White House reporter Sid Davis, and the Kennedy assassination

The link, below, is for an October 26th New York Times obituary of journalist Sid Davis.   Mr. Davis died on October 13th, at age 97.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/26/obituaries/sid-davis-dead.html?smid=url-share

As recounted in the Times obituary:

In 1959, Mr. Davis was hired as a White House correspondent by Westinghouse, which then had a national network of five television stations and seven radio stations in major markets. After a brief turn reporting on President Dwight D. Eisenhower, he covered the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations as chief of the 18-member Westinghouse Washington bureau.

He joined NBC News in 1977 as the Washington news director. He was NBC’s Washington bureau chief from 1979 to 1982 (and a vice president from 1980 to 1982), and senior correspondent from 1982 to 1987, covering the Reagan administration.

From 1987 to 1994, Mr. Davis was director of programs for the Voice of America, and until 1998 he directed worldwide Voice of America programming, in charge of 1,500 people working in 46 languages.

Much of the Times obituary, however, concerns his coverage of the 1963 Kennedy assassination.

On November 22nd, Mr. Davis was in a press bus in the presidential motorcade in Dallas. He filed reports, by phone, from Dallas's Parkland Hospital, and was subsequently one of three reporters who witnessed the swearing-in of Lyndon Johnson on Air Force One.  The other journalists were Merriman Smith of UPI--who later was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the assassination--and Charles Roberts of Newsweek.  

Mr. Smith and Mr. Roberts then flew to Washington on Air Force One. Yet, as described in the Times obituary, Mr. Davis "stayed in Dallas to brief the press corps on the swearing-in ceremony and his observations aboard Air Force One. He had been chosen as a pool reporter by a White House aide, not by fellow journalists, but he regarded it as a solemn obligation to represent, and report to, the press corps."

From the obituary:

Tom Wicker, who covered the assassination [for the Times], was awed by Davis’s briefing.“It ranks as one of the most generous acts by a reporter that I can remember,” he wrote in Times Talk, a staff publication. “Davis put together a magnificent pool report on the swearing-in, read it off, answered questions and gave a picture that so far as I know was complete, accurate and has not been added to.”

Diane Keaton (1946-2025)

I loved seeing her, on-screen.  Her talent, at both comedy and drama, was awesome. She was brilliant--so deeply funny, and charming, and serious--in 1977's Annie Hall, with Woody Allen (for which she won a Best Actress Oscar). And superb in so many other roles--including the 2003 romantic comedy Something's Gotta Give, with Jack Nicholson (which earned her a Best Actress Oscar nomination).

There is a significant scene in Annie Hall which I particularly enjoy, and admire.  It is not a comic scene. She sings in a nightclub, for about two and a half minutes, the 1940s song "Seems Like Old Times." Her vocal, at the link below, is really lovely.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p32OEIazBew&list=RDp32OEIazBew&start_radio=1

October 7th

Remembering, on the second anniversary of October 7th, the sickening, gruesome attacks which took place in Israel: the twelve hundred people who were murdered by Hamas (aided by such terrorist groups as Palestinian Islamic Jihad). Some civilians, it has been reported, also took part in the attacks.

And, remembering the breathtaking extent of the cruelties, the terror, that day: the burning of homes with their residents inside, the hunting of victims, the rapes (which, it has been reported, included gang rape), the reported acts of mutilation of victims' bodies, the countless other depravities. 

And, of course: the kidnappings of some 250 people--babies, children, adults, and elderly people, taken into Gaza as hostages.

Twenty hostages are believed to still be alive in Gaza; it is also believed that the bodies of twenty-eight others, who were either killed on October 7th or who died afterward, remain held by Hamas.

One prays that the peace deal currently on the table will be agreed to (or at least mostly agreed to), that all of the hostages (living and dead) will be released to their loved ones, that Hamas will lay down its arms and will leave Gaza, and that we will see the beginning of the end of the suffering of the Palestinian civilians.

Rob Reiner, and early television

The noted film director and actor Rob Reiner was interviewed on 60 Minutes Sunday night.  He talked about his life and career, and his new film, Spinal Tap II, a sequel to the original Spinal Tap movie, which was released in 1984, and was the first film he directed. He later directed such movies as A Few Good Men, The American President, When Harry Met Sally, The Princess Bride, and Stand By Me.

Mr. Reiner, who is 78, was also interviewed in the September/October issue of the AARP Bulletin.  He was asked about his father, Carl Reiner, who had a long and distinguished show business career--as an actor, comedian, writer, and director. He created television's Dick Van Dyke Show--and, memorably, acted on the show, as TV star Alan Brady. He also appeared as a performer in early television--which included his starring role on Your Show of Shows, which aired Saturday nights on NBC, from 1950 until 1954.

Rob Reiner said this, in the AARP interview, about early TV: "Oddly enough, my father was on television before we had a television.  We bought one in 1951 so we could see him on Saturday nights." 

I have no doubt this was true of many television performers of the era--that they may not have had a TV set when they began performing in the new medium.

In 1949, my mother was living with her parents; she had graduated from college in 1948.  She had appeared in a Broadway music and comedy revue, Small Wonder, from the fall of 1948 until the show closed in January of 1949. Soon after, she began singing on The Stan Shaw Show, a weekday musical program on TV's DuMont Network; she sang on the show until early March, when the program left the air. From March until July, she sang on a weeknight musical show on the network, Teen Time Tunes, with the musical group The Alan Logan Trio.  Shortly after Teen Time Tunes began airing, she turned twenty-one. 

Her family, at the time, didn't own a TV set, and so my grandparents would go to Macy's, in New York City, to watch her on the store's demonstration models. 

Early in the year, my parents had met at a party, and began dating; they would marry in August of 1949.  My father was in his medical residency at the time, and he didn't have a TV set either. In order to see my mother sing on Teen Time Tunes, he would often go to the DuMont Network studio on Madison Avenue, and (while there was no studio audience for the program) would watch the show in person.

The indictment of James Comey

One of the most striking things I have learned, since the beginning of the second Trump presidency, appeared in a March 2025 online story in The Atlantic, by the writer Peter Wehner.  Mr. Wehner worked in the administrations of three Republican Presidents: Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush.  

His March piece in The Atlantic was titled: "Trump’s Appetite for Revenge Is Insatiable."

Mr. Wehner wrote, in his piece, that Trump's desire for vengeance is nothing new--that it goes back decades:

Revenge has long been a central theme for Donald Trump. In a 1992 interview with the journalist Charlie Rose, Trump was asked if he had regrets. Among them, he told Rose, “I would have wiped the floor with the guys who weren’t loyal, which I will now do. I love getting even with people.” When Rose interjected, “Slow up. You love getting even with people?” Trump replied, “Absolutely.”

Here is the video of the interview with Charlie Rose. The above comments appear at approximately 41 minutes from the video's start.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QQqioef19k

Here, too, is the link to Mr. Wehner's piece in the March 20, 2025 Atlantic:

 https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/political-enemy-retribution-efforts/682095/?gift=Tcay7nmVziC9n3Jf9Qllm6NqcjM7ax8BygQt0VIicMI&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

As Mr. Wehner noted, at the outset of his Atlantic piece, Trump famously said the following, during his last campaign for the presidency:  "For those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution." 

While on the first day of his second presidency, in 2025, Trump set free all of those convicted of, or charged with, crimes related to the events of January 6, 2021, including those convicted of assaulting law enforcement officers on that day--some 140 officers were injured at the Capitol on January 6th--his primary interest, regarding retribution, clearly concerns himself.  

And now, there has been the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey.  

As The Washington Post reported on Thursday:

The case against Comey marks the most significant step to date in Trump’s campaign to deploy the Justice Department to avenge personal grievances and prosecute those he perceives as his enemies. The president’s demands during the weekend that Attorney General Pam Bondi swiftly charge Comey and others flew in the face of long-standing norms meant to shield the Justice Department from direct political interference from the White House.

Last week, the White House forced out the previous top prosecutor on the case after he declined to seek an indictment and replaced him with one of Trump’s former personal attorneys.

That successor, Lindsey Halligan — now interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia — personally presented the case against Comey to the grand jury on Thursday, said two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Before she was sworn in Monday, Halligan had no prosecutorial experience.

Trump claimed today that the indictment of Mr. Comey was "about justice, really. It's not revenge."

Yet, as The Washington Post story on Thursday noted, attorneys for Comey are "likely to point to the fact that before Thursday’s indictment the case had been rejected by Erik S. Siebert, the Trump-appointed interim U.S. attorney who had been overseeing the investigation. He concluded there was insufficient evidence to move forward with a prosecution, The Post has reported."

The Post story continued:

Siebert resigned last week under intense pressure from the Trump administration, in part because of that decision. Trump appointed Halligan as his replacement because, the president said, she would “get things moving.”

Since Halligan was sworn in Monday, several attorneys in the Eastern District of Virginia shared a memo with her laying out concerns with the strength of the evidence, two people familiar with that meeting said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely about those internal deliberations. Nevertheless, Halligan opted to move forward.

Jimmy Kimmel

I am sure there are people--perhaps many--who might feel that the suspension, and potential firing, of television host and comedian Jimmy Kimmel, was not a big deal.  

It has in fact been a very big deal--and so one felt, really, a sense of relief watching his return to his ABC show last night. His monologue, at the program's outset, was terrific--impressive, funny, and affecting.

PA Governor Josh Shapiro on political violence, in the aftermath of the murder of Charlie Kirk

The headline of a story, online, from today's Philadelphia Inquirer: 

"Josh Shapiro says Donald Trump should learn to manage political violence by looking to Pennsylvania"

Governor Shapiro, the Inquirer reported,

criticized Trump and his allies for responding to the Kirk shooting with calls for vengeance and cherry-picking which instances of violence to condemn, in turn raising the political temperature.

“I don’t care if it’s coming from the left or the right, we need to be universal in our condemnation, and the president has once again failed that leadership test, failed the morality test, and it makes us all less safe,” Shapiro argued.

https://share.inquirer.com/54oS4F