The Week

■ It turns out that Ross Perot was right. Just about the time NAFTA passed there was, indeed, a giant sucking sound heading South. But it turned out to be Ed Rollins’s career.

■ After two thousand books, many TV specials, and a movie, it is once again becoming the consensus of experts that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, murdered JFK, as surely as Leon Czolgosz shot the hapless William McKinley. John Kennedy’s Presidency would be as memorable as McKinley’s (perhaps less so, since McKinley’s Cuban venture succeeded) were it not for the power of image-making in a media age: not least among intellectuals, and among that generation touted as the most skeptical in history, the baby-boomers. Even when we have concluded that the glitter was dross, we still feel compelled to scour it away. Our absorption with the media will have to ratchet to some new level, of intensity or detachment, before we see Jack Kennedy for what he was: a charming and cunning pol, who still carried traces of a moderately crooked, and moderately conservative, background.

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■ It turns out that Ross Perot was right. Just about the time NAFTA passed there was, indeed, a giant sucking sound heading South. But it turned out to be Ed Rollins’s career.

■ After two thousand books, many TV specials, and a movie, it is once again becoming the consensus of experts that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, murdered JFK, as surely as Leon Czolgosz shot the hapless William McKinley. John Kennedy’s Presidency would be as memorable as McKinley’s (perhaps less so, since McKinley’s Cuban venture succeeded) were it not for the power of image-making in a media age: not least among intellectuals, and among that generation touted as the most skeptical in history, the baby-boomers. Even when we have concluded that the glitter was dross, we still feel compelled to scour it away. Our absorption with the media will have to ratchet to some new level, of intensity or detachment, before we see Jack Kennedy for what he was: a charming and cunning pol, who still carried traces of a moderately crooked, and moderately conservative, background.