Martin Meenagh blog

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...

Dwight David Eisenhower was elected in defiance of his party’s isolationist instincts. In 1952, Robert Taft and John Bricker, both of Ohio, were much more in sympathy with Republican members; in those primaries that were held, Taft won 35% overall to Eisenhower’s 26%. In addition, during the Republican convention—which was entered with no candidate having a majority—Eisenhower’s supporters had to resort to rule changes to exclude Taft’s Southern supporters and to secure the nomination. The furious reaction to these events of Taft followers, such as the highly influential Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, illustrated how far from the GOP mainstream ‘Ike’ was, and was the principal reason why Eisenhower was saddled with Richard Nixon as a running mate and a requirement that, at some point, he shake the hand of Joe McCarthy. The circumstances of Eisenhower’s nomination may not seem immediately relevant to the foreign policy pursued by his administration, but in truth they are. Ei...

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...