John F Kennedy

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      Did the assassination of JFK kickstart the conspiracy theory movement? – podcast

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      This week marked 60 years since President John F Kennedy was shot dead as he travelled in the back of a car through the streets of Dallas, Texas. From the moment the news broke, people had their theories about what happened.
      So why did the assassination of JFK spawn dozens of conspiracy theories that have persisted for decades? Is there a reason why Americans are quick to believe their government is covering something up? And despite multiple examples of when conspiracies turn dangerous, are politicians today, including Kennedy’s own nephew, using conspiracy theories for political gain?
      This week, Jonathan Freedland speaks to Prof Kathryn Olmsted, author of Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11

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      Dallas lives with JFK legacy – but hate that spawned assassination simmers

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      The brick walls are painted white. Dozens of cardboard boxes marked “Books” are stacked like a barricade on grimy floorboards. At the south-east corner window, the boxes appear to form a sniper’s perch. It was here 60 years ago on Wednesday that, by official accounts, Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots heard around the world.The assassination of John F Kennedy, the 35th US president, shone an unforgiving light on Dallas, Texas, which came to be known as the “city of hate”. Six decades later, the city has grown beyond recognition and come a long way in grappling with that legacy. But the forces that turned Dealey Plaza into a white hot crucible are arguably more prevalent than ever.A 24-hour news cycle; gun violence; casual accusations of treason; rightwing extremism and Confederate flags; conspiracy theories and distrust of authority – all are part of the story of the Kennedy assassination and, perhaps more than when the 40th or 50th anniversaries were commemorated, all are newly resonant today.“The political climate now is like the closed-minded climate that was in Dallas at the time of the assassination where people believe what they believe,” said Carolyn Barta, 84, a veteran journalist born and raised in Dallas. “‘If you didn’t believe that, you were wrong and I’m not considering your opinion or how you see things.’ It’s the same sort of condition that is now prevalent in the country and it’s frightening.”In the 1960 presidential election, Dallas had voted for the Republican Richard Nixon over Democrat Kennedy by the biggest margin of any major city. Kennedy’s civil rights bill, introduced in 1963, was unpopular in the south. In the nine months before his Texas swing, he received more than 400 death threats nationwide.In Dallas, the buckle on the Bible belt, the hostility was a toxic mix of racism, anti-communism and religious bigotry aimed at America’s first Catholic president – some feared that Kennedy was being controlled by the pope. Extremist groups such as the John Birch Society and the Minutemen were small but vociferous.Mike Rawlings, a Democrat who was mayor of Dallas from 2011 to 2019, said: “There was definitely a very conservative bent. The John Birchers were the worst of it but still there was a lot of folks that were that way. It was the Tea Party and Maga [Make America great again] before the Tea Party and Maga.”The rightwing firebrand Edwin Walker, a former army general who in 1962 was charged (but not convicted) with “insurrection and seditious conspiracy”, moved his base of operations to the city. A protest flyer circulating Dallas in 1963 had photos of Kennedy with the headline: “Wanted for treason.”Bill Minutaglio, a journalist and co-author of Dallas 1963, which examines the extremist elements of the time, also sees modern parallels. “People say you could change the title of that book to ‘United States 2023’ because of a lot of the polarisation and anger and vituperative nature of the political discourse. The social commentary that seemed to be redolent and pervasive back then sure seems to be in existence today.“There was an extreme amount of anger and hate in the city of Dallas in 1963 but it was marshalled by a small minority of people. They just happened to be people that held what I call the public microphone. They had access to the airwaves, church pulpits, newspapers, political forums and they were angry and they were hateful – there’s just no other word for it. They seemed to have cornered the market in terms of the social climate.”There had been hints of danger in Dallas. Four days before the 1960 election, Kennedy’s running mate, Lyndon Johnson, was heckled by protesters who spat in the direction of his wife, Lady Bird, and grabbed her gloves and threw them in a gutter. A month before Kennedy’s visit in 1963, the UN ambassador, Adlai Stevenson, was spat on and hit on the head with a placard, prompting some advisers to warn Kennedy to stay away.And on the day of the president’s arrival, the Dallas Morning News newspaper contained a full-page, black-bordered advertisement that included 12 rhetorical questions that accused Kennedy of being soft on communism and betraying US allies. Kennedy reportedly read the ad and remarked to his wife Jacqueline, “we’re headed into nut country”.But oligarchs in Dallas, aware of the dangers, had called for a dignified reception for Kennedy and tried to tighten security. About 200,000 people came out to watch the motorcade and give the first couple an effusive welcome, waving signs and flags including the Confederate flag. As they neared Dealey Plaza, Governor John Connally’s wife, Nellie, told Kennedy: “Mr President, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you.”The presidential limousine turned off Main Street at Dealey Plaza at around 12.30pm. As it passed below the Texas School Book Depository, gunfire suddenly erupted from a window on the sixth floor, sending onlookers diving and running. Bullets struck the president’s neck and head and he slumped over toward Jacqueline. Governor Connally was shot in the back but survived.The car sped off to Parkland Memorial hospital a few minutes away. A Catholic priest was summoned to administer the last rites and, and at 1pm, the 46-year-old Kennedy was pronounced dead, sending shockwaves around the world. In Britain, Big Ben tolled every minute for an hour and lights dimmed in Piccadilly Circus; in Germany, 60,000 West Berliners held an impromptu torchlight parade.The death of a president gave birth to the 24-hour news cycle as, for the first time, major TV and radio networks cancelled regular programming to provide wall-to-wall coverage of preparations for Kennedy’s funeral and the criminal investigation in Dallas. Hundreds of reporters crammed into the police headquarters, where Oswald held a bizarre press conference and was subsequently shot dead on live television by a nightclub owner, Jack Ruby.That incident sealed Dallas’s fate. The New York Times newspaper described it as “not too many decades removed from the vigilante tradition of the old frontier” (even today, around the corner from Dealey Plaza, Wild Bill’s Western Store sells parody pistols and bullets with the slogan: “We don’t call 911.”)Patricia Puckett-Hall, 71, who remembers Oswald helping her with homework when he rented a room from his grandmother, and who now runs the Oswald Rooming House Museum, said: “The country renamed Dallas the ‘city of hate’ and for about 20 years we could not get tourists to come to Dallas. We couldn’t get conventioneers, we couldn’t get new industry to come to the Dallas area.“We were truly taboo economically and there were thousands of stories where family or businessmen would go north-east and the cab driver, being friendly, would say where you from? If they made the mistake of saying Dallas, the driver would pull over, throw their things on the sidewalk and leave them wherever they were. The word got passed through the grapevine: do not tell them you’re from Dallas.”Within the city, there were attempts to bury the stigma. Some wanted to demolish the book depository. Mary Kay Ash, a cosmetics entrepreneur, told CBS in 1984: “I think what we should have done is tear that building down, not put up that plaza, not do anything to commemorate it and make a parking lot of out of that thing and not have it there for people to remember.”But the book depository was saved and, after much soul searching, the Sixth Floor Museum opened there in 1989. The sniper’s perch at the corner window is recreated based on crime scene photos and encased in glass. Other exhibits include an Italian-made Mannlicher-Carcano rifle identical to the one found by investigators, Oswald’s wedding ring, Ruby’s grey fedora hat and a scale model of Dealey Plaza built by the FBI, complete with strings tracing the paths of the bullets.Neither the Warren Commission nor a congressional select committee found any evidence of a plot from extremist rightwing groups or the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). But the assassination has spawned a thousand conspiracy theories that Oswald did not act alone, boosted by Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK and QAnon.Nicola Longford, the British-born chief executive of the Sixth Floor Museum, said: “We do stay neutral. We don’t tell you what to believe. We present the facts and some people might want to dispute those facts. We always hope that there will be new information that will come forward but so far all the conspiracy theories, and the popular ones, can easily be debunked.”The museum has collected almost 2,500 oral histories and is still collecting them from eyewitnesses, some of whom have stayed silent for decades. Before the coronavirus pandemic, it had more than 400,000 visitors a year; in the last fiscal year, when it opened five days a week, it had 265,000. There is also a daily flow of tourists through Dealey Plaza, with some posing for photos on the infamous “grassy knoll”.Meanwhile, two factors were important in rebuilding Dallas’s reputation. The Dallas Cowboys American football team enjoyed success and were dubbed “America’s team”. The TV soap Dallas ran from 1978 to 1991, starring Larry Hagman and Patrick Duffy, enjoying worldwide success and turning outsiders’ first question from “Who shot JFK?” to “Who shot JR?”When Dallas, and the world, marked the 50th anniversary of the assassination in 2013, many found it a cathartic experience. For Rawlings, 69, the former mayor, who delivered a speech during a solemn ceremony at Dealey Plaza, it was an opportunity to research and reflect on the city’s trajectory.He said: “There was a psychosis that the city went through, there’s no question and a real questioning of where you’re from,” he said. “Look, we’re all from someplace it stays with us. Proust said the past is never in the past; it’s with us all the time and it definitely was through the 60s and 70s and as we grew.“But what I understood much better is how Dallas got on with it much quicker than I would have ever thought. It was like: it happened, we had to deal with it. There were some issues but we’ve got to take the future in our hands and do something with it as opposed to kind of stewing in our own pity and guilt.”A decade later, the city is looking forward rather than back. Dallas-Fort Worth is one of the America’s fastest-growing metropolitan areas, drawing business looking to expand or relocate, and has the world’s second busiest airport. Increasingly young and cosmopolitan, it is on course to overtake the Chicago area to become the third most-populous metro within the decade.Only a fraction of residents can remember the Kennedy assassination now and there is no official commemoration planned for Wednesday. The former police headquarters, now a law school, recently opened an exhibition that shows Oswald’s jail cell, interrogation room and final steps, but it is by invitation only and not open to the public.But as Dallas finally moves on from 22 November 1963, America is sliding back into distrust, polarisation and violence. A mob driven to a frenzy by President Donald Trump’s election lies stormed the US Capitol on 6 January 2021; a man last year broke into the home of the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and attacked her husband with a hammer.Minutaglio, author of a new book, A Single Star and Bloody Knuckles: A History of Politics and Race in Texas, said: “I’ve met some people of Dallas who truly are not surprised by the political environment today because they saw it back then.“They saw the consequence of how people can spread conspiracy theories and supercharge things and just turn the temperature up so high that it becomes an explosive and cancerous and frightening environment. Sadly, I don’t know that we learned a lot of the lessons from back then so we keep repeating the same mistakes of letting extremism fester and then multiply.”Rawlings, who now works in private equity, added: “To me the most fascinating part of the relevancy today – because I don’t believe in a conspiracy theory – is that this sort of vitriol can turn into mental illness so quickly. Someone in Maine can kill people in a bowling alley or people feel alienated and they go into a church private school in Nashville and shoot people.“Everything we do can create this and it did back then and Lee Harvey Oswald pops up. I don’t think there was a big belief that we need to kill Kennedy but there was just that river of hate that’s in us all and, sometimes, people pop up and do bad things.” More

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      JFK assassination witness questions whether shooter acted alone

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      An ex-Secret Service agent who was feet away from John F Kennedy when the former president was shot dead has broken his decades-old silence to cast doubt on the single-bullet theory held by the commission which investigated the assassination.In an interview published by the New York Times over the weekend, Paul Landis said that he long believed the official finding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he killed Kennedy.But, based on discrepancies between things he saw on the day of the assassination and the report from the commission, “I’m beginning to doubt myself,” Landis said. “Now I begin to wonder.”Landis’s recollection of Kennedy’s death is bound to fuel those who believe multiple shooters killed the late president in Dallas on 22 November 1963. Yet his remarks – coming about a month before he releases a memoir – differ from two written statements which he turned in shortly after the assassination, surely keeping one of the darkest chapters in US history shrouded in mystery.Landis was on the running board of a car trailing the open-top limousine that Kennedy was riding when – as he tells it – he heard a barrage of gunshots and a bullet struck the president from behind. The Warren commission, convened to examine the investigation, concluded that one bullet then continued forward, striking fellow passenger and Texas governor John Connally in his back, thigh, chest and wrist.As the New York Times noted, the main reason for that conclusion was because the bullet was found on a stretcher used to move Connally around a hospital afterward.Enter Landis’s new interview and his upcoming memoir, The Final Witness: A Kennedy Secret Service Agent Breaks His Silence After 60 Years. Landis told the New York Times that he was the person who discovered that bullet, which he remembers being stuck in the limousine seat behind Kennedy’s seat after the president had been brought to the hospital.Landis also said he did not think the bullet went too deeply into Kennedy’s back before “popping back out” prior to the president’s removal from the car he was in. Worried someone would try to pocket it as a souvenir, Landis said he took the bullet and placed it next to a stretchered Kennedy.“It was a piece of evidence that I realized right away [was] very important,” Landis said. “And I didn’t want it to disappear or get lost. So it was, ‘Paul, you’ve got to make a decision’ – and I grabbed it.”Realizing in 2014 that the location of the bullet’s recovery cited by him was different than the one cited by the Warren commission, Landis checked with multiple officials, according to the New York Times’s story. He was generally met with skepticism, largely because of two written statements that he filed himself.Neither statement mentioned his finding the bullet in question, and he reported hearing only a pair of gunshots at the time of the assassination, the Times wrote.Landis said he was in shock and suffering from sleep deprivation at the time he filed those reports. He said he expected those reports to have mistakes and omissions because his focus at the time was on supporting the first lady Jacqueline Kennedy through her grief.Going public with his contradictions of the official Kennedy assassination narrative was not an easy decision, as his lengthy wait to do so suggests, Landis said.“I didn’t want to talk about it,” said Landis, who left the Secret Service about six months after the Kennedy assassination. “I was afraid. I started to think, did I do something wrong? There was a fear that I might have done something wrong and I shouldn’t talk about it.”The Final Witness is set to be released on 10 October. Its scheduled arrival comes less than a year after Biden’s White House directed the National Archives to publish about 12,000 documents pertaining to Kennedy’s assassination – a move that more than 70% of Americans favored, according to a new poll at about that time. More

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      RFK Jr draws quite a crowd – what does it mean for 2024?

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      Wearing a Robert Kennedy Jr campaign T-shirt, Kevin O’Keeffe found there was standing room only as the candidate, introduced as “Bobby Kennedy”, walked on a sunbaked stage decked with hay bales to whoops and applause.“He supports freedom of speech, and he’s questioned the efficacy of the vaccine, which is legitimate at this point,” said O’Keeffe, 52, who works for a telecommunications company in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. “I like his views on foreign policy and keeping us out of the war. He cares about his fellow Americans in a way that a lot of the politicians nowadays I don’t think really do.”He was far from alone in rooting for Kennedy at the Iowa state fair in Des Moines last weekend. The longshot challenger to Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination in 2024 drew one of the biggest and most energetic crowds, outnumbering conventional politicians on the Republican side. The shouts of “We love you, Robert!” and “Thank you, Robert!”, and subsequent mobbing of Kennedy for handshakes and selfies, hinted at the stirrings of a movement.In a nation that has seen plenty of political convulsions over the past decade, Kennedy, a 69-year-old environmental lawyer who has never before run for public office, is proof that Americans’ appetite for insurgents and outsiders, mavericks and populists, remains undimmed. Even when a campaign traffics in anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and has been hit by antisemitism scandals.Kennedy rose to prominence during the coronavirus pandemic because of his strident and widely condemned opposition to vaccines. He has styled himself as a hammer of the elites – quite a feat for a scion of one of America’s most storied political dynasties. He has scrambled old political allegiances, striking an anti-establishment nerve on the far left and far right over the Ukraine war and other issues.Brandy Zadrozny, a senior reporter for NBC News, summed up his supporters as “anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, internet contrarians, billionaire tech bros, Camelot nostalgists and rightwing provocateurs who seem to be pumping Kennedy as a spoiler candidate”.In his speech from the Des Moines Register newspaper’s political soapbox, Kennedy wore blue jeans and a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves. He spoke of his father, former attorney general Robert Kennedy, and uncle, President John F Kennedy, as figures from a golden age when America was the envy of the world.His campaign chairman, Dennis Kucinich, held up a map as Kennedy railed against proposed pipelines that would run through Iowa to transport liquefied carbon dioxide away from ethanol plants for burial underground. It was a retro, 20th-century presentation but more locally targeted than many candidates offered.Such is the celebrity-style clamor for Kennedy that, for an interview with the Guardian, he slipped away from the crowds and sat in the back of a black limousine with security detail present. Kucinich, a former congressman and past presidential contender, offered to take an Uber back to the hotel but Kennedy insisted that he climb in too, then asked an aide for some fried bacon from the fair.His uncle, Ted Kennedy, was once floored by the simple question, “Why do you want to be president?” This Kennedy does have an answer for that one: “I’m running for president because I feel like I’m losing my country and because I feel like the Democratic party is going in a bad direction. In particular, it has become the party of war – the Ukraine war was an unnecessary war.“It has become the party of censorship. It’s become the party of a pugnacious neocon-driven foreign policy and a Wall Street-driven domestic policy. Those are all the opposite of the Democratic party that I grew up with, so I’m running to bring the party back to its traditional values.”The political class was rattled in 2016 by the two-headed insurgency of not only Donald Trump on the right but Bernie Sanders on the left, channeling frustrations with the status quo in very different ways. Kennedy argues that Democrats, once the party of the poor and middle class, now own most of the nation’s wealth and dominate its richest counties.“Americans feel ignored by both political parties,” he said. “Their wealth is being strip mined by large corporations, corporate interests, and you’re seeing a level of desperation that I’ve never seen in this country. They just don’t feel that anybody’s listening, and they felt like Bernie was maybe listening, and they felt like Donald Trump was maybe listening as well.”Many are disturbed by Kennedy’s flirtations with the far right, including racists and antisemites. He has appeared on Infowars, a channel run by Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and granted interviews to pro-Trump extremists Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson. A Super Pac supporting Kennedy’s presidential run owes half its money to a longtime Republican mega-donor and Trump backer, according to campaign finance reports.Kennedy insists that he is happy to receive support from across the spectrum and focus on issues that united Americans rather than divide them. He said: “My message is a populist message. The Republicans are appealing to a populist base and I appeal to the same base. I appeal to working people, middle class people and the poor.”So what did he make of Trump’s presidency? Kennedy seemed a little reluctant to reply and kept his answer short: “I don’t think it was the shining apex of American exceptionalism.”Trump is facing 91 criminal charges across four cases, many related to an attempted coup after his 2020 election defeat. Democrats warn starkly that his return to the White House could spell the end of American democracy. But again Kennedy swerved: “There’s authoritarian impulses on both sides. On one side it’s the authoritarianism of rightwing demagoguery, and on the left it’s the authoritarianism of the elites, which is equally dangerous because it involves censorship.”Equally dangerous? “I would say equally dangerous,” he reiterated. “What do you think is more dangerous? The attack on the Capitol building on January 6 or the revelations that the White House has been using the CIA and the FBI to censor its critics? What do you think is more dangerous for the republic? Both parties are doing things that are equally dangerous.”He added: “Once a government can silence its critics it has licence for every atrocity and so it’s shocking to me that people in the Democratic party now think it’s OK to silence people. I’ve never thought that’s right. I’ve always spoken to people who I don’t agree with. That’s an important part of being American.”It is an exercise in false equivalence fueled by personal animus. Kennedy accuses the government of colluding with social media companies to deny his freedom of speech, making him the first person censored by the White House after Biden’s inauguration. In reality he was suspended from platforms such as Instagram and Twitter for spreading coronavirus vaccine misinformation.Without the pandemic, it might be argued, there would be no Kennedy candidacy. He has long promoted bogus theories linking vaccines to autism, antidepressants to school shootings and chemicals present in water sources to transgender identity. But now his anti-scientific views have moved from the fringe to resonate with millions of people, especially consumers of rightwing media.His anti-vaccine charity, Children’s Health Defense, prospered during the pandemic, with revenues more than doubling in 2020 to $6.8m, according to filings made with charity regulators. Kennedy has repeatedly invoked Nazis and the Holocaust when talking about measures aimed at mitigating the spread of Covid, such as mask requirements and vaccine mandates. In 2021 he published a book, The Real Anthony Fauci, in which he accused America’s top infectious disease expert of assisting in “a historic coup d’etat against western democracy”.In his Guardian interview, Kennedy is unrepentant, saying: “Show me where I got one thing wrong.” He tossed out far-fetched claims that might have been plucked from dark corners of the web: “The British study that just came out said 98% of the people who died were triple vaccinated”; “If you look at the data, countries that were least vaccinated had the least Covid deaths”. He did not take the vaccine himself and did catch the virus but “it didn’t stop me from skiing”.Earlier this year the UN’s World Health Organization declared an end to Covid as a public health emergency, stating that immunity increased due to “highly effective vaccines” developed in record time. A modelling study by the Commonwealth Fund and Yale School of Public Health at the end of last year found that Covid vaccines kept more than 18.5 million people in the US out of the hospital and saved more than 3.2 million lives.Kennedy’s own family have distanced themselves from him. Jack Schlossberg, President Kennedy’s grandson, said in an Instagram video: “He’s trading in on Camelot, celebrity, conspiracy theories and conflict for personal gain and fame. I’ve listened to him. I know him. I have no idea why anyone thinks he should be president. What I do know is, his candidacy is an embarrassment.”But at the state fair there was a significant constituency thrilled to hear Kennedy keep saying the unsayable, renewing questions about what the rise of such candidates tells America about itself and its yearning. Gail Buffington, 62, wearing a white “Kennedy 2024” cap and “RFK Jr for president 2024” T-shirt, said: “I believe in freedom of speech, peace and civil liberties. Trump drew a large crowd too, and I was in that crowd, and I got nothing but thumbs up from everybody.” More

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      Joe Biden’s Ireland trip reinforces narrative of the American dream

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      John F Kennedy set the template for US presidential forays to Ireland with a rapturous visit in 1963 that he called the best four days of his life.Joe Biden’s visit this week did not quite match that fervour but at times it came close, alchemising politics, diplomacy and the personal into a feelgood glow for visitor and hosts.Standing in Ireland’s legislature Biden raised his arms to heaven, saying: “Well, mom, you said it would happen. I’m at home. I’m home. I wish I could stay longer.”It was corny but also true. This is the most Irish of presidents since Kennedy, a man steeped in Irish ancestry who cannot make a speech without citing Irish poets, proverbs, myths. He had visited Ireland before but to come as president was to consecrate the relationship between the US and Ireland.He was late for engagements and he rambled. There were gaffes. He confused the All Blacks with the Black and Tans. He recast the foreign minister, Micheál Martin, a Corkman, as a proud son of Louth.But the trip was a success. Biden navigated the Northern Ireland leg – a meeting with Rishi Sunak, a speech at Ulster University in Belfast to mark the Good Friday agreement’s 25th anniversary – deftly. Instead of hectoring the Democratic Unionist party over the collapse of power sharing, he said he was there to “listen” and dangled a $6bn (£5bn) carrot of US investment if Stormont was restored.The party’s former leader, Arlene Foster, still accused him of hating Britain, a line echoed by some colleagues and UK commentators, but the DUP leader, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, and other unionist leaders were respectful, even warm.Once Biden crossed the border on Wednesday his smile broadened and his schedule loosened as he dallied with well-wishers in Dublin and lingered in the Cooley peninsula in County Louth, where his great-grandfather James Finnegan was born. A reporter asked amid driving wind and rain what he thought of the weather. “It’s fine. It’s Ireland,” Biden beamed.The entourage included his son Hunter, his sister Valerie, the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and other senior officials that reflected US diplomatic and corporate interests in Ireland.There is evidence the trip has already boosted US tourist numbers. “Biden’s trip is like a golden worldwide tourism windfall,” said Paul Allen, a public relations consultant who launched an Irish for Biden campaign in 2020.The love-in continued in Dublin, where a day of ostensible politics – meetings with President Michael D Higgins and the taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, the address to a joint sitting of parliament – felt more like a family reunion. “President Biden, today you are among friends because you are one of us,” said Seán Ó Fearghaíl, the speaker of the Dáil.There was an element of paddywhackery and performative Irishness for a returned son of Erin. Donald Trump mocked Biden for making such a tip while the world was “exploding”.Few doubt the sincerity of Biden’s Irish affinities. But the pilgrimage had some electoral logic. Other US presidents – Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama – visited Ireland the year before re-election contests. Biden is expected to seek another term.The trip is unlikely to sway Irish Americans, as many of the 30 million-plus Americans who profess Irish roots vote Republican. And those who vote Democrat will back Biden, if at all, for reasons unrelated to his visit to a pub in Dundalk or a Catholic shrine in County Mayo.The trip, rather, reinforces an Ellis Island narrative about the US being built by immigrants from all over the world, not just Ireland, about a land of opportunity where working-class families can forge communities, send their children to college and achieve the American dream.Biden’s last stop on Friday was Ballina, a County Mayo town where he has relatives from another side of the family. It is twinned with his native Scranton in Pennsylvania. The hosts prepared a dramatic light show for his farewell speech outside St Muredach’s cathedral. It promised to be part homecoming, part campaign rally. More

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      US National Archives releases more than 12,000 documents on JFK assassination

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      US National Archives releases more than 12,000 documents on JFK assassinationDocuments disclosed after Joe Biden issued an executive order authorizing them to be made available to the public The US National Archives on Thursday released thousands of documents related to the 1963 assassination of then President John F Kennedy shortly after Joe Biden issued an executive order authorizing the release that also kept hundreds of other sensitive records secret.Sixty years ago, true statecraft avoided a nuclear war. We need that again over Ukraine | Jonathan SteeleRead moreThe release of 12,879 documents was not expected to include any new bombshells or change the conclusion reached by the commission led by chief justice Earl Warren that Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Marine and communist activist who had lived in the Soviet Union, acted alone. However, the latest cache will be useful for historians focusing on the events around the assassination.Kennedy was shot and killed while riding in his motorcade through Dallas on 22 November 1963, at the age of 46.Thousands of books, articles, TV shows and films have explored the idea that Kennedy’s assassination was the result of an elaborate conspiracy. None have produced conclusive proof that Oswald – who was fatally shot by nightclub owner Jack Ruby two days after killing Kennedy – worked with anyone else, although they retain a powerful cultural currency.There were initial concerns that Ruby might have had some connection to Oswald. But a newly released September 1964 memo to the presidential commission investigating the assassination said “the Central Intelligence Agency has no indication that Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald ever knew each other, were associated, or might have been connected in any manner”.Congress in 1992 had ordered that all remaining sealed files pertaining to the investigation into Kennedy’s death should be fully opened to the public through the National Archives in 25 years, by 26 October 2017, except for those the president authorized for further withholding.In 2017, then President Donald Trump released a cache of records, but decided to release the remaining documents on a rolling basis.All of the remaining JFK files were originally supposed to have been released in October 2021. Biden postponed that planned release, citing delays caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, and announced they would be instead disclosed in two batches: one on 15 December 2021, and another by 15 December 2022, after undergoing an intensive one-year review.With Thursday’s release, 95% of the documents in the CIA’s JFK assassination records collection will have been released in their entirety, a CIA spokesperson said in a statement, and no documents will remain redacted or withheld in full after an “intensive one-year review” of all previously unreleased information.In a memorandum on Thursday, Biden said that until 1 May 2023, the National Archives and relevant agencies “shall jointly review the remaining redactions in the records that had not been publicly disclosed”. After that review, “any information withheld from public disclosure that agencies do not recommend for continued postponement” will be released by 30 June 2023.TopicsJohn F KennedyUS politicsBiden administrationnewsReuse this content More

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      Top 10 books about US presidents | Claude A Clegg III

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      Top 10 books about US presidentsFrom the anguish of Lincoln to the showbiz of Reagan and Obama’s introspection, these books show the power and helplessness of America’s commanders-in-chief The US presidency was supposed to be something different, something novel, compared with the fossilised monarchical rule that it supplanted after the American revolution. Born of Enlightenment theory, settler colonialism and 18th-century warfare, the US constitution gave the chief executive primarily an enforcement role, with the authority to lead armed forces in the event of foreign encroachment or domestic unrest but stripped of the capacity to legislate or issue judicial decisions. The architects of the new republic meant for the president to preside over a citizenry well-endowed with rights, not to rule over cowed subjects.Chief executives from George Washington and Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan have been sorely tested by both the responsibilities and the limitations of the country’s highest, loneliest office. Through civil war, economic catastrophes, foreign misadventures, social upheavals and plagues, the presidency has endured, but it – and the 45 men who have occupied the job – has been moulded and often humbled by the promise and perils of the office.Is the US presidency – indeed, American democracy – equal to the dire challenges of the 21st century? One could certainly argue that it isn’t, based on the ongoing bungling of the Covid-19 response, the horrifying (and presidentially inspired) insurrection of 6 January 2021 and the glacially slow and fickle efforts to address everything from climate change to widening social inequality. If the founding fathers meant to circumscribe the power of the presidency out of a well-founded fear of kingly abuses, then they would surely comprehend the creeping threat that authoritarianism and political extremism present to the US system of government today. Nevertheless, they probably could not have guessed that the hard lessons that they had learned about the fragility of democracy would be so fiercely resisted or blithely ignored more than two centuries after they beseeched a patrician general from the Virginia countryside to preside over their fledgling experiment in government by the people.Of the many works that I have found useful in thinking about the history of the US presidency and for writing my newest book, The Black President: Hope and Fury in the Age of Obama, these 10 have been among the most helpful. They are a mix of biographies, memoirs and reportage which, taken together, represent some of the best writings by and about the small group of powerful people who have occupied the White House.1. Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge by Erica Armstrong Dunbar (2017)Dunbar’s important book is less a biography of George Washington, Martha Washington, or Ona Judge, the runaway enslaved woman whom the first couple made such extraordinary efforts to recapture, than a look into the power and privilege of a slaveholding elite forcing its way through a new republic rhetorically committed to liberty. The relentless pursuit of Judge by the Washingtons after her bold flight from the new US capital in Philadelphia is expertly told by Dunbar.2. The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed (2008)This history of overlapping, intertwined families vivifies the world around Thomas Jefferson, the third US president, while skilfully making more legible the travails and aspirations of the enslaved people on his storied estate at Monticello. The decades-long relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings, one of the Black women he owned and who bore several of his children, occupies the core of the book, but Gordon-Reed manages to craft a complicated and often contradictory history that extends far beyond the tangle of race, gender, and status that marked the Jeffersons and the Hemingses’ commingled journey through US history.3. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin (2005)This book follows the intersecting biographical tributaries of the powerful, ambitious men whom Abraham Lincoln, the nation’s 16th president, was able to steer toward the rushing river of his own turbulent civil war presidency. Lincoln as political strategist and savvy tactician is the frame that Goodwin points up most dramatically. But the book also succeeds at conveying Lincoln as a beleaguered and empathic head of state whose mettle is tried time and again by those around him and news from the battlefield.4. Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S Grant (1885-1886)Rightly considered by many historians and literary critics as among the best of presidential autobiographies, this book was completed a generation after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox as Grant succumbed to a slow strangulation by throat cancer in the 1880s. The memoirs provide a vantage point on the nation’s bloodiest and most defining conflict that only a soldier elemental to the war and its aftermath could offer.5. Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris (2001)As the best biographical volume on America’s 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt, Morris’s book draws bold-coloured portraits of outsized historical figures, with equally knowing shades of nuance and frailty. Morris has the contextual eye of the historian and sets scenes that are alive and convincing. He also conveys mood and meaning as well as any novelist.6. Franklin D Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940 by William Leuchtenburg (1963)Dated, frayed, and surpassed by newer research and more eloquent storytellers, Leuchtenburg’s volume on the first two presidential terms of Franklin Roosevelt still stands the test of time as a scholarly, well-researched, and jargon-free narration of arguably the most consequential presidency of the 20th century. It is the tale of the rise of the liberal welfare state against the backdrop of the Great Depression and the gathering clouds of world war. Leuchtenburg tells the story well and sets the standard for future researchers.7. The Making of the President, 1960 by Theodore White (1961)White’s fascinating chronicle of the 1960 presidential race is the starting point of quality, book-length journalistic coverage of modern American politics. Writing in the moment, White had an eye for discerning the essential character of men such as John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon who sought the country’s highest office, even as the media ecosystem of his day made such discernment more difficult to achieve.8. Sleepwalking Through History: America in the Reagan Years by Haynes Johnson (1991)Johnson captures the zeitgeist of the 1980s by juxtaposing the countervailing forces of American optimism – or the desperate need of many Americans to again believe in their scandal-wracked government – against the greed, corruption, militarism and debt that threatened to unmask the soothing myths of American exceptionalism. At the centre of Johnson’s story is a self-made man, an actor by training and temperament who through force of will, theatrics – and a good dose of luck – led the country through domestic and external perils whose ramifications are still being felt today.Top 10 books about the Roman empire | Greg WoolfRead more9. Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama (1995)Of Obama’s autobiographical writings, this one provides the best understanding of his origins and burgeoning sense of self. His early and more frank ruminations on race are present here, and the book is not encumbered by the exigencies of political campaigning. At once a memoir, travelogue and deeply introspec­tive meditation, it is a fluent self-study of his efforts to reconcile himself with his eclectic lineage and to discover his place and pur­pose in the world.10. Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin (2010)The essential volume on the 2008 presidential primaries and general election. Heilemann and Halperin had generous access to many of the historical players – including Barack Obama, John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin – and their staffs. It is a fast-paced, even breathless read, and anyone who paid even casual attention at the time to the historic events chronicled here will recognise its richly drawn characters, plotlines and twists of fate.
      The Black President: Hope and Fury in the Age of Obama by Claude A Clegg III is published by Johns Hopkins University Press. To help the Guardian and Observer, order your copy from the Guardian bookshop. Delivery charges may apply.
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