MEMORIAL DAY - Let Us Never Forget

"This women’s memorial honors millions of ‘sisters in arms’" PBS NewsHour 5/28/2018

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SUMMARY:  For the 3 million women who have served in the U.S. military, there's a growing effort to highlight and register their place in history.  Going back to the American Revolution, they have held a variety of roles, and are now the fastest-growing group of veterans.  Judy Woodruff reports on the Women in Military Service for America Memorial's work to gather and commemorate their names, photos and stories.

"When Memorial Day becomes every day" PBS NewsHour 5/28/2018

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SUMMARY:  If you’re watching this today, perhaps you’re taking a break from a family barbeque, or maybe you’ve just returned from shopping for some much needed item that this weekend’s sales have allowed you to purchase.  I hope the extra time with your loved ones is rewarding, and the long weekend a satisfying break from the challenges of work, or school, or parenting.  I’ll be hoping for the same for myself and my loved ones.

I still believed that we might all make it home together.  But that’s not how war goes.

But I humbly ask you to consider the following.  Fourteen years ago, I spent Memorial Day looking for I.E.D.s in AND around the city of Mosul, Iraq.  I had only been in country for a couple of months, and the brave men and women of the 101st Airborne Division had worked and fought and bled throughout the previous year to clear the way for what we all hoped would be a relatively peaceful transfer of power.

My unit had not yet suffered its first casualty, and as summer began the purple fingers of Iraqi citizens casting their votes felt like a cause worth facing that danger for.  But soon enough, something shifted.  Attacks increased in both intensity and frequency over the summer, and by the time autumn came around several members of my company had been wounded, some seriously, and some terrifyingly so, especially when you knew you had to go back outside the wire again the next day.  I’ll admit, I was scared pretty much all of the time, but I did my job to the best of my ability, and I still believed that we might all make it home together.

But that’s not how war goes.  Close to Christmas, as 2004 was coming to a close, our unit lost two young men, Sergeants Nicholas Mason and David Ruhren.  They were both 20 years old.  I grieved for them and their families then, and I grieve for them today.  And I would ask you to consider the fact that on so many of the days between that one and this one, there have been others to grieve for.  Less than a month ago, a young man from Colorado was killed in Afghanistan.  When I came home from Iraq in 2005, he was 9 years old.

So today, I’d ask you to take a moment to ask yourself, “How many more names might be added to the long list of those we are asked to remember next year?”  And to also remember the thousands of veterans, actively serving men and women, and grieving families of their fallen brothers and sisters, for whom Memorial Day doesn’t just fall on the last Monday in May, but on every single day of the rest of their lives.

"A portable memorial to fallen soldiers blooms in Washington" PBS NewsHour 5/28/2018

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SUMMARY:  In our NewsHour Shares moment of the day, a temporary memorial, now on the National Mall, honors the hundreds of thousands of U.S. military members who lost their lives since the turn of the 20th century with 645,000 poppies.

"What history teaches us about surviving times of turmoil" PBS NewsHour 5/28/2018

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SUMMARY:  In "The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels," Jon Meacham tries to offer historical context and a sense of proportion for our current times.  The Pulitzer Prize-winning author is best known for his Presidential biographies of Andrew Jackson, Thomas Jefferson, and George H.W. Bush.  Meacham joins Judy Woodruff for a conversation.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY - President Carter's Chief of Staff

"How a boy from segregated South grew up to be Jimmy Carter’s chief of staff" PBS NewsHour 11/26/2015

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SUMMARY:  Before he was Jimmy Carter’s chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan was just a boy living in a deeply segregated south.  For a decade, he worked on an autobiography about growing up in that place and time, before passing away from mesothelioma.  His daughter, Kathleen Jordan finished the book, and speaks to Judy Woodruff about the work.

HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour):  They were known collectively as the “Georgia mafia” — Washington outsiders who played key roles in the Jimmy Carter presidential campaigns, and in the White House.  Among them, Hamilton Jordan, who was the president`s Chief of Staff and top confidant.  He died of cancer in 2008.  He left behind a mostly finished memoir.

His daughter Kathleen has edited and completed the book, “A Boy from Georgia: Coming of Age in the Segregated South.”  She talked to Judy recently.

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  So let me — I have to ask you first, it looks like Hamilton Jordan, Kathleen Jordan, but it`s “Jerden;” where did that come from?

KATHLEEN JORDAN, Editor, “A Boy From Georgia”:  You know, my dad always said it`s the Southern pronunciation of the surname.  If you hear it in old spirituals, you`ll hear it pronounced the “River Jerden.”  So I think it`s a long-standing tradition of the South.  At least that`s what we were told and we've taken that forward with us.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  I knew your father, Hamilton Jordan, because he worked for Jimmy Carter.  I covered Carter as governor of Georgia, then as President of the United States.  Your father was a strategist, he was chief of staff, but this book really is about his growing up in South Georgia, growing up in the segregationist South, isn't it?

KATHLEEN JORDAN:  When political junkies hear that my dad has a new book out, they`re excited because they think it may be about the Carter years, and what I say to those people is that it may not necessarily be about his political years, but it`s about his early indoctrination into politics, and kind of learning about politics from the people around him and about the formation of his political skills.

BOOKS - New Autobiography of Mark Twain

"Mark Twain is back!  Volume II of his autobiography just out" PBS Newshour 10/20/2013

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HARI SREENIVASAN (Newshour):  And now to an important literary development ...  The publication of Volume 2 of The Autobiography of Mark Twain.  The 700-page book is filled with the author's pictures and letters and thoughts he dictated to a stenographer.  Among the highlights:  Twain's recollections of a dinner with Helen Keller, whom he described as the "8th Wonder of the World."  Joining me now is Ben Griffin, the book's associate editor.

So the first volume of the autobiography of Mark Twain, it was in 2010.  It was a bestseller, and one reviewer wrote how strange, alluring, but less sure-footed Twain seemed.  What does the second volume reveal about Mark Twain?