Martin Meenagh blog

  Abraham Lincoln, for most of his career, was a failed politician. He was a candidate for the Illinois General Assembly in 1832. He lost. He was a candidate for a Whig nomination for the House of Representatives in 1843. He lost. He attempted to become a Commissioner of the General Land Office under President Taylor, which was a bureaucratic role, but was turned down. He was elected to the Illinois legislature in 1854 but did not take his seat, and in 1858, he lost the United States Senate seat for Illinois to Stephen A. Douglas. He was a compromise candidate for President in 1860, won a four-way election, and was promptly discounted and abused across the United States and Confederacy, as well as abroad, until having to create his own party to run for reelection in 1864, which was unexpected.  All Lincoln could really show in terms of elections between 1832 and 1860 was a single term as a member of the House of Representatives in a failing Whig party between 1846 and 1848. ...

The thirty-fifth president of the United States was shot in Dallas in 1963 on the 22 November at around 12:30 pm. That single sentence is the most that Americans and historians from across the political spectrum can agree on in 2014, which in itself offers the outline of a suggested answer to the question of why the assassination was controversial. Unlike the previous assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley, the assassin was not seen and did not identify himself or themselves during the shooting. Subsequently, out of the Warren Commission’s partial investigation, the internal Secret Service and FBI investigations, the three Congressional Investigations (the Pike Committee, Church Committee and Committee on Assassinations), the Assassination Records Review Board, and the notorious Garrison investigation by the District Attorney of New Orleans, only the Warren Commission identified one assassin to the exclusion of all others. Shortly after the killing itself, President John...

The question above carries an implication that the Soviet challenge to the West could in some way have been unreal, at least in terms of espionage. There has been, certainly since the 1947 Red Scare and the subsequent rise from 1951 of Joseph McCarthy, a tendency in the West to view the Cold War effort to find and to stop Soviet subversion as ‘paranoid.’ Books and articles have embedded in the public consciousness the idea that Allen and John Dulles, James Jesus Angleton, Howard Hunt, Cord Meyer, Curtis LeMay, Lyman Lemnitzer, Edward Teller, J.Edgar Hoover, and dozens of other strange, multi-level figures were in some way delusional in the pursuit of their undeniable anticommunist obsessions, and also that they were representative of the anti-communist effort. A parallel perspective has also arisen which holds that the security structure created between 1947 and 1961, covering the emergence in 1946 of the Strategic Air Command, the CIA, Department of Defense, and National Securi...

On the application of the test used to establish causation by lawyers—the ‘but for this the event would not have happened’ test—the key event in African-American achievement of civil rights between 1953 and 1965 was the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in Brown v Topeka 1 & 2. This decision struck at segregation in education, but also in the provision of state facilities and services, across the South. By deciding that ‘separate’ could never mean ‘equal’, and that states had no right to segregate on racial grounds rooted in the constitution, it effectively went further than the reversal of Plessey v Ferguson but also undermined the legal ratio decidendi of the Slaughterhouse cases which had strengthened state power after the civil war. Brown also forced a decision about whether or not to uphold the new interpretation—the only legal interpretation—of the constitution onto President Eisenhower, and it encouraged Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, and th...