At least one advisor sees harbingers of change for the better at every turn. Alec Haverstick is a managing partner of Boxwood Strategic Advisors, a New York-based advisory to ultra-high-net-worth individuals and families.

I have become a devotee of reading entrails in recent months -- you know, where one slaughters a chicken and tries to read the future in its innards; I slaughter nothing but see signs in everything. And I am beginning to sense a modest change in our world. So here are, in reverse order, are Alec's top ten picks for believing in a better immediate future.

First, it's cold here in New Jersey. We're having a real winter: snow is on the ground and in the air, and we're bundling up like we haven't in years. I think that's a good sign. After all it is January. Second, the lines at Costco yesterday were replete with individuals buying big-screen TVs, and, for those of us waiting in line to buy our monthly supply of paper goods, those lines were very, very long. Third, the Arizona Cardinals are in the Super Bowl led by a quarterback old enough to claim kinship with the Ancient Mariner. Four through nine: Captain "Sully" Sullenberger.

And Number 10? Number 10 is today.

Forty-eight years ago this week there was snow on the ground, lots of it. So much, in fact, that Fairfield Country Day School, where I had just become a third grader (my mother moved us mid-year to Connecticut to take advantage of divorce laws less onerous than those in New York), |image1|was closed on Jack Kennedy's inauguration day.

Giants

The summer preceding Kennedy's election had been my first substantive introduction to politics (hell, I was seven), and Jack Kennedy had already become my hero. I had watched the conventions on my grandmother's Zenith across the Canasta table at which I sat with her and whoever else might join us, and marveled at the political drama that unfolded before my eyes.

The Democrats went first. If I remember correctly, Kennedy had come to the convention as the front runner but Lyndon Johnson was nipping at his heels. Also sniffing around were Adlai Stevenson (in danger of becoming a perennial candidate like Harold Stassen), Stuart Symington, one of the heroes of the Army-McCarthy hearings, and Hubert Humphrey whose time had not yet -- and never really did -- come. Four or five of the lesser potential nominees were from Jim Crow states, Texas, Georgia and Arkansas included, and rumors and deals and rumors of deals were flying right and left. Did Kennedy have Addison's disease? Would the Southerners walk out? Would LBJ get behind JFK? And, then, in a night of raucous voting, the man who would later accompany Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris won on the first ballot and named Johnson as his v.p. in a move engineered by RFK to keep the South in the party.

The Republican Convention was less compelling. They trotted Herbert Hoover out from his suite in the Waldorf, for a few minutes of bathos. But my grandmother said Barry Goldwater stole the show with a call for the conservatism that became the Republican agenda for the next fifty years. My grandmother loved Goldwater. I was more interested in the moderates and, to confess, in people watching. I still am.

Nelson Rockefeller was there in his pre-Happy days, aiming for 1964 ("whoops"); George Romney was there before he was 'brainwashed" about Vietnam; John Lindsay was there, representing the "silk stocking district." He had yet to run for mayor of New York City and so could still say he went to prep school. A few years later, St. Paul's would become the "high school" he attended. I don't remember many others. Norman Thomas was probably holding his own convention somewhere else, but his grandson and I had yet to become friends, so I wasn't really focused on him.

But I digress into the past -- but then that's precisely the point I would like to make about the future.

Forty eight years ago tomorrow, my future as an American began and was forever defined. It began when a bareheaded man stood up in the snowy cold and issued a challenge that all of us can quote; it began when Robert Frost, unable to read because of sun glare, departed from his prepared text and recited "A Gift Outright," and it began with a sense of the possibilities of life that all of us who were then in third grade knew for a thousand days, and know forever as "Camelot."

Tomorrow, I pray that all our futures commence anew.

We need a Camelot. We really do. -FWR

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