Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

According to The International Herald Tribune , Venezuelan loud mouth Hugo Chavez will nationalize fuel distribution: “Distributors, including subsidiaries of British Petroleum, Exxon Mobil and Chevron, had hoped to persuade the government not to seize total control of their businesses.” But they failed to persuade the Vladmir Putin of Latin America, who earlier had nationalized other privately owned companies. “Under Chávez,” the Tribune reports, “the government has nationalized Venezuela's largest telephone, electricity, steel and cement companies and has assumed majority control over four major oil projects.” Exon Mobile and Chevron are American companies. It is unknown at this point whether Mayor of New Haven Connecticut John DeStefano will protest the seizure by refusing to accept winter shipments of oil from Chavez distributed through a company run by Joseph Kennedy . Chris Dodd, Connecticut’s expert on Lain America, has offered no diplomatic suggestions that might temper Cha...

Burton Hersh, the author of two books on the Kennedys and an authoritative book on the founders of the CIA, “The Old Boys”, was ambivalent about writing Bobby and J. Edgar: The Historic Face-Off between the Kennedys and J. Edgar Hoover That Transformed America. At first, Hersh wanted to keep the book narrowly focused, “though honest.” Too wide an historical orbit, he thought, “was likely to scorch out sources and friends whom I have cherished since the middle sixties.” But he had become privy through his contacts to new information, and the book flowered under his hand. Hersh’s scorched friends and sources are not likely to be indifferent to the book. Nor is anyone else who reads it. The face page at the beginning of Bobby and J. Edgar carries a quote from Ralph Martin’s Seeds of Destruction: “John F. Kennedy ‘told his good friend John Sharon that if he had his life to live over again, he would have a different father, a different wife, and a different religion.” Sometimes in the f...