21 Feb 2009, Posted by Chris Kaufman in Culture, 0 Comments

Remembering Socks the Cat

From MSNBC:

Former First Cat Socks, one of the world’s most famous felines, died Friday at the age of 20 after battling throat cancer since November. A stray cat rescued by the Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea, Socks lived in the governor’s mansion in Arkansas and later moved with the family to the White House.

“Socks brought much happiness to Chelsea and us over the years, and enjoyment to kids and cat lovers everywhere,” the Clintons said in a statement, released first to PEOPLE.COM. “We’re grateful for those memories, and we especially want to thank our good friend, Betty Currie, for taking such loving care of Socks for so many years.”

Currie, the president’s personal secretary, and her husband, Bob, took over care of Socks after the Clintons left the White House. It was near their home in Maryland that Socks was put to sleep Friday morning. “He could no longer stand and wasn’t eating,” according to family friend and presidential historian Barry Landau.

His pal Buddy the Lab
Though much was made of the fact that Buddy, the family’s beloved brown Labrador retriever – who died after being hit by a car in 2002 – remained with the Clintons while Socks did not, Landau says, “The truth be known, Betty asked if Socks could come live with her. The Clintons didn’t abandon Socks. They were totally conflicted. It broke their hearts, but they knew it would be the right thing for Socks’ welfare.”

“Betty had lost a close family member and a dog and they wanted to do something nice for her,” continues Landau, noting that Hillary Clinton had just been elected to the U.S. Senate.

During the family’s days in the White House, Socks had become attached to Betty, with whom he spent many hours every day. “Socks was always curled up on a blue striped silk chair, next to Betty,” in her office outside the Oval Office, Landau says. “Socks didn’t act like a cat. Socks was very dog-like, and Buddy and Socks got along well.” Landau adds that even visiting heads of state asked to have pictures taken with the cat.

A taste for chicken
In the years since he left the White House, Landau says, “Socks had an incredible life. Betty cooked for Socks,” he said, noting the cat loved chicken. He was also the subject (along with the family dog) of a book by Hillary Clinton titled Dear Socks, Dear Buddy: Kids’ Letters to the First Pets.

On Thursday, Currie took Socks for one last walk; she plans to have the cat cremated.

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20 Feb 2009, Posted by Chris Kaufman in Art, 0 Comments

The Floating Man

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10 Feb 2009, Posted by Chris Kaufman in Culture, Politics, 0 Comments

Happy Birthday, Abe!

Tomorrow marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln. The Library of Congress has launched an extensive website dedicated to the Lincoln Bicentennial, which includes a detailed history of our 16th president—including timelines, speeches, podcasts and histories of of his family members. The website can consume a good amount of time to peruse, but if you’re like me, and Lincoln is your favorite president, you’ll be glad you did.

Here is Lincoln’s official White House biography:

The son of a Kentucky frontiersman, Abraham Lincoln had to struggle to live and learn. Five months before receiving his party’s nomination for President, he sketched his life:

“I was born Feb. 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families—second families, perhaps I should say. My mother, who died in my tenth year, was of a family of the name of Hanks…. My father … removed from Kentucky to … Indiana, in my eighth year…. It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up…. Of course when I came of age I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher … but that was all.”

Lincoln made extraordinary efforts to attain knowledge while working on a farm, splitting rails for fences, and keeping store at New Salem, Illinois. He was a captain in the Black Hawk War, spent eight years in the Illinois legislature, and as a lawyer rode the circuit of courts for many years. His law partner said of him, “His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest.”

He married Mary Todd, and they had four boys, only one of whom lived to maturity. In 1858 Lincoln ran against Stephen A. Douglas for Senator. He lost the election, but in debating with Douglas he gained a national reputation that won him the Republican nomination for President in 1860.

Lincoln warned the South in his Inaugural Address: “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you…. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it.”

Lincoln thought secession illegal, and was willing to use force to defend Federal law and the Union. When Confederate batteries fired on Fort Sumter, South Carolina, and forced its surrender, he called on the states for 75,000 volunteers. Four more slave states joined the Confederacy but four remained within the Union. The Civil War had begun.

As President, he built the new Republican Party into a strong national organization. Further, he rallied most of the northern Democrats to the Union cause. On January 1, 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation that declared forever free those slaves within the Confederacy.

Lincoln never let the world forget that the Civil War involved an even larger issue. This he stated most movingly in dedicating the military cemetery at Gettysburg: “that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Lincoln won re-election in 1864, as Union military triumphs heralded an end to war. In his planning for peace, the President was flexible and generous, encouraging Southerners to lay down their arms and join speedily in reunion.

The spirit that guided him was clearly that of his Second Inaugural Address, now inscribed on one wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C.: “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds…. ”

On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Lincoln was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC, by John Wilkes Booth, an actor who thought he was helping the South. The opposite was the result, for with Lincoln’s death, the possibility of peace with magnanimity died.

President Lincoln died at 7:22 the next morning. Following a funeral at the White House, his casket was viewed by millions as it was carried on a special train back to Illinois.  He was buried May 4 in Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield.

Happy 200th, Abe!

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