A new year, a new beginning

I began 2009 by getting up, making some coffee and sitting down to reread JFK and the Unspeakable by James W. Douglass. I was struck once again by this prophetic passage from the contemplative monk Thomas Merton, written January 1962:

I have little confidence in Kennedy, I think he cannot measure up to the magnitude of his task, and lacks creative imagination and the deeper kind of sensitivity that is needed. To much the Time and Life mentality, than which I can imagine nothing further, in reality, from, say, Lincoln. What is needed is really not shrewdness or craft, but what the politicians don't have: depth, humanity and a certain totality of self-forgetfulness and compasion, not just for individuals but for man as a whole: a deeper kind of dedication. Maybe Kennedy will break through into that some day by miracle. But such people are before long marked out for assassination.