Why Presidents Fail provides an innovative, comprehensive assessment of how political parties influence presidential survival and contributes fresh ideas to the debates on the stability of presidential governments.
https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=35483
"Christopher A. Martínez sheds important new light on presidential crises in Latin America by stressing the crucial role of party institutionalization. Based on thorough, in-depth research, he convincingly substantiates this argument with a range of country case studies."
—Kurt G. Weyland, The University of Texas at Austin
#ReadUP #ComparativePolitics #latinamericanstudies
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4.18 晚上在CNN看完此次演說，主持人提醒大家要等總統夫婦先走...
Obama Mourns Victims of Boston Marathon Bombing
April 19, 2013
BOSTON — President Obama mourned the victims of the Boston Marathon bombings at an interfaith service of healing on Thursday, embracing Chinese graduate student Lu Lingzi as one of this city's own and speaking of the “heartache of her family and friends on both sides of a great ocean.”Almost 1,800 people packed the pews and hundreds more outside listened intently as his words were broadcast into the morning sun.
“Our prayers are with the Lu family of China, who sent their daughter, Lingzi, to BU so that she could experience all this city has to offer. She was a 23-year-old student, far from home,” he said. “And in the heartache of her family and friends on both sides of a great ocean, we’re reminded of the humanity that we all share.'”
In the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, Mr. Obama comforted the Campbell family, who lost their daughter Krystle. “Those who knew her said that with her red hair and her freckles and her ever-eager willingness to speak her mind, she was beautiful, sometimes she could be a little noisy, and everybody loved her for it. She would have turned 30 next month. As her mother said through her tears, 'This doesn’t make any sense.'”
And he mourned the third and youngest victim, 8-year-old Martin Richard. “His last hours were as perfect as an 8-year-old boy could hope for -- with his family, eating ice cream at a sporting event. And we’re left with two enduring images of this little boy -- forever smiling for his beloved Bruins, and forever expressing a wish he made on a blue poster board:
'No more hurting people. Peace.'”
Boston University announced the establishment of a scholarship fund in Lu's memory, and her family issued a statement thanking the public for its compassion and recalling their daughter as a “intelligent and beautiful young woman” who fell in love with Boston and its people.
“She loved her new friends and her professors at Boston University. She wanted to play a role in international business, specializing in applied mathematics. She has been studying very hard toward her goal. Sadly, it was not to be.”
Kenneth Feld, the BU trustee who proposed the scholarship honoring Lu, said it recognized the university's connection to China. More than 2,000 students from China are studying at BU, and U.S. ambassador Gary F. Locke is an alumnus, the university said.
At the service, Mr. Obama's theme was the marathon, both as road race and metaphor, and he began his remarks with the same phrase that he used to end them: “Scripture tells us to run with endurance the race that is set before us.”
He assured the maimed that they were not alone. “We will all be with you as you learn to stand and walk and, yes, run again,” he said. “Of that, I have no doubt. You will run again.”
With a nod to his years as a student at Harvard Law School and to his speech at the 2004 Democratic convention here when he burst on the national political stage, he told this heartbroken city: “Every one of us has been touched by this attack on your beloved city. Every one of us stands with you. Because, after all, it’s our beloved city, too.”
“Like you, Michelle and I have walked these streets. Like you, we know these neighborhoods. And like you, in this moment of grief, we join you in saying -- 'Boston, you’re my home.
' For millions of us, what happened on Monday is personal. It’s personal.”And whoever the perpetrators may be, Mr. Obama dismissed them as “small, stunted individuals who would destroy instead of build.”
But mostly he rallied the living as he reflected this city’s determined spirit.
“Like Bill Iffrig, 78 years old — the runner in the orange tank top who we all saw get knocked down by the blast — we may be momentarily knocked off our feet, but we’ll pick ourselves up,” the president said. “We’ll keep going. We will finish the race.”If the perpetrators sought to intimidate or terrorize Boston, he said, “well, it should be pretty clear by now that they picked the wrong city to do it.” The crowd cheered as if at a sports arena. “Not here in Boston.”
奧巴馬悼念波士頓爆炸案死難者
紐約時報 報道 2013年04月19日
Matt Rourke/Associated Press
周四，波士頓聖十字主教座堂舉行多宗教悼念儀式前，內森·芬尼和5歲的女兒麥克納。
波士頓——周四，奧巴馬總統在多宗教哀悼儀式上悼念波士頓馬拉松比賽(Boston Marathon)爆炸事件的遇難者，稱遇難的中國研究生呂令子是波士頓社會的一員，並說“大洋兩岸的家人和朋友都為她感到心痛”。
奧巴馬在晨曦中發言時，教堂的長凳上坐着近1800人，還有數百人在教堂外面專註聆聽。
他還追思了第三名也是年紀最小的一名遇難者，8歲的馬丁·理乍得(Martin Richard)。
“對新朋友和波士頓大學的教授，她也滿心熱愛。她憧憬將來在國際商務領域發揮作用，專門從事應用數學方面的工作。為了這個目標，她一直非常努力地學習。可惜，她不能如願了。”
提議為紀念呂令子設立獎學金的波士頓大學託管人肯尼斯·費爾特(Kenneth Feld)稱，學校意識到了自身與中國之間的聯繫。該校稱，目前有2000多名來自中國的學生在波士頓大學學習，美國駐華大使駱家輝(Gary F. Locke)也是波士頓大學校友。
奧巴馬在悼念儀式上的講話主題是馬拉松，既指比賽，也是比喻，以同樣的話開場並結尾：
回顧自己在哈佛法學院(Harvard Law School)的學生時代，以及自己躍上全國政治舞台時在2004年波士頓民主黨大會上發表的演講，他對這個傷心欲絕的城市說：“你們熱愛的城市遭遇的這 次襲擊觸動了我們每個人。我們每個人都和你們站在一起。因為，歸根結底，這也是我們熱愛的城市。”
不過，他大部分時間都是在回憶這座城市的堅韌精神，鼓舞人心。
總統說，
奧巴馬在晨曦中發言時，教堂的長凳上坐着近1800人，還有數百人在教堂外面專註聆聽。
“我們為呂令子身在中國的家人祈禱，他們把女兒送到波士頓大學（Boston University，簡稱BU），讓她體驗這個城市所能給予的一切。她是一名年方23歲的學生，與家鄉相隔萬里，”他說。“大洋兩岸的家人和朋友都為她感到心痛，這體現了我們共有的人性。”在聖十字主教座堂(Cathedral of the Holy Cross)，奧巴馬安慰了坎貝爾(Campbell)一家，他們失去了女兒克里斯托(Krystle)。“認識她的人說，她很漂亮，紅頭髮，有一些雀 斑，她有時候可能有點鬧騰，大家卻都喜歡她這一點。她本來會在下個月滿30歲。正如她的母親含淚所說的一樣，‘這樣的事情毫無道理。’”
他還追思了第三名也是年紀最小的一名遇難者，8歲的馬丁·理乍得(Martin Richard)。
“他生命的最後幾個小時是一個8歲男孩所能期望的最完美時刻：和家人在一起，在一項體育比賽的現場吃着冰激凌。這個小男孩給我們留下了 兩個永難忘懷的畫面，畫面里的他永遠笑對着他熱愛的波士頓棕熊隊(Boston Bruins)，永遠傾訴着他在一張藍色海報上寫下的願望：波士頓大學稱，為了紀念呂令子，該校已經設立了一個獎學金基金。她的家人也發佈了一封公開信，感謝公眾的同情，並回憶稱他們的女兒是一個“智慧美麗的姑娘”，已經喜歡上了波士頓和波士頓人。
‘不要再有人受傷害。祈盼和平。’”
“對新朋友和波士頓大學的教授，她也滿心熱愛。她憧憬將來在國際商務領域發揮作用，專門從事應用數學方面的工作。為了這個目標，她一直非常努力地學習。可惜，她不能如願了。”
提議為紀念呂令子設立獎學金的波士頓大學託管人肯尼斯·費爾特(Kenneth Feld)稱，學校意識到了自身與中國之間的聯繫。該校稱，目前有2000多名來自中國的學生在波士頓大學學習，美國駐華大使駱家輝(Gary F. Locke)也是波士頓大學校友。
奧巴馬在悼念儀式上的講話主題是馬拉松，既指比賽，也是比喻，以同樣的話開場並結尾：
“《聖經》告訴我們，我們要以堅韌不拔的精神在前方的比賽中奔跑。”他向傷者保證，他們並不孤單。他說，“在你們學習再次站立、再次行走以及，是的，再次奔跑的過程中，我們大家都會和你們在一起。對此，我毫不懷疑。你們一定能再次奔跑。”
回顧自己在哈佛法學院(Harvard Law School)的學生時代，以及自己躍上全國政治舞台時在2004年波士頓民主黨大會上發表的演講，他對這個傷心欲絕的城市說：“你們熱愛的城市遭遇的這 次襲擊觸動了我們每個人。我們每個人都和你們站在一起。因為，歸根結底，這也是我們熱愛的城市。”
“和你們一樣，米歇爾(Michelle)和我也在這些街道上走過。和你們一樣，我們也熟悉這些街區。和你們一樣，在這個悲痛的時刻，我們要和你們一起說——‘波士頓，你是我的家園。’對我們當中的數百萬人來說，周一發生的事情是一種切膚之痛。切膚之痛。”無論襲擊者是誰，奧巴馬都將他們蔑稱為“只知毀滅不知創造的小人”。
不過，他大部分時間都是在回憶這座城市的堅韌精神，鼓舞人心。
總統說，
“比如78歲的比爾·伊費里格(Bill Iffrig)，就是那個穿着橘黃色背心的選手，我們都看到了他被炸倒在地。像他一樣，我們也會有被暫時擊倒的時候，但我們將會站起來。我們會繼續前行。我們會完成比賽。”他說，如果襲擊者試圖嚇倒波士頓，“那麼，現在已經很清楚，他們選錯了城市。”人群就像在運動場上那樣歡呼起來。“波士頓不會被嚇倒。”
-----
2011.7.9 總統學當然必須包括他/她的配偶。
Stevenson, ( Adlai E., 1900-1965) 在一篇關於羅斯福夫人伊蓮娜‧羅斯福 (Eleanor Roosevelt的誄詞《她的旅程已盡》(Her Journeys Are Over)中，也提到林肯和小羅斯福總統。
剛過世的福特總統夫人Betty Ford， 雖然大家不太熟悉，但她協助建立了全美最有名的戒毒治療所。
Betty Ford 1918-2011
Betty Ford, Former First Lady, Dies at 93
White House Photograph courtesy of Gerald R. Ford Library
Former President Gerald R. Ford embraced the former first lady, Betty Ford, at the White House Oval Office in 1974. More Photos »
By ENID NEMY
Published: July 8, 2011
Betty Ford, the outspoken and much-admired wife of President Gerald R. Ford who overcame alcoholism and an addiction to pills and helped found one of the best-known rehabilitation centers in the nation, died Friday in Palm Springs, Calif. She was 93.
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The news of her death at Eisenhower Medical Center brought statements of condolence from President Obama, former Presidents George Bush, George W. Bush and Jimmy Carter, and Nancy Reagan, the former first lady.
“She was Jerry Ford’s strength through some very difficult days in our country’s history,” Mrs. Reagan said, “and I admired her courage in facing and sharing her personal struggles with all of us.”
Few first ladies have been as popular as Betty Ford, and it was her frankness and lack of pretense that made her so. She spoke often in support of the Equal Rights Amendment, endorsed legalized abortion, discussed premarital sex and revealed that she intended to share a bed with her husband in the White House.
When her husband’s voice failed him the morning after he was defeated by Jimmy Carter in 1976, it was she who read the official concession statement with smiling grace. And when Mr. Ford died in December 2006, it was Mrs. Ford who announced his death. The six days of national mourning returned her to a spotlight she had tried to avoid in her later years, living in Rancho Mirage, Calif., a golf community southeast of Palm Springs, and tending to her clinic there, the Betty Ford Center.
The country’s affection for Betty Ford transcended party lines. It began in earnest slightly more than two months after Gerald Ford became president in August 1974, following President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation over Watergate. Mr. Ford had been vice president for less than 10 months, named by Nixon to succeed Spiro T. Agnew, who had resigned in disgrace over accusations of bribery and tax evasion. On Sept. 28, 1974, Mrs. Ford had a radical mastectomy after doctors discovered cancer in her right breast.
Courage Against Cancer
Within days, 10,000 letters, more than 500 telephone calls, more than 200 telegrams and scores of floral arrangements poured into the White House and into her suite at Bethesda Naval Hospital. In the months that followed, tens of thousands of American women, inspired by Mrs. Ford’s forthrightness and courage in facing her illness, crowded into doctors’ offices and clinics for breast-cancer examinations.
After leaving the hospital, Mrs. Ford underwent chemotherapy treatment for two years. In November 1976, her physician announced that she had made a complete recovery.
Mrs. Ford was once asked if she felt sorry for herself during the trauma of losing her breast.
“No! Oh, no — heavens, no,” she replied. “I’ve heard women say they’d rather lose their right arm, and I can’t imagine it. It’s so stupid. I can even wear my evening clothes.”
She advised women facing such an operation to “go as quickly as possible and get it done.”
“Once it’s done,” she said, “put it behind you and go on with your life.”
Breast cancer was only one of the medical battles Mrs. Ford won.
Confronting Addiction
Her dependency on pills began in 1964 with a medical prescription to relieve constant pain from a neck injury and a pinched nerve. Her drinking, which became troublesome as she was faced with her husband’s frequent absences on political business, grew increasingly serious as Mr. Ford’s Congressional career advanced. Her loneliness was compounded by low self-esteem and a debilitating self-consciousness about things like her lack of a college degree.
“Now I know that some of the pain I was trying to wipe out was emotional,” she recalled in “Betty: A Glad Awakening” (1987), the second volume of her autobiography written with Ms. Chase. Going back to the days when her husband was a Michigan congressman and minority leader in the House of Representatives, she remembered that “on one hand, I loved being ‘the wife of’; on the other hand, I was convinced that the more important Jerry became, the less important I became.”
In 1978, the year after leaving the White House, her husband, children, doctors and several friends confronted her about her drinking and her abuse of pills. She refused to acknowledge that a problem existed, calling her family “a bunch of monsters,” but she eventually entered the Long Beach Naval Hospital in California for treatment.
The Betty Ford Center, dedicated on Oct. 3, 1982, was a direct result of Mrs. Ford’s victory over her alcoholism and addiction. Set on 14 acres on the campus of the Eisenhower Medical Center 11 miles southeast of Palm Springs, the center was a nonprofit venture spearheaded by Mrs. Ford and Leonard K. Firestone, an industrialist and former ambassador to Belgium who raised a major part of the money.
The center’s philosophy, drawn from the 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous, is based on peer interaction and learning to identify and express feelings. Many celebrities, including Elizabeth Taylor, Liza Minnelli, Mary Tyler Moore, Mickey Mantle and Darryl Strawberry, spent time there.
“It’s hard to make anyone understand what it’s like to have your name on something, to be given credit for things you haven’t done,” Mrs. Ford wrote. “I’ve been at meetings where someone turned and thanked me, and I hugged the person and said, ‘Don’t thank me, thank yourself, you’re the one who did it, with God’s help.’ From the beginning, we have wanted every patient at the center to feel, ‘I’m important here, I have some dignity.’ ”
Betty Ford was good at doing the things that every first lady does: accompanying her husband on tours and public ceremonies and holding dinners and parties. Her parties usually lasted past midnight as she danced from one partner to another.
But unlike many other wives of presidents, Mrs. Ford rarely hesitated to make public her views on touchy subjects. She held a White House news conference announcing her support of the Equal Rights Amendment; the mail response ran three to one against her. In 1975, appearing on “60 Minutes,” she said she “wouldn’t be surprised” if her daughter, Susan, had a premarital affair; the mail was four to one against her. Her husband jokingly told her later that the comment had cost him 20 million votes in the 1976 election, she said.
A decade later, reminiscing with Margaret Truman for Ms. Truman’s book “First Ladies,” she voiced regret over that television appearance. Later that year, despite her advocacy for abortion rights, she reined herself in. She said nothing about the Republican platform that called for a constitutional amendment to ban abortion.
She also told Ms. Truman that she had warned her husband not to pardon Nixon, a more definitive statement than one she made in “The Times of My Life” (1978), the first volume of Mrs. Ford’s autobiography. In that book she said she had known that a pardon would be unpopular but that she had supported it anyway.
“I think it had to be done,” she wrote. Nevertheless, she said, she believed it cost her husband the election.
Mrs. Ford said she had been influential in President Ford’s appointments of Carla Hills as secretary of housing and urban development and Anne Armstrong as ambassador to Britain. She was unsuccessful, however, in urging him to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court.
She was, in her own words, “more of a hawk” than her children on the war in Vietnam. Although she said she believed men and women should give two years of service to the country, she confessed she was “very relieved” when her sons drew high draft-lottery numbers.
A Relaxed White House
Mrs. Ford brought a relaxed touch to the White House within days of moving in. She asked why the staff never returned a greeting and was told that President Nixon and the first lady, Pat Nixon, had preferred them to be as silent and invisible as possible. An immediate change went into effect, to the degree that during family meals the president and the butler compared golf scores. And when Mrs. Ford returned from her mastectomy, the staff lined up with signs reading, “We love you, Betty.”
She disliked other manifestations of Mrs. Nixon’s formal tastes, particularly the choice of stiff furniture, which had replaced the more comfortable Kennedy ambience from the early ’60s. Although she left the décor as it was, she could not resist a bit of deviltry. A ceramic bowl in the Yellow Oval Room was supported by two Greek goddesses, one of them with her hands out. “Every time I went through,” Mrs. Ford said, “I used to put a cigarette between her fingers.” Her mischievous side also surfaced after her husband complained that she was too thin. Borrowing a skeleton from a hospital, she dressed it in her hat and coat and sat it in a bedroom chair to welcome him.
Later, when she was no longer first lady, she was criticized in some circles for having a facelift almost immediately after overcoming her addictions. She wanted, she said, a fresh new face for her new life. She later thought that some of the resentment stemmed from the fact that she could no longer be perceived as a victim — of cancer, drugs and drink. “It was easier to be sorry for me, to feel superior to me, and therefore to root for me,” she said. “We all like to cheer an underdog. But I’d stopped being an underdog; I’d gotten myself in hand.”
Elizabeth Anne Bloomer was born on April 8, 1918, in Chicago to William S. Bloomer and the former Hortense Neahr. She always wanted to be called Elizabeth but ended up with Betty, Bet or Bets. She was the youngest child and the only girl in a family of three children. Her father was a traveling salesman in conveyor belts for factories. The family moved to Grand Rapids, Mich., when she was 2.
The Bloomers were financially comfortable, lived in a fashionable area and spent summers at Whitefish Lake. She began dancing lessons when she was 8, and for two summers after graduation from high school she attended Bennington School of the Dance at Bennington College in Vermont. At 14, she was confirmed as an Episcopalian (her mother’s religion; her father was a Christian Scientist) and began working on Saturdays, for $3, as a model for Herpolsheimer’s department store.
At 20, she was in New York, living on the fringes of Greenwich Village and attending dance classes with Martha Graham. She also joined her troupe.
Dance was always a major interest, and Mrs. Ford said many times that she was disappointed that she had never been quite good enough to be a first-rate dancer. When she went to China with her husband in 1975, however, she enchanted the Chinese by kicking off her shoes and dancing in her stocking feet at a Beijing school.
Her mother persuaded her to return to Grand Rapids in 1941, but not before she had modeled on Seventh Avenue and for the John Robert Powers modeling agency. Back home, she became a fashion coordinator for the store in which she had been a teenage model. In her spare time, she taught dance to underprivileged and disabled children.
The following year, she married William C. Warren, a furniture dealer. The marriage ended in divorce in 1947, and she did not ask for alimony. When Mr. Ford became vice president and his wife’s first marriage was disclosed, Mrs. Ford was asked why she had kept it a secret. She hadn’t, she said: “No one ever bothered to ask.”
Some months after her divorce, she began dating Gerald R. Ford, a lawyer with political ambitions and a man she described as “probably the most eligible bachelor in Grand Rapids.” He proposed in February 1948. “He’s a very shy man and he really didn’t tell me he loved me,” she wrote. “He just told me he’d like to marry me — I took him up on it immediately.”
They were married on Oct. 15, 1948, while he was running his first race for a seat in the House. The ceremony took place on a Friday so that Mr. Ford’s plans to go to a Northwestern-Michigan football game the following day would not be disrupted. (He had played center for Michigan.) The groom was 35; the bride, 30. They spent their two-day honeymoon at Republican Party rallies.
Mr. Ford won the election. “We came to Washington for 2 years and stayed for 28,” Mrs. Ford said. Their first son, Michael, was born in 1950 while the Fords lived in an apartment in Georgetown. By 1952, when John, known as Jack, was born, they had moved to an apartment in suburban Northern Virginia. Steven was born in 1956, a year after the Fords’ split-level house in Alexandria, Va., was completed. Susan, their only daughter, came along the next year.
“From the outside, our life looked like a Norman Rockwell illustration,” Mrs. Ford said at one point. Nevertheless, by 1962, she was seeing a psychiatrist twice a week because, as she put it, “I’d lost my feeling of self-worth.”
“I think a lot of women go through this,” she said. “Their husbands have fascinating jobs, their children start to turn into independent people and the women begin to feel useless, empty.”
Later, when she accompanied her husband on campaign trips more frequently, she acknowledged that that, too, was not all fun. At one point, she recalled, she was in an airport and “through clenched teeth said: ‘I don’t want anyone to come over and talk to me. I just want to sit here all alone and finish this cigarette.’ ”
Shortly after leaving the White House, the Fords built a 15-room house bordering the 13th fairway of the Thunderbird Country Club in Rancho Mirage. The couple also acquired a second home, an elaborate ski lodge in Vail, Colo. Mrs. Ford remained active in the Betty Ford Center and in feminist causes.
In addition to her four children, she is also survived by seven grandchildren and several great-grandchildren.
“I am an ordinary woman who was called onstage at an extraordinary time,” she wrote in the prologue to her first autobiography. “I was no different once I became first lady than I had been before. But through an accident of history, I had become interesting to people.”
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