The Klan revived in 1915 as “America First” wasn’t only anti-Black; its founding enemies were Catholics, Jews, and immigrants, and the Catholic was the main target through the 1920s, when the Klan ran millions of members on the theory that Rome was plotting to seize America through its schools and its voters.
That’s the same Klan that pushed Oregon’s 1922 law to abolish parochial schools and that helped bury Al Smith, the first Catholic nominee, in 1928.
JFk was an Irish Catholic. He had to give the Houston ministers speech in 1960 to swear he’d take no orders from the Pope precisely because that suspicion was still live. To the Klan, a Catholic in the White House was the conspiracy coming true.
What he did as President infuriated the KKK. Federal marshals protecting the Freedom Riders in 1961, troops at Ole Miss to seat James Meredith in 1962, the Guard federalized to walk Wallace out of the schoolhouse door in 1963, the June 1963 speech calling civil rights a moral issue and the bill that followed, and his brother’s Justice Department going after Klan violence directly.
Every intervention of JFK was federal power imposed on the South, which is the exact thing the third-wave Klan of the 1950s and 60s existed to resist.
Put together, Kennedy was the perfect villain for white nationalists: proof that a Rome-loyal outsider would use Washington to force integration on white Protestants. That’s why the “Wanted for Treason” atmosphere in Dallas wasn’t a fringe mood but a coalition, and why the Kennedy Center Congress built after Dallas was explicitly a memorial and not just a concert hall.
Hostility to the Kennedy name has a lineage. The 2025 slogan is Wilson’s 1915 slogan. The past year shows its target. Trump paved over the Rose Garden Kennedy commissioned and leveled the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden with the East Wing. The Center’s facade carried “Trump-Kennedy” until a judge ruled that only Congress can rename the memorial Congress created in January 1964. Trump’s kangaroo Justice Department then told the court the building must be taken down. The lineage explains the demolition threat.