John F. Kennedy Research Articles

Of media scandals and regimes of forgetting: Strauss-Kahn, Public History, and Memory Studies

Do you remember Dominique Strauss-Kahn? In 2010, at the height of his career, Strauss-Kahn earned the distinction of being the sixth most influential Jewish person in the world. In a ranking list assembled by The Jerusalem Post, Strauss-Kahn outperformed Jewish luminaries such as Shimon Peres, Alan Dershowitz, and Michael Bloomberg. At the time, The Jerusalem Post announced that it would forthwith publish the list each year although we are still waiting for a sequel. Most likely, the editors at the Post realized that they were inadvertently feeding “the antiSemitic stereotype that Jews control the world” (Linde, 2010). If The Jerusalem Post had continued its ranking efforts, Strauss-Kahn would have dropped off the list like a stone in 2011 when he resigned from his post as director of the International Monetary Fund after having been indicted in New York City (NYC) for sexually assaulting a hotel maid. In a dramatic turn of events, NYC authorities arrested Strauss-Kahn at John F. Kennedy (JFK) International Airport moments before he was boarding a Europe-bound plane and held him without bail at Riker’s Island for several days. However, in the course of a lengthy investigation, NYC authorities developed serious doubts about the accuser’s credibility. The criminal case collapsed while the media frenzy continued. The drama in NYC prompted other women to come forward with rape allegations against or passionate defenses of Strauss-Kahn. And the story continued in Europe. Strauss-Kahn appears to have been involved in a prostitution ring in France and has been standing trial for the alleged crime of aggravated pimping in Lille. As a result of these multiple scandals, Strauss-Kahn’s career lies in shambles. The erstwhile leading contender for the Socialist candidacy for the French Presidency has been forced to peddle his financial expertise to such dubious employers as Russia, Serbia, and Sudan. The lurid mix of sex, politics, and money, further spiced up with great conspiracy theory potential and an action movie airport chase, turned the Strauss-Kahn affair into an instant media event. Strauss-Kahn, who has yet to be convicted of any crime, set a new record as he found himself prominently displayed on the front pages of over 150,000 newspapers around the world (Marlowe, 2011). Inevitably, the affair has been addressed in a Law & Order episode and been turned into a movie featuring embattled and scandal-prone French actor Gerard Depardieu in the role of StraussKahn (Scorched Earth 2011; Welcome to New York 2014). The film in question, Welcome to New York, received severe criticism as well as some stellar reviews but never made it into theatrical

Kennedy, Johnson, and Policy toward China: Testing the Importance of the President in Foreign Policy Decision Making

Presidents and their advisors are absolutely certain that their individual contributions to American foreign policy are significant, unique, and often heroic. An administration's legacy in foreign policy is the product of the president's vision or at least the result of an opportunity seized by a shrewd and decisive leader. In this sense, it is more than literary convention when scholars personify a policy, naming it the Truman Doctrine or Johnson's War or the Reagan Doctrine. This view runs counter to the rise of the Institutional model in presidential studies. This body of work often argues that characteristics of individual presidents are irrelevant; political and legal forces create a context for presidential policy making, and all presidents will react to those forces in a similar manner, making decisions based on rational choice calculations. This debate over whether individual presidents matter is critical to the evolution of presidential studies (Cohen 2009; Dickinson 2009; Jacobs 2009; Mayer 2009; Moe 2009; Rockman 2009; Skowronek 2009; Wood 2009). While scholars may be pleased with their ability to develop parsimonious and more rigorous models of the presidency, veteran policy makers might argue that scholars are missing the essence of decision: people make decisions, and different people make different decisions even in similar situations. (1) The more personality-centered model, often called some variation on Persuasion or Bargaining (hereafter Persuasion model) and derived from the seminal work of Richard Neustadt, sees the ways in which individual presidents choose to wield their power as the crucial characteristic in executive branch decision making. Presidents use their powers of persuasion to bargain with organizations and individuals in an effort to direct policy in a desired direction (Neustadt 1990). In contrast, the Institutional model downplays the importance of the president's decision-making impact, contending that as the presidency has become more institutionalized, it has decreased the importance of the character of the individual president (Moe 1989, 1998, 2009) This article dives into that debate by developing a research design that tries to isolate the impact of the president as a variable. The transition from President John F.Kennedy (JFK) to President Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ) provides a measure of experimental control that is unique (however morbid). The tragedy of JFK's assassination left LBJ as the leader of JFK's hand-picked foreign policy team facing a set of challenges initially defined by JFK. In short, were any variations in the decision-making structure that followed the transition based on LBJ's idiosyncratic style, or were institutional pressures the cause of any changes? Focusing on a specific policy area, in this case China policy, creates an additional measure of control. If the Institutional model is correct in its assumptions, the replacement of JFK with LBJ should have had little effect on the policy process. The independent variable in the foreign policy process is the set of external and internal institutional pressures facing the administration. Consistency or variation in management structures will be based on the consistency or variation in those institutional pressures. However, if the Persuasion models are correct, the change in the White House should redefine the foreign policy process, since JFK and LBJ are typically considered to be very different types of presidents with very different management styles. The decision-making needs of the individual president are the independent variable. This article first considers the Institutional model and the Persuasion model then develops a case study research design to test the impact of the president on decision making. A structured-focused comparison methodology is used to assess change or the lack of change (George 1979; George and Bennett 2004; George and McKeown 1985). A standard set of questions provides a comparative framework for each case study. …

New York, New York: Two ways of estimating the delay impact of New York airports

High arrival delay at major airports tends to propagate and generate secondary delay through the National Airspace System (NAS). In the United States, it is widely believed that the major culprits for delay throughout the NAS are the three New York commercial airports – Newark (EWR), LaGuardia (LGA), and John F. Kennedy (JFK). Various estimates of the extent to which the New York airports impact the delay in the NAS have been reported over the years. Yet there is no thorough investigation into the mutual relationship between delays at New York and non-New York airports. In this paper, we take two different approaches to quantify the impact of the three New York airports on delay throughout the NAS. First, we estimate and apply an econometric model using a large historical dataset. The other model is the FAA SWAC model that simulates flights and tracks the daily performance of the system. The counterfactual scenarios in these two models are adjusted to be comparable to each other. There is disparity between the results of the two different models, suggesting the simulation model might not capture all the factors that cause arrival delay. Still both results conclude that the portion of delay in the system caused by New York airports is much less than publicized estimates. Combining econometric and simulation models to address questions of this nature appears to be a promising approach.

Deconstructing delay: A non-parametric approach to analyzing delay changes in single server queuing systems

This paper introduces an empirically driven, non-parametric method to isolate and estimate the effects that changes in demand and changes in throughput have on delay – in particular, arrival and departure flight delay at airport runways. Classic queuing concepts were used to develop a method by which an intermediate, or counterfactual, queuing scenario could be constructed, to isolate the delay effects due to shifts in demand and throughput. This method includes the development of a stochastic throughput function that is based entirely on data and has three key features. Firstly, the function relies on non-parametric, empirically-based probability distributions of throughput counts. Secondly, facility capacity needs not be explicitly defined, as it is implicitly included in the probability distributions of throughput. Thirdly, the throughput performance function preserves the effect of factors that cause capacity (and, therefore, throughput) to fluctuate over a given period. Temporal sequences of high, moderate, and low capacity are maintained between the observed and counterfactual scenarios. The method was applied to a case study of the three major New York area airports of LaGuardia (LGA), Newark Liberty (EWR), and John F. Kennedy (JFK), using operational data extracted from the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA’s) Aviation System Performance Metrics (ASPM) database. The focus was on the peak summer travel seasons of 2006 and 2007, as these airports experienced record levels of delay in 2007. The results indicate that decreases in both demand and throughput were experienced at LGA and EWR, although the decreases in throughput had more significant effects on operational delays as they increased overall at these airports. At JFK, the increase in departure throughput was not sufficient to offset the increase in departure demands. For arrivals, demand increased and throughput decreased. These trends caused a significant growth in delay at JFK between 2006 and 2007.

Improving quality of prediction in highly dynamic environments using approximate dynamic programming

AbstractIn many applications, decision making under uncertainty often involves two steps—prediction of a certain quality parameter or indicator of the system under study and the subsequent use of the prediction in choosing actions. The prediction process is severely challenged by highly dynamic environments that particularly involve sequential decision making, such as air traffic control at airports in which congestion prediction is critical for smooth departure operations. Taxi‐out time of a flight is an excellent indicator of surface congestion and is a quality parameter used in the assessment of airport delays. The regression, queueing, and moving average models have been shown to perform poorly in predicting taxi‐out times because they are slow in adapting to the changing airport dynamics. This paper presents an approximate dynamic programming approach (reinforcement learning, RL) to taxi‐out time prediction. The taxi‐out prediction performance was tested on flight data obtained from the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) Aviation System Performance Metrics (ASPM) database on Detroit International (DTW), Washington Reagan National (DCA), Boston (BOS), New York John F. Kennedy (JFK) and Tampa International (TPA) airports. For example, at the Boston airport (presented in detail) the prediction accuracy by RL model was 14running‐average model. In general, the RL model was 35–50% more accurate than the regression model for all of the above airports. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Characterization of traffic-related PM concentration distribution and fluctuation patterns in near-highway urban residential street canyons

Analyses of outdoor traffic-related particulate matter (PM) concentration distribution and fluctuation patterns in urban street canyons within a microscale distance of less than 500 m from a highway source are presented as part of the results from the Brooklyn Traffic Real-Time Ambient Pollutant Penetration and Environmental Dispersion (B-TRAPPED) study. Various patterns of spatial and temporal changes in the street canyon PM concentrations were investigated using time-series data of real-time PM concentrations measured during multiple monitoring periods. Concurrent time-series data of local street canyon wind conditions and wind data from the John F. Kennedy (JFK) International Airport National Weather Service (NWS) were used to characterize the effects of various wind conditions on the behavior of street canyon PM concentrations.Our results suggest that wind direction may strongly influence time-averaged mean PM concentration distribution patterns in near-highway urban street canyons. The rooftop-level wind speeds were found to be strongly correlated with the PM concentration fluctuation intensities in the middle sections of the street blocks. The ambient turbulence generated by shifting local wind directions (angles) showed a good correlation with the PM concentration fluctuation intensities along the entire distance of the first and second street blocks only when the wind angle standard deviations were larger than 30 degrees. Within-canyon turbulent shearing, caused by fluctuating local street canyon wind speeds, showed no correlation with PM concentration fluctuation intensities. The time-averaged mean PM concentration distribution along the longitudinal distances of the street blocks when wind direction was mostly constantly parallel to the street was found to be similar to the distribution pattern for the entire monitoring period when wind direction fluctuated wildly. Finally, we showed that two different PM concentration metrics-time-averaged mean concentration and number of concentration peaks above a certain threshold level-can possibly lead to different assessments of spatial concentration distribution patterns.

JFK and dark tourism: A fascination with assassination

Abstract This paper sets out to explore the phenomenon that the authors have entitled Dark Tourism and to analyse evidence of its existence in the context of sites associated with the life and death of the former US President, John F. Kennedy (JFK). These sites present front‐line staff, curators, and development bodies with dilemmas concerning legitimacy of presentation/representation and lead to questions about the, often cited, educational mission, of such attractions. The media has had a central role in the development of this phenomenon and documentation and illustration via news and film has been central to much of the interpretation of JFK and the Kennedys. This paper considers media fascination with this subject and examines exploitation of this interest at three, contrasting sites.

Integrated Pavement Management System for Kennedy International Airport

John F. Kennedy (JFK) International Airport is one of the largest and busiest airports in the world. Effective maintenance and management of JFK's extensive network of runway, taxiway, and other airfield pavements presents a major engineering challenge. To accomplish this, the Integrated Airport Management System (IAPMS) has been developed and implemented at JFK. IAPMS couples state‐of‐the‐art pavement engineering methods with powerful information management technology to provide data base management, pavement engineering analysis, and forecasting tools for airfield pavement maintenance management. The basic components of IAPMS and the steps involved in the implementation of IAPMS at JFK are outlined. An example application of IAPMS to hypothetical but typical maintenance management questions at JFK is also provided.

MLS: keeping pace with the future

It is argued that the instrument landing system (ILS) is now at its operational limit in terms of radio frequency availability, approach flexibility, and technology. The operational requirements for a microwave landing system (MLS), which will overcome key limitations of the ILS and provide growth to meet future requirements of precision landing systems, are discussed, John F. Kennedy (JFK) International Airport and LaGuardia Airport in New York City are discussed as examples to demonstrate the capabilities of MLS. >