"Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country" – John F. Kennedy, Ted Sorensen.
Yeah, I met this Ted Sorensen. His brother Bob invited me to live in his family's brownstone on the Upper East Side when I landed in New York. Bob was a Princeton professor at the time, but the person who recommended me to him and whose husband worked with him for Radio Free Europe back in West Germany — which also aired my stuff from behind the Curtain or made noise when we got nabbed — told me they thought he worked for the CIA. Could be, because Ted himself was a shoo-in for a CIA director under Carter, until Chappaquiddick came up. John F. I didn't meet, because he was shot dead before I came.
But later on, when I got bored with a library gig at Pace University, fixed by the oldie connections, and hired out as a busboy for the Oak Room in the Plaza Hotel…
…there was an old waiter there, Fred. Donald Trump, who bought The Plaza for a while for his then-wife paying her one dollar a year and for all the dresses she'd pick, would put up a plaque in the Oak Room right next to George M. Cohan's on Fred's 50th anniversary with the joint, pure Don.
Fred came from Italy as a kid and became a busboy, like me. One day he said to me, I like how you work, you have gusto. I didn't know the word but looked it up and it was good. And Fred told me that when he served John F. that John F. had pea soup and a Heineken. Pea soup and a Heineken, it felt like I got to know John F. too, just a little bit.
This Substack Explained
My European masterpiece lounges in the best libraries of the West, the Library of Congress, Oxford, Sorbonne, Heidelberg, Harvard, Berkeley. These guys don’t buy crap, yes? My American magic (before it ranks as a revelation) is to bridge with its public yet, but it already made noises in its baby stage. It has fleshed into three ebooks, Americaa (2014, 2018), Seattle (2022), and now Aurora Bridge (here in progress). Though separate, they make a unibody on a quest for a singular spiritual foundation of the European people, I realized at some point. This is probably the super wave that landed me on this shore. I’ll now mix kindred chapters from Americaa and Seattle with the breaking content of Aurora Bridge to get us up to speed, then we’ll roll with the big Aurora. The transforming sensation of “singular spiritual foundation for the European people” should meet us somewhere down the stretch, is the ticket. Advice on wallet: don’t spend on Americaa & Seattle now, most of it is breathing here. Advise on going: start with “Why Aurora Bridge” then follow your pointer, or consider my plan. We’re ready hit the construction site now, let’s go:
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