Martin Meenagh blog

  Gary Hart was George McGovern’s campaign manager. A young Democrat in 1974, he ousted a serving Senator in Colorado, and embodied the new Democratic Party which had begun to emerge in the transparent, environmentally conscious technology- and policy-driven culture of the late nineteen seventies and early eighties. He served on one of the most consequential committees in modern congressional history—the Church Committee—which investigated and contributed to the abortive reform of America’s Intelligence agencies. An ‘Atari Democrat’ who promoted the semiconductor industry, Hart merged new politics with a grasp of the primary process, and came very close to snatching the Democratic nomination from a former vice-president anointed by the party’s establishment. Hart was one of a number of Democrats elected in the wake of the oil price shocks and Watergate who formed a bridge to the neoliberal Democratic leadership Council without completely breaking with the past. Instead, politic...

  The passage of time often changes the apparent significance of events. This is because events are given meaning from the standpoint of observers, not all of whom share the same perspective. James Carter, for instance, has often attributed the enmity of Senator Edward Kennedy, which undermined his 1980 re-election bid, to Carter’s near forgotten failure to appoint Archibald Cox, a Watergate investigator, to a seat on a federal bench at Kennedy’s suggestion. Similarly, Michael Holt has made a persuasive case that decisions by Franklin Pierce on the construction of his cabinet led to the collapse of the national political parties and were a major secondary cause of the Civil War of 1861-65. The Watergate affair is an unusually rich example of this process. The twists and turns of a story which emerged from a burglary of the Democratic National Headquarters at the Watergate building in a presidential election year took place in a demented and polarised cultural and political atmo...

  The Republican party dominated the period between 1876 and 1912, winning all but two presidential elections and Congressional elections in 1880, 1888, and from 1894 to 1910. The two Democratic administrations of the period, in addition, were one man, Grover Cleveland, who was elected twice non-consecutively, and with only pluralities of the popular vote. Similarly, Democratic dominance between 1932 and 1980 was characterized by every Congress being Democratic with two exceptions between 1932 and 1980, and 8 Democratic victories in presidential elections in the same period. At first glance, dominance can be attributed in both cases to a combination of events and party weakness. Democrats in the late nineteenth century were split between Southern ‘Bourbons’, populists, bimetallists, and over religion, to the point where nominating conventions were frequently deadlocked. Republicans, by contrast, proved capable of developing and applying a locally based infrastructure nationally...

Federalism is a complex term in American history and politics. The first Federalist Party, for instance, which broadly held sway for the first twenty five years after 1787, was based on Hamiltonian ideas of a powerful centre, and of a state funded in part by national debt. This was at odds with Jefferson’s vision of local ‘ward democracies’, populism, and the principle of open elections. Most people who call themselves federalist in the twenty first century would probably identify more with Jefferson than with Hamilton’s party. This is in part because the term federal has become consonant with ‘confederate’. The latter word is unusable, however. This is firstly because of the existence between 1861 and 1865 of the Confederate States of America, and secondly because the Constitution was meant to replace what were perceived as failed ‘Articles of Confederation’. Nevertheless, the word ‘Confederation’ is a better one to sum up what modern federalists seem to want. It implies a we...

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...