standoff between Washington and Moscow, much of the long-held conventional wisdom about the missile crisis has been knocked down, including the common belief that Kennedy's bold brinksmanship ruled the day.

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That was then – when O’Reilly was a scrappy reporter for low-budget syndicated TV. But now, of course, he’s BILL O’REILLY – Fox News icon, a lavishly paid centerpiece of the Murdoch empire. Everything he says   -- every windy pontification and dyspeptic remark – is writ LARGE. He can no longer afford to have the courage of his suspicions. In O’Reilly’s new ideological mold, the CIA is not the incubator of an unspeakable crime against American democracy – it’s the defender of the greatest nation in the world.

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"We establish no religion in this country, we command no worship, we mandate no belief, nor will we ever. Church and state are, and must remain, separate. All are free to believe or not believe, all are free to practice a faith or not, and those who believe are free, and should be free, to speak of and act on their belief."

Rick Santorum teed off on a venerated former president Sunday morning for telling America that the separation of church and state was "absolute.." Was it the guy responsible for the above quote? No, that was Ronald Reagan, running for reelection in 1984 (h/t BB).

It's Democrat John F. Kennedy who made Santorum "throw up," the GOP presidential contender told ABC's George Stephanopoulos, with his famous 1960 speech to Baptist ministers trying to assuage widespread fears about his Catholicism in order to become our first, and still our only, Catholic president. Santorum claims that JFK said that "people of faith have no role in the public square," and urged ABC's viewers to go read the speech for themselves and see.

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Funny and inquisitive, canny and cutting. In "Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy," the former first lady was not yet the jet setting celebrity of the late 1960s or the literary editor of the 1970s and '80s. But she was also nothing like the soft-spoken fashion icon of the three previous years. She was in her mid-30s, recently widowed, but dry-eyed and determined to set down her thoughts for history.

Kennedy met with historian and former White House aide Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. in her 18th century Washington house in the spring and early summer of 1964. At home and at ease, as if receiving a guest for afternoon tea, she chatted about her husband and their time in the White House. The young Kennedy children, Caroline and John Jr., occasionally pop in. On the accompanying audio discs, you can hear the shake of ice inside a drinking glass. The tapes were to be sealed for decades and were among the last documents of her private thoughts. She never wrote a memoir and became a legend in part because of what we didn't know.

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Partisan wrangling over presidential vacation time is as old as the Republic itself. The Salon.com War Room Historical Fun Fact Team did some research, and found out what sort of grief past presidents got when they wanted to recharge their batteries:

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The first Camelot drama out of the chute is "The Kennedys," the controversial miniseries that was canceled by the History Channel under pressure from Carolyn Kennedy and historians, who argued that the channel should at least make some effort to root the story in, well, history. This was a quaint argument, since the History Channel abandoned history long ago in favor of ice-road truckers, gator wrestlers and other reality sideshows. But the network owners were sufficiently embarrassed by the ruckus to dump the series. "The Kennedys" then took a long, downward trip through television's alimentary canal, ending up in some dark cavity called the Reelz Channel. The six-episode series begins plopping out on Sunday.

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The Zapruder film, this is not. (Thankfully.) Rather, it's a fascinating and melancholy look at an American icon during his last hours.

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He served as the director of the Peace Corps and was George McGovern's running mate in the 1972 presidential elections.

USA Today has published an obituary of Shriver's life, highlighting his record of public service despite never winning an election to political office. 

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The Barrett-Jackson Auction Co. in Scottsdale says the 1963 Pontiac Bonneville Naval Ambulance transported Kennedy's casket from Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base to Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland.

The same ambulance was used to move Kennedy's casket, along with the late president's wife and brother Robert, to the U.S. Capitol Building.

Many watching grainy black and white images that November day saw Jackie Kennedy, with her blood stained clothing, enter the ambulance.

The auction runs Jan. 17-23.

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Online:

http://bit.ly/dOHqOy

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