The History Channel is showing a special, JFK: 3 shots that changed America. It does sort of a timeline and uses newsreels and personal video clips to show what was happening at different important times. They show people saying where they were & what they were doing when they heard the president was shot. They also show the aftermath… All the wild ideas about Oswald having ties to political organizations, Russian influence, etc.

It is well done, and can help provide a window into what it was like to have been alive when that happened.

Did anyone ever write about the United Fruit connections when Mad Men did the Kennedy-Nixon campaign?

That's really part of America's "lost history." Our overthrow of democratically-elected officials in Latin America continues to this day. Those are not the actions of a democracy. John Ashcroft refused to let workers for Chiquita sue when company stooges forced people to work at gunpoint. Forced labor is also not the action of a democracy. Of course, these undemocratic actions are not limited to republicans, since Kermit Roosevelt oversaw the overthrow of Mossedegh in Iran in the 1950s. But Eisenhower had to sign off on it, just as he signed off on the Latin American coups.

And tying back to the Kennedy-centered season 3, another big part of America's "lost history" was the coup plot planned by members of the J.P. Morgan co. (big bail out winners recently, unsurprisingly), a member of the Du Pont family and the "America league" a right-wing fascist organization in the U.S. that opposed the New Deal.

Time Magazine tried to undermine General Smedley Butler, the man the right wingers contacted to be the coup figurehead (he also stood with the Bonus Army marchers who camped out in D.C. when Patton and MacArthur tried to kill U.S. troops who demanded the money they had been promised to them as soldiers during WWI) but finally had to admit that the U.S. House of Representatives did find that Butler's testimony to them was true.

So, conspiracies to kill or overthrow the president of the United States did not start with Kennedy. Nor were attempts by the media powers in the U.S. to ridicule the truths of these treasonous actions by rich and powerful people.

Henry Ford, at that time, also wrote The International Jew, which was a fascist screed against Jewish people. He's rarely if ever presented as the anti-semitic asshole that he was.

Conrad Hilton reminds me of these people with his talk of manifest destiny and his association with the rise of Goldwater and, eventually, Reagan and his enfranchisement of the southern theocrats, followed by the neo-conservatives using these same theocrats to get elected for foreign policy goals… on to now and the monster that this has created in this nation.

I don't think the allusion arising from the Hilton character is accidental, as MW's passing remark about United Fruit demonstrates he is aware of much of America's "lost history" as well.

When the show brought on the "death vish" woman, I thought that was another nod to Bernays and his use of advertising/public relations for social control.

Don's dismissal of Freudian concepts, to me, demonstrated he was both behind and ahead of his time since Freud was so obviously bound to his Victorian cultural mileu he couldn't even imagine what women want and had to pretend they wanted a penis, when in fact women wanted the autonomy and power that a simple accident of birth had conferred upon men for centuries.

Men never had to a damn thing to have privileged status because they had simply been born into a culture with centuries of religious and social belief that conspired to maintain this power over females. The same could be said about inherited or accumulated wealth and its power over democratic processes. Those are the sorts of conspiracies that are really pernicious because they are rarely labeled as such because they have become part of the ideology of a culture and then conflate power with democracy when the two are artificially constructed.

When I first read 71, I had the same thought. Harry is going to throw a fit. He's not clueless about his job. Harry does his actual job, at least the way it's written on paper, well. We've never heard a client complain about, "how dare you ran that ad of mine after that scene." Where Harry fails is office politics, basically anything to do with people.

I'm so torn between wanting to see Sterling Cooper react to 11/22/63 as it happens, and wanting to see the reactions a few days later.

"They're not showing any of our commercials!"

Clueless dweeb….

But other stories had been televised earlier. Hurricane Carla swept through Texas in 1961–the first hurricane to be shown "live." Young Houston newsman Dan Rather caught the eyes of the country by being the first guy to ever stand outside with a microphone, buffetted by the hurricane force winds & rain.

And I remember, back in the 50's, my mother spending all day watching the dullest TV show in the world. We'd just moved from South Dakota–where there was no TV. But this show was just a bunch of guys in suits, sitting at big tables & talking. Later, I realized it was the McCarthy hearings. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army%E2%80%93McCarth…

Back to Our Show: Still don't know how It will be depicted. The ill-starred wedding might be a chance for all our characters to get together & exchange impressions. Will someone smuggle a TV into the reception? Will the Open Bar inspire everybody to say a bunch of things that needed to be said? Or things better not said?

Jefferson Morley, writing for Playboy.com, looks at various issues and, to me, is more objective than a lot of things out there.

Since Robert Baer outed Operation Northwoods, who knows, who can know, who might have been playing whom. I mean that literally. Nevertheless, the sun comes up every day and we make our ways to work.

and – just to say- YES to Don DeLillo. both White Noise and Libra. bathos and pathos – wonderfully written.