John F Kennedy

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    John F Kennedy’s grandson Jack Schlossberg announces run for US House seat

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    John F Kennedy’s grandson Jack Schlossberg has said he will run for the US House next year, announcing Tuesday that he was seeking a key New York seat set to be vacated by longtime Democrat Jerry Nadler.“This district should have a representative who can harness the creativity, energy and drive of this district and translate that into political power in Washington,” Schlossberg said in a campaign video posted on social media late Tuesday.In an email to supporters, Schlossberg, a Democrat, said that his campaign will officially launch on Wednesday.Schlossberg has drummed up a large following on social media with frequent posts weighing in on national issues, including taking aim at his mother’s cousin, health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr.Last month, he posted on Instagram an image of a Halloween costume for “MAHA Man,” in reference to Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again message and described it as including such things as measles.Nadler, who is serving his 17th term in Congress, announced in September that he will not run for reelection next year, suggesting to the New York Times that a younger Democratic lawmaker in his seat “can maybe do better, can maybe help us more.”The 12th District includes Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Upper East Side and midtown.A political commentator and writer whose work has been published in such news outlets as The Washington Post, Politico and Time magazine, Schlossberg joins a crowded field of contenders already vying for the 12th congressional district seat.His decision to run comes as Democrats are hoping to regain control of the House in the 2026 midterm elections and thus a measure of legislative clout they currently lack in opposing the agenda of Republican president Donald Trump.“There is nothing our party can’t do to address costs of living, corruption and the constitutional crisis that we’re in,” Schlossberg was quoted as saying in an interview with the New York Times. “But without the control of Congress, there’s almost nothing that we can do.”Schlossberg’s entry into congressional politics follows the meteoric rise of another younger New York millennial, Zohran Mamdani, 34, the state assemblyman who was elected last week as mayor of New York City.“If Zohran Mamdani and I have anything in common, it’s that we are both trying to be authentic versions of ourselves and meet people where they are and communicate with people in New York City and be present and show up for people,” Schlossberg told the Times.With Reuters and Associated Press More

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      John F Kennedy grandson says Julia Fox’s bloody Jackie Halloween costume ‘disgusting’

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      Political writer and commentator Jack Schlossberg has said it was “disgusting, desperate and dangerous” for actor Julia Fox to wear a Halloween costume evoking the assassination of president John F Kennedy, his grandfather.Fox, however, has defended her controversial decision to wear a replica of the blood-stained, pink suit that former first lady Jackie Kennedy was seen wearing when her husband was shot dead by a sniper while the couple rode in a motorcade in Dallas in 1963. The Uncut Gems star has said she dressed as Jackie Kennedy as “a statement” about the poise and “extraordinary bravery” she showed when subjected to unimaginable “brutality”.Fox wore the ensemble in question to a 30 October Halloween party in New York City. Many online met an image of Fox in the outfit with negative reactions, with TikTok users dismissing the look as “a terrible idea” and “disrespectful”.One particularly notable reaction came from Schlossberg, the son of the Kennedys’ daughter Caroline, who wrote in part on X: “Julia Fox glorifying political violence is disgusting, desperate and dangerous.”View image in fullscreenFox was unbowed by the commentary from Schlossberg and others, with the 35-year-old actor and model saying in an Instagram post that she dressed as Jackie Kennedy “not as a costume but as a statement”.“When her husband was assassinated, she refused to change out of her blood-stained clothes, saying, ‘I want them to see what they’ve done,’” the post read. “The image of the delicate pink suit splattered with blood is one of the most haunting juxtapositions in modern history.“Beauty and horror. Poise and devastation. Her decision not to change clothes, even after being encouraged to, was an act of extraordinary bravery. It was a performance, protest, and mourning all at once. A woman weaponizing image and grace to expose brutality. It’s about trauma, power, and how femininity itself is a form of resistance. Long live Jackie O ♥️”.After JFK’s assassination, Jackie Kennedy indeed refused to take the suit off at Dallas’ Parkland hospital where her husband was pronounced dead and as she flew with his body on Air Force One to Washington DC.“Let them see what they have done,” she is reported to have said before exiting the plane in the US capital.The pink suit then became fashion history’s most iconic piece of first lady clothing despite its dark past. The day of the assassination, the former first lady also wore blue shoes, a pair of bloodied stockings and a blue blouse that were folded and stored without cleaning.The suit is often claimed to be made by Chanel. But it was actually an authorized copy of a Chanel design. It is said that this was a strategy employed by Jackie Kennedy, who died in 1994, to circumvent public disapproval of her taste for European style.All of these items are preserved in a climate-controlled vault at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, as materials of historical importance. Documents have shown that the Kennedy family wanted to keep the suit from public viewing until 2103.The controversy surrounding Fox’s Halloween garb surfaced as political violence has become one of the most prominent topics of public discussion in the US.It attained that status in part after Donald Trump survived two assassination attempts while successfully running for a second presidency in 2024. Other such cases were the firebombing in April of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro’s home, the murders in June of Minnesota state house speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and the killing in September of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. More

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      ‘He didn’t think he was a good man’: new book reveals unseen portrait of JFK

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      J Randy Taraborrelli has already written five books on the Kennedy family but his sixth, JFK: Public, Private, Secret, is his first that’s directly about John F Kennedy, 35th US president from 1961 until his assassination in Dallas two years later.“I have been writing about the Kennedys from Jackie’s perspective for 25 years,” Taraborrelli said, referring to Jacqueline Kennedy, the first lady who lived for another 30 years after he was shot, a figure of worldwide fascination.Taraborrelli’s first book about the Kennedys “was Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot, and that was in 2000. And then I did After Camelot, which was a lot about Jackie and her marriage to [Aristotle] Onassis,” the Greek shipping tycoon, “Camelot” the name given to the Kennedys’ apparently charmed circle, in reference to the legendary court of King Arthur.“I also did Jackie, Janet and Lee, which was about Jackie and her mom [Janet Auchincloss] and her sister [Lee Radziwill]. Two years ago, I did Jackie: Public, Private, Secret, which was Jackie, cradle to grave. When that was successful, I thought, ‘It’s time to tell JFK’s side of the story.’”Evidently, Kennedy books sell. So do books by Taraborrelli, whose subjects have also included Diana Ross, Madonna, Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, Cher and Elizabeth Taylor.View image in fullscreenFor JFK, he turned to the vast Kennedy archives but also his own extensive interviews, looked at anew, and new sources including Monroe’s publicist, Patricia Newcomb, now 95, and Janet Des Rosiers Fontaine, once secretary and girlfriend to JFK’s father, Joseph Kennedy, now 100 years old.Readers “know what they’re going to get when they read one of my books,” Taraborrelli said. “It’s not going to be … a blow-by-blow of every moment in JFK’s political history. I wanted to do more of a human portrait, something people can [use to] really sort of understand this man and like him or hate him, at least.”Taraborrelli’s central theme is JFK’s treatment of women.“We’ve always looked at JFK as this unconscionable cheating husband,” he said. “I wanted to maybe not defend him as much as explain him, try to get into his head and tell his side of the story. This book is really a companion to Jackie: Public, Private, Secret. When you read them both, you really get a full picture of that marriage.”It’s a sympathetic picture. Taraborrelli’s JFK is a relentless adulterer but one who came to some realization of his weakness, through the painful consequences of his behavior, through a belatedly deepening connection to his wife, and through the trials of office.Taraborrelli said: “The thing about JFK is that as unconscionable as his actions were, he still had a conscience, which made it even more difficult for him, because if you have no conscience, then you can just be a crappy person and you’re OK with it. It’s when you have a conscience that it causes problems for you internally.”JFK’s behavior has certainly caused problems for his reputation. As Taraborrelli was writing, Maureen Callahan published Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed, a lacerating account, ceding nothing to the trappings of glamor and power.Taraborrelli did not read it: “If it had come out at a different time, I might have. But when books start coming out while I’m working on a book, I don’t even want to know what’s in them, because I don’t want to inadvertently repeat the same material or be in some way influenced.“I also made a decision early on with JFK that I did not want [the book] to be a compendium of all of his affairs … an A-through-Z list of every woman he ever slept with, because these women, many of them have written books of their own, and many of them have been interviewed for books. Their stories have been told.View image in fullscreen“I wanted to find women that made a difference, like Joan Lundberg actually made a difference in his life. Judith Exner made a difference, though I don’t believe anything she ever said about anything. She was there, you know. Mary Meyer made a difference. Marilyn Monroe makes a difference, historically if not personally.”Whether JFK had an affair with Monroe is part of a conspiracy-laced legacy fueled by Kennedy’s policies and presidency, his proximity to organized crime (in part through Exner, also involved with a Chicago mobster), and his assassination, all of it fuel for a thriving publishing industry of labyrinthine what-ifs. Taraborrelli says he has no wish to join it. He deals with the assassination in a few final pages, pointedly ignoring old questions: did killer Lee Harvey Oswald act alone, what did the CIA know. Releases of government files came and went. Taraborrelli stayed focused on his man.He thinks there was no Monroe affair – chiefly, though Jackie expressed concern, because no evidence exists. But Taraborrelli does say JFK had a previously unknown affair with Lundberg, a Californian air hostess, in the 1950s, when he was an ambitious senator from Massachusetts. It ended for Lundberg with Kennedy paying for an abortion.Taraborrelli said: “JFK met Joan when he was on the outs with his family. Jackie had a stillbirth in 1956 and JFK did not return from a vacation to be with his wife. It took him a week to get back. And when he got back, everybody in the family, both sides of the family, wanted nothing to do with him. In fact, Jackie’s mom was so upset that she made him sleep in the servants’ quarters over the garage.“And so he went to Los Angeles, and he met [Lundberg], and she didn’t know anything about him, other than that he was a famous senator, but she didn’t know him personally, and she didn’t know anybody in his life. And he was able to open up to her honestly and use her as sort of a pseudo-therapist to try to work out some of his issues. And he was trying to grapple with how could he have done this to his wife?”As Callahan shows, Kennedy men doing unconscionable things to women has never been rare. JFK’s nephew, Robert F Kennedy Jr, is now US health secretary, after extensive coverage of his philandering and its tragic consequences.Of JFK, Taraborrelli said: “At one point, Joan said to him, ‘I think that you’re a good person.’ And he said, ‘No, I’m really not.’ He did not even think he was a good man. He said he felt like he was stuck in himself and he couldn’t figure out a way to get out.”Nor could Kennedy’s sister, Rosemary, who endured developmental difficulties and whose father arranged in 1941 “for brain surgery that went terribly wrong, turned her into an invalid, and then he institutionalized her and told the family they needed to forget she existed, and they all did, but JFK held this shame that he let this happen to the sister he loved.View image in fullscreen“In the book, you realize that if he was able to disassociate himself from his own sister, who he loved, then how was he to feel about a baby Jackie had that died, who he didn’t know? It’s like he didn’t have empathy. Jackie realized that, so she found Rosemary, the sister [JFK] had not seen in 15 years, and she encouraged him to go to and reconnect with his sister, because she knew he could not be a fully realized man, holding this dark secret and feeling ashamed.“And so that was another building block. And then when their son Patrick died [living less than two days in August 1963] that was another building block.”As Taraborrelli sees it, such experiences helped bring “Kennedy out of himself” on the brink of his death, “turn[ing] him into a different man, a man with good character … and so in this book, you see JFK take accountability for his mistakes. He says, ‘The way that I was was painful, and by painful, I mean shameful.’“He also takes accountability as a president when the Bay of Pigs [the 1961 invasion of Cuba], for instance, is a disaster. It was something he inherited from [President Dwight D] Eisenhower but he didn’t blame the other administration, ‘I have to clean up that guy’s mess,’ all that stuff. JFK went to the American people and said, ‘I’m the president. This is my responsibility. I did this, and I’m sorry.’ And guess what? His approval rating went up to 85%, because people want a president who takes accountability.“But he had to become a man who could take accountability first, and he did. That’s a great story, and I think it’s a really hopeful story to tell, especially in these days when we question what is leadership and what do we expect from our leaders.”

      JFK: Public, Private, Secret is out now More

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      American corporations didn’t want to diversify, anyway

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      View image in fullscreenAt Ford Motor Company, the moral stock-taking began with a letter.“This is an extraordinary moment in our history,” Bill Ford, the company’s executive chair, and Jim Hackett, its CEO, wrote to employees on 1 June 2020. It had been three months of upheaval since the coronavirus pandemic began and the company first suspended production at its manufacturing sites. By mid-May, more than 87,000 people in the United States had died from the virus. Then, on 25 May, the video of Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes, ultimately killing him, was seared into Americans’ consciousness.Even in the midst of a global pandemic, as systemic inequities around healthcare and wealth and education were thrown into sharp relief, the world saw how deadly everyday injustices remained. “All at once, we are grappling with a public health crisis that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, an economic shock that has forced us to adapt on the fly, and social upheaval that has challenging all of us to think and act differently,” Ford and Hackett wrote. Globally, people wanted to do something, but they did not know exactly what. There were online gestures: Black squares on Instagram, direct messages of apology to Black friends, well-designed slides with digestible facts about systemic racism. But, as the video spread, millions flooded the streets as well. They rallied in Chicago, Minneapolis, Portland and Washington DC; and they protested overseas in London and Sydney and the Canary Islands. The actions were bolstered by calls to finally address the disparities that made the nation so inequitable.C-suites and boardrooms and universities couldn’t look the other way. Colleges and hospitals began renaming buildings; activists toppled statues and busts of traitors and racists, politicians took down others; and across the country, institutions were pushed to evaluate how their policies had locked certain people out of the American dream. But now, as the Trump administration has brought back to the White House its war against a diversifying workforce, the federal infrastructure and a critical history of the US, corporations are dropping diversity and equity programs as quickly as they created them.How did we get here? Why were so many companies – from Walmart to Paramount to Victoria’s Secret – willing to roll over on their diversity goals after the promises they made in 2020 to uproot systemic racism and transform the nation? Were they all just paying lip service? In many ways, the programs were never intended to radically change the workplace in the first place – they were intended to appease workers and dampen discontent. What we’ve seen since 2020 is not new. It’s a reversal rooted in the policies the US created decades ago, when it cast aside the goal of addressing a legacy of discrimination for the vague idea of diversity – an idea that was always destined to fail, and an idea many corporations never truly believed in.Superficial actionsFor employees at Ford, which was founded in Detroit, where nearly three-quarters of the city’s residents are Black, there was nothing academic about the issues highlighted in 2020. The pandemic hit the city as the plague of racism had left it economically distraught for decades; healing the disease systemic discrimination had left would require effort and intention. “There are no easy answers. We are not interested in superficial actions. This is our moment to lead from the front and fully commit to creating the fair, just and inclusive culture that our employees deserve,” Ford and Hackett wrote.Ford’s first step to healing was a series of conversations with staff to better understand how they felt. They would launch employee resource groups to ensure workers believed they could be their whole selves at the office. “We know that systemic racism still exists despite the progress that has been made,” the Ford executives wrote. “We cannot turn a blind eye to it or accept some sense of ‘order’ that’s based on oppression.”If that sounds familiar, it’s because offices across the country were undergoing similar soul-searching efforts. Within a year of Floyd’s murder, companies had pledged at least $50bn to support racial justice and advance equity and by 2023 that number had jumped to more than $340bn, according to a report by the McKinsey Institute for Black Economic Mobility. Companies such as Apple, Facebook and Pfizer committed to spending externally. Bank of America pledged $15bn to expanding low- and middle-income homeownership; Netflix, PayPal and Nike deposited millions in Black-owned banks; and other companies gave to organizations such as the Equal Justice Initiative. Corporations committed to internal changes, too: they set diversity goals and launched initiatives to try to meet them; they hired chief diversity officers; they held mandatory – if sometimes clumsy – anti-discrimination trainings. Most of these tools had existed in some form before, but amid public outcry, they were pushed to the foreground.The problem was that even when companies actually wanted to help, they often launched their efforts haphazardly. When companies jump to solutions before understanding the desired outcomes, they make rushed decisions, said Eddy Ng, a business professor at Queen’s University in Canada. “Without a clear plan, we go buy more training. People don’t like that,” Ng said. Company leaders had little idea how to fix the structural issues baked into their DNA, so they went with the things that sounded good. “It’s like you go grocery shopping with 100 bucks, but you don’t have a shopping list. You’re going to buy chips and cookies,” Ng told me.Chips and cookies can make a person feel full, they can hold someone over, but eventually there’s a crash – and that person will be left wondering why they have not actually had a full meal; why they are not satisfied. Within weeks, it seemed, companies had built out their diversity, equity and inclusion plans. But not everyone was convinced by them. “Someone like me might say, ‘let’s wait and see if they mean it,’” said Cedric Dawkins, an associate professor of management at York University who studies business ethics. Marginalized communities have felt the sting of America’s empty promises before.Progress in the US is always met with pushback. During Reconstruction, the so-called “Redeemers” – who sought a return of white supremacy – argued that federal support for recently enslaved African Americans was a threat to their liberty. The civil rights movement was immediately met with lawsuits that would limit its desired effects on voting, education and labor. In that context, the only real measure of an organization’s commitment to justice is whether they keep pushing forward with their reforms in spite of any backlash.When corporations launched their plans, they felt like drastic measures, Ng said: “Instead of actually having clear guidelines and goals and outcomes in terms of what they wanted to achieve over the five-year period.” Now, as we come to the end of the five-year period – and companies begin to roll back their diversity efforts, vindicating those who were waiting for the other shoe to drop – one question remains: what was it all for?The backlash beginsOn 6 March 1961, then president John F Kennedy signed executive order 10925 – which created the president’s committee on equal opportunity. “Americans who are members of minority groups have often been unjustly denied the opportunity to work for the government or for government contractors,” Kennedy wrote in his signing statement. He directed the committee to launch a study of government employment practices that would examine the “status of members of minority groups in every department, agency and office of the federal government”. The report would lay down a marker, Kennedy hoped, by which Americans could measure future progress. “I have no doubt that the vigorous enforcement of this order will mean the end of such discrimination.”View image in fullscreenTypically, Kennedy’s order is where histories of affirmative action or race-conscious employment practices begin – after all, it’s the first time the idea of affirmative action as we understand it today emerged. But federal action to address discrimination in the workforce actually stretches back to at least Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal, and one New Deal policy in particular: the 1935 Labor Relations Act. The act protected the rights of employees at private companies to better working conditions. If a company engaged in unfair labor practices, employees were “entitled to affirmative action as a remedy to make the employee whole”, said D Caleb Smith, a labor historian at Mount Holyoke College. Those remedies could look like job reinstatement or back-pay. Essentially, the provision was a general remedy to employment discrimination.But the Labor Relations Act was also a mixed bag. The National Urban League and NAACP opposed the legislation because it provided for closed-shop provisions that allowed unions and employers to exclude workers from union membership and apprenticeship programs. Union race discrimination had historically limited Black participation in the workforce: in 1930, for instance, just 3% of the 3,392,800 trade union workers in the US were Black.Still, it was a starting point, and over time, additional protections were added. In May 1943, executive order 9346 reconstituted the fair employment practices committee, which processed 8,000 discrimination complaints in its three years of existence. And in 1947, the Taft-Hartley Act prohibited the closed-shop provision from the New Deal policy. By 1960, however, affirmative action still did not have a formal definition. “It is implied that it’s the intent to improve working conditions to create opportunity for underrepresented minority groups,” Smith said. Kennedy helped provide some unity of definition.Kennedy’s order created one of the earliest affirmative action programs, the Plans for Progress Program, which encouraged companies to develop plans that addressed discrimination and underrepresentation of minorities. Within the first few months, the committee on equal opportunity reported that the program was in full swing. Agencies had begun designating compliance officers and developing training seminars; they had studied best practices for compliance reporting; and they had launched outreach to contractors and the general public. But “the Plans for Progress Program is largely seen as a performative publicity endeavor,” Smith said. It was done in good faith, he added, but it was hampered by the same problems other compliance agencies had: it was understaffed, underfinanced and could not exercise its full authority. For its imperfections, though, “some historians will point to it as a positive that provides companies a model for desegregation and implementing equal employment opportunity,” Smith said.By January 1964, after Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson took over the reins and carried out Kennedy’s vision. In a speech to new corporate members of the Plans for Progress program, Johnson announced that it had largely been a success. More than 100 major corporations – representing 6 million workers – had bought into the program, he told those assembled. The ratio of white salaried employees to non-white salaried employees at 91 companies had dipped from 65 to one to 60 to one. “Most significant is the fact that these jobs are not all at the lowest level – Negroes and other minority group Americans are being placed and promoted to positions of responsibility,” Johnson gushed. “This was not accomplished by displacing other workers – rather it was the result of conscious adjustments in personnel practices making merit and ability the only real tests – practices that strengthened the individual companies, and, as a result, strengthen our entire economy.”But some companies and federal contractors began creating measures to subvert the new federal rules, Smith told me. They implemented new tests for employees and had segregated seniority lines – white people occupied positions of power; contrary to the pronouncement, Black people were still often consigned to the lower rungs of industry. After Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act – and executive order 11246 a year later, which created the office of federal contract compliance to ensure contractors and subcontractors were complying with requirements to “safeguard equal employment” through affirmative action programs – the backlash was almost immediate.White people began claiming the programs were reverse discrimination and sued in federal court over college admissions, hiring and promotion practices. The supreme court upheld certain provisions of affirmative action programs – such as diversity as a compelling interest – but argued that quota systems designed to account for a legacy of discrimination in the US were a bridge too far. The Reagan administration sought to eliminate affirmative action altogether, and was surprised when corporations fought back. Companies such as Merck had begun to believe in their affirmative action policies – a new crop of workers brought new ideas and introduced products to new markets. It was great development philosophically – for those who cared about addressing a legacy of discrimination – and financially, for those who were more ambivalent. As Julian Mark noted in the Washington Post, a survey of 128 Fortune 500 companies revealed that an overwhelming majority, 95%, would keep their affirmative action policies regardless of Reagan’s policy.Reagan was ultimately unsuccessful – in part because he was largely alone in his efforts, even among Republicans. Still, his push to eliminate affirmative action programs led many corporations to settle for policies aimed at promoting a diverse workforce rather than addressing injustice. Such policies, they believed, had less legal exposure. The result was a new crop of watered-down programs that were a far cry from those that preceded them.Some conservatives agreed with Reagan, and as the decade wore on, became a loud contingent of the Republican party. Through the 1980s and the 90s, Republicans began using judicial appointments to transform the federal bench and pursue litigation to reshape civil rights law – warping its meaning. They argued that even watered down affirmative action programs and civil rights measures had gone too far; they wanted them eliminated altogether. Conservatives lionized the leaders of California’s Proposition 209, which banned affirmative action in public education and employment in 1996. The California Civil Rights Initiative “is the beginning of the new civil rights revolution in America; a revolution that promises to unite all America under a banner of hope and freedom”, Gay Hart Gaines, the former president of GOPAC, the Republican donor group, said at the time. Philanthropic organizations such as the Bradley Foundation, Scaife Foundations and Searle Freedom Trust bankrolled challenges to race-conscious admissions at universities and efforts that ultimately gutted the Voting Rights Act. Reagan lost his initial battle, but conservatives saw it as the first shot fired in a longer war – a war they believe, in 2025, is paying off.The capitulationLess than two months after Hackett, the Ford CEO, sent the letter lambasting systemic racism to the company’s employees, he stepped down from his position. Jim Farley, an executive from within, replaced him. In August 2024, ahead of the election, Farley wrote a letter of his own to the staff about diversity, equity and inclusion.“As we work to build an even brighter future, we are mindful that our employees and customers hold a wide range of beliefs, and the external and legal environment related to political and social issues continues to evolve,” Farley wrote. It was a very elaborate way of telling staff that they would be walking back diversity policies because the political winds had shifted. George Floyd’s murder had receded from the national consciousness. The Republican party had seized upon the language of DEI and turned it into a catch-all symbol for the ways the US was diversifying and becoming less tolerant to sexism, racism, ableism and homophobia.The company would no longer comment on “polarizing issues”. Its philanthropic arm’s mission changed from “[providing] access to resources and opportunities that build equity and empower underserved and underrepresented communities to reach their highest potential” to “[partnering] with communities to move people forward and upward”. And Ford would stop contributing to external culture surveys such as the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index. The fresh look at Ford’s policies said nothing – save for vague allusions to the benefits of diversity – about systemic racism. Hackett’s earlier declaration that Ford would not “turn a blind eye” to systemic racism seemed but a memory.Within days of taking office, Donald Trump signed an executive order that would eliminate Johnson’s civil rights order. The order directed the office of federal contract compliance to stop “promoting diversity” and holding contractors responsible for “affirmative action”. To Smith, the administration’s early actions amount to “a blatant effort in order to not only uphold the white power structure, but to remove any government responsibility to uphold the rights of individuals of color, specifically Black people”. It is the fruit of a conservative movement that has been trying to reverse course ever since the government began taking seriously efforts to protect the rights of Americans regardless of race, sex, religion or national origin.In 2020, hundreds of private companies pledged to change their culture – to use their power and influence and, most importantly, money, to re-shape American society toward more just ends. Now, the three largest employers in the nation – Walmart, Amazon and the federal government – have all rolled those policies back. Dozens of other corporations have turned back the clock on even pretending to care about equality in the workplace as well.To businesses’ credit, they had a difficult task ahead of them in 2020. “They’re faced with putting a policy in place quickly that’s responsive and doesn’t sound like lip service to frustrated people,” Dawkins said. But in doing so, they made an admission: they had not been taking diversity seriously before – and the capitulation to the administration’s demands since has betrayed that truth. And they made clear their efforts were always lip service.When corporations pushed back against Ronald Reagan in the 80s, they had the public on their side – and even a significant chunk of the Republican caucus – for at least the valence of effort. Most of the pressure was coming from Reagan himself. But when they felt the united political pressure from conservatives this time around, in the absence of near-universal public support, they had a choice to make.For companies whose values course through everything they do, the choice was easy. As Dawkins, of York University, explained: “A company like Patagonia – which challenged the first Trump administration over environmental regulations – or Ben and Jerry’s, they’ve been in this for the long haul so it doesn’t change as much.” But organizations who opted for expediency – programs to pacify rather than any transformational interrogation of institutional culture and values – capitulated.Values are only as good as their durability under pressure; and many of America’s largest companies proved an equitable, inclusive workplace was never one of their core values to begin with. More

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      The Guardian view on Trump and reality: from promoting alternative facts to erasing truths | Editorial

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      What does the public need to know? The Trump White House boasts of being the most transparent administration in history – though commentators have suggested that the inadvertent leak of military plans to a journalist may have happened because senior figures were using messaging apps such as Signal to avoid oversight. Last week, it released thousands of pages of documents on John F Kennedy’s assassination. Donald Trump has declared that Kennedy’s family and the American people “deserve transparency and truth”.Strikingly, this stated commitment to sharing information comes as his administration defunds data collection and erases existing troves of knowledge from government websites. The main drivers appear to be the desire to remove “woke” content and global heating data, and the slashing of federal spending. Information resources are both the target and collateral damage. Other political factors may be affecting federal records too. Last month, Mr Trump sacked the head of the National Archives without explanation, after grumbling about the body’s involvement in the justice department’s investigation into his handling of classified documents.The impact is already painfully evident. Cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have affected not only climate records but also an extreme weather risk tool. The purge’s results are absurd as well as damaging. A webpage on the Enola Gay, the aircraft that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, appears to have been marked for deletion because it was mistaken for a reference to LGBTQ+ issues.Yet the disparity between the data dump on the Kennedy assassination and the removal of other material is not a contradiction. It speaks volumes about the administration’s approach to truth and knowledge, which it regards as contingent and a matter of convenience. (Tellingly, it is also axing the body that provides most federal funding to libraries.)The 1963 presidential assassination is not only an event around which multiple theories circle but one that helped feed a broader culture of conspiracy theorising and distrust in authority. That has metastatised to the bizarre and extreme claims embraced and even promoted by Mr Trump or figures around him, including birtherism, Pizzagate and QAnon. These increasingly fantastical narratives have had real-world consequences. Facts, science and rationality itself are under attack.In his first term, Mr Trump’s aides shamelessly promoted “alternative facts” while decrying actual facts as “fake news”. The Washington Post tallied more than 30,000 false or misleading claims over those four years. This time round, his administration is removing existing sources of information. Websites, datasets and other information vanished from federal health websites – such as that for the Centers for Disease Control – last month, though some has since reappeared. One scientist called it “a digital book burning”. The Union of Concerned Scientists has warned that “critically important science conducted at many US agencies, institutions, and universities [is] under increasing assault”.Ad hoc preservation of essential national information and records is usually the work of those faced with the destructive force of foreign invasions, jihadist insurgencies or dictators. But as this bonfire blazes, a motley but committed array of individuals – “nerds who care”, in the words of one – are fighting back by preserving data before it is deleted. Their admirable effort to defend the truth deserves support.

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      Trump releases thousands of pages on John F Kennedy assassination

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      The Trump administration on Tuesday released thousands of pages of files concerning the assassination of John F Kennedy, the 35th president who was shot dead in Dallas, Texas, in November 1963.“So people have been waiting decades for this,” Donald Trump told reporters on Monday while visiting the Kennedy Center, “and I’ve instructed my people that are responsible, lots of different people, put together by [director of national intelligence] Tulsi Gabbard, and that’s going to be released tomorrow.”Experts doubted the new trove of information will change the underlying facts of the case, that Lee Harvey Oswald opened fire at Kennedy from a window at a school book deposit warehouse as the presidential motorcade passed by Dealey Plaza in Dallas.The digital documents included PDFs of memos, including one with the heading “secret” that was a typed account with handwritten notes of a 1964 interview by a Warren Commission researcher who questioned Lee Wigren, a CIA employee, about inconsistencies in material provided to the commission by the state department and the CIA about marriages between Soviet women and American men.The documents also included references to various conspiracy theories suggesting that Oswald left the Soviet Union in 1962 intent on assassinating the popular young president.Department of Defense documents from 1963 covered the cold war of the early 1960s and the US involvement in Latin America, trying to thwart Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s support of communist forces in other countries.The documents suggest that Castro would not go so far as to provoke a war with the United States or escalate to the point “that would seriously and immediately endanger the Castro regime”.“It appears more likely that Castro might intensify his support of subversive forces in Latin America,” the document reads.Trump signed an order shortly after taking office in January related to the release, prompting the US Federal Bureau of Investigation to find thousands of new documents related to the Kennedy assassination in Dallas.“President Trump is ushering in a new era of maximum transparency,” Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said in a post on X.ABC News reported that Trump’s announcement prompted an all-night scramble at the justice department.John F Kennedy was killed during a motorcade through Dallas on 22 November 1963. Oswald was killed two days later by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner.Ever since, Kennedy’s death has been the subject of immense scholarship, cultural commentary and spiraling conspiracy theories.Files have been released before, including three releases in 2017, when Trump was first in power. One document released then was a 1975 CIA memo that said a thorough search of records showed Oswald was not in any way connected to the intelligence agency, as posited by numerous authors and hobbyists.Trump’s latest JFK files release comes weeks after the death at 93 of Clint Hill, a Secret Service agent who leapt onto Kennedy’s car, a moment of history famously captured on film by Abraham Zapruder, a home movie enthusiast.Trump survived an assassination attempt of his own in Pennsylvania last year, during a campaign event. In office, he has also promised to release files on the assassinations of Kennedy’s brother, the US attorney general and New York senator Robert F Kennedy, and the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, both in 1968.Robert F Kennedy’s son, Robert F Kennedy Jr, is now US health secretary. He has voiced conspiracy theories, including saying he thinks his father was probably killed by the CIA and his uncle, the president, certainly was.King’s family has expressed the fear that genuine FBI attempts to smear him will again be brought to the light.Last month, directed by Trump, the US justice department released files about Jeffrey Epstein, the financier, convicted sex offender and Trump associate who killed himself in prison in New York in 2019. Aggressively touted and targeted to rightwing social media influencers, the release proved a damp squib.On Monday, Larry Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia and the author of a book on Kennedy, told Reuters: “People expecting big things are almost certain to be disappointed” by the new files release.Reuters contributed reporting More

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      The ‘Iron Mountain’ hoax: how anti-Vietnam war satire sparked today’s conspiracy theories

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      We live in a ­blizzard of fake news, ­disinformation and ­conspiracy theories. It’s tempting to blame this on social media – which does indeed ­exacerbate the problem. And AI deepfakes promise to make the situation even worse. But at root this is not about technology: it’s about how humans think, as an astonishing case that long predates the internet reveals. This is an amazing story – about the perils of amazing stories.In November 1967, at the height of the war in Vietnam, a strange ­document was published in New York. Report from Iron Mountain was the work of a top-secret “­special study group” recruited by the Kennedy administration to scope out what would happen to the US if permanent global peace broke out. It warned the end of war, and of the fear of war, would wreck America’s economy, even its whole society. To replace the effects, extreme measures would be required – eugenics, fake alien scares, pollution, blood games. Even slavery. The report was so incendiary it had been suppressed, but one of the study group leaked it, determined that the public learn the truth. It caused a furore. The worried memos, demanding someone check if this document was real, went all the way up to President Johnson.View image in fullscreenIn reality, as the White House eventually realised, Report from Iron Mountain was a hoax. It was the brainchild of leftwing satirists: Victor Navasky, editor of a magazine called Monocle, his colleagues, and a fellow satirist, Leonard Lewin, who wrote it with the help of luminaries like the famous economist and former US ambassador to India, JK Galbraith. Their goal was to expose what they saw as the insanity driving the intervention in Vietnam, and the whole of the cold war. By presenting their fake report as a real leak, they aimed to make people ask if this insane document might be real – and what that said about the people running the US government.And it worked. To young Americans living under the shadow of conscription, Report seemed all too plausible. Officials whispered to journalists that some of their ­colleagues really did think like this. Once the hoax had its satirical impact, Lewin came clean. But his work was so convincing it began to take on a life of its own.In the late 1980s, Report from Iron Mountain was discovered by the extreme right, which was convinced it was real. It was republished by a company called the Noontide Press, part of a network of fringe organisations that were among America’s primary promoters of Holocaust denial. These ­people were convinced they had found the smoking gun, confirming their darkest suspicions about the government’s secret plots to start wars and control the ­public. A ­horrified Lewin embarked on a long legal battle to take back control of his work and its true, meaning.But meanwhile, the militia movement spreading across the US seized on Report from Iron Mountain, as fuel for its paranoid visions of imminent oppression at the hands of the ­one-world government and its black helicopters. And Lewin’s creation found its way to Hollywood. In JFK, Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie about the Kennedy assassination, the great revelation about why the president was assassinated hinges on a character repeating the hoax’s claims in the belief that they were disturbing truths.View image in fullscreenReport even spawned a secondary hoax: Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars. This ­purported to be the operations ­manual that helped the elite control its ­sheeple-civilians. This strange text was first popularised by the pioneering conspiracist Milton William Cooper, who ­published it in Behold a Pale Horse, his influential compendium of ­conspiracy theories. Cooper also included extracts from Report from Iron Mountain itself (and, horrifyingly, another hoax: that notorious antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion). Silent Weapons has often been cited by arch ­conspiracist Alex Jones and has been invoked by “Q”, the ostensible government insider revered by the QAnon movement.Lewin and his colleagues had contrived their hoax so expertly that they inadvertently created “evidence” for a host of conspiracy theories. It could be used to explain everything from why wars end to the real reasons behind lockdown, from environmental regulations and terrorist attacks to the fiery end of a cult in Waco, Texas.The reasoning at work here is revealing. If something in Report chimes with what is really happening in the world, the conspiracist’s logic runs, that cannot be a coincidence. Rather, it exposes the secret motives that caused that reality. The ­principle here – a ­consistent fallacy of ­conspiracy theory – is that “nothing is accidental”. One online ­analysis of Report from Iron Mountain in 2014 even decided the fact Lewin later wrote a novel was an attempt to ­retrospectively create a cover ­identity so he could pretend Report was fiction too.And yet the fate of this all-too-successful hoax also suggests what we might need to do to ­counter this kind of thinking. In a political ­climate roiled by conspiracy ­theories and disinformation, the tale of Report from Iron Mountain is a warning about the ­consequences of taking your eye off the line between compelling stories and what we know to be true.Phil Tinline is the author of Ghosts of Iron Mountain: The Hoax That Duped America and Its Sinister Legacy, which will be published by Head of Zeus on 27 March. More

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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.”

      Presidents at War is out now More

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      MLK’s family fear new batch of assassination files will have FBI ‘smears’

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      The family of Martin Luther King Jr has expressed concern over Donald Trump’s executive order to release records surrounding the civil rights leader’s assassination, saying the president’s mandate could revive efforts to discredit the revered activist with the public.Speaking to Axios, a friend of the King family said: “We know J Edgar Hoover tried to destroy Dr King’s legacy, and the family doesn’t want that effort to prevail,” referring to the late former FBI director and his agency’s years-long surveillance of King as well his associates.In addition to covert surveillance, the FBI threatened King in other ways – including by sending King’s wife, Coretta, a tape of King allegedly having an extramarital affair, as well as a note encouraging him to kill himself for the sake of the civil rights movement.The latest remarks from the King family friend follow an executive order signed by Trump in January, the first month of his second presidency, that ordered the release of thousands of classified federal documents on King’s 1968 assassination.He ordered a similar release of classified federal documents pertaining to the 1963 and 1968 assassinations of President John F Kennedy and Senator Robert F Kennedy.Respectively, the Kennedy brothers were the uncle and father of Trump’s newly appointed health and human services director, Robert F Kennedy Jr.“Their families and the American people deserve transparency and truth,” Trump’s executive order said. “It is in the national interest to finally release all records related to these assassinations without delay.”Trump in January boasted to reporters: “Everything will be revealed.”After Trump’s order, King’s family released a statement, saying: “For us, the assassination of our father is a deeply personal family loss that we have endured over the last 56 years. We hope to be provided the opportunity to review the files as a family prior to its public release.”However, according to a White House official speaking to Axios, the Trump administration refused that request from King’s family, though it claimed the refusal did not stem from “animus toward the family”.Speaking to the outlet, a second source who spoke with one of King’s two surviving adult children said that “there are deep concerns” within the family over the ordered release.“They know the right wing wants to smear Dr King, and one way to do it is by putting these smears in the public under the guise of transparency. If there are assassination records, release those. But smears are not assassination records,” the source told Axios.King dedicated his life’s work to advancing civil rights across the United States before assassin James Earl Ray fatally shot him at the Lorraine motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on 4 April 1968.A 2020 documentary by US film-maker Sam Pollard titled MLK/FBI explores the agency’s pursuit of King via state-sanctioned surveillance. More