It’s rare that I send out two Newsletters so close together. Because November 22nd, 2023 is the 60th memorial anniversary of President John Kennedy’s assassination, I wanted you to view/listen to my most recently published podcast episode on the subject. In it I speak about how I wrote my new book, Empires of Dirt, along with the reasons behind spending three years of research and editing to launch it on such a significant memorial time of Kennedy’s assassination.

The episode of Just Around the Corner with Dennis Mansfield, is simple and straightforward. I’m hoping that it acts as an encouragement for the books that are inside YOU – and your willingness to venture out, write them and share them with an audience in YOUR life that needs to embrace hope – in a world currently full of angst and anger.

Large or small, your audience needs to hear about the things that motivate you. For me, it’s the question of “What if?”

What if JFK had lived into old age; Lincoln too, MLK and RFK, as well?

What would our world be like today? Empires of Dirt places that question squarely in front of a band of fascinating characters – an author, a friend of President Teddy Roosevelt, an ally of FDR and a former Hitler confidant, a woman physicist, C. S. Lewis, and some very intense and yet funny characters who live in the vortex of spacetime travel.

“History is full of strange coincidences,” the National Archives tell us. Impressions on young people can leave a lasting impact. For example, when Lincoln was assassinated, the funeral procession passed under the 8th story window of Cornelius Roosevelt’s brownstone. A photo was taken; in the window are pictured his two little grandson’s Elliott and Teddy Roosevelt. The impression on young TR never left him. 36 years later he was President.

So it was that in 1963 when, as a little 7-year-old boy, I lived in San Antonio, and President Kennedy stopped by on his way to Dallas. My father says he took our gaggle of siblings to see JFK speak; I don’t remember that. It was the day before he was killed. What I DO vividly remember is being with other students and coming into my 2nd grade classroom on November 22nd just after lunchtime, and being told in deliberate, hushed, and somber tones by my teacher that the President of the United States had been shot just minutes before and was dying. We little boys and girls broke down in torrents of tears.

Within a half hour he was dead.

Whether that moment in time seared my young mind to “help in politics” in the future, I cannot say. My decades of involvement in politics and public policy may stand as a mute testimony to that day, I suppose. What it DID do was forge in me a love of country, a hatred for evil that can attack our land, and an immediate realization that death waits on no one – not even little boys and girls. Eternity came close to me.

60 years later, the grandpa-version of that little boy from San Antonio is an author and historian with an eternal perspective: an author who shares life with others so that THEY can share their lives with others - a historian that connects the dots.

I hope you enjoy the free podcast episode, as well as purchase an ebook copy of Empires of Dirt and To Trust in What We Cannot See.

Please let others know.

More later,

Dennis

550 E. 52nd St., Garden City, Idaho 83714
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