Against the Vietnam War

Pell was a leading critic of the Vietnam War, and his open break with LBJ in a 1967 major Senate speech made headlines everywhere -- and drew a deluge of letters, some supporting him and others slamming him as an unpatriotic pinko-Commie. And then came his secret mission to Paris, which I am writing now...
Pell's vocal opposition brought him into direct conflict with LBJ, whose otherwise brilliant legacy (on domestic issues) was forever tarnished by his escalation of the war. Here is Pell in 1967, posing with a painting of our first president.

Wins again!

Pell won his first reelection, against Ruth Briggs, in 1966 with almost 70 percent of the vote. Here he is reading the Providence Evening Bulletin on Nov. 9, the day after the election.
Trivia point: I remember the Evening Bulletin well, since I wrote for it back in the days when the Projo had two editions. In fact, I wrote the very last deadline story for the Bulletin, in 1992, about a small fire.

National Endowment for the Arts

What a trip through history this week of writing has been -- the Berlin and Cuban Crises, the Cold War, JFK's assassination (on Pell's 45th birthday), all of which is grim. Fallout shelters and duck-and-cover, which I remember from when I was a kid, were very unsettling. And then there was the Vietnam War.
But the '60s were also a time of great hope, especially as the decade wore on. Pell played a large role in that -- he was an optimist by nature -- and one of his lasting contributions to the greatness of what the human spirit can be was in his critical role in establishing the National Endowment for the Arts, and also the Humanities. Am writing that passage now, and came across this great quote from LBJ at the 1965 swearing-in of the members of the new National Council on the Arts:
“I believe that a world of creation and thought is at the very core of civilization and that our civilization will largely survive in the works of our creations. That quality, as I have said many times before, confirms the faith that our common hope may be much more enduring than our conflicting hostilities, and I want that each hour of the things that we do will be enduring. Right now, the men of affairs are struggling to catch up with the insights of great art. The stakes may very well be the survival of our entire society.”
The photo is Pell with the president at about that time.