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Havana Syndrome

Listen in on this Morning Joe conversation with Joe Scarborough, Jonathan Lemire and Mike Barnicle as they discuss the mysterious neurological ailment known as Havana Syndrome that has attacked American embassies around the world, while the State Department is now investigating new complaints of brain injuries linked to the so-called Havana Syndrome at the U.S. Embassy in Colombia. “We don’t know the source of the attacks, if indeed they are attacks. So, you’ve had all these embassies around the world in the, you know, State Department employees suffering from something and yet we can’t…put our finger exactly on what that is. So, it’s a quandary for the State Department, which is vastly undermanned, which I think, Jonathan, is part of the story in and of itself, given the gutting of the bureaucracy in the State Department within the past four years, but the idea is, has to be primary, figure out first what it is. And then we have to deal with it; but they’re trying to do what they can do up to this point, and it’s not much,” says Barnicle about the United States not being able to uncover what or who is causing Havana Syndrome. Join the conversation here.

MIKE BARNICLE: IS IT TIME TO SLOW DOWN?

Morning Joe has on Tim Kreidel talking about his Sunday New York Times piece: The ‘Busy’ Trap

Barnicle says: “I read your piece and I was so thrilled because one of my favorite things to do is sit on my front porch and do nothing other than stare at a 110-year-old Elm tree in my front yard, and I feel guilty about doing it, but I feel wonderful inside.”

ONE DEATH IN AFGHANISTAN: BEN SKLAVER’S ...

Last week, Laura and Gary Sklaver buried their oldest boy, Ben, who was 32 when killed by a suicide bomber in the remote village of Murcheh in the distant land of Afghanistan. Ben was a captain in the U.S. Army. Now he has become one of 804 Americans, 37 from Connecticut, to lose their lives in an expanding war that belongs mostly to the parents and families of those who serve a nation preoccupied by a wounded economy and political polarization.

One Death in Afghanistan: Ben Sklaver’s Story

“He didn’t have to go,” Laura Sklaver said the other day. “His obligation was up in May.”

“But he was recalled in March,” Gary Sklaver added. “And he didn’t want to leave his men.”

Ben Sklaver grew up drawn to service. He admired his grandfather, who served with George Patton’s Army in World War II. He joined ROTC at Tufts, received a master’s in international relations from the Fletcher School of Diplomacy, was commissioned as an officer in the Army Reserve in 2003 and became convinced that a world consumed with conflict and terrorism might be changed by Americans bringing clean water, medicine and food as much as by drones, missiles and military might.

“This was his second tour overseas,” said Laura while sitting at her dining-room table. “His unit went to Uganda for a year in 2007. That’s where he created his nonprofit, the ClearWater Initiative, so people there would have something we all take for granted — clean water.”

In a dangerous and divided world, Ben’s principal weapon was idealism. In Uganda, he helped bring the simplest of things — clean drinking water and a bit of hope — to thousands who often saw sunrise as just one more dawn in a country where death can seem as common as drawing a breath. After his tour in Uganda ended, he came home seeking other ways to help those most in need.

“Ben had just started a new job with FEMA in New York when his unit was recalled,” Gary Sklaver said. “They were supposed to go to Iraq, but then the strategy changed along with his orders, and they were sent to Afghanistan.”

He shipped out July 6. His fiancée, Beth Segaloff, drove him to the airport. They set a wedding date for next June, when his tour of duty in Afghanistan was to end. “I cried every day he was there,” his mother, a lawyer, says. “I took long walks every day, worried every minute, avoided reading the papers or listening to news about the war, wondered how my son could tell the difference between people over there who wanted peace and people who wanted to kill him.”

On the day Ben died, four other Americans were also killed in the nearly medieval land that has exposed the folly of empires for centuries. At the final moment of his young and accomplished life — when he stood talking to a village leader in Murcheh — he wore the colors of a country nobly represented by an all-volunteer Army; he fought on behalf of a dangerously self-absorbed people back home and the politicians who represent them, many of whom are unable to see beyond the next election.

“When did you last hear from him?” I asked his parents.

“The last time we spoke was on Yom Kippur,” Laura said. “He called to wish us well.”

“We didn’t talk long,” said Gary. “Ben said he wanted to let his men use the phone while they had one. That’s who Ben was: generous, kind, always looking out for others.”

And here is how war too often ends for those who serve and the families left behind, the uncounted casualties among us: a knock on the door of a home located on a small-town street where fallen leaves glisten in Autumn sun. Two soldiers on the stoop bearing the bitter details of death. A mother and father driving to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to stand on a tarmac while their oldest boy, a lost treasure to his family and his nation, is carried gently to a hearse. A crowded service last Tuesday at Congregation Mishkan Israel in Hamden. A dining-room table filled with pictures of his life, letters of condolence, medals awarded for bravery, a folded flag and young Ben’s parents — Gary and Laura Sklaver — left with a permanent hole in the heart, two more casualties of a war waged by the forgotten few.

 

Tito and Theo – Grantland

Tito and Theo

Tito Francona is tired. He is sitting at his desk in the manager’s office located at the far end of a small locker room in a ballpark — Fenway Park — approaching its 100th birthday.

He is wearing white uniform pants, a red hot-top and black spike-less athletic shoes, a Red Sox cap on his hairless head. And he is staring at a cluster of numbers on the screen of a laptop. The numbers run alongside the names of those players who are in the starting lineup of the Baltimore Orioles, the Friday night game about four hours away. The numbers are mathematical guidelines to the recent baseball past: What Baltimore players did against Red Sox pitchers. Where players are most likely to hit the ball if they connect with a curve, a slider, or a cut fastball.

“Can’t call ’em stat-geek stuff,” Tito Francona volunteers. “That’s disrespectful. There’s a lot of good information here, matchups, stuff like that. People work hard at this.

“I used to do these by hand,” he says. “Did it before all this math stuff and computers got so big. Did it without knowing it. When I managed the Phillies. Did ’em all by hand then. Would sit down with a pencil and a piece of paper and go through opposing lineups. Took forever. Now it’s all on these things, computers.

“And I suck at computers,” he is saying. “I’m a one-finger guy with them. I can get around on a computer OK using one finger but it’s not my favorite thing.”

“How you doing otherwise?” he is asked.

“Exhausted,” he replies.

“How’s Nick doing?”

“He’s OK,” said the Red Sox skipper, now in his eighth summer of employment with a club that dominates daily discussion in New England. “Guys in his squad in front of him on patrol got hit the other day. Tough day for him. Good thing though, he loves what he’s doing.”

The father now talking about the son: 26-year-old Lt. Nick Francona, United States Marine Corps, halfway through a six-month, one-day tour leading a rifle platoon in a long war that has forever ravaged a country locked somewhere in centuries past, Afghanistan.

“You OK?”

“Awful, ” the manager says. “I’m doing awful. My wife’s doing worse. I think about it all the time. Worry about him all the time. Hard not to. Try and stay away from the news about it. Try not to watch TV when stories about it are on, but it’s there, you know? It’s always there.”

The phone on his desk rings and Francona reaches to answer with his left hand, the right-hand index finger slowly scrolling through the Orioles roster on his laptop, his eyes narrowing behind glasses, looking, always looking for an edge.

“Yeah Theo, what’s up?” he says, pausing to listen to the guy on the line, Theo Epstein, the 37-year-old general manager.

“Yeah, I spoke to Buck Showalter about that … OK … Talk to you later.”

“Theo,” Francona says, hanging up, a smile creasing his weary face. “How do we get along? We got through eight years here together. We haven’t killed each other. I’d say we get along pretty good.”

The Major League Baseball season runs from early February, across spring, through summer, and concludes for most players and teams just as Columbus Day approaches. The season, longest of all the majors and quite exhausting, is a bit like dating a nymphomaniac; it demands daily performance. And in Boston the expectation is always to play toward Halloween.

In some aspects the game has changed irrevocably since a young Tito Francona, his father’s first baseman’s mitt on his hand, ran to sandlots in the small Pennsylvania town where his family lived. Managers today are provided tools to compete that were simply not available 20, even 10 years ago. They have access to a Niagara of information sometimes spoon-fed by a generation of front-office young people who have rarely played actual games.

“People, some writers I guess, get that wrong you know,” Tito Francona points out. “Theo and the guys working for him, they’re not in here six times a day with stats telling us what to do. We get stuff before a series begins and it’s valuable. I study it. I do.

“But it’s about more than numbers,” he says. “I remember a few years ago, we’re playing the Yankees on national TV and one of the kids in baseball ops — he’s not here now — says to me about five hours before the game, ‘You got Mike Lowell in the lineup?’ And I say, ‘Yeah.’ And he says he doesn’t do well in the matchup with Chien-Ming Wang, who was pitching for the Yankees.

“I say to the kid, ‘So you don’t want me to play him?’ And he says, ‘Yeah’ and I tell him, ‘OK. Look over there. There’s Mikey Lowell’s locker. He’s over there. You go tell Mikey Lowell he’s not playing in a national TV game against our biggest rival ’cause your fucking numbers tell us not to play him. See what kind of reaction you get from him and then come back and tell me.’ Course Mikey Lowell played that game.

“That doesn’t happen a lot, though. It works pretty well, the numbers stuff and us down here.”

“What are the biggest differences between you and Theo?” Francona is asked.

“There aren’t a whole lot,” he answers. “We talk every day. It’s good. We’re not yelling ‘Shut the fuck up’ at each other either. He knows I value the input I get from him and the guys in baseball ops, but he knows my world down here in the clubhouse is different from theirs.

“I get it. He knows I get it. And he knows getting a player in winter is different from getting a guy ready in the seventh inning. In uniform you’re looking at today. Right now.”

Two different worlds. Francona and Epstein. They are characters out of a kind of baseball version of Upstairs-Downstairs the old PBS series about class and expectation. One is Ivy League. The other is Summer League. One grew up dreaming of baseball. The other played it, raised in a house with a father who made a living at it in the major leagues.

Terry Francona is 52 years old, a baseball lifer from New Brighton, Penn., where the median annual family income today is roughly $31,000. The town is 30 miles northwest of Pittsburgh, and it is a place where men worked factory jobs and women knew how to stretch every grocery dollar, day to day, week to week. He went to high school there, attended the University of Arizona, was a 1980 first-round draft choice by the Montreal Expos.

Theo Epstein, 37, grew up in Brookline, Mass., median annual family income, $120,000, in the shadow of Fenway Park. He went to Yale, was sports editor of the Yale Daily News, got a job as a summer intern with the Orioles, parlayed his energy and his instincts into a front office position with the San Diego Padres, came home to Boston when John Henry, Tom Werner, and Larry Lucchino purchased the Red Sox in 2001. Took over as general manager in 2003, a lifelong dream in his back pocket at age 29.

The other day Epstein was sitting in a conference room located in the bowels of the ballpark, in a space that used to be part of an old bowling alley before it and much of the rest of Fenway was renovated and rebuilt under the watchful eye of Lucchino and ballpark architect Janet Marie Smith. He is a confident, disciplined, self-contained young guy, cautious with language and body movement, always alert that in the crazed media atmosphere that surrounds the Red Sox, one dropped syllable or the wrong adjective could put thousands of talk-show callers into crisis mode. In addition to statistics, the semantics of baseball have changed, too, young front-office people far less reliant on one of the locker-room staples of the game: The F-Bomb.

“What do you think Tito said about you?” I ask Epstein.

“Ahh,” he says, “he probably said we worked really well together. That we understand each other and respect the differences between our two jobs, and that he knows I have his back.

On the walls of the conference room were several white-boards filled with names of high school and college players just drafted, along with others to be looked at in fall ball leagues. The future hanging right there. The immediate, game no. 89 on the march to 162, four hours away.

“Actually we’re like an old married couple,” Epstein adds. “I can usually tell from his facial expression what kind of mood he’s in. And there is an element of ‘his’ world versus ‘my’ world in the relationship, but we’ve learned to pick our battles, and as well as I know him he knows me too.

“Communication is different in the clubhouse than it is in a boardroom. The heartbeat that exists in the clubhouse … you don’t find that same type of heartbeat in the front office. There is a cloak of intensity in the clubhouse that doesn’t exist here,” the general manager points out. “There is a little more objectivity here in this office. We see the game at 10,000 feet. Tito sees it 50 feet away. Tito is looking at tonight’s game and those of us in baseball ops, a lot of the time, are looking at the next five years.

“His job is clear: Win tonight’s game. That’s his focus. Ours is that, as well, but the focus is also on the years ahead. That’s the inherent conflict between the two jobs, his and mine. It’s the subjective versus the objective.”

“What did you want to know from him when he interviewed for the job?” Theo Epstein is asked.

“That’s interesting,” he replies. “The big thing was what kind of relationship would exist? Would both of us be willing to say anything to the other without worrying about hurting feelings?”

“Right before I interviewed for the job with Theo, I called Mark Shapiro of the Indians. He’s one of my best friends in baseball and I asked him what I should do,” Tito Francona was saying earlier. “He gave me good advice I still use today. Mark told me, ‘Just don’t try and bullshit him.'”

“It’s become like a family relationship,” Epstein says. “You can’t bury things. We get them out in the open. I recognize the limitations of my view and my background but the two of us work well together.”

Epstein had just returned from lunch with his father, Leslie Epstein, who retired as head of the creative writing department at Boston University. The day before, a 39-year-old Texas firefighter sitting at a Rangers game alongside his 6-year-old son had died after falling out of the stands in pursuit of a foul ball tossed toward him as a generous gesture by Texas outfielder Josh Hamilton.

A dad’s dying young, at a ballpark, his little boy bearing eternal witness, clearly touched Epstein. He is sometimes labeled as cold and impersonal in his approach to whom he wants on or off his roster and what his club’s needs are, but what took place in Texas clearly triggered a reality he knows well: He is a young man living a dream.

“When I heard about that I wanted to have lunch with my dad,” Theo Epstein says. “What an awful story.”

In the manager’s office, Francona, his son Nick constantly on his mind, was attempting to lose himself in the landscape of a baseball game about to be played with the Baltimore Orioles.

“Theo knows,” Francona says with a slight laugh. “He knows he’s already looking at next year’s draft and he knows I’m down here looking at the seventh inning tonight. That’s the game.”

BARNICLE GUEST HOSTS MSNBC’S “WAY TOO EARLY”

Talks to Lesley Stahl from “60 Minutes”

Stay tuned for more Barnicle on “Morning Joe” ….

The Afghan War Through a Marine Mother’s...

Mélida Arredondo, of Roslindale, Mass., center, holds boots worn by her son, Marine Lance Corporal Alexander Arredondo, who was killed in Iraq in 2004, as she joins demonstrators in Boston Dec. 2 in opposition to President Obama’s plan to commit an additional 30,000 troops to the war in Afghanistan. Josh Reynolds / AP The Afghan War Through a Marine Mother’s Eyes

Nearly everything is a sad reminder for Mélida Arredondo: the news on TV, stories in the paper, speeches of Barack Obama and others who talk about a war that seems to have lasted so long and affected so many lives, those lost as well as those left behind.

“Did your son like the Marine Corps?” I ask her.

“Yes,” she replies. “He loved it.”

“And why did he join?”

“Too poor to go to college,” Mélida Arredondo says.

Alexander Arredondo enlisted at 17 and was killed at 20 in Najaf during his second deployment in Iraq. He died on his father’s birthday, Aug. 25, 2004, when Carlos Arredondo turned 44.

“My husband almost killed himself in grief,” his wife says. “The day [the Marines] came to tell us Alex was dead, he poured gasoline all over himself and all over the inside of [their] car and lit it on fire. He survived … physically.”

Last week, she and her husband went to the Kennedy Library in Boston to hear Ted Kennedy’s widow talk about her husband’s book, True Compass. She and Carlos, born in Costa Rica, stood patiently while Vicki Kennedy signed books and shook hands. They reminded her that their son Alex and her husband the Senator died on the same day, Carlos’ birthday, five years apart, and they thanked her for the help Senator Kennedy provided after the young Marine’s death when his father sought citizenship.

“I remember,” Vicki Kennedy told them.

The library event took place hours after Obama announced he would throw 30,000 additional troops into an ungovernable country called Afghanistan. Carlos and Mélida Arredondo listened and thought of their lost son and a nephew now at Fort Hood, one tour of Afghanistan behind him, a second on the horizon because the Army is fractured by years of battle.

“People have no idea what it does to families,” she says. “When he got killed, I didn’t sleep for days. I still don’t sleep. I lost 30 pounds. My husband withdrew from everyone.

“My son Brian, he is 22, and he can’t seem to do anything without thinking about Alex. We are very worried about him.”

The families of the fallen are nearly alone in a nation served by an all-volunteer military now nearing a decade on the front line against an enemy that wears no uniform and cannot be brought to any negotiating table. The pain of loss is forever. Their shared grief scatters across the land like ashes blown by the wind, invisible to the majority preoccupied with joblessness and a gnawing anxiety that America might be broken.

“I was disappointed in Obama,” Mélida Arredondo says. “I thought, ‘I’ve heard this before, from Bush.’ He wasn’t as passionate as he usually is. He sounded like a professor. I want to hear him talk about the cost of these wars. I want a discourse about a war tax. I want people to have some skin in the game.”

“Did you believe him?” I ask.

“Wrong question,” she suggests. “Did he believe his own speech? I don’t think so.”

She speaks from another battleground too, the health care wars that threaten to swallow Washington. For nine years, Mélida Arredondo has worked at a neighborhood health center in the Dorchester section of Boston, the Upham’s Corner Health Center. She has a master’s in public health and does the work of three people because of staff layoffs and funding cutbacks.

“We take care of the poor,” she points out. “We had 250,000 patient visits last year in this one clinic. We’ll have even more this year. We have staff people who speak Vietnamese, Spanish, Haitian Creole, Portuguese and English. Many of the people we see are uninsured. The costs are enormous. That’s why I’m a fiscal conservative. Working here, I have to be.”

She is behind a desk on the second floor of a three-story brick building located on a busy boulevard filled with those who measure the future by a wristwatch. She is surrounded by the heartache of those who show up grappling with the oldest of maladies: no money. The work helps push her own sadness, etched permanently in her eyes, off the screen for a few hours each day.

Two days ago, returning home in darkness, she discovered a letter from the President. She and her husband had written twice to the White House, upset about the prospect of increased casualties.

“Thank you for writing me,” Barack Obama wrote. “Every day, we are humbled by the legacy of our men and women in uniform who sacrificed their lives for our country.”

Mélida Arredondo paused after that first paragraph. She thought of Alex and her husband Carlos and her nephew at Fort Hood. She thought about the long parade of the poor who arrive each day at her work seeking care, and she thought about the fact that she was a member of a Gold Star family.

“Wars cost a lot,” she says.

BARNICLE INVOLVED IN AN MSNBC FAMILY “FEUD”

Hotline On Call/National Journal

By Rachelle Douillard-Prouix

During this morning’s broadcast of “Morning Joe,” MSNBC’s Willie Geist had a (lighthearted) bone to pick with Mike Barnicle over sarcastic comments the latter made during the show’s Wednesday broadcast. To highlight the annual lighting of the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center that took place last night, Geist reported live from the courtyard.

Barnicle, following Geist’s report from in front of the hulking tree: “I finally realized what I want for Christmas, Willie. I would like to see that tree fall right on you right now.”

Geist reported this morning on the show that he had received many emails regarding Barnicle’s comments, and demanded an apology.

Geist: “He said he wanted the tree to fall on me. I’ve received a number of emails, including from members of my own family, attacking Mike Barnicle.

Mike Barnicle, what say you, sir?”

Barnicle, reading from newspaper coverage of the statement golfer Tiger Woods released in light of his own recent controversy: “Willie, and all of you people out there, let me just say, I have let my family down, and I regret those transgressions with all my heart. I have not been true to my values in that statement yesterday.”

Continued Barnicle: “And I’m far short of perfect. I am dealing with my behavior, and personal failings, behind closed doors with Willie and my family. So, I beg your forgiveness.”

Geist: “I forgive you for your personal failings. Thank you, Mike Barnicle. Apology accepted.”


Barnicle on Kennedy: Of Memory and the S...

Barnicle on Kennedy: Of Memory and the Sea

Here was Ted Kennedy, 74-year-old son, brother, father, husband, Senator, living history, American legend. He was sitting on a wicker chair on the front porch of the seaside home that held so much of his life within its walls. He was wearing a dark blue blazer and a pale blue shirt. He was tieless and tanned on a spectacular October morning in 2006, and he was smiling too because he could see his boat, the Mya, anchored in Hyannis Port harbor, rocking gently in a warm breeze that held a hint of another summer just passed. Election Day, the last time his fabled name would appear on a ballot, was two weeks away.

“When you’re out on the ocean,” he was asked that day, “do you ever see your brothers?”

“Sure,” Kennedy answered, his voice a few decibels above a whisper. “All the time … all the time. There’s not a day I don’t think of them. This is where we all grew up. There have been some joyous times here. Difficult times too.

“We all learned to swim here. Learned to sail. I still remember my brother Joe, swimming with him here, before he went off to war. My brother Jack, out on the water with him … I remember it all so well. He lived on the water, fought on the water.”

He paused then, staring toward Nantucket Sound. Here he was not the last living brother from a family that had dominated so much of the American political landscape during the second half of the 20th century; he was simply a man who had lived to see dreams die young and yet soldiered on while carrying a cargo of sadness and responsibility.

“The sea … there are eternal aspects to the sea and the ocean,” he said that day. “It anchors you.”

He was home. Who he was — who he really was — is rooted in the rambling, white clapboard house in Hyannis Port to which he could, and would, retreat to recover from all wounds.

“How old were you when your brother Joe died?” Ted was asked that morning.

“Twelve,” he replied. “I was 12 years old.”

Joe Kennedy Jr., the oldest of nine children, was the first to die — at 29 — when the plane he was flying on a World War II mission exploded over England on Aug. 12, 1944.

“Mother was in the kitchen. Dad was upstairs. I was right here, right on this porch, when a priest arrived with an Army officer. I remember it quite clearly,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy remembered it all. The wins, the losses and the fact there were never any tie games in his long life. Nobody was neutral when it came to the man and what he accomplished in the public arena. And few were aware of the private duties he gladly assumed as surrogate father to nieces and nephews who grew up in a fog of myth.

He embraced strangers. Brian Hart met Kennedy at Arlington National Cemetery on a cold, gray November day in 2003. Brian and his wife Alma were burying their 20-year-old son, Army Private First Class John Hart, who had been killed in Iraq. “I turned around at the end of the service, and that was the first time I met Senator Kennedy,” the father of the dead soldier said. “He was right there behind us. I asked him if he could meet with me later to talk about how and why our son died — because he did not have the proper equipment to fight a war. He was in a vehicle that was not armored.

“That month Senator Kennedy pushed the Pentagon to provide more armored humvees for our troops. Later, when I thanked him, he told me it wasn’t necessary, that he wanted to thank me for helping focus attention on the issue and that he knew what my wife and I were feeling because his mother — she was a Gold Star mother too.

“On the first anniversary of John’s death, he and his wife Vicki joined Alma and me at Arlington,” Brian said. “He told Alma that early morning was the best time to come to Arlington. It was quiet and peaceful, and the crowds wouldn’t be there yet. He had flowers for my son’s grave. With all that he has to do, he remembered our boy.”

Ted Kennedy was all about remembering. He remembered birthdays, christenings and anniversaries. He was present at graduations and funerals. He organized picnics, sailing excursions, sing-alongs at the piano and touch-football games on the lawn. He presided over all things family. He was the navigator for those young Kennedys who sometimes seemed unsure of their direction as life pulled them between relying on reputation and reality.

An emotional man, he became deeply devoted to his Catholic faith and his second wife Vicki. He even learned to view the brain cancer that eventually killed him as an odd gift — a gradual fading of a kind that would be easier for his family and friends to come to terms with than the violent and sudden loss of three brothers and a sister, Kathleen. He, at least, was given the gift of time to prepare.

The day after Thanksgiving in 2008, six months after his diagnosis, Kennedy had a party. He and Vicki invited about 100 people to Hyannis Port. Chemotherapy had taken a toll on Ted’s strength, but Barack Obama’s electoral victory had invigorated him. His children, stepchildren and many of his nieces and nephews were there. So were several of his oldest friends, men who had attended grammar school, college or law school with Kennedy. Family and friends: the ultimate safety net.

Suddenly, Ted Kennedy wanted to sing. And he demanded everyone join him in the parlor, where he sat in a straight-backed chair beside the piano. Most of the tunes were popular when all the ghosts were still alive, still there in the house. Ted sang “Some Enchanted Evening,” and everyone chimed in, the smiles tinged with a touch of sadness.

The sound spilled out past the porch, into a night made lighter by a full moon whose bright glare bounced off the dark waters of Nantucket Sound, beyond the old house where Teddy — and he was always “Teddy” here — mouthed the lyrics to every song, sitting, smiling, happy to be surrounded by family and friends in a place where he could hear and remember it all. And as he sang, his blue eyes sparkled with life, and for the moment it seemed as if one of his deeply felt beliefs — “that we will all meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when” — was nothing other than true.

“I love living here,” Ted Kennedy once said. “And I believe in the Resurrection.”

 

BARNICLE’S VIEW ON WTKK: The false arrest of Henry Louis Gates

7/22/09: Barnicle talks about the role of race in the recent false arrest of Henry Louis Gates

Listen here: https://barnicle.969fmtalk.mobi/2009/07/22/72209-henry-lewis-gates-arrest-story.aspx

“Barnicle’s View”, with Mike Barnicle, Imus in the Morning, Monday-Wednesday-Friday, 6:55a & 8:55a.

Coming Soon: Barnicle hosts WTKK’s Evolutionary Luncheon May 19, featuring...

On May 19, 2009, WTKK’s Evolutionary Luncheon will showcase Jack and Suzy Welch for Winning the 10-10-10 Way, hosted by Mike Barnicle. This powerful talk about strategically winning in business and in life will highlight Suzy Welch’s new book, 10-10-10. Used by senior business executives, government administrators, entrepreneurs, college students and busy moms, Suzy’s straightforward and transparent approach to decision making is a powerful strategy for immediate and future clarity and success.

To order tickets: https://www.wtkk.com/

BARNICLE’S VIEW ON WTKK: Our terrible winter

3/2/09: Barnicle talks about the horrible winter in the Northeast, and the current storm that is slamming New England as the show is being broadcast.

Listen here: https://barnicle.969fmtalk.mobi/2009/03/02/3209-wintersnow-storm.aspx

“Barnicle’s View”, with Mike Barnicle, Imus in the Morning, Monday-Wednesday-Friday, 6:55a & 8:55a.