Due to his relative youth in the presidency (he is the youngest president ever elected), Kennedy made an effort to court his predecessors, according to Gibbs and Duffy. He was already on good terms with Truman and Hoover was a friend of his father, Joseph Kennedy, so Eisenhower was the one who had to be won over – not an easy task when Kennedy had just spent a campaign denouncing him. Kennedy met Eisenhower at the White House after he was elected and Eisenhower was still in office. Eisenhower said of Kennedy that "he had no idea of the complexity of the job at that time," but also called him one of the "ablest, brightest minds I've ever come across." They met again when the invasion on the Bay of Pigs had gone wrong and the two talked at Camp David, and Eisenhower publicly supported Kennedy in the backlash to come.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
