John F Kennedy

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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.
      TopicsHistory booksTop 10sPolitics booksUS politicsAbraham LincolnFranklin D RooseveltJohn F KennedyRichard NixonfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Priscilla Johnson McMillan obituary

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      US newsPriscilla Johnson McMillan obituaryJournalist, author and historian who knew both President John F Kennedy and his alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald Michael CarlsonMon 19 Jul 2021 04.54 EDTLast modified on Mon 19 Jul 2021 05.38 EDTPriscilla Johnson McMillan, who has died aged 92 after a fall, was the only person who could claim to have known both President John F Kennedy and his alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. As a young college graduate, Johnson was befriended by Senator Kennedy while she worked in his office; a few years later she interviewed the young Oswald soon after he showed up in Moscow wishing to defect to the Soviet Union.After the assassination, Johnson was given exclusive access to Oswald’s Russian widow, Marina, and her ensuing book, Marina and Lee (1977), became a key document in establishing Oswald as a lone disturbed assassin. It also prompted many researchers to point to Johnson’s close ties to the US intelligence community, not least when she received similarly exclusive access to Joseph Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, when she defected to the US, and worked with her through translating her bestselling 1967 memoir Twenty Letters to a Friend.Johnson’s career grew from her unexpected interest in Russian language and culture. Her father, Stuart Johnson, a financier, was heir to a textile fortune; he was her mother, Mary Eunice Clapp’s, second husband. Patricia was born in Glen Cove, New York, and grew up on the family’s estate, Kaintuck Farm, in Locust Valley, Long Island.She was educated at Brearley school in New York, then at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, one of the elite “seven sisters” female colleges, where she became the first graduate majoring in Russian studies and was active in the United World Federalists (UWF), dedicated to effective world cooperation, primarily to prevent nuclear war.After an MA at Radcliffe College (now part of Harvard University), in 1953 she joined the staff of the newly elected senator Kennedy, researching French Indochina. They became friends; he would call her regularly for chats. She denied any romance, “I didn’t love him; he was mesmerising but he was just someone I knew.” She was rejected when she applied to join the CIA, ostensibly because of her ties to the UWF. Oddly, her interviewer was Cord Meyer, who in 1947 had been the first president of the UWF; now he headed the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird, aimed at influencing media. She did translation work for a review of the Soviet press, spending much time in Russia. On Kennedy’s recommendation, she received a grant to study the Soviet legal system, and again did translation work at the US embassy. She met Truman Capote, travelling with a US production of Porgy and Bess, and is mentioned in his book The Muses Are Heard.In 1958 she joined the North American News Alliance (NANA), and in November 1959 arrived in Moscow just a day after Aline Mosby of United Press International had filed a story on Oswald’s defection. The US consul John McVickar, himself a CIA man, recommended she interview Oswald, who was at her hotel; her report on the four-hour session appeared in NANA-affiliated papers.Mosby noted that Johnson lived in the Metropol, unlike other press in their state-assigned office/residence, saying “she was a very nice person and had good connections”. Johnson was one of many journalists expelled from Russia in the wake of the Russians shooting down of an American U2 spy plane; Oswald had been a radar operator at the Atsugi, Japan base from which U2s flew.She became a visiting fellow at the Russian research centre at Harvard, returning to Russia in 1962 and writing a memorable piece for Harper’s magazine about the Soviet writer Boris Pasternak’s funeral. On her return she was interviewed by Donald Jameson, the head of the CIA’s Soviet Russia division, who described her in a memo as someone who could “be encouraged to write the articles we want … but it’s important to avoid making her think she’s being used as a propaganda tool.”Then, in November 1963, came the news of Kennedy’s assassination by Oswald; Johnson gasped as she realised: “I know that boy.” Her 1959 profile of Oswald was immediately reprinted, but with a few changes, including a final line that did not appear in the original: “This was the stuff of which fanatics are made.”In 1964, when Marina was being held incommunicado, under threat of deportation, Johnson moved in with her. With her Russian and knowledge of Lee, she won Marina’s trust, but her book did not appear until 1977. While researching it, Johnson co-edited a collection of essays, Khrushchev and The Arts: The Politics of Soviet Culture (1965). She returned to Kaintuck, where Alliluyeva lived while they worked on her memoir.Johnson married the journalist George McMillan in 1966; he covered the civil rights movement in the south, and published, in 1977, Making of an Assassin, showing how Martin Luther King’s alleged assassin, James Earl Ray, acted alone. They divorced in 1980.Marina and Lee: The Tormented Love and Fatal Obsession Behind Lee Harvey Oswald’s Assassination of John F Kennedy finally appeared, coincidentally, just as the House select committee on assassinations reopened the case. Johnson testified in closed session; large sections of her HSCA testimony are redacted whenever she is asked about her intelligence connections. Her book was a major influence on Norman Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale; Mailer blamed Oswald’s killing of the president on his sexual frustration with Marina, and jealousy of JFK. By this time Marina began to distance herself from Johnson’s conclusions, saying “it was up to Priscilla to fish out all the facts and everything”.In 1988, Johnson added another line to her Oswald interview, telling Dan Rather of CBS that Oswald had told her: “I want to give the people of the US something to think about.” Eventually, Marina would claim she was “misled by the ‘evidence’ presented to me by government authorities … I am now convinced Lee was an FBI informant and did not kill President Kennedy”.Priscilla’s obituary of Edward Teller, father of the H-bomb, in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists led to her being asked to write about the hearings that declared J Robert Oppenheimer, the “father” of the atomic bomb, a security risk when he opposed building an H-bomb.She received extensive access to the archives of the Los Alamos Atomic Laboratory, but as with Marina and Lee, the research overwhelmed the writing. When The Ruin of J Robert Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Modern Arms Race finally appeared in 2005, it was a year after a massive Oppenheimer biography by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin had won a Pulitzer prize. But her portrayal of the political shift that left Oppenheimer on the outside won praise.On the 50th anniversary of the assassination, Marina and Lee was reissued. Johnson wrote of Oswald’s “unfitness for any conspiracy outside his own head”. Oddly enough, the description also would suit a hapless someone who was, as Oswald himself claimed, a “patsy”.Johnson is survived by a niece, Holly-Katharine Johnson, who is working on her biography.TopicsUS newsUS politicsJohn F KennedyRussiaNew YorkCIATruman CapoteobituariesReuse this content More

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      Caroline Kennedy reportedly in line to be next US ambassador to Australia

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      Caroline Kennedy, the only surviving child of President John F Kennedy, is reportedly in line to be announced as the next US ambassador to Australia.US-based news website Axios, citing “people familiar with the matter” reported: “Caroline Kennedy is in line to be US ambassador to Australia”, while the AP said the US president, Joe Biden, was “giving serious consideration” to nominating Kennedy to a high-profile ambassadorial role in Asia.Kennedy was formerly the US ambassador to Japan during the Obama administration.The White House declined to comment.Kennedy, a scion of one of America’s most high-profile political families, threw her support behind Biden relatively early in the crowded 2020 Democratic primary process.Along with her uncle, senator Ted Kennedy, she also offered a critical early endorsement to Obama in his 2008 run for the White House.Caroline, born in 1957, is the only surviving child of the former president Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline. She was only five when her father was assassinated in Dallas in November 1963.It was the first of a series of tragedies for the privileged but ill-fated US family. A brother, Patrick, died in infancy in 1963. Her uncle Robert Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, and another brother, John, died in a plane crash in 1999.Axios has reported that Biden was considering another Kennedy, Ted Kennedy’s widow, Vicki, for an ambassadorial posting in western Europe.Australia’s previous ambassador to Australia, Arthur Culvahouse Jr, finished his appointment with the end of the Trump presidency in January this year.Before his appointment, the post was vacant for nearly two and a half years after Obama appointee John Berry departed.The US mission to Australia is currently headed by chargé d’affaires Michael Goldman.Biden is expected to soon announce his first major tranche of political ambassadorial nominations, according to White House officials.The AP has previously reported he is expected to nominate former senior state department official Nicholas Burns to serve in China, Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti in India, former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel in Japan, and former deputy secretary of state Tom Nides to Israel.Ken Salazar, a former colleague of Biden’s in the Senate and Obama-era interior department secretary, is a candidate for the Mexico ambassadorship.Cindy McCain, the widow of Republican senator John McCain and a longtime friend of the president and first lady, Jill Biden, is under consideration for an ambassadorial position, including leading the UN World Food Program.With AP More