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What if JFK had lost? 5 things that might be different

If just a few thousand votes in a few key states had gone the other way that day, you could argue that Cuba might now be our 51st state.

By the time it was over, Kennedy had won and Nixon's camp was quietly accusing the other side of dirty tricks. The election was about much more than Washington bragging rights.

to invoke his waiver privilege to keep some of the documents secret, as some members of the US intelligence community have privately requested.

In a Saturday tweet, Trump said he would allow the release of the documents "subject to the release of further information."

Trump could block the release of certain documents if he finds "an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement or conduct of foreign relations" and if "the identifiable harm is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure,"

President Donald Trump said Saturday he intends to allow the release of classified government documents about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy "subject to the receipt of further information."

A White House official told reporters Saturday: "The President believes that these documents should be made available in the interests of full transparency unless agencies provide a compelling and clear national security or law enforcement justification otherwise."

"Subject to the receipt of further information, I will be allowing, as President, the long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened," Trump said, appearing to leave open the possibility that some documents could still be withheld.

Donald Trump has said he plans to allow the opening of a trove of long-classified files on the assassination of former president John F Kennedy.

Congress ruled in 1992 that all JFK documents should be released within 25 years, unless the president decided the release would harm national security.The archive contains more than 3,000 previously unreleased documents, and more than 30,000 that have been released before but with redactions.

"The American public deserves to know the facts, or at least they deserve to know what the government has kept hidden from them for all these years," Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics and author of a book about Kennedy, told the Associated Press news agency. "It's long past the time to be forthcoming with this information."

Candidate Kennedy’s purpose was simply to express sympathy to Coretta Scott King over her husband’s plight. Many of his aides opposed the call as likely to lose votes in the South. But King was released from jail shortly afterwards, and reports of Kennedy’s concern energized African-Americans. Many historians feel it shifted crucial votes in Northern states away from Richard Nixon to give JFK his razor-thin victory.

They admired each other’s best qualities but were suspicious of the other’s flaws. On civil rights, they marched to different cadences.Early in his administration, President Kennedy did not want to be seen as too eager to press for such moves as equal housing and voting protection for minorities, even though he saw such changes as inevitable. King was not invited to his inauguration or to an initial meeting of civil rights figures in the Oval Office

In June 1963, Kennedy unveiled sweeping civil rights legislation. Among other things, it promised the right to vote to all citizens with a grade-school education, and eliminated legal discrimination in public accommodations such as hotels and restaurants.Kennedy remained hesitant to embrace the nation’s most prominent civil rights figure, however. In part this was due to allegations that a key King aide had communist ties, as well as the FBI’s notorious surveillance of King, which produced evidence of womanizing.The FBI’s file on King’s sex life was dauntingly thick, Berl L. Bernhard, staff director of the US Commission on Civil Rights from 1958 to 1963, said in an oral history at the Kennedy Library.“I do think the president was aware of it, and I know [darn] well some people in the administration were aware of it,” Mr. Bernhard said.Kennedy himself had numerous affairs, of course. It’s unknown how he felt about the juxtaposition of his own recklessness with the King allegations.In the summer of 1963 the administration was worried about the upcoming March on Washington to highlight civil rights. Unable to stop the planning, the White House recruited white union and labor groups to participate, to counter criticism that whites were not interested in sweeping civil rights changes.

John F Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, was shot dead on 22 November 1963. He was travelling in an open-topped limousine.

A week after Kennedy was killed, President Lyndon B Johnson set up a commission to investigate the case.

Around 88% of the records are open in full; 11% are open but with "sensitive portions" removed; and 1% are withheld in full.According to the 1992 law, all records must be published in full within 25 years, unless the president says otherwise.The deadline is Thursday.

A president might be the one accused of the conspiracy; rarely is he the one spreading rumors.

The curious thing about all this is the extent to which these various performances of alternate reality converge.

Here’s the thing that happens, apparently, when a conspiracy theorist becomes president of the United States:

The plot of the Hollywood film Seven Days in May (1964) is, of course, fiction. But its journey to the screen is historically significant, because the person who got the ball rolling on the production in 1962 was not a Hollywood mogul but someone with even more power: President John F. Kennedy.

The president favoured history (he was a subscriber to History Today) and spy novels. When in 1962, midway through his tenure, he received the galleys of a new thriller about a military takeover of the US government he read it eagerly.

Knebel and Bailey were seasoned political reporters. They began writing Seven Days in May after interviewing General Curtis LeMay in the wake of the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, when the US landed anti-communist rebels in Cuba to depose Castro. LeMay blamed JFK for aborting the operation too early, accusing him of ‘cowardice’. The more Knebel and Bailey investigated, the more they realised that the military establishment and the intelligence community despised Kennedy.

NOT NORMALA-List’s Trump Snub Hits Him Where It Hurts

Rockettes and now even a member of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, who are refusing to raise their microphones, kick up their bare-legged heels or otherwise perform for Donald Trump at his inaugural

America is, in many ways, as much an idea as it is a country. And Americans have long marketed that idea around the world through our popular culture

by taking a position directly counter to that of Mitt Romney, who favors a constitutional amendment to ban all rights for gay couples across the entire country, Obama advanced his key strategy to winning in the fall: to make this a choice election. If it is a choice election, he wins. If it is a referendum on the last four years of economic crisis, he could lose.

it’s been confirmed: gay rights is indeed a wedge issue. But now—unlike 2004—it’s a wedge issue for the Democrats. Women, too, are more supportive of marriage equality—a further shoring up of the gender gap already widened by the spring’s chatter about contraception.

He did this the way he always does: leading from behind and playing the long game. He learned from Clinton that tackling this issue up front would only backfire, especially in a recession.

conspiracists aren’t completely isolated. They’re surrounded by a substantial number of deep skeptics—people who aren’t drinking the Kool-Aid but don’t trust the government to tell the whole story. On average, these people seem to represent about a quarter of the population. In many cases, when combined with the conspiracy believers, they add up to a majority

The lesson in these

We need to understand more about these skeptics. We need to keep them from falling into the arms of the conspiracy-theory peddlers. If th

America's iconic war machine By James Morgan

Her name is "Cajun Fear" - painted on her nose with a snarling alligator.

This bomber was built in 1960 - the year JFK won the US presidential election, Hitchcock's thriller Psycho was released in cinemas and the USSR successfully sent two dogs into space.

England, France, and Russia blamed Germany and Austria-Hungary, while the latter blamed the former.

A century later, the guns have long been silenced, but the war over the war continues. To an extent that seems amazing for a modern conflict, there is still no consensus over who was responsible for World War I,

influencing US foreign policy in different ways with each generation.

Think back to the fall of 2002, just a few weeks before that year’s crucial midterm elections, when the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq was up for a vote. A year after the 9/11 attacks, hundreds of members of the House and the Senate were about to face the voters of a country still traumatized by terrorism.

History has indeed taught us that when it comes to the instincts that drive us, fear has no rival. As the lead House impeachment manager, Representative Adam Schiff, has noted, Robert Kennedy spoke of how “moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle.”

Late in the evening on day four of the trial I saw it, just 10 feet across the aisle from my seat at Desk 88, when Mr. Schiff told the Senate: “CBS News reported last night that a Trump confidant said that Republican senators were warned, ‘Vote against the president and your head will be on a pike.’” The response from Republicans was immediate and furious. Several groaned and protested and muttered, “Not true.” But pike or no pike, Mr. Schiff had clearly struck a nerve. (In the words of Lizzo: truth hurts.)

Senator Patty Murray, a thoughtful Democrat from Washington State, still remembers “the fear that dominated the Senate leading up to the Iraq war.”“You could feel it then,” she told me, “and you can feel that fear now” — chiefly among Senate Republicans.

History has indeed taught us that when it comes to the instincts that drive us, fear has no rival. As the lead House impeachment manager, Representative Adam Schiff, has noted, Robert Kennedy spoke of how “moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle.”

There’s an old Russian proverb: The tallest blade of grass is the first cut by the scythe. In private, many of my colleagues agree that the president is reckless and unfit. They admit his lies. And they acknowledge what he did was wrong. They know this president has done things Richard Nixon never did. And they know that more damning evidence is likely to come out.

“The wealthy have often done better than the poor when faced with epidemics and pandemics because they tend to be resilient as a function of having greater resources,”

When President Trump was asked Wednesday why athletes and other well-connected people are getting tested before everyone else, he said, “Perhaps that’s been the story of life.”

Throughout history, scholars, scientists and philosophers have wrestled with the stark fact that the most of the rich survive plagues and pandemics while the poor die cruelly.

You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.

Why are we like this?The short answer is because we’re Americans—because being American means we can believe anything we want; that our beliefs are equal or superior to anyone else’s, experts be damned.

The word mainstream has recently become a pejorative, shorthand for bias, lies, oppression by the elites.