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“... must surely have been collective, the planning long-term and meticulous. The killing of John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963, or the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York in 2001, are the two major vortices into which conspiracy theorists have been sucked in our own time, generating ever more elaborate explanations and pseudo-explanations. Argument ...”

“... Driving across America, one of the characters in Richard Powers’s new novel remarks that the whole country has become a gigantic theme park. The same impression might have been gained from reading American novels, or from going to the movies. From Oklahoma to Mount Rushmore, and from the Devil’s Tower to Zabriskie Point, the activities of being on the road and imagining being on the road feed into one another, as one might expect ...”

“... they still represented 12 per cent of all American movies. But if the year that brought Richard Nixon’s triumphant re-election was the last in which the number of Western releases would reach double figures, the residual significance of the West as the bedrock of American identity was eloquently reiterated, just before the collapse of Soviet ...”

“... how those dreams had been deferred. Yet tonight the cemetery of hope and idealism is empty. Jack Kennedy is alive. Martin Luther King is alive. Bobby Kennedy is alive. James Baldwin is alive. Janis Joplin is alive. Jack Kerouac is alive. Jimi Hendrix is alive. Lyndon Johnson is alive. James Jones is alive. Jim Morrison and ...”

“... Nobody else would link John Betjeman with Anthony Frewin, compiler of The Assassination of John F. Kennedy: An Annotated Film, TV and Videography 1963-92. At this point, Seabrook needs a videography, not a bibliography. He is what he watches, late at night. Charles Hawtrey, in his youthful pomp, in Michael Powell’s A Canterbury Tale. Hawtrey (pre-booze) with ...”

“... this immortal ‘me’. Discussing a study of 1883 entitled Walt Whitman and written by his friend Richard Bucke, he insists to Traubel that his endorsement of the book was never meant to extend to its interpretations: as to his explication – no, no, no – that I do not accept – for Leaves of Grass baffles me, its author, at all points of its meaning ...”

“... parallel when Clinton was told that the architect of his ‘family values’ election campaign, Richard Morris, was about to be exposed in the press as the assiduous client of a call-girl, with whom he had shared White House secrets. It was the worst possible kind of scandal for Clinton, given the past stories of his own extra-marital affairs, now more ...”

“... men were caught breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in June 1972, Richard Helms, then director of the CIA, refused to help with the cover-up. In February 1973, after his re-election, Nixon fired Helms and replaced him with James Schlesinger. In an initiative to regain public trust as the crisis escalated, Schlesinger announced ...”

“... one of the most familiar scenes from the life of Wilde: the bad moment outside Swan and Edgar’s. Richard Ellmann’s biography says that, as Wilde caught sight of ‘the painted boys on the pavement’ outside the department store, he was struck by an overwhelming sense of catastrophe. Holland traces the story back to 1930 and to Ada Leverson, who – he ...”

“... Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox when other officials in the Justice Department refused to obey Richard Nixon’s order. He deliberately turned his Senate hearings into ‘a discussion of judicial philosophy’, with the aim of exposing the modern heresies that had brought the Warren and Burger Courts to such jurisprudential absurdities as Roe v. Wade. He ...”

“... comes on inauguration day. During the traditional post-inaugural lunch at the White House, Teddy Kennedy collapsed with a sudden, violent seizure. As the emergency medics took him away, with his wife looking on stricken at his side, the thoughts of the other guests were with the two of them, ‘none of us imagining the political consequences that would ...”

“... misleading reference to Yellow Sun were presumably chosen to cause maximum confusion. After the Kennedy Administration in turn cancelled the Skybolt missile which was to have been the RAF’s strategic nuclear system, Macmillan persuaded a reluctant President Kennedy at Nassau in December 1962 to provide Polaris missiles ...”

“... chemical and biological warfare (CBW), which had tripled its budget between 1961 and 1964 as the Kennedy and Johnson administrations began the systematic use of defoliants and herbicides in Vietnam. Hersh found a colonel who had recently retired from the US Army Chemical Corps with grave doubts about the morality of the work he had been doing. The colonel ...”

“... Was the Week That Was broadcast a sickeningly sycophantic tribute to the assassinated President Kennedy. There was no part of public life, he insisted, which was free of humbug and therefore immune to mockery. Peter’s own statements to journalists must always be treated with caution. He could rarely resist satirising himself or his interviewer, and ...”

“... hanky-panky across the country on both sides on election night. But at least when Chicago Mayor Richard Daley helped to deliver Illinois to John Kennedy in the narrow contest of 1960, it was not televised. (For those keeping track of our dynastic democracy, Richard was father to ...”