neo

President Gephardt is fine with that.

President Gephardt isn't fine with the Vice President calling his next wave of trade barriers the "Korean Exclusion Act"

GEP!; or, Only in America!

Even on the aforementioned issues he was rough on, it was thoroughly demonstrated during his career that he could shift on those issues (it was how his original views on Cold War politics came to be).

Relatively young charismatic liberal Senator, war vet from the West with an air-tight private life, loving family, and insane bully pulpit on corruption in the aftermath of Watergate.

Basically, an infinitely more electable and far, far, far less naive McGovern, to be honest.

In my long quest for understanding the Truth, I've come to the conclusion that, despite his faults on issues like abortion, gun control, and Israel, Frank Church was absolutely the greatest Senate liberal of his era and one of the greatest of all time.

It is truly a tragedy he was passed up on.

March 13th, 1980: Kissinger endorses Ford, Ford says he would bring Kissinger back as SoS if nominated and elected.

added without comment

Lucky me, we hit the trifecta!

what a stalemate in France does to a mfer

cant find the rest but I'd presume the rankings are something like

Dewey - Favorite
Willkie - Running Strong
Taft - Running Strong
Vandenberg - Running Strong / Dark Horse(?)
Hoover - Dark Horse

yeah sure... the contest is with this 30-something-year-old-kid and a registered-democrat internationalist newton baker acolyte...

main 1940 RNC battle between two people who were basically nobody ~4 years ago...

FDR with Hopkins: "This is exactly how you need to run your campaign and if you do that I'm sure you'll win. You're going to be a great president."

FDR with every other potential successor: "Yeah, Hull, you're going to hate life when you're sitting behind this desk. Shit luck."

most of this is still from The Last Honest Man I've just had a lot of time to ruminate on it while writing campaign trail stuff for church. the book goes really in-depth onto the committee anyway.

well, one (Richard Welch), and then there were multiple mobsters who were killed before being able to testify (Sam Giancana) and then Johnny Roselli who did testify and then got got killed. There's also Orlando Letelier which is a whole other can of worms. Shit got scary for them.

it's also deeply funny how many people the church committee indirectly got murdered.

he held plenty of real beliefs but they also served for his endless thirst for media attention. he was just a huge clout chaser! his anti-war positions on Vietnam were completely real and great for the effort, as were his Church Committee investigations, but it was curated for media hype!

having done a lot more reading since this I've come to the conclusion that church was just the most interesting guy ever tbh. mostly fake outside personality while he was internally striving for as much fame as possible. not even power really, just attention...

in 1970...

dont blame me, I voted gore

he was trying way too hard here

Like with many things, his admiration of Borah, at least once he got into politics himself, was entirely superficial. He learned Borah was a deadbeat asshole when he was fairly young, and grew to dislike him.

He still called him his idol because it looked good! He did this on a lot of things too.

The conclusion you kind of have to come to is that it's something he just genuinely believed in. I guess that also applies to many from his generation, especially those who served in the war, but it's a pretty jarring thing that he held onto until the very end.