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    Presidents at War: how battle has shaped American leaders

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    In his new book, Presidents at War, Steven M Gillon considers how the second world war shaped a generation of presidents, a span that takes in eight men – but not all of them served in uniform between 1941 and 1945.Gillon likes to “ask people, ‘There are seven men who served in uniform in world war two and who went on to be president: who are they?’ And most people think Jimmy Carter did, and they forget Ronald Reagan.”Carter was born in 1924 and came of age in wartime. But the submariner turned peanut farmer turned politician, who died aged 100 in December, graduated the US Naval Academy in 1946, the year after the war. Reagan, meanwhile, joined the Army Reserve in the 1930s and spent the war years enlisted – but stayed at home in Hollywood, where he made his name as an actor, narrating films and joining fundraising drives.“Reagan was the most fascinating for me,” says Gillon, emeritus professor of history at the University of Oklahoma and scholar-in-residence at the History Channel. “I once bought the story about: ‘Oh, he wanted to go and fight but his eyes were too bad.’ In fact, there’s all these machinations going on behind the scenes that keep him from going overseas, to make sure he stays in California so he can make movies, while at the same time creating this public image of a guy who has been off to war, and he comes home to his wife [Jane Wyman], and there’s a picture of him in his uniform, kissing his wife – who in fact he slept with every night during the war.”Gillon focuses on how the war affected men who led their country through the cold war with Russia, into the quagmire of Vietnam, and eventually into the first Iraq war. To Gillon, “those presidents who came closest to combat were the ones who were most restrained in their use of force afterwards,” meaning Dwight Eisenhower, who commanded Allied forces in Europe, and John F Kennedy and George HW Bush, who flirted with death in the Pacific, JFK as a torpedo boat captain, Bush as a navy flier.“Reagan is the exception of so many of these things,” Gillon says. “Reagan never sees war. He thinks he saw the Holocaust camps, but he didn’t. He just makes stuff up, and he thinks it’s true. But what I did not know was how he came out of the war with the real fear of nuclear weapons, and he belonged to an organization for international control of atomic weapons, largely a liberal organization, as he was involved in other liberal organizations like Americans for Democratic Action.“While he shed all the other liberal ties, he never shed that fear of nuclear weapons. And despite all his bombastic language, he was very restrained in the use of force. I mean, the only thing he did was create a phony war in Grenada [in which 19 Americans died] and see 241 Americans killed in Lebanon [both in 1983], and that was a peacekeeping mission.”View image in fullscreenIn response to the Beirut embassy bombing, Reagan launched limited strikes. He also bombed Libya, in 1986, and funded and fueled conflicts elsewhere, his efforts in Nicaragua creating the Iran-Contra scandal. But on the global scene, Gillon “was surprised at how restrained Reagan was. And then his fear of nuclear weapons made him open to [Mikhail] Gorbachev’s overtures” for detente and arms control “during his second term … this was where Reagan followed his own instincts and in this case his instincts were right, and he was the right person to do it because he had such strong anti-communist credentials. So that was a twist I had not appreciated before.”Gillon’s book contains more twists. Many involve Lyndon Baines Johnson, like Reagan no stranger to distorting facts for political gain. A congressman when the US entered the war, LBJ got himself into uniform for a Pacific fact-finding tour. Hitching a ride on a bomber, he survived an attack by Japanese fighters.“There’s controversy over whether that took place the way he described it,” Gillon says. “There was an article written by some aviation historians who said it never could have happened. And then, years later, the Japanese pilot who had actually led the attack against the American planes said he remembered Johnson’s plane. He remembered crippling it, and he said the plane was so wounded that he knew it wasn’t going to do any damage, so he broke off and went back into the main attack.”Johnson’s plane made it back to base, leaving him alive to tell tales of his own bravery on the campaign trail. Gillon shows how those tales grew more shameless but thinks the basic story “is definitely true”, including how a bathroom break meant Johnson lost a spot on a plane which was shot down, killing all onboard.“Yeah, Johnson was just cool as a cucumber. And I’m sure he was thrilled when he landed.”Gillon was born in working class Philadelphia in 1956, in the shadow of the war. Too young for the Vietnam draft, fascinated by the presidency, he graduated from Widener and Brown and then taught at Yale and Oxford. Recent books include America’s Reluctant Prince, about his late friend John F Kennedy Jr, and The Pact, about Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, a Democratic president and a Republican House speaker whose relationship resonates loudly today.With his latest book, Gillon focuses on the major lessons of the second world war, particularly the cost of appeasement, Hitler’s triumph at Munich in 1938 a constant ghost at the feast. Such lessons, he says, “some forgot, like Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam, while others, like Kennedy and Bush, those who really saw battle and the horrors of war, you see them thinking about world war two all the time when they’re making big decisions, whether it’s the Cuban Missile Crisis for Kennedy or it’s the invasion of Iraq with George Bush”.View image in fullscreenLooking to Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Gillon describes how both served but did not see battle. Both were in the navy. Ford’s closest brush with action involved a fire aboard his ship during a Pacific typhoon. Nixon was posted to tropical islands, working logistics and supply, failing to reach the front line.Vietnam dominates Gillon’s book. US involvement began under Eisenhower, accelerated under Kennedy, swirled into nightmare under Johnson and finally ended under Nixon – though he had lengthened the horror by thwarting peace talks for his own political gain. Gillon retells the extraordinary Anna Chennault affair, in which a Washington socialite acted as a go-between with the government of South Vietnam, relaying Nixon’s urge to boycott talks till the 1968 election was done. When Johnson learned of it, he told a senior Republican: “This is treason.” The senator agreed. Johnson called Nixon, who denied it. Gillon writes: “According to some reports, after hanging up, Nixon collapsed with laughter.”In 1968, Nixon beat Hubert Humphrey. The war did not end until 1973. Reading Presidents at War, it is striking to realize that no future president who was of an age to serve in Vietnam did so.Bill Clinton opposed the war, studied abroad and denied accusations of dodging the draft. Joe Biden secured student deferments then was exempted on account of teenage asthma. George W Bush, the son of a war hero, went into the Texas Air national guard, which, Gillon notes, “is a place notoriously where rich, powerful people put their kids during war”. Al Gore, John Kerry and John McCain did go to Vietnam – but lost presidential elections.As so often, Donald Trump is a whole other matter. He obtained student draft deferments but also found a doctor to say “bone spurs” in his heels rendered him unfit for service. He has also said avoiding sexually transmitted diseases while dating in New York was his “personal Vietnam”, making him feel like “a great and very brave soldier”. It’s not a line to endear him to Gillon, who says he cast his first vote for a Republican president, Ford, but whose epilogue to Presidents at War makes clear his distaste for Trump, his view of military matters and his reported negative comments about those who serve.“I have my political point of view but when I write history, I try to be really fair-minded,” Gillon says. “And I can’t be fair-minded toward Trump. I just dislike him so much that I don’t think I could write a book about him. I wrote a book about Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, and what made me happy was that both Clinton and Gingrich liked it. I take great pride in being fair of mind towards someone like Newt Gingrich, who I have no political affinity for, but I just can’t get to that point mentally with Trump. I can’t write a book that I feel I can’t be fair.”

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      ‘There are images no leader ever wants to be seen’: 33 pivotal US presidential moments captured on camera

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      Is it any surprise that “photo op” is a phrase imported into British English from the United States? Of course it came from there, the land where the visual image sits right at the centre of the culture, with politics no exception. It was the Nixon White House that came up with it, specifically a press aide by the name of Bruce Whelihan. According to Washington legend, whenever the president was meeting a visiting dignitary, Richard Nixon’s hardball press secretary, Ron Ziegler, would turn to his underling with an order to summon the snappers. “Get ’em in for a picture,” Ziegler would say. Too polite to put it that way himself, Whelihan would clear his throat and announce to the ladies and gentlemen of the Washington press corps: “There will be a photo opportunity in the Oval Office.” The photo op was born.But if the term was new, the thing itself had been a part of US politics almost from the start. Just as Roman emperors sought to cast themselves in stone and Tudor kings commissioned the finest artists to capture their likeness, so American presidents moved fast to harness the new technology of the age, in order that the nation might see the men who governed them. The selection of photographs assembled here is made up of a series of striking images, but a couple are extraordinary less for what they show than for the fact that they exist at all.Behold a portrait of John Quincy Adams, sixth US president and the son of its second. A daguerreotype, it dates to March 1843), when Adams had been out of office for well over a decade, but still: it is the earliest known photograph of a US president, its subject a man born in 1767 and whose father was the successor to George Washington himself. Seeing the face of Abraham Lincoln induces a similar feeling of historical vertigo. If there’s a tendency to divide human events into two broad categories – our own, modern era and everything that went before – then the invention of the photograph can often be the instinctive dividing line between the two. But here are Adams and Lincoln, jumping over the barrier and barging their way into our own times.As for Nixon himself, he appears in this collection twice. That’s fitting, and not only because of the origin story of the photo op. Nixon learned the hard way that in modern American politics, image is everything. Washington legend holds that in their 1960 presidential debate, Nixon comfortably beat the young Massachusetts senator John F Kennedy among voters who followed the contest on the radio – but, his face darkened by five o’clock shadow, he lost among those who watched on TV. After that, Nixon was ready to put himself in the hands of the image-makers.One result is the intriguing photograph of the president and the king, Nixon and Elvis, standing improbably together in the White House in 1970. Showing two men both then at the height of their powers, both to fall just a few years later, the picture was long the most requested of all those held by the US National Archives). It fascinates partly because the pair represent polar opposites – a rock legend and a man so uncool he wore a suit on the beach) – and partly because it invites you to guess at the men’s motives: Nixon surely wanted some of Presley’s stardust to land on him, while Elvis was in search of a federal agent’s badge and, it seems, a sense of purpose.The other Nixon shot is the one that etched his downfall into the public imagination. It shows his parting gesture – an oddly celebratory, double V-for-victory salute – from the presidential helicopter as he made his disgraced exit following the Watergate scandal). Nixon flew off to California and into the history books as the first US president ever to quit.Between them, Elvis and Watergate, those pictures represent the two categories of presidential photograph: the ones they wanted – the photo ops – and the ones they most emphatically did not. The first category brims with examples and they follow a pattern. They show the occupant of the White House as a heroic, even mythic figure. The exemplar is Teddy Roosevelt on horseback, a hunter and adventurer who engaged in photogenic displays of muscularity and machismo so overt, they’d make Vladimir Putin blush. But that tradition has endured. Indeed, it has turned into an expectation that a US president must not only be competent and wise, but also fit, strong and marked by conspicuous physical courage.Meeting that demand has been easy for some occupants of America’s highest office. Dwight Eisenhower didn’t have to pretend to be a warrior: he had been the supreme allied commander during the second world war. When he first campaigned for the presidency in 1952, there was no need to stage a photo op: there were images aplenty of him directing the D-day mission) that had turned the war around just eight years earlier. No wonder he won.But for others, producing images of strength and command has taken some doing. The group portrait of Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin at Yalta ) had to have the so-called the Big Three seated because Roosevelt was paralysed from the waist down and required either a wheelchair or leg braces to get around. He and his aides went to great lengths to keep that fact from the US public and they mostly succeeded, thanks to a compliant press pack who obediently put away their cameras once the chosen image had been secured.That remained the custom for a while, the snappers keeping a discreet distance even after Eisenhower had both a heart attack and stroke in office, and as Kennedy battled crippling back pain. The images told a different story, including the silhouetted portrait of JFK standing alone at the Resolute desk in the Oval Office, head bowed, a study in the loneliness of ultimate political authority). That photograph may lack the glamour or sparkle of other Camelot-era pictures, but it contributed to the Kennedy mystique – and the mythology of the presidency itself – every bit as much. This was the era of the cold war, of a nuclear standoff between the US and the USSR, and that desk was where the buck stopped. Here was where the button would be pressed – and here was the man who would press it.Naturally, this iconography of president-as-hero takes different forms, depending on who’s in the job. The image Jimmy Carter treasured from his single term in office cast him as successful peacemaker, bringing together Menachem Begin of Israel and Anwar Sadat of Egypt in the Camp David peace accords. For supporters of Donald Trump, the picture that renders him a hero is the one taken a second after a would-be assassin’s bullet had brushed his ear, when he raised his fistand, with bloodied face, urged them to “Fight, fight, fight!”.Sometimes, though, the man at the top has struggled to meet that deep public need for an alpha figure in the White House. Carter’s political prospects took a hit when he was photographed “wobbling, moaning and pale with exhaustion” during a six-mile run in 1979). But the most recent, and serious, example is Joe Biden, whose visible frailty drove him from this year’s presidential race. The pictures showing him apparently slack-jawed during a June TV debate with Trump were enough to persuade Democrats that he had to go.Which brings us to the images no leader ever wanted to be seen. Some were photo ops whose aim was to offer a heroic, presidential figure, which went badly wrong. Michael Dukakis’s handlers wanted to project him as a potential commander-in-chief when they put him in a tank during the 1988 campaign); instead he looked like a hopeless dweeb. George W Bush’s team doubtless thought a Mission Accomplished banner on an aircraft carrier conveyed victorious strength following the invasion of Iraq; instead it came to haunt him as an emblem of hubris and myopia.But other unwanted images from this collection capture not mistaken bits of stage management, but rather tragedy and disaster. George W Bush reading My Pet Goat to a group of Florida schoolkids as he gets word of the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 distils the shock of 9/11, even now. The lifeless body of Robert F Kennedy evokes the turbulence and violence of 1968), a time when the US seemed about to tear itself apart.It’s all here: moments of hope – Barack Obama inspiring a young boy as America’s first Black president – and moments of despair – Lyndon Johnson taking the oath following JFK’s assassination while Jackie Kennedy, in blood-stained clothes, looks on. And yet, no matter how sweeping the range of these photographs, there is something missing from this selection. It would be lacking in any assembly of presidential pictures. Yes, there are Democratic presidents and Republican presidents. Yes, there are old presidents and young presidents. But there is no female president. We see Hillary Clinton, who got close. We see Shirley Chisholm, who was the first Black woman to try but never got near. Otherwise, there is an absence. On 5 November, Americans have a chance to fill that space – and to give the world a picture no one has ever seen before.Picture captions by Felix Bazalgette and Gabrielle SchwarzJimmy Carter collapses, 1979By Phil StewartView image in fullscreen“His face was ashen and his mouth hung open,” is how one reporter described Jimmy Carter in September 1979, when the president dropped out of a six-mile race four miles in. Though he swiftly recovered, this image – two months after his speech blaming US problems on a “crisis of confidence” – was seen as evidence of weakness. He lost to Ronald Reagan the following year. GSRichard Nixon bids goodbye, 1974Photographer unknownView image in fullscreen“Once more, there was not a spark of contrition in the man,” commented the Guardian at the time. On 8 August 1974, Richard Nixon earned the dubious honour of being the first (and, to this day, only) president to resign from office.Two years earlier, five men were caught trying to burgle and bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington DC. The subsequent investigation implicated Nixon, who faced impeachment for his role in covering up the break-in. Yet – as seen in this image of him leaving the White House for the last time – he was never really repentant. As he told David Frost in 1977, “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” One month after he resigned, his chosen successor, Gerald Ford, pardoned him. GSFDR at Yalta, 1945Photographer unknownView image in fullscreenFor eight days in February 1945, the “Big Three” – Franklin D Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin – met in the Crimean city of Yalta to discuss allied strategy.“FDR’s position between the other leaders is significant,” Diana Preston, historian and author of Eight Days at Yalta. “It was appropriate for a man who hoped to reconcile conflicting interests and build a future peace.” The conference was at first deemed a success, but the Soviet leader soon broke his promises to allow free elections in eastern Europe, and the cold war began. GSTexts from Hillary Clinton, 2011By Kevin LamarqueView image in fullscreenIt was the photograph that launched a thousand memes before becoming a liability at election time. The image of Hillary Clinton texting in sunglasses aboard a military plane to Libya went viral, inspiring a popular blog called “Texts from Hillary”. CBS reported at the time: “Hillary Clinton brings the LOLZ” and Clinton even name-checked the authors of the blog in her first ever tweet, proudly setting the image as her avatar.By 2015, however, she would distance herself from it, dropping it from her Twitter profile when the FBI announced an investigation into her use of a private email address for government business. As the image became used in articles about the investigation, its meaning began to shift. Many people started to wonder what Clinton might have been writing on that Blackberry. The scandal came to a catastrophic peak just 11 days before the 2016 election, when FBI director James Comey announced that he was reopening the investigation after having closed it in July. FBTheodore Roosevelt, 1898Photographer unknownView image in fullscreenThis image of Roosevelt on a horse encapsulates the rugged masculinity the 26th president – in fact born into an aristocratic family in New York – strove to embody. Once a sickly child, he credited his recovery to exertion and hardship, and argued this approach would lead to triumph for both man and nation. Here he is in Cuba during the Spanish-American war, leading volunteer regiment the Rough Riders. Returning a war hero, he re-entered politics and became president after William McKinley’s assassination in 1901. GSHair Like Mine, 2009By Pete SouzaView image in fullscreenThe symbolic power of the first African American president was cemented in this image of Barack Obama leaning forward so a five-year-old boy could feel his hair. On 8 May 2009, Jacob’s dad, departing national security council staffer Carlton Philadelphia, took his family to the Oval Office for a farewell photo. This snap, by the then chief White House photographer Pete Souza, captures the moment Jacob asked, “Is your hair like mine?” Obama suggested he touch it and see. A framed print of the photo was hung in the White House for the rest of his presidency.“The whole thing happened so fast, I literally have this one picture,” Souza recalls. “My composition was not perfect, but I think it adds to the spontaneity of the moment.”Two years ago, Obama called Jacob to congratulate him on his high-school graduation. “Folks who maybe didn’t feel they belonged,” he said of the image, “they’d look at themselves differently – to see a person who looked like them in the Oval Office.”“That was a highlight of my life,” Jacob said. “If I get to see another Black man at the top, I want to follow that lead.” GSAssassination attempt on Donald Trump, 2024By Evan VucciView image in fullscreenThis photograph will be remembered as a pivotal moment in this year’s election. On 13 July, a gunman opened fire at a Trump rally in Butler County in Pennsylvania. The former president was only lightly wounded when a bullet grazed his right ear but one crowd member was killed and another two critically injured before the shooter was taken down by a Secret Service sniper. This remarkable image of Trump – his ear and face bloodied, and fist defiantly raised in the air as he is hurried off the stage, an American flag raised behind him – instantly went viral. In an interview soon after, AP photojournalist Evan Vucci recalled his thoughts as he was capturing the scene: “In my head, I just kept saying to myself, slow down, slow down. Compose, compose.” GSAbraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, 1863By Mathew B BradyView image in fullscreenFor almost a century, it was thought that no photographs existed of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg on 19 November, the day he delivered his endlessly quoted address at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery. That is, until archivist Josephine Cobb undertook some detective work in 1952. Cobb, the first woman to be employed by the National Archives, picked through the work of the 19th-century photographer Mathew Brady, famous for his portraits of the great and good. She came upon a broken glass negative that showed a vast crowd at Gettysburg – she estimated the time to be about noon, a few hours before Lincoln would speak. After repeatedly enlarging, expanding and reprinting the image, she found his unmistakable face in the crowd (bare-headed, left of centre). FBRonald and Nancy Reagan kissing in Vanity Fair, 1985 By Harry Benson View image in fullscreen“There is in the West,” wrote William F Buckley in 1985, “a tradition against chiefs of state engaging in visible, let alone ostentatious, shows of biological informality.” Ronald and Nancy Reagan, both successful actors before going into politics, bucked tradition by using the White House as a setting for their love story. The media was happy to indulge them, with Buckley writing a fawning ode to the couple in Vanity Fair, to accompany a series of images by Harry Benson of them dancing to Sinatra and locking lips.Reagan, a year into his final term, could risk a little biological informality – the images were probably more consequential for Vanity Fair. Benson later said that the loss-making publication was facing closure until this issue. The editor Tina Brown, he said, convinced the owner to “wait until the June 1985 cover of the Reagans appeared. The magazine sold off the stands and the magazine was saved.” FBRichard Nixon with Elvis Presley, 1970By Oliver F AtkinsView image in fullscreenOne December morning in 1970, Elvis showed up at the White House with a handwritten letter for the president. He wanted to give him a gift (a Colt pistol with silver bullets) and discuss becoming a “federal agent at large”: “I have done an in-depth study of drug abuse and communist brainwashing and I am right in the middle of the whole thing where I can do the most good,” he wrote.Nixon gave Presley a federal narcotics badge, but not an official role. The bizarre encounter was captured by White House photographer Oliver F Atkins, but the images weren’t made public until the 1980s, after Nixon’s resignation and Presley’s death. GSJohn F Kennedy: the loneliest job, 1961By George TamesView image in fullscreenA few weeks into his presidency, JFK stood at his desk before meeting the French ambassador, reading an official paper. Photographer George Tames, shadowing him for the New York Times, took this photograph, which became famous for its intimate portrayal of the pressures of holding office.It was later reproduced in the opening title of US political drama The West Wing. FBBill Clinton hugs Monica Lewinsky, 1996By Dirck HalsteadView image in fullscreenIt was a moment captured by chance: a hug between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky in the crowd at a Democratic fundraiser in Washington in October 1996. But when news of the affair between the president and the former White House intern broke in 1998, photojournalist Dirck Halstead, then senior White House photographer at Time magazine, recognised her face. After searching through his archives, he located this image in a box of transparencies. The photo ran on Time’s cover that August, when Lewinsky agreed to testify before a grand jury investigating Clinton’s denials of the affair.Four months later, Clinton was impeached on charges of obstruction of justice and perjury, but he was eventually acquitted and left office after two terms in 2001 with the highest approval rating of any departing postwar president. Lewinsky, meanwhile, was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, “mainly from the ordeal of having been publicly outed and ostracised back then”, the anti-bullying campaigner wrote in Vanity Fair in 2018. “There has been at least one significant reference in the press to that unfortunate spell in our history every day for the past 20 years.” GS‘Dewey defeats Truman’, 1948Photographer unknownView image in fullscreenWith Harry Truman’s popularity waning, a win for his Republican opponent, Thomas E Dewey, in the 1948 election seemed certain. The Chicago Daily Tribune, forced to go to press early due to a printers’ strike, issued 150,000 copies of this 3 November edition – held up by a gleeful Truman en route to Washington – before it became clear its editors had backed the wrong horse. GSDwight D Eisenhower, 1944Photographer unknownView image in fullscreenThis image of General Dwight D Eisenhower addressing paratroopers at Greenham Common airfield on 5 June 1944, the day before they would parachute into France, became one of the most widely circulated of the war, durably linking him with D-day’s success and the eventual American victory. Despite the general’s authoritative pose, the soldier closest to him, Lieutenant Wallace Strobel, recalled a lighter conversation. “He asked my name and which state I was from … He then said, ‘Oh yes, Michigan, great fishing there. Been there several times and like it.’”After the war “Ike”, as he was popularly known, regularly topped polls as America’s most admired man. After years of claiming that it would be inappropriate for a military leader to run for president, he finally went for it in 1952, winning 55% of the popular vote for the Republicans. FBHarry S Truman and Lauren Bacall on the piano, 1945Photographer unknownView image in fullscreenWhile playing piano for photographers during a wartime variety show in 1945, vice-president Truman was joined by 20-year-old Lauren Bacall, with the famous actor perched awkwardly above him. “I was just a kid,” shrugged Bacall years later. “My press agent made me do it.”Truman had only been vice-president for a few weeks, plucked from relative obscurity by Franklin D Roosevelt. This photograph, considered risque at the time, made headlines all around the world and helped to establish his public image – even if they irritated his inner circle, including his wife, Bess. “I don’t think you should play piano in public again,” she said, according to Truman’s grandson. The New York Times recently dubbed it a viral image before its time – it inspired so many other women to climb up on the piano that it eventually broke. FBShirley Chisholm’s presidential bid, 1972By Don Hogan CharlesView image in fullscreenThis is Shirley Chisholm – who four years earlier had become the first Black woman elected to Congress – announcing her presidential bid at the Concord Baptist Church, Brooklyn. She knew that, with its “Unbought and Unbossed” slogan, the campaign was a long shot – she was also the first woman of colour from either major party to run for president. So it was a feat that, despite racism and sexism from her own party as well as the opposition, she made it to the Democratic national convention with the support of 152 delegates – and came fourth. When Kamala Harris launched her first presidential bid in 2020, she paid tribute with campaign colours based on the red and yellow pins Chisholm’s supporters wore. GSGeorge W Bush’s Mission Accomplished moment, 2003By Stephen JaffeView image in fullscreenDan Bartlett, George Bush’s communications director at the time, would later call this photo op “one of the big regrets of my life”. “It did seem premature,” remembers Stephen Jaffe, the press corp photographer covering Bush’s speech on the aircraft carrier that day. “The administration tried to stage everything perfectly – unfortunately it’s not a perfect world.”As the eight-year occupation of Iraq spiralled and weapons of mass destruction failed to appear, the image of Bush in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner, just six weeks into an invasion that would kill more than a quarter of a million Iraqi civilians, became a symbol of hubris.While Bartlett says the banner referred to the mission of the USS Abraham Lincoln, returning from its tour in the Gulf – the ship’s crew requested it, and he “didn’t think twice”– Jaffe is sceptical and thinks the intended meaning was plain to all on the day. “There was a lot of spin afterwards,” he says. “If the mission had been accomplished, they would have taken credit for it.” FBGeorge W Bush learns of 9/11, 2001By Win McNameeView image in fullscreenThis captures the moment on the morning of 11 September 2001 when George Bush, taking part in a reading session at a primary school in Florida, learned that a second plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. (He’d been informed of the first plane, at the time thought to be an accident, before he entered the classroom.) When his chief of staff, Andy Card, whispered in his ear, “America is under attack,” he decided not to interrupt the reading, instead waiting around seven minutes before leaving.It would become one of the most scrutinised events of his presidency. In his scathing 2004 film Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore said, “Not knowing what to do, with no one telling him what to do, and no Secret Service rushing in to take him to safety, Mr Bush just sat there.” But several people there that day have since spoken out in his defence. “It was nice he understood we were young kids and would probably have gone crazy if he had told us what had happened,” former student La’Damien Smith told an interviewer in 2011. GSSituation Room, 2011By Pete SouzaView image in fullscreen“It’s not a picture I have hanging on my wall,” Pete Souza says. “It’s not artistic – the lighting in that room sucked.” On 1 May 2011, the chief White House photographer was called to the situation room, a network of rooms below the White House. The atmosphere immediately felt unusual. “I had been there many, many times before to cover discussions about sensitive policy decisions,” Souza says. On this day, however, the decision had already been made: Souza was there to document Barack Obama and his senior team as they watched the operation to kill or capture Osama bin Laden play out in real time.As everyone packed into a side room to watch a live feed from a drone, Souza squeezed himself in the corner. (Seated, from left to right, is then vice-president Biden, Obama, joint operations command Marshall B Webb, deputy national security adviser Denis McDonough, secretary of state Hillary Clinton and secretary of defense Robert Gates.) While the raid unfolded in Abbottabad, Pakistan, Souza took about 100 images. “It was as tense and anxious a situation as I had ever seen that whole team in,” he recalls. “You could see it on their faces.” He tried to focus on his composition, getting everyone in frame, and on timing his shutter clicks so as not to distract them. Later it was announced that Navy Seals had killed Bin Laden, along with his son, a courier and two of the courier’s relatives.Of nine pictures released that day, it was this one that went viral, exhaustively analysed and relentlessly memed. Souza, looking back today, believes this was because it occupied some part of the national psyche: “We had this guy that attacked our country, and it took us 10 years to find him, but we found him. It closed the chapter.” FBJohn Quincy Adams, 1843By Philip HaasView image in fullscreenThough Adams was not the first president to be photographed (an 1841 picture of William Henry Harrison is now lost), this is the oldest surviving portrait of a US president. Adams had a familiarly vexed relationship with the medium. “All hideous,” he wrote in his diary, after posing for daguerreotypes in the early 1840s. “Too true to the original.” This image of Adams – who served as president in the 1820s – surfaced in 2017, found by the great-great-grandson of a congressman who had received it as a gift from Adams. FBMichael Dukakis and the tank, 1988By Michael E SamojedenView image in fullscreenMeant to project strength, this unfortunate photo-call crystallised, for critics and voters, something mediocre and uncertain about the Democratic presidential hopeful Michael Dukakis. The Republicans used it relentlessly in attack ads.Politicians are drawn to tanks: Churchill, Putin, Blair, Hugo Chavez, Liz Truss and Nigel Farage have all been snapped on or in one. Dukakis’s efforts came only a couple of years after Thatcher’s influential contribution to the genre; while she loomed out of the turret with uncanny poise, dressed in her own clothes, he seemed shrunken and overwhelmed, in a helmet that didn’t belong to him.Widely recognised as one of the most disastrous campaign photos in history, the image would haunt future presidencies. “I sat in countless meetings in which some smartass warned that a stop on the president’s schedule had the makings of a ‘Dukakis in the tank moment,’” recalled former Clinton aide John King to Politico. In 2013, after being handed a naval football helmet, Obama declined to try it on. “You do not put stuff on your head if you’re president,” he joked. FBJFK in the motorcade, 1963Photographer unknownView image in fullscreen“It was a watershed moment that changed America,” says Fredrik Logevall, historian and biographer of John F Kennedy. “I think there’s something to the notion that America lost its innocence after 22 November 1963.”More than other images from Kennedy’s assassination – grainy TV coverage of the immediate aftermath, or Lyndon B Johnson being sworn in – this long lens shot of Kennedy smiling just moments before his assassination has come to signify what was lost that day. “In this photograph he’s for ever frozen in our minds,” Logevall says, “the picture of youthful vitality and glamour.”For Logevall, it captures an era not only less haunted by political violence – open-top motorcades, beloved by Kennedy because he could get “closer to the people”, are a thing of the past – but also less riven by polarisation. “This was a conservative city,” he notes, and yet “hundreds of thousands of people turned up to cheer him on”.Kennedy was on his way to deliver a speech on political extremism, with lines Logevall believes to be prescient. “America’s leadership must be guided by learning and reason, or else those who confuse rhetoric with reality and the plausible with the possible will gain popular ascendancy, with their seemingly swift and simple solutions to every world problem.” FBLBJ being sworn in, 1963By Cecil W StoughtonView image in fullscreenOn 22 November 1963, shortly after the assassination of John F Kennedy, vice-president Lyndon B Johnson took the oath to become the 36th president of the US, inside a cramped compartment aboard Air Force One, on the runway of Dallas airport. Kennedy’s body had been loaded on to the plane 15 minutes before, and as the compartment filled with people, White House photographer Cecil Stoughton stood on top of a sofa, crammed himself against the curved ceiling and asked everyone to step back.When Jackie Kennedy arrived, still in her blood- stained suit, she was positioned to LBJ’s left – her haunting, dazed expression lends the image its emotional force. In less than a minute, as Stoughton snapped eight pictures, the ceremony was over. As Air Force One continued on to Washington, Stoughton left the plane to ensure his film was swiftly developed and transmitted to the world’s press, to authenticate the transfer of power to a new president. FBDonald Trump mugshot, 2023By Fulton County Sheriff’s OfficeView image in fullscreenEven before Trump arrived at the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office in Atlanta, Georgia, last August, people were anticipating the release of his mugshot, with fakes spreading around the internet. It was his fourth arrest that year, but the first time he had had a picture taken.Mugshots are often used to shame public figures who have run-ins with the law. But for Trump, ever the self-publicist, the image became a golden opportunity, adorning mugs, T-shirts and stickers, with the mottos “Never Surrender” or “Not Guilty”. Trump, not long reinstated on X by Elon Musk, tweeted the image himself, raising more than $7m in just a few days. FBJimmy Carter at Camp David, 1978By Karl SchumacherView image in fullscreenIn September 1978, Jimmy Carter convened a secret 12-day summit with Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat at Camp David. The main focus was a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel after 30 years of intermittent war. The resulting accords led to Israel agreeing to withdraw from the Sinai in exchange for its first official recognition by an Arab state and an end to the state of war. A plan was also laid out for Palestinian self-government in the West Bank and Gaza, but it was never implemented.Here Begin and Sadat are shown smiling and shaking hands at the presidential retreat in Maryland, as Carter looks on. “The picture makes it look as if the three leaders all got along very well at the summit. That was not at all the case,” recalls William B Quandt, a former national security council staffer who was involved in the negotiations. “The adversaries were very hostile, and on the third day Carter decided not to have any more three-way meetings. We were not at all sure we would get an agreement until the last day.”Begin and Sadat won the Nobel Peace prize that year, while Carter was awarded it in 2002 for “his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts”. While the Camp David accords are recognised as his greatest presidential achievement, they left crucial issues unresolved and, some argue, helped prevent Palestianian statehood. GSGeorge HW Bush in bed, 1987By David ValdezView image in fullscreenThis photograph, taken in 1987 for Life ­magazine, captured the then vice- president with his ­family on holiday in Maine. David Valdez – personal photographer to Bush at the time – was invited by Barbara Bush to come by the house at 6am. “I poked my head in the bedroom door and there were George and Barbara Bush in bed,” he later told NPR. “Then the ­grandchildren started coming in and I took that snap, and that wound up running two full pages, and it’s taken on a life of its own.” The Washington Post credited the image with launching Bush’s successful campaign for the presidency; Valdez became his official White House ­photographer. FBLyndon B Johnson watches war protests, 1968By Yoichi OkamotoView image in fullscreenThis strikingly intimate shot shows LBJ and his family at his ranch in Texas, watching TV coverage of Vietnam war protests outside the 1968 Democratic national convention in Chicago. This level of access was remarkable: Yoichi Okamoto was the first civilian to be appointed chief photographer for the White House.Here we can also see a turning point in LBJ’s presidency. Since taking over in 1963, he had sent more than 500,000 troops to what the public increasingly saw as an unjustifiable, unwinnable war. “I know we oughtn’t to be there,” Johnson admitted to a colleague in 1966, “but I can’t get out.” He withdrew from the 1968 election, and Nixon won. GSCalvin Coolidge as a cowboy, 1927Photographer unknownView image in fullscreenDuring his tenure in the 1920s, Calvin Coolidge held the greatest number of press conferences of any president (521 over six years), delivered the first State of the Union address on the radio and was the first to appear in a sound film. The media-savvy president appeared in photos dressed up in workers’ overalls, pitching hay and – as here – wearing a cowboy’s chaps and hat, on a trip to South Dakota. This image caused a stir: while the New York Times claimed “Coolidge as Cowboy Wins West’s Heart”, others called him “a pitiful puppet of publicity”, the first president to make himself a laughing stock. He would not be the last. FBBill Clinton on Arsenio Hall, 1992By Reed SaxonView image in fullscreenThis may well be what clinched the 1992 election for Bill Clinton. In June, weeks before accepting the Democratic presidential nomination, he appeared on Arsenio Hall’s late-night talkshow and played Heartbreak Hotel on the saxophone. It was a bold move at the time and the image of a cool, confident Clinton on stage with his sax and dark shades is credited with helping him secure the youth vote especially. “It’s nice to see a Democrat blow something besides the election,” Hall quipped on the show. The success of the appearance, the Los Angeles Times wrote, “changed presidential politics – turning pop culture’s hippest TV shows into the contemporary equivalent of campaign whistle-stops”. GSLyndon B Johnson with Martin Luther King Jr, 1965Photographer unknown View image in fullscreen“I want to tell you how grateful I am,” Johnson told King on the phone, after becoming president in 1963, “and how worthy I’m going to try to be of all your hopes.” The cautious collaboration between the two reached its peak on 6 August 1965, with the signing of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibited racial discrimination in voting. Johnson is pictured that day, reaching out to pass a smiling King the pen used to sign the act, as Rosa Parks looks on.How strong this much mythologised moment of unity really was has remained the subject of fierce debate. Mutual distrust haunted their interactions and King faced relentless pressure from J Edgar Hoover’s FBI, with Johnson’s knowledge. King split with the government over Vietnam, and today, voting rights have been rolled back. FBRonald Reagan at the Berlin Wall, 1987By Dirck HalsteadView image in fullscreenOn 12 June 1987, Ronald Reagan delivered probably the most famous sentence of his presidency: “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” He was standing in front of the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate, 24 years after JFK gave his famous speech in the city. It was a risky move: the previous day, thousands had gathered to protest against his visit. Even his own advisers had been unsure whether the public address to the Soviet leader was too provocative. But the fall of the Wall two years later, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, seemed to vindicate the decision – though there is debate over whether its importance has been overplayed. Over time, Gorbachev and Reagan, both keen to end the cold war, formed a productive alliance. GSJoe Biden at the debate, 2024By Justin SullivanView image in fullscreen“I’ve done 31 debates since I’ve been at Getty,” says photographer Justin Sullivan, “and I’ve never seen anything like that.” The Biden-Trump debate of June 2024 had felt unusual even before it started: press were allowed in only moments before it began and the room was eerily empty. As a “pale and very unstable” Biden gave “incoherent” answers, Sullivan focused on the “strange facial expressions” that damned him as much as his nonsensical responses did. Within weeks, he’d dropped out of the race.“It was a sad ending to a strong presidency that history will look upon more favourably,” says David Smith, the Guardian’s Washington bureau chief. “He inherited four major crises – the pandemic, the economy, racial justice and climate – and made significant progress on all of them.” FBRobert F Kennedy’s assassination, 1968By Bill EppridgeView image in fullscreenOn 5 June 1968, Robert F Kennedy was in the ballroom of the Ambassador hotel in Los Angeles, giving a victory speech after winning the Democratic California presidential primary – he was shaping up to be the nominee to run against Richard Nixon in the general election. As he exited through the hotel kitchen after midnight, shaking hands with staff, shots rang out. In this photograph by Life magazine photographer Bill Eppridge, Kennedy lies on the floor while a busboy, Juan Romero, crouches down to comfort him. Kennedy died the next day. The gunman was Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian-Jordanian man who said he felt betrayed by Kennedy’s support for Israel in the six-day war.Letters addressed to “the busboy” soon arrived at the hotel. “One even went so far as to say that if he hadn’t stopped to shake my hand, the senator would be alive, so I should be ashamed of myself for being so selfish,” Romero told NPR in 2018. “It’s been a long 50 years.” He visited Kennedy’s grave in 2010, buying his first suit for the occasion.Alternative accounts of the assassination have since emerged. His son, Robert F Kennedy Jr – a conspiracy theorist who recently suspended his own presidential campaign – is among those who believe there was a second gunman. GS More

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      US presidential debates: the 10 most memorable moments

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      Joe Biden and Donald Trump will debate on Thursday for the first time this election cycle, and it holds the potential for some history-making moments.Debates can inform voters on both the issues and temperaments of the candidates, potentially swaying an undecided voter toward one candidate’s direction. They can also make for good TV, creating soundbites that resonate for decades to come.From the candidates’ physical appearances to gaffes to planned attacks to off-the-cuff retorts, here are some memorable moments from US presidential debate history.View image in fullscreen1960: The first and possibly still the most famous televised American presidential debate pitted the telegenic Democrat John F Kennedy against Republican vice-president Richard Nixon, creating defining moments for both presidential debates and television itself. The clammy Nixon was recovering from illness and had a five o’clock shadow but refused makeup. TV viewers are said to have judged Kennedy the winner, whereas radio listeners gave it to Nixon or called it a draw. Kennedy won a narrow election. He was assassinated three years later.View image in fullscreen1976: Republican president Gerald Ford, who succeeded Nixon after the Watergate scandal, had been closing the gap on Democrat Jimmy Carter but then remarked: “There is no Soviet domination of eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.” It was seen as a critical gaffe in the context of the cold war and Carter went on to win the election.View image in fullscreen1980: Carter accused Republican Ronald Reagan of planning to cut Medicare healthcare funding for the elderly. Reagan, who had complained that Carter was misrepresenting his positions on numerous issues, said with a chuckle: “There you go again.” The audience erupted. The duel attracted 80.6 million viewers, the most ever for a presidential debate at that time, according to Nielsen.View image in fullscreen1984: Reagan, at 73 the oldest president in US history at the time, took the sting out of the issue of his age during the second debate with the Democratic candidate Walter Mondale, 56, with this line: “I want you to know that, also, I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” Reagan was re-elected.View image in fullscreen1988: Democrat Michael Dukakis, taking on the Republican vice-president George HW Bush, was asked whether he would support the death penalty for someone who raped and murdered his wife. “No, I don’t, Bernard,” the Massachusetts governor replied. “And I think you know that I’ve opposed the death penalty during all of my life.” He was criticised as cold and unemotional and lost the election.View image in fullscreen1988: In the vice-presidential debate, Bush’s running mate Dan Quayle compared himself with John F Kennedy. The Democratic senator Lloyd Bentsen shot back: “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” It is probably the most famous line ever uttered in a vice-presidential debate and has been much parodied since.View image in fullscreen1992: In a three-way contest with Democrat Bill Clinton and businessman Ross Perot, President George HW Bush made the fatal mistake of looking at his watch. It gave the impression of a haughty, aloof incumbent who did not want to be there and took too much for granted. Bush later admitted what had been on his mind: “Only 10 more minutes of this crap.” He lost to Clinton.View image in fullscreen2000: Democratic vice-president Al Gore went into the debate leading in the polls but sighed loudly when his rival, Republican George W Bush, spoke. In another incident, he was criticised for invading Bush’s personal space when Bush strolled forward and Gore rose and moved towards his rival, as if looking for a fight. Bush dismissed him with a nod and won a close and bitterly disputed election.View image in fullscreen2012: President Barack Obama was widely felt to have “phoned in” his first lackluster debate performance against Republican Mitt Romney, who performed above expectations. But in the second debate, Romney, responding to a question about gender pay equality, said he had “binders full of women” as candidates for cabinet posts. The phrase became a meme on social media and Romney lost in November.US elections 2024: a guide to the first presidential debate
      What to know about the Biden-Trump debate
      Debate could open up the race for the White House
      An election rarity: two ex-presidents in an contest
      RFK Jr fails to qualify for the first debate and blames CNN
      View image in fullscreen2016: With no incumbent in the mix, Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton debated like an outsider and a seasoned public servant, respectively. In perhaps the most enduring soundbite, Clinton hit at Trump’s failure to pay income taxes in the few tax returns that were public at the time. “That makes me smart,” Trump retorted. He also called people coming into the US “bad hombres”, botching the pronunciation of the word. And in one eerie moment, Trump stood close behind Clinton as she answered an audience question, which Clinton later wrote made her skin crawl. Trump also refused to say whether he’would accept the results of the election – which he would go on to win in 2016.View image in fullscreen2020: Trump, now the incumbent, debated Joe Biden in his characteristically testy way, replete with interruptions. At one point, an exasperated Biden pleaded, “Will you shut up, man?”. That memorable line came as the debate schedule was affected by a new virus, Covid-19, spreading through the country. Trump tested positive for the virus, leading to the cancellation of the second debate. His former chief of staff claimed Trump tested positive before the first debate but didn’t disclose it, a claim that Trump called “fake news”. Biden went on to win the election.
      An earlier version of this article was published in 2016 More

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      Pat Robertson obituary

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      Although the concept of separation of church and state is entrenched in the US constitution, the influence of churchmen in political affairs is an American tradition dating back to the colonial era. Indeed, modern media has made the voice of contemporary evangelists every bit as powerful as Cotton Mather’s sermons were to the early Puritans. Pat Robertson, who has died aged 93, rode the growth of cable television, and a shrewd sense of the economics of the business, to become the most overtly political, and arguably the most influential, of them all.When Robertson appeared on the front of Time magazine in 1986, the cover line read Gospel TV: Religion, Politics and Money. The melding of those three strands of his career was not always seamless, though in American fundamentalism, material wealth is usually seen as a visible sign of God’s blessing. Through his Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), he progressed from televised faith healing to a serious run at the US presidency in 1988, and made a fortune in the process.Robertson started that campaign for the Republican nomination with a petition, and contributions, from 3 million viewers, and finished second in the Iowa caucuses, ahead of the then vice-president George HW Bush. But voters gave him little support in the Republican primaries, and Bush of course went on to the presidency.Robertson, who had handed control of CBN to his son Tim, then founded the Christian Coalition of America. Having failed to take over the Republican party, his “rainbow coalition” of fundamentalists would attempt to steer the party in its ideological direction.The coalition’s lobbying exerted immense influence, helping spearhead the right’s assault on President Bill Clinton, and provided both a fundraising and ideological template for Bush. Although the coalition was censured and fined for coordinating its campaigns directly with the Republican party, and for improper aid delivered to then-House majority leader Newt Gingrich and the Virginia senatorial candidate Oliver North, its success spurred on Robertson’s indulgence in another grand tradition of American evangelical preachers, the hubris that found him courting constant controversy, and frequent financial scandal.Controversy became inevitable with the shift from mainstream politics to the Christian Coalition. Preaching to the converted meant the restraints on expressing his true beliefs were lifted. The framework for those beliefs was set out in his 1991 bestseller The New World Order, an amalgam of historical conspiracy theories, which posited an alliance of Masons and Jewish bankers who controlled the world.Robertson called feminism a “socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practise witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians”. He predicted that the staging of “gay days” at Disney World would result in God’s retribution through earthquakes, tornados, terrorist bombings or meteors.Asked to be “nice” about rival Protestant denominations, such as Episcopalians, Presbyterians or Methodists, he said: “I don’t have to be nice to the spirit of the antichrist.” He described leftwing academics as “racists, murderers, sexual deviants, and supporters of al-Qaida”.In 2005 he called for the assassination of the Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, and explained Ariel Sharon’s 2006 stroke as God’s retribution for giving land back to Palestinians. He later apologised to Sharon’s family and claimed to have been misquoted.That followed Robertson’s standard pattern, of making wild accusations that pleased his core audience, then claiming to have been misquoted by an anti-Christian mainstream media. Most notoriously, on his TV show The 700 Club, he agreed emphatically with his fellow evangelist Jerry Falwell’s theory that the 9/11 attacks were caused by “pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays, lesbians, the American Civil Liberties Union, and [the progressive advocacy group] People for the American Way”. After the ensuing uproar, he claimed that due to a malfunctioning earpiece he had not actually heard what Falwell was saying when he agreed with it.Robertson came by his political ambitions naturally, being related through the family of his mother, Gladys (nee Willis), to two presidents, the Harrisons, William Henry and Benjamin, while his father, Willis Robertson, was a US Senator from Virginia, one of the conservative segregationist southern Democrats dubbed “Dixiecrats”. He was born in Lexington, Virginia, and christened Marion Robertson, but was nicknamed Pat, because his older brother, Willis Jr, would say “pat, pat, pat” while patting baby Marion’s cheeks.Pat was educated at two military academies: McDonogh, near Baltimore, and McCallie, in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He attended Washington and Lee University in his home town. He was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Marines, but his claims to have seen combat with the First Marine Division in Korea came back to haunt him during his run for the presidential nomination.His Republican rival, Congressman Pete McCloskey, who had served with Robertson, said Robertson’s father had used influence to keep him out of combat, and that his primary responsibility had been to keep the officers’ clubs stocked with liquor. Robertson denounced this, and allegations by fellow Marines that he had consorted with prostitutes, as attempts to discredit him.Robertson returned home to gain a law degree in 1955 from Yale, but failed the bar exam. Soon afterwards, he was converted by the Dutch missionary Cornelius Vanderbreggen. By the time he was ordained by the Southern Baptist Convention in 1961, he had bought his first television station, in Portsmouth, Virginia, and established the Christian Broadcasting Network. He gave Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker their first break, doing a children’s programme, and started the breakfast-time show The 700 Club, its title taken from a fundraising drive for 700 subscribers.Robertson’s early success was based on televised faith healing. Critics pointed out that God seemed to speak through Robertson while taking programme cues from the director. His style, with fixed smile and narrow eyes, could seem almost a caricature of a snake-oil salesman, but its appeal was unquestionable, as CBN eventually claimed an audience in 180 countries. It functioned as a network of affiliated stations subscribing to its programming, but in 1977 Robertson started his own cable channel, CBN Cable, offering mainstream entertainment bookended by The 700 Club.Renamed the Family Channel, its profits eventually threatened CBN’s religious non-profit status, so Robertson set up International Family Entertainment, with himself and Tim as its heads, and sold the Family Channel to it. In 1992 he took IFE public, making $90m on the launch. In 1997, IFE sold the Family Channel to Rupert Murdoch’s Fox network for $1.9bn. Fox has since sold it on to Disney, but as a condition of the original sale, the channel, now called Freeform, is still required to broadcast The 700 Club, hosted by Pat’s son Gordon, president of CBN, twice a day.Evangelists including Oral Roberts and Bob Jones had founded their own colleges, and Robertson’s television success spawned CBN University, now called Regent University, at the CBN headquarters in Virginia Beach, the city where Robertson lived in a hilltop mansion with its own landing strip. On a number of occasions he credited his public prayers for steering hurricanes away from Virginia Beach, though he was unsuccessful with Hurricane Isabel in 2003.More controversial than Regent was his international humanitarian charity Operation Blessing. In 1994, it was claimed in his local newspaper, the Virginian-Pilot, that Robertson’s impassioned fundraising for Operation Blessing’s refugee airlift in Rwanda and Zaire was at least partly a cover for the use of his aircraft to transport diamond-mining equipment for the Robertson-owned African Development Corporation. A long investigation by Virginia’s Office of Consumer Affairs recommended Robertson be prosecuted for fraud, but the state’s attorney general, Mark Earley, brought no charges against him. The George W Bush administration made Operation Blessing the second-largest recipient of federal relief funds in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, which was seen in some quarters as payback for Robertson’s support.In 2003, Robertson used The 700 Club as a platform to argue on behalf of the Liberian president Charles Taylor, who had been indicted by the UN for war crimes. It emerged that Robertson had an investment in a Liberian gold mine, which he claimed was intended to help pay for Operation Blessing’s humanitarian efforts in the country, but which was allowed to go bankrupt after Taylor’s departure from office.Other business enterprises included the Ice Capades, a pyramid sales scheme, and a financial services venture with the Bank of Scotland, which was cancelled after Robertson called Scotland “a dark land overrun by homosexuals”. No matter how outrageous his statements, Robertson never alienated his core audience, and could count on the committed support of born-again Christians who felt the Lord spoke through him, and rewarded him for passing on his message, as did countless politicians hungry for his endorsement.He married Dede (Adelia) Elmer in 1954. She died in 2022 and Robertson is survived by their sons, Tim and Gordon, and daughters, Elizabeth and Ann, 14 grandchildren and 24 great-grandchildren. More

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      ‘Trump’s not a good sport’: Chris Cillizza on presidents at play

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      From The Big Lebowski to Alice on The Brady Bunch, depictions of bowling abound in American pop culture. The sport’s real-life adherents included Richard Nixon, who installed bowling lanes in the White House and was known to play between seven to 12 games late at night. Characteristically, he played alone. This is one of many athletic accounts from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in a new book, Power Players: Sports, Politics, and the American Presidency, by the longtime political journalist Chris Cillizza.Bowling solo personified “Nixon the loner”, Cillizza says. “He didn’t play tennis or golf with friends. He did enjoy bowling by himself. It’s a powerful image, a telling image.”Tricky Dick’s love of bowling also helped with a crucial voting bloc: “Nixon viewed it as the sport of the Silent Majority – white, blue-collar men who sort of made up his base. He was very aware of this.”A Washington journalist for four decades, most recently for CNN, Cillizza pitched the book as about “the sports presidents play, love, spectate, and what it tells us about who they are and how they govern. That was the germ of the idea, the seed going in.”Power Players surveys 13 presidents of the modern era, from Dwight Eisenhower to Joe Biden. Some of its narratives are well-known – think Ike’s extensive golf-playing, John F Kennedy’s touch football games or Barack Obama’s pickup basketball on the campaign trail. The book explores less-remembered sides of these stories, including a scary moment on the links for Eisenhower.While golfing in Colorado in 1955, he fielded multiple stressful phone calls from his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles. After eating a hamburger with onions and getting yet another call from Dulles, Ike felt too angry to keep playing. Chest pains followed that night. The White House initially claimed indigestion but an electrocardiogram found something more serious – a heart attack. At the time, there was no 25th amendment specifying the chain of command if a president became incapacitated. Fortunately, Ike never lost consciousness during the episode.Golf was a popular sport for many presidents, as reflected in a previous book about White House athletics, First Off the Tee by Don Van Natta Jr, whom Cillizza interviewed. Yet the list of presidential pastimes is long and diverse, from Nixon’s bowling to Jimmy Carter’s fly fishing to George HW Bush’s horseshoes. Yes, horseshoes. In addition to Bush’s well-known prowess on the Yale University baseball team, he was a pretty good horseshoes player who established his own league in the White House, with a commissioner and tournaments. The White House permanent staff fielded teams; Queen Elizabeth II even gifted Bush a quartet of silver horseshoes.In the greatest-presidential-athlete discussion, Cillizza lands in Gerald Ford’s corner.“No debate, he’s the best athlete ever, I think, with [George HW] Bush a distant second, among modern presidents.”Ford sometimes lived up to the bumbling stereotypes made famous by Chevy Chase and Bob Hope – including when he accidentally hit people with golf balls. Yet he was an All-American center on the national-champion University of Michigan football team and received contract offers from two NFL squads, the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers.In addition to the sports presidents play, Cillizza’s book examines how presidents use sports to connect to the public.Calling sports “a common language that lots and lots and lots of Americans speak”, Cillizza says: “I think politicians are forever trying to identify with the average person … I think sports is a way into that world for a lot of presidents.”There’s the practice of inviting championship teams to the White House, which Cillizza traces to Ronald Reagan, although instances date back decades. While not much of a sports fan, Reagan came from a sports radio background, played the legendary Gipper in the film Knute Rockne, All American and understood the importance of proximity to winners, Cillizza says.There’s also the tradition of presidential first pitches at baseball games, arguably the most iconic thrown by George W Bush at Yankee Stadium during the 2001 World Series, in the wake of the September 11 terror attacks. Cillizza notes Dubya’s baseball pedigree as president of the Texas Rangers, and that he reportedly contemplated becoming commissioner of Major League Baseball.Of the presidents surveyed, Cillizza says George HW Bush had the most sportsmanship, thanks to early lessons about fair play from his mother, Dorothy Walker Bush, a strong tennis player herself. The least sportsmanlike, according to the author? Lyndon Johnson and Donald Trump. Cillizza cites an account of Trump’s time on the Fordham University squash team. After a loss to the Naval Academy, he drove to a department store and bought golf equipment. He and his teammates vented their frustration by hitting golf balls off a bluff into the Chesapeake Bay, then drove away, sans clubs.“That’s Trump, in a lot of ways,” Cillizza says. “He’s not a good sport who’s going to be genteel.”The author notes similar behavior throughout Trump’s career, including bombastic performances in World Wrestling Entertainment storylines and a whole recent book about his alleged cheating at golf, as well as a recent news item about the former president going to Ireland to visit one of his courses.“He hit a drive, and said Joe Biden could never do this,” Cillizza recalls. “It went 280ft right down the middle of the fairway. He talks about his virility, his health, through the lens of sports.”Not too long ago, two ex-presidents from rival parties teamed up as part of a golf foursome. George HW Bush joined the man who beat him in 1992 – Bill Clinton – en route to an unlikely friendship. Rounding out the foursome were the broadcasting legend Jim Nantz and NFL superstar Tom Brady.“It’s remarkable what sports can do to bring presidents together,” Cillizza says. “This day and age, it’s hard to consider … I don’t think Donald Trump and Joe Biden will be playing golf together anytime soon.”
      Power Players is published in the US by Twelve More

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      Incite, smear, divide: why are the Tories and Labour copying the tactics of America’s vilest strategist? | Nels Abbey

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      Will 2024 be a repeat of 1992 or 1997, is the (binary) question people ask: a repeat of Neil Kinnock’s shock defeat to the Tories in 1992 or Tony Blair’s triumphant landslide victory in 1997.But while we are talking about the what will happen next time, we had better discuss the how. The means matter. The means help shape society. They impact how cohesive we are, how we treat each other. The means last longer than victory or defeat. And by many current indications, the means suggest we are looking at neither 1997 nor 1992, but at a mirror image of the 1988 US presidential election.The name might not mean much, but the brutal political genius of Lee Atwater looms large over today’s British politics – to such an extent that even he would not believe it. Atwater was a highly influential strategist who helped shape modern presidential campaigning for the Republicans. Perhaps the foremost part of his legacy was the ruthless, nihilistic mainstreaming of dog-whistle racism into political campaigning. He explained how that worked.“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger’. By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” – that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger’.” Atwater’s crowning achievement, having advised President Ronald Reagan, was masterminding Vice-President George HW Bush’s 1988 presidential election victory against the Democratic governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis. And to do so, he leveraged the most reliable of western tropes: the Black bogeyman. Atwater conceived and created the now notorious Willie Horton ad. The advert offered a simple juxtaposition: George Bush, a tough-on-crime Republican who believed in the death penalty for murderers, or Michael Dukakis, a wet liberal who allowed murderers to have weekend passes to get out of jail.And then came the money shot: a menacingly scary black-and-white mugshot of William Horton (his name was altered by Atwater from William Horton to Willie Horton; the intended effect is self-explanatory), a Black man who had been convicted of murder and rape in Dukakis’s Massachusetts, yet was granted a temporary release from prison pass (otherwise known as a furlough). While out on furlough he carried out even more horrific crimes. The advert did what it intended: to make Horton and Dukakis look like an inseparable couple, the Democrats and the black felon as running mates: a racist signal to rally the vote.Intentional or otherwise, I see a clear link between the Willie Horton advert and Labour’s “soft on paedophiles” attack advert on Rishi Sunak. Sadly, given the chance to pull back from his Willie Horton moment, the Labour leader stood “by every word”.But then, looking across the divide, Atwater would see much to admire in Tory politics as well. Last week the home secretary, Suella Braverman, pointed at Pakistani Muslim men with the message that she would not let “political correctness” get in the way of apprehending grooming gangs – despite the fact that her own department had found it was overwhelmingly and disproportionately white men who constituted grooming rings. But why stop there? Atwater wouldn’t. There goes Braverman apparently upholding a landlord’s decision to display golliwogs in his pub.There she goes, telling some of the world’s most desperate people that, should they dare to show up here, they’ll end up on prison barges. Just the place for the political scapegoat. Atwater would have loved those barges.In his pomp, he would have loved the intolerance, the viciousness, the very British race struggle in our politics right now: the tussle of one side to out-racist the other, to make complexity and decency look weak, often leveraging polite and innocent sounding substitutes and subtleties for race along the way – think: wokeness, political correctness, virtue signalling. Call it Atwater signalling perhaps, make a dead man happy. But ultimately we must decide if we are happy with politics conducted like this.Because the next election will have a victor and a vanquished, and the victor will feel the means justified the ends. But if both parties continue down this dark and dirty path, what will the following election be like, and the next? And what kind of country will emerge from them?Look at what devil-take-the-hindmost politics has done to America. We know it can work – that’s the tragedy. And we know where it ends.
      Nels Abbey is a writer, broadcaster and former banker. He is the author of the satirical book Think Like A White Man

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      Donald Trump’s former attorney general William Barr to publish his memoirs

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      Donald Trump’s former attorney general William Barr to publish his memoirsThe book, to be published in March, will divulge details from his tenure as attorney general for George HW Bush and Trump William Barr, Donald Trump’s second attorney general and perceived “hatchet man” until he split from the former president over his lies about election fraud, will publish his memoirs in March.In an era of rightwing populism, we cannot destroy democracy in order to save it | Jeff SparrowRead moreHarperCollins, the publisher of One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General, promised a “vivid and forthright” read on Barr’s long career in law and conservative politics, in which he was first attorney general under George HW Bush.“Barr takes readers behind the scenes during seminal moments of the Bush administration in the 1990s, from the LA riots to Pan Am 103 and Iran Contra,” the publisher said on Tuesday.“With the Trump administration, Barr faced an unrelenting barrage of issues, such as Russia-gate, the opioid epidemic, Chinese espionage, big tech, the Covid outbreak, civil unrest, the first impeachment, and the 2020 election fallout.”The publisher also said Barr would help readers understand how Bush and Trump “viewed power and justice at critical junctures of their presidencies”.During the investigation of Russian election meddling and links between Trump and Moscow, Barr stoked rage among Democrats who accused him of interfering on behalf of the president.His handling of Robert Mueller’s report also prompted protest from the special counsel himself.Republicans and other observers defended Barr but the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, then a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president, called him “a disgrace” and “not a credible head of federal law enforcement”.Barr was also present during key flash points of the Trump administration, for instance, walking at the president’s side in summer 2020 when he marched across Washington DC’s Lafayette Square, which had been cleared of protesters against racism and police brutality, to stage a photo op at a historic church.Barr split from Trump as the president refused to admit defeat by Joe Biden in the 2020 election. Angry scenes between the two men have been reported in other books, including bestsellers by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa of the Washington Post and Jon Karl of ABC News.Barr stoked Trump’s rage by telling the Associated Press he had not seen evidence of “fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election”.He was no longer in office during the culmination of Trump’s concerted attempt to overturn his election defeat – the deadly Capitol riot of January 6.On 7 January 2021, Barr condemned Trump for “orchestrating a mob to pressure Congress” and said: “The president’s conduct was a betrayal of his office and supporters.”The same day, the Guardian published an article examining the state of the Department of Justice after Barr’s second stint in the chair.Vanita Gupta, a former head of the civil rights division, said: “The morale and the reputation of the department has been gutted because of undue political influence on the decisions of career staff.“The department needs to be rebuilt by new leadership committed at every turn to decisions made on the law and on the facts, and not on what the president wants.”On Tuesday, Sadie Gurman, a Wall Street Journal reporter, was among observers to note the provenance – and irony – of Barr’s chosen title.Current attorney general Merrick Garland, Gurman said, might appreciate that “Barr’s book title is actually an homage to his hero, Ed Levi”, who, when asked “to describe the job of attorney general … famously replied, ‘It’s just one damn thing after another.’”Ed Levi, a law professor and “non-politician”, was installed by Gerald Ford in 1975, after the Watergate scandal brought down Richard Nixon and his attorney general, John Mitchell – who served time in prison.TopicsWilliam BarrDonald TrumpUS politicsGeorge HW BushTrump administrationRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      Bob Dole obituary

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      Bob Dole obituaryLongstanding Republican leader in the US Senate who lost the 1996 presidential election to Bill Clinton0In late 1995, one of the US’s shrewdest political observers, Michael Barone, wrote of Senator Bob Dole that he “towers over everyone else in the political landscape, even the president”. Less than 12 months later, Dole, who has died aged 98, had given up his prized leadership of the Republican-controlled Senate to run one of the most inept presidential campaigns in modern US history. It ended with his hard-won reputation as a master politician in tatters and his opponent, Bill Clinton, becoming the first Democratic president to be voted a second term for 52 years.By the time Dole felt obliged to surrender his Senate seat in a desperate effort to revive his flagging campaign, he had represented Kansas on Capitol Hill for 36 years, the longest Republican incumbency of his generation.He served first, for eight years, in the House of Representatives. His election in 1960 had come after a long apprenticeship making himself known to all levels of the deeply conservative society of the rural midwest. He reached Washington only after service in the Kansas state legislature and eight years as a county prosecuting attorney in his small home town of Russell. Elected to office as a staunch conservative, he retained that view for the rest of his political life.As a young man, he had been hit by a shell during wartime service in Italy. The shoulder injury, from which he nearly died, became the overriding influence on the rest of his life. The determination he had mobilised to fight his disability was harnessed to his political career and early on he revealed two characteristics that were to mark his campaigning style – readiness to fight a deeply partisan battle and the acerbic wit he often employed to further his cause.During his four terms in the House of Representatives Dole carved out a solid enough reputation to secure him victory when he ran for the Senate in the watershed year of 1968, amid the turmoil of the Vietnam war and the social cataclysm set off by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. It was a good year for the Senate Republicans, who gained seven seats from the Democrats, but they still did not control the chamber.Dole soon found himself mounting a vigorous defence of Richard Nixon as the new president settled in to face a hostile Congress. It was plain that the two men had much in common, both politically and personally. In short order Dole was fighting the Democrats’ effort to stop US military action in Cambodia and coming under fire for procedural manoeuvres that the chairman of the Senate armed services committee said “bordered on the ridiculous”.It won him enough points in the White House, however, for the president to appoint him chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1971, his first rise to national prominence. He carried out the role assiduously, building up the party in preparation for the 1972 re-election battle, until obliged to fall on his sword in 1973 when Nixon needed something for George HW Bush, newly replaced as UN ambassador, in the post-election reshuffle. That proved an unexpected blessing for Dole as the Watergate scandal unravelled and Bush found himself forced to defend the indefensible.It may have been this relative obscurity that narrowly saved the senator’s bacon after Nixon’s unprecedented resignation. He had to fight for his seat in a deeply hostile mid-term election which saw the Democrats in Congress achieve a large enough majority to override any presidential veto, the first time that had happened for nearly 40 years.Two years later, the 1976 general election found the unelected President Gerald Ford under siege not only because of the circumstances of his arrival at the White House and his decision to pardon Nixon but because his own Republican right thought him too soft. He won the party nomination by a majority of only 4% over Ronald Reagan and, in an effort to appease his opponents and unify the party, chose Dole as his running mate.It was a disastrous move. Dole’s combative style in the campaign soon had the country in a furore, particularly after he had characterised the century’s two world conflicts as “Democrat wars”. Jimmy Carter squeaked into office with just 50.1% of the popular vote – a margin of 1.6m in a total of just over 80m – and Dole was widely blamed for the outcome.However, as the country swung to the right in the Reagan years, Dole’s reputation recovered. He was chairman of the Senate finance committee during the White House tax-cutting campaign of 1981 and demonstrated his exceptional skill at managing the intricate legislative process.But he was far from happy about the budgetary consequences of the measures and successfully manoeuvred an offsetting bill through the Senate the following year in an attempt to stop the federal deficit ballooning uncontrollably. The clumsily named but effective Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act led the then fiery young congressman Newt Gingrich to dub Dole “the tax collector for the welfare state”.But, generally speaking, Dole’s legislative record was poor: he was a manager rather than an innovator. As leader of the Senate Republicans for more than a decade his unrivalled talent, of inestimable value in a constitutional structure designed to reduce intransigence to deadlock, was to wheel and deal until common ground had mysteriously surfaced from the party quagmire.Among the fruits of his efforts were such laws as those extending food stamp relief for very poor people, the 1982 Voting Rights Act, and important new federal support for disabled people.But his lack of specific ideological aims repeatedly undermined his wider ambitions. His first bid for the presidency ended abruptly in 1980 with a derisory vote of 607 in the New Hampshire primary. His second attempt in 1988 appeared at first to be going far more smoothly until George HW Bush’s spin doctors successfully induced Dole to lose his temper during a televised debate in New Hampshire and snarl at his opponent “stop lying about my record”. Bush romped through the subsequent primaries.In 1996 Dole secured the Republican nomination but seemed wholly unable to mount a credible campaign against an ostensibly vulnerable Clinton. The president had a poor legislative record and there was a host of allegations of sexual and financial misconduct. But Dole’s electioneering was marked by poorly delivered speeches whose content baffled many of his audiences. He seemed to have no clear electoral strategy and constantly reshuffled his staff in the effort to develop one.In the final stages, with the opinion polls swinging steadily towards the Democrats, even his own party gave up the fight to sit resignedly awaiting the inevitable defeat. That dismal 1996 campaign persuaded only 49% of eligible voters to turn out (the second lowest figure in US history) and Dole’s failure to address issues important to female voters proved to be critical. While he and Clinton each secured 44% of the male vote, Dole could attract only one third of women’s ballots.Born in Russell, Kansas, Robert was the son of a small dairy retailer, Doran Dole, and his wife Bina (nee Talbott). There were few indications in his early life that he would emerge from the pack. His formative years were spent in that disastrous period of the 1930s when poor farming methods had turned the Great Plains into a dust bowl and the Depression had limited the few alternative ways of making a living. Government relief was the only lifeline for many families, a deeply traumatic experience for homesteaders whose principal creed was self-reliance.The six members of the Dole family kept going by moving into their basement and renting out the rest of their house to an oil prospector, but they were obliged to pinch and scrape for years. Doran gave up the dairy business for the more secure post of managing a grain storage unit and his mother sold sewing machines door-to-door.Robert, who had shown himself a formidable athlete during his school career but not much of an academic, nonetheless gained the financial support of a local banker to enrol at the University of Kansas. He wanted to become a doctor but the US was pitched into the second world war and the 18-year-old student found himself in the US army, fighting in Europe.On 14 April 1945, three weeks before the end of the European campaign, he was leading an assault on a German machine gun position in the Po valley in Italy when a shell smashed his spine and tore his right shoulder apart, leaving him temporarily paralysed. On his return to Russell, local people raised a fund to send him to Chicago for treatment by one of the leading neurosurgeons of the day, Hampar Kelikian. During the three-year course, for which the doctor refused payment, Kelikian became one of Dole’s closest friends and eventually persuaded the young man that he would have to cope with the permanent disablement of his right arm.The occupational therapist brought in to train him for this disability, Phyllis Holden, became Dole’s first wife in 1948, and they had a daughter, Robin.Under the spur of the doctor and the therapist, Dole settled down to cope with the pain he would endure for the rest of his life. He resumed his university career but diverted to a law degree. Since he was still unable to write with his left hand, his wife sat with him to take lecture notes and write out examination answers to Dole’s dictation.To outsiders the young man seemed to overcome most of his physical problems, but this was really because of a great deal of backstage manoeuvring. As he embarked on his political career his wife padded his suits to disguise his injured arm and shoulder and arranged for his food to arrive ready cut at public functions. Dole took to carrying a pencil permanently in his right hand to avert the agony of anyone trying to shake it.In 1950, at the age of 27, he became one of the youngest state legislators in the history of Kansas. In an overwhelmingly Republican state he naturally ran as a steadfast conservative. He also began to show the obsession with every aspect of politics for which he later became renowned. He was far from the favourite in the 1960 Republican primary for the first congressional district, covering about three-quarters of Kansas, but eventually won the election, embarking on a Washington career that would last nearly four decades.After standing down as a senator, and his defeat in the 1996 presidential election, he did not seek public office again. It was a sad ending at the age of 73 to a career in which he had served his country well in war and in peace. Many of his most significant contributions were made well away from the public eye. In the words of one of his staff, “people never just knew what Bob Dole achieved late at night in the Senate”.He wrote a number of books, including a memoir of his second world war experiences, One Soldier’s Story (2005). The only former Republican nominee to endorse Donald Trump, he was awarded the Congressional gold medal in 2018 for his service as “soldier, legislator and statesman”. In 2019 Congress made him an honorary colonel.His first marriage ended in divorce in 1972. Three years later he married Elizabeth Hanford, who – as Elizabeth Dole – became a leading political figure in her own right, serving in the administrations of Reagan and Bush Sr, and later as a senator. She survives him, along with his daughter. Robert Joseph Dole, politician, born 22 July 1923; died 5 December 2021TopicsUS politicsRepublicansUS CongressBill ClintonRichard NixonGeorge HW BushSecond world warobituariesReuse this content More

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      Donald Rumsfeld obituary

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      Donald Rumsfeld, who has died aged 88, arguably did more damage to the US’s military reputation than any previous secretary of defence. An unbendingly ideological approach to international affairs, and a conviction that he could micromanage the vast resources of the Pentagon like those of a private company, ensured not only that the US became enmeshed in a disastrous and costly campaign in Iraq from 2003 but that it would be vilified for its harsh treatment of the country’s citizens.As the war dragged on with little sign of progress and pressure grew for him to be replaced, President George W Bush initially declared that Rumsfeld would hold his post until the end of the presidency in January 2009. But in November 2006, in the aftermath of the scandal of torture and abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib military detention centre in Baghdad, the Army Times, voice of an outraged military, roundly declared that “Rumsfeld has lost credibility with the uniformed leadership, with the troops, with Congress and with the public at large. His strategy has failed, and his ability to lead is compromised.”A few days later, voters in that year’s midterm elections endorsed this blast with an electoral drubbing for the Bush administration. Rumsfeld was immediately sacked, and largely disappeared from public life. In 2011 he published a memoir, Known and Unknown, in which he defended his handling of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – and used to lay into any member of the Bush administration who had dared to dissent from his views. He took the title of the book from the celebrated remark he had made in 2002, when asked about the lack of evidence to support the White House’s assertion that Iraq was supplying terrorist groups with weapons of mass destruction: “As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”Rumsfeld was the only politician to have taken charge of the Pentagon twice. In 1975, at 43, he became its youngest-ever head under President Gerald Ford, holding the post for just over a year, and then, at 68, its second oldest, when Bush junior brought him back in 2001.In his second period in the role, he was at first was compared to his 1960s predecessor Robert McNamara, who had effectively outwitted a bloated military bureaucracy to rationalise America’s defence posture. But McNamara had stuck to broad strategy and left the fighting to the generals (disastrously, as it turned out in Vietnam). Rumsfeld, a successful businessman with an unrivalled understanding of Washington’s bureaucratic maze, believed he could tear the whole structure up by the roots and drag it, totally reformed, into the new century.His abrasive administrative style became notorious, taking the form of a blizzard of short, unsigned notes, which questioned anything and everything about equipment and doctrine. But he had barely settled in to his Pentagon office when his wide-ranging plans were brought sharply to earth by 19 men wielding Stanley knives.The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 not only made members of the new Bush administration realise that there was no such thing as Fortress America, but also had an immediate personal impact on Rumsfeld. He was at his desk being briefed by CIA officials when the hijacked American Airlines Boeing 757 crashed into the south-west wing of the building. He rushed to help in the rescue work before moving into the military command centre to deal with the wider crisis. His then became the most resolute voice at the cabinet table and he acted as the administration’s hardline front man in America’s call for a worldwide coalition against terrorism.Between October and December 2001 the administration, with British support, launched retaliatory attacks on the Afghan Taliban regime for sheltering Osama bin Laden. The regime, though not its resistance, collapsed, but the seemingly irrelevant issue of attacking Iraq had also been proposed by Rumsfeld and such administration hawks as the vice-president, Dick Cheney. The two had earlier served together under presidents Richard Nixon and Ford; when Rumsfeld became Ford’s chief of staff at the White House in 1974, Cheney was originally his deputy and later took over the job when Rumsfeld went to the Pentagon.During the Ronald Reagan years, Rumsfeld – by then running a highly profitable business – was sent to meet Saddam Hussein in the US’s effort to counter the Khomeini regime in Iran by re-establishing diplomatic relations with Iraq. His briefing for the visit included intelligence reports on Saddam’s use of chemical weapons both in the war with Iran and against his own people.In 2001 Rumsfeld was still obsessed with the issue and cited it as one of the reasons to justify an attack, a proposition strongly resisted by the secretary of state, Colin Powell. When Powell was eventually won over, the US’s international campaign against Iraq’s reputed weapons of mass destruction got under way, culminating in the military assault opened by the US and its coalition partners in March 2003.Underlying the chaos of the subsequent occupation had been Rumsfeld’s unshakeable belief that the Iraqi population would greet the invading coalition forces with jubilation and that everyday life in the ensuing secular democracy would resume within weeks. This view was constantly reinforced by one of his own key appointees, Douglas Feith, whom he put in charge of defence policy planning.Feith launched a fierce bureaucratic struggle with the CIA and the state department. On Rumsfeld’s orders, and in some secrecy, he established an intelligence operation, dubbed the Office of Special Plans, devoted to collating reports of Saddam’s continued production of weapons of mass destruction.Moreover, Feith (and therefore Rumsfeld) was encouraged by the exiled leader of the Iraqi national congress, Ahmed Chalabi, to believe that the Iraqi people would rise in their millions to greet their liberators and that America’s military presence could rapidly be reduced once the actual fighting was over. (It was a view firmly rejected by the State Department, which had produced an enormous set of briefings about the complexities of running Iraq after Saddam’s fall.)This increased Rumsfeld’s resistance to the army’s assessment of the forces needed to conquer Iraq. The initial version of Operations Plan 1003-98 for Iraq, which had been regularly tested in Pentagon war games, envisaged the deployment of 500,000 troops, which Rumsfeld immediately dismissed as absurd. When the army argued that, having needed 40,000 peacekeepers to control 2 million inhabitants in Kosovo, it would clearly need at least 480,000 to cope with 24 million Iraqis, Rumsfeld dismissed this as “old thinking” and set the absolute maximum at 125,000.This was based on what turned out to be two critical fallacies. The first was that Iraqi army units would defect en masse and fight alongside coalition forces (the Pentagon had even printed special “Articles of Capitulation” for Iraqi force commanders to sign). The second was that there would be only a limited need for US involvement in any postwar civilian administration.Once Rumsfeld had accepted these propositions, what followed was almost inevitable. Central to the Pentagon’s planning for any major military excursion is a vast computerised project known as the time-phased force and deployment list, or TPFDL (colloquially called the “tip-fiddle”), used to work out in minute detail the order in which equipment, troops and supplies must be assembled and dispatched to any field of operations.The Iraq tip-fiddle covered everything from tanks to soap, and generated some 40 pages of dates, times, ships, combat troops and support staff. It represented all that Rumsfeld hated about the lumbering military bureaucracy he had sworn to reform. He not only rejected the number of troops and the gear they would need, but decreed that the whole plan should be junked so that the size, composition and deployment of the invading force could be tightly controlled by him.The abysmal consequences of this decision became apparent as the war evolved and the compromise total of 140,000 American soldiers began their advance on Baghdad. There had, of course, been none of the anticipated Iraqi defections: instead, the advancing US troops met stiff resistance and needed rapid reinforcement.The obvious source in the original tip-fiddle deployment was the 4th Infantry Division, the army’s most technologically advanced unit. But all its tanks and equipment were still aboard 30 vessels that had been cruising around the Mediterranean for weeks while Washington vainly tried to persuade Ankara to let them land in Turkey and attack Iraq from the north (a diplomatic negotiation that the cancelled tip-fiddle would have triggered). In the end, a squadron of the 2nd Armoured Cavalry Regiment and all its equipment had to be scrambled into an emergency airlift from its US base.In his 2011 memoir, Rumsfeld wrote that the cause of the mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib by their American guards was partly “a lack of training. Part of it was a lack of discipline and supervision. And part of it was the failure from the outset of the department of the army and joint staff to provide the appropriate and agreed-upon staff and support to General Sanchez’s headquarters in Iraq.”Notably absent from this list was the name of the official who had overruled the military deployment plan – Rumsfeld himself. An official inquiry into the mistreatment, chaired by James Schlesinger, blamed a failure of leadership in the Pentagon and painted an extraordinary picture. Published in August 2004, the report stated that one of the brigade commanders had told the inquiry panel that the loss of the tip-fiddle ensured that “anything that could go wrong went wrong”.The 800th Military Police (MP) Brigade, a reserve unit of civilian volunteers, had been assigned to handle detainees. During initial preparation for the war, the part-time military police had been separated from their equipment for so long that they had not been able to train before deployment. When they arrived in Iraq, their equipment still did not follow them. “Brigade commanders did not know who would be deployed next … A recently arrived battalion HQ would be assigned the next arriving MP companies, regardless of their capabilities or any other prior command and training relationships.”This eventually meant that poorly trained civilian volunteers became responsible for guarding around 7,000 rebellious prisoners at Abu Ghraib, many of whom had no idea why they had been arrested. The guards often could not communicate with one another because they had the wrong sort of radio, and therefore had little idea of what was happening elsewhere in the prison. Most did not know who was authorised to give them orders, or whether such orders were legal. The upshot of this chapter of Rumsfeld’s war on bureaucracy was the torture and abuse of prisoners revealed in a series of shocking photographs that were published around the world.Rumsfeld’s miscalculation of Iraqi citizens’ response to the invasion compounded the widespread chaos which followed Saddam’s fall in April 2003. (He defended the looting of Baghdad as an inevitable part of the transition process, with the notorious remark “stuff happens”.) Rumsfeld had originally asked a retired general, Jay Garner, to establish a postwar civil administration, but he had been given few resources. The general also blotted his political copybook with Rumsfeld by falling out with Chalabi and by recruiting State Department Arabists to help him out. Within three weeks Rumsfeld arbitrarily replaced Garner with Paul Bremer, a former diplomat and long-time associate of Henry Kissinger. Bremer insisted he could only do the job with powers analogous to those of an imperial viceroy. Rumsfeld persuaded President Bush to agree and so set the scene for the most egregious misjudgments of the whole Iraqi adventure.Even Kissinger described Bremer as a control freak and his record in Baghdad confirmed it. He created the Coalition Provisional Authority and its first executive order, issued within days of his arrival, barred the first four levels of Ba’ath party members from official employment. This immediately stripped 30,000 of the most knowledgable Iraqi civil servants and teachers of their jobs and salaries.A week later, Bremer’s second executive order disbanded the Iraqi army and its associated organisations, throwing a further 300,000 people into penury, causing widespread rioting, and removing the only organisation which might have abated the increasing anarchy. Many of the affected troops inevitably joined the armed opposition. This disbandment was in total contravention of official US policy, as Bush himself later publicly acknowledged, but Bremer’s boss at the Pentagon neither countermanded the order nor undid what was acknowledged as the worst political mistake of the Iraq campaign.After 13 disastrous months Bremer quit, signing over sovereignty to the Iraqi interim government, leaving Baghdad to the suicide bombers and to its own squabbling politicians. Rumsfeld admitted that the rise of Islamic State was ‘something that, generally, people had not anticipated’In later years, Rumsfeld continued to defend his handling of the war, showing no remorse for the mess he had created, nor for his erroneous claims about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. He did later admit that the subsequent disorder in Iraq and Syria, including the rise of Islamic State, was “something that, generally, people had not anticipated”.Born in Chicago, Donald was the son of George Rumsfeld, an estate agent, and his wife, Jeannette (nee Husted). He was educated at New Trier high school, in Winnetka, Illinois, and then won a scholarship to Princeton. In 1954, he graduated, married Joyce Pierson and signed on for three years as a naval pilot. Determined that politics would be his preferred career, he moved to Washington as a congressional administrative assistant and then, after a brief period in merchant banking, ran for Congress in his home suburb on Chicago’s North Side, winning the first of three terms in the House of Representatives (1963-69). He quickly established his reputation as a vigorous rightwinger, organising a group of reform-minded young legislators, known as Rumsfeld’s Raiders, with policies including massive increases in defence spending and reductions in the anti-poverty programmes of the time. His energy attracted the notice of Nixon, then positioning himself for the 1968 election.As president, Nixon brought Rumsfeld into his first cabinet to run the Office of Economic Opportunity. The implicit brief was to cut back on the Democratic extravagance of the Kennedy-Johnson years, but Rumsfeld’s principal achievement was, in fact, to make the office far more efficient and its anti-poverty programmes therefore more effective.When the 1972 economic crisis obliged Nixon to impose a wage and price freeze, abandon the dollar’s fixed convertibility, and impose import surcharges, Rumsfeld was put in charge of the ensuing “economic stabilisation programme”. It proved a political bed of nails on which he was rapidly skewered by enraged business leaders, trade unionists and America’s international trading partners.After Nixon’s re-election in 1972, Rumsfeld moved to Brussels as US ambassador to Nato, remaining there until brought back to head the team preparing for the imminent change of presidency, with the clouds gathering over the Watergate scandal. When vice-president Ford took over in August 1974, Rumsfeld became White House chief of staff.The following year, when Schlesinger was unexpectedly turfed out of the Pentagon, Rumsfeld took over. At 43, it made him the youngest defence secretary in US history. In office, Rumsfeld confirmed his brisk administrative skills and continued the hawkish stance he had displayed as a congressman. He increased the defence budget and accelerated the development of the B-1 bomber, the Trident submarine missile and the land-based MX missile. He also embarked on an aggressive sales drive for US weaponry and staged a resolute campaign against the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT), then under negotiation with the Soviet Union.With the accession of Jimmy Carter, Rumsfeld had a spell as lecturer at Princeton before being recruited as chief executive of the international pharmaceutical company GD Searle, then in serious financial trouble. Within eight years its fortunes were transformed and Rumsfeld was lauded as a remarkable company doctor.In 1985 he resigned from Searle’s to go into business for himself, and in 1990, he was again asked to rescue an ailing business, the General Instrument Corporation, making it sufficiently profitable for a successful stock-market flotation within three years.Meanwhile, he was assiduous in maintaining his political contacts, and when George HW Bush took office Rumsfeld served as a presidential adviser on economic policy. During the Clinton years he chaired a commission to assess the potential threat from ballistic missiles (1998), and a similar probe into the security problems of space (2000). This networking paid off and in 2001 George W Bush gave him the second term at the Pentagon that provided the platform for him to apply business principles to military operations.He is survived by Joyce and their three children, Valerie, Marcy and Nick. Donald Henry Rumsfeld, politician and businessman, born 9 July 1932; died 29 June 2021 More