By JOCELYN NOVECK and JENNIFER AGIESTA, Associated Press
As Christy Everson was nearing age 40, she made a decision: She wanted to have a child, even though she was single and it meant doing it all alone. Her daughter, conceived via a sperm donor, is now 2 1/2 years old, and Everson hopes to have a second child.
“Was it worthwhile? Well, I’m thinking of doing it again, aren’t I?” she says.
Everson and women like her are part of a shift in American society. An Associated Press-WE tv poll of people under 50 found that more than 2 in 5 unmarried women without children — or 42 percent — would consider having a child on their own without a partner, including more than a third, or 37 percent, who would consider adopting solo.
The poll, which addressed a broad range of issues on America’s changing family structures, dovetails with a recent report by the U.S. Census Bureau that single motherhood is on the rise: It found that of 4.1 million women who’d given birth in 2011, 36 percent were unmarried at the time of the survey, an increase from 31 percent in 2005. And among mothers 20-24, the percentage was 62 percent, or six in 10 mothers.
The AP-WE tv poll also found that few Americans think the growing variety of family arrangements is bad for society. However, many have some qualms about single mothers, with some two-thirds — or 64 percent — saying single women having children without a partner is a bad thing for society. More men — 68 percent — felt that way, compared to 59 percent of women.
The survey found broad gender gaps in opinion on many issues related to how and when to have children. One example: At a time when the can-you-have-it-all debate rages for working mothers, women were more apt than men to say having children has negatively impacted their career.
And this was true especially among mothers who waited until age 30 or older to have children. Fully 47 percent of those mothers said having a child had a negative impact on their careers. Of women overall, 32 percent of mothers reported a negative effect, compared with 10 percent of men.
For Everson, who lives in a suburb of Minneapolis and is now 44, being the only parent means daily responsibilities that naturally suck up some of the time she used to spend on her career as a financial consultant.
“To be honest about it, it’s hard to be a rock star” when parenting a baby, she says. But she sees it as more of a temporary career setback, and feels she’s already getting back on track with her toddler now over age 2. Soon, she says, “I’ll be getting back on my A-game.”
For Joyce Chen, a hospital occupational therapist in San Francisco, it’s a question of what kind of career she wants to have. Chen, 41 and also a single mother, is happy to have work that she not only enjoys, but that she can balance easily with caring for her 10-year-old daughter. “I’ve been blessed,” she says. “I have a decent income. I don’t feel like I need to climb the ladder. I enjoy what I do, but I can leave it at the end of the day and not think about it.”
Chen also credits a strong community of friends from church for helping make her family work. “That community has helped me raise my daughter,” she says. She hopes to get married one day if the right situation comes along.
But Chen feels that a single mom can do just as good a job of raising a child as two parents can. Overall, the poll found decidedly mixed results on that question: Thirty percent of respondents said yes, 27 percent said no, and 43 percent said “it depends.”
At 26, Jacqueline Encinias is at a much less established point in her career. A married mother of a month-old baby in Albuquerque, N.M., she aims to go back to school to study accounting. For now, though, she says she’s “just looking for something to get me by.” Encinias says that she would probably not have made the choice to be a mother alone.
“I wouldn’t want my child to grow up with just one parent,” she says. “If other people want to do it, it’s OK, but it’s not for me.” Support of a partner is crucial to her, she says. (Finding the right person to parent with was a key factor in the decision to have a child, the poll found, cited by both current parents and non-parents.)
Shermeka Austin, a 23-year-old student in Warren, Mich., feels the same way. “That would not be a choice for me, being a single parent,” Austin says. She hopes to get married and have children one day, but first, she says, she wants to focus on her goal of opening her own bakery. Once she achieves that, she’d be happy to make sacrifices in order to have kids. In the poll, about three-quarters (76 percent) of women without children said that it was important for them to reach certain career goals before they start a family.
While 42 percent of unmarried women said they would consider single parenthood, compared with 24 percent of men, answers varied greatly as to the ways they’d consider going about it. Thirty-seven percent of women said they’d consider adopting solo (compared to 19 percent of men), about a third of women — 31 percent — said they’d consider freezing their eggs, and 27 percent would be willing to use artificial insemination and donor sperm.
Stacey Ehlinder, a 28-year-old event planner in Denver, says she would consider some of those options at some point if necessary — though she’s currently in a relationship headed towards marriage. She says she’s surprised by the high percentage of poll respondents who had doubts about single mothers. “It just seems like these days there are so many more definitions of a family,” she says.
Ehlinder is confident that if she does have children, she’ll be able to balance career and motherhood. “In my industry, and in companies I’ve worked for, I’ve seen flexibility given to mothers,” she says. “It makes me feel confident that I could juggle things and be the mother I want to be.”
Many respondents, in interviews, said that while the optimal situation for raising kids is two parents, there’s no prescription for the perfect family.
Matthew Dean, a father of three in San Antonio, Texas, said he was glad that his wife, a former teacher, is able to stay home with their kids, an arrangement that was originally supposed to be temporary. “It was first, let’s do it through kindergarten, then it was, let’s do it through second grade…” he quips. Ultimately they decided it was best for the children. “I look around and realize how everything would have been so chaotic and rushed, otherwise,” Dean says.
Still, he says, he understands that many different arrangements work, including single-parent families. “It’s maybe not preferred, but it is what it is,” says Dean, 46. “It’s an added challenge, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. There’s no guarantee in any situation. People can have a two-parent situation that is a complete wreck.”
The poll was conducted in conjunction with WE tv ahead of the launch of the show “Pregnant and Dating,” which looks at the dating lives of women on the verge of becoming single mothers. It was conducted May 15-23, 2013 using KnowledgePanel, GfK’s probability-based online panel. It involved online interviews with 1,277 people age 18-49, including interviews with 298 women who have children or are currently pregnant with their first child and have never been married. The survey has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.8 percentage points for all respondents.
KnowledgePanel is constructed using traditional telephone and mail sampling methods to randomly recruit respondents. People selected who had no Internet access were given it for free.
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AP News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius contributed to this report.
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Online:
A deeper look at the key findings in the Associated Press-WE tv poll
An Associated Press-WE tv poll took a deep look at how Americans under age 50 feel about having children, single parents and changing family structures.
THE CHANGING AMERICAN FAMILY
-In the poll, 31 percent of all parents reported being unmarried when they had their first child. About half (47 percent) of currently unmarried women in this age group are mothers.
-Nearly half (45 percent) say the growing variety of family arrangements in the U.S. doesn’t really have much impact on society, with the remainder divided on whether they make a positive impact (28 percent) or a negative one (26 percent). Women tilt toward calling new arrangements positive (31 percent say so compared with 23 percent who say it’s a bad thing) and men are split nearly evenly (29 percent say they’re bad, 25 percent good).
-On the other hand, 64 percent call single women having children a bad thing for society — a figure that has held steady in Pew Research Center polls on the topic back to 1997. Even mothers who had their first child while unmarried express concern that increasing numbers of solo moms are bad for society — 49 percent say so compared with 11 percent who say it’s a good thing and 40 percent who say it doesn’t make much difference. About half of single mothers (51 percent) say a single mother can do as good a job as two parents.
PARENTS REFLECT ON THEIR DECISIONS, IMPACT OF CHILDREN
-Three-quarters who already have children say they always knew they wanted them, and fathers (81 percent) were a bit more likely to say they always wanted kids than mothers (72 percent).
-Parents say their children had a positive impact on their love life (45 percent positive vs. 19 percent negative) and social life (37 percent positive to 22 percent negative), but more say having children hurt rather than helped their financial well-being (35 percent negative, 25 percent positive).
-Among working parents, working mothers are almost three times as likely as fathers to say their careers took a hit when they became parents (31 percent of working moms say so compared with 11 percent of working dads).
-College educated women (44 percent) and women who became mothers at age 30 or above (47 percent) were most apt to report a negative impact on their career from having children. But those same women who became mothers at age 30 or above were more apt than other mothers to say having children increased their overall happiness, sense of accomplishment and sense of purpose.
-More than 8 in 10 parents said that their decision to have a child rested heavily on having found the right person to have a child with, the joy in having children and having the financial resources to raise a child. Less than half said it was important that they reach certain career goals before having a family, and only 17 percent said pressure from parents or other family members was key. Forty percent of parents said an important factor was that “it just happened.”
MOST WITHOUT CHILDREN WANT THEM EVENTUALLY
-Among those under age 50 without children, 53 percent say they want them eventually, 30 percent say it depends, 16 percent say no. Of those who do, 94 percent say an important factor is finding the right partner. Yet 42 percent of unmarried women and 24 percent of unmarried men who want children say they would consider ways to have or adopt a child on their own.
-Non-parents are more likely than those who’ve already had children to say it’s important to consider whether they have the financial resources to raise a child (94 percent call that important) and to reach certain career goals before starting a family (72 percent say it’s important to do so).
-If those parents-to-be go it alone, they won’t necessarily stay that way. Broadly speaking, kids aren’t a turnoff in the dating world. About 7 in 10 would start a relationship with someone who already had children, though that drops to 56 percent if the child is an infant.
-Among men, about a quarter say they would consider a relationship with a woman who’s pregnant.
The AP-WE tv Poll, conducted May 15-23, 2013 using GfK’s probability-based online panel KnowledgePanel, involved online interviews with 1,277 people age 18-49. The survey has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.8 percentage points for all respondents.
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Methodology and question wording available online: http://surveys.ap.org
How the Associated Press-WE tv poll on the changing American family was conducted
The Associated Press-WE tv poll on the changing American family and having children was conducted May 15-23 and is based on interviews of 1,277 adults 18-49, including 298 women ages 18-49 who have never married and have children or are pregnant.
The national survey was conducted online by GfK of Palo Alto, Calif., under the direction and supervision of the AP’s polling unit.
The original sample was drawn from a panel of respondents GfK recruited via phone or mail survey methods. The company provides Web access to panel recruits who don’t already have it. With a probability basis and coverage of people who otherwise couldn’t access the Internet, GfK’s online surveys using KnowledgePanel are nationally representative.
Results were weighted, or adjusted, to reflect the adult population by demographic factors such as age, sex, region, race, and education.
No more than one time in 20 should chance variations in the sample cause the results to vary by more than plus or minus 3.8 percentage points from the answers that would be obtained if all adults 18-49 in the U.S. were polled. The margin of sampling error for women ages 18-49 who have never married and have children or are pregnant is plus or minus 8.9 percentage points.
There are other sources of potential error in polls, including the wording and order of questions.
The questions and results are available at http://surveys.ap.org .
11
By ALLEN G. BREED, Associated Press
On the very day John F. Kennedy died, a cottage industry was born. Fifty years and hundreds of millions of dollars later, it’s still thriving.
Its product? The “truth” about the president’s assassination.
”By the evening of November 22, 1963, I found myself being drawn into the case,” Los Angeles businessman Ray Marcus wrote in “Addendum B,” one of several self-published monographs he produced on the assassination. For him, authorities were just too quick and too pat with their conclusion.
”The government was saying there was only one assassin; that there was no conspiracy. It was obvious that even if this subsequently turned out to be true, it could not have been known to be true at that time.”
Most skeptics, including Marcus, didn’t get rich by publishing their doubts and theories — and some have even bankrupted themselves chasing theirs. But for a select few, there’s been good money in keeping the controversy alive.
Best-selling books and blockbuster movies have raked in massive profits since 1963. And now, with the 50th anniversary of that horrible day in Dallas looming, a new generation is set to cash in.
Of course, the Warren Commission officially concluded in 1964 that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone — and issued 26 volumes of documents to support that determination. But rather than closing the book on JFK’s death, the report merely served as fuel for an already kindled fire of doubt and suspicion.
Since then, even government investigators have stepped away from the lone assassin theory. In 1978, the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations ended its own lengthy inquiry by finding that JFK “was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.”
That panel acknowledged it was “unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy.” But armed with mountains of subsequently released documents, there has been no shortage of people willing to offer their own conclusions.
Among the leading suspects: Cuban exiles angry about the Bay of Pigs fiasco; Mafiosi enraged by Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s attacks on organized crime; the “military-industrial complex,” worried about JFK’s review of war policy in Vietnam.
One theorist even floated the notion that Kennedy’s limousine driver shot the president — as part of an effort to cover up proof of an alien invasion.
Anything but that Oswald, a hapless former Marine, was in the right place at the right time, with motive and opportunity to pull off one of the most audacious crimes in American history.
”As they say, nature abhors a vacuum, and the mind abhors chance,” says Michael Shermer, executive director of the Skeptics Society and author of “The Believing Brain,” a book on how humans seem hardwired to find patterns in disparate facts and unconnected, often innocent coincidences.
Polls underscore the point.
About 6 in 10 Americans say they believe multiple people were involved in a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy, while only one-fourth think Oswald acted alone, according to an AP-GfK survey done in mid-April. Belief in a conspiracy, though strong, has declined since a 2003 Gallup poll found 75 percent said they thought Oswald was part of a wider plot.
The case has riveted the public from the start. When the Warren Commission report was released in book form, it debuted at No. 7 on The New York Times Best Sellers List.
Two years later, attorney Mark Lane’s “Rush to Judgment” dominated the list. The Warren Commission, he argued, “frequently chose to rely on evidence that was no stronger and sometimes demonstrably weaker than contrary evidence which it rejected.”
The book has since sold millions of copies in hardcover and paperback, says Lane.
Since then, dozens of books with titles like “Best Evidence,” ”Reasonable Doubt,” ”High Treason” and “Coup D’Etat in America: The CIA and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy” have sought to lay responsibility for JFK’s death at the highest levels of the U.S. government — and beyond.
British journalist Anthony Summers, whose BBC documentary became the 1980 book “Conspiracy,” says many conspiracy buffs “are fine scholars and students, and some are mad as hatters who think it was done by men from Mars using catapults.”
Unlike the later coverage of Watergate, there were no reporters like The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who were told by their editors, “Get on this and don’t get off it,” says Summers, whose works focused on people and events largely ignored or treated cursorily by the official investigations. “Nobody went down there and really did the shoe leather work and the phone calls that we’re all supposed to do,” he says.
For many, the Kennedy assassination has become “a board game: ‘Who killed JFK?’ So you feel free to sit around and say, ‘Oh! It’s the mob. Oh! It’s the KGB’ … and have no shame,” scoffs Gerald Posner, whose 1993 book “Case Closed” declared that the Warren Commission essentially got it right.
The Oswald-as-patsy community has vilified Posner.
But the lawyer says he didn’t set out to write a defense of the Warren Commission. Instead, he planned to go back through the critical evidence to see what more could be determined through hindsight and more modern investigative techniques — “and then put out a book that says, ‘Read THIS book. Here are the four unresolved issues of the Kennedy assassination, with the evidence on both sides.’”
Halfway through the allotted research time, Posner went to the editorial staff with a new idea: A book that says flat-out who killed Kennedy.
”Who?” one of the editors asked, as Posner retells it.
“Oswald,” he answered.
”And who?”
”Oswald,” Posner says he repeated. “And they literally looked at me as though I had just come in from Mars. And you could tell there was this feeling of, ‘Oh my God. He’s read the Warren Commission and that’s all he’s done.’”
”Case Closed” went on to sell 100,000 copies in hardcover. “I would have never thunk it,” Posner says.
Unlike Posner, Vincent Bugliosi, author of 2007′s “Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” embarked on his book expecting to vindicate the Warren Commission.
What he didn’t expect was for it to balloon into a 1,650-page behemoth — with a CD-ROM containing an additional 960 pages of endnotes — that cost $57.
”STOP writing,” he recalls his wife telling him. “You’re killing the sales of the book.”
The 78-year-old lawyer blames the conspiracy theorists. “We’re talking about people,” he explains, “who’ve invested the last 15, 20, 25 years of their life in this. They’ve lost jobs. They’ve gotten divorces. Nothing stops them.”
”Like a pea brain,” he says, he responded to all of their allegations. “It’s a bottomless pit. It never, ever ends. And if my publisher … didn’t finally step in and say, ‘Vince, we’re going to print,’ I’d still be writing the book.”
Despite its girth and hefty price tag, “Reclaiming History” had a respectable first printing of 40,000, says Bugliosi, best known as the former deputy Los Angeles district attorney who prosecuted Charles Manson.
But in a 9,400-word review, Gary L. Aguilar, a director of the Washington-based Assassination Archives and Research Center, wrote that the only thing Bugliosi’s book proved was “that it may not be possible for one person to fully master, or give a fair accounting of, this impossibly tangled mess of a case.”
Bugliosi omitted or distorted evidence and failed to disprove “the case for conspiracy,” Aguilar wrote.
Lamar Waldron is not surprised at the success of people like Bugliosi and Posner.
”The biggest money has been generated for the authors … who kind of pretend it all was right back in 1964 and nothing really has happened since,” says Waldron, who has co-written two books on the assassination. “The large six-figure advances and everything like that don’t go to the people who dig through all those millions of pages of files and research for years.”
In “Ultimate Sacrifice” and “Legacy of Secrecy,” Waldron and co-author Thom Hartmann used declassified CIA documents to make the case that JFK (and later his brother Robert) were killed because of plans to overthrow Cuban dictator Fidel Castro — and the Mafia’s infiltration of that operation. Waldron says the books have sold a combined 85,000 copies since 2005.
And now, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro are set to star in a feature film version of “Legacy of Secrecy” — with a reported price tag of up to $90 million.
That’s one of a pair of major movies — landing on opposite sides of the Oswald-as-lone-gunman debate — due out this year.
Oscar winners Marcia Gay Harden and Billy Bob Thornton have signed on for the Tom Hanks-produced “Parkland,” named for the Dallas hospital where Kennedy was pronounced dead. That project, which Hanks’ website describes as “part thriller, part real-time drama,” is based on a small portion of Bugliosi’s magnum opus.
A TV movie is to be made from another new book, “Killing Kennedy,” co-written by Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, which had sold 1 million copies within four months of its release in October. In a note to readers, O’Reilly wrote: “In our narrative, Martin Dugard and I go only as far as the evidence takes us. We are not conspiracy guys, although we do raise some questions about what is unknown and inconsistent.”
Academy Award winner Errol Morris is working on a documentary about the assassination. He did not respond to an interview request.
One film, critics say, has done more than anything to shape the public’s perception of the assassination: That’s Oliver Stone’s 1991 drama, “JFK.”
”He made this kind of paranoid conspiracy theory respectable,” says New York writer Arthur Goldwag, author of “Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies.”
The movie tells the story of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, played by Kevin Costner. Garrison remains the only prosecutor to bring someone to trial for an alleged conspiracy to kill Kennedy.
The film is “a remarkable litany of falsehoods and misrepresentations and exaggerations and omissions,” Posner says. “The reason that I’m so hard on Stone is because he’s such a good filmmaker. If he was a schlocky filmmaker, it wouldn’t matter.”
Shermer, of the Skeptics Society, agrees that Stone’s role in stirring the conspiracy pot is “huge.”
”You tell somebody a good story, that’s more powerful than tons of data, charts and graphs and statistics,” he says. “And Oliver Stone’s a good storyteller. He’s biased and he’s very deceptive, and I don’t trust him at all. But the movie’s great.”
Stone’s publicist said the director had “chosen to pass on this opportunity” to comment.
”JFK” took in more than $205 million at the box office, nearly two-thirds of that overseas, and has since raked in untold millions more in television royalties, pay-per-view, and videocassette and DVD rentals.
In the recent AP-GfK poll, respondents were asked how much of what they knew about the JFK case came from various sources. Only 9 percent cited movies or fictional TV shows, while the greatest portion, 37 percent, said history texts and nonfiction books.
About two dozen JFK-related titles are due on bookstore shelves in coming months, says Patricia Bostelman, vice president of marketing for Barnes & Noble booksellers. Among them is “They Killed Our President: The Conspiracy to Kill JFK and the Cover-Up That Followed,” by former pro wrestler and Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura.
Other authors are taking advantage of the anniversary to reissue or expand on previous works.
Waldron is working on a book focusing on mob figures who confessed to being part of a conspiracy to kill the president. Summers is publishing a sequel to “Conspiracy,” incorporating material released since 1980, while Bugliosi has a “Parkland” paperback to accompany the movie release.
And “Case Closed” will soon appear for the first time as an e-book. Despite the mountains of documents released since its publication, and a mountain of criticism of his conclusions, Posner says there is no plan to update it, other than perhaps including a new foreword.
”I moved on to other subjects,” he says.
On Nov. 22, 1963, John Kelin was a 7-year-old second-grader in Peoria, Ill. He says the Kennedy assassination is “my earliest clear memory in life.”
But he didn’t really give the case much thought until 13 years later, when as a sophomore at Eastern Michigan University he attended a lecture by Mark Lane. It was the first time he saw the Abraham Zapruder film that captured the moment when Kennedy was fatally wounded.
”Using slow motion and freeze frame, Lane made sure that all of us sitting in that hot, poorly ventilated auditorium understood that Kennedy’s head and shoulders were slammed backward and to the left, and that Lee Harvey Oswald’s alleged shooting position was behind the presidential limousine,” Kelin wrote in a book, “Praise from a Future Generation,” about early critics of the Warren Report. “In a way, that lecture was the genesis of this book.”
Kelin bristles at references to a conspiracy theory “industry,” preferring to think of himself as part of a grass roots response to the government’s “severely flawed, unsatisfactory explanations for what really happened in 1963.”
His publisher, Wings Press, has “made intimations” about releasing a digital edition of “Praise” for the 50th anniversary. Meanwhile, Kelin has written another JFK book — a fictional account of how he came to write the first one.
”It’s kind of a satire of the present-day research community,” he says, “with a love story thrown in to try to broaden the interest level.”
The title: “Conspiracy Nut.”
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AP writer David Porter in Newark, N.J., also contributed to this report.
Breed is a national writer, based in Raleigh, N.C. He can be reached at features(at)ap.org. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/AllenGBreed
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Note: The Associated Press-GfK Poll was conducted April 11-15, 2013 by GfK Roper Public Affairs and Corporate Communications. It involved landline and cell phone interviews with 1,004 adults nationwide. Results for the full sample have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.9 percentage points, it is larger for subgroups.
Online: http://www.ap-gfkpoll.com
11
By The Associated Press
A clear majority of Americans still suspect there was a conspiracy behind President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, but the percentage who believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone is at its highest level since the mid-1960s, according to a new Associated Press-GfK poll.
Cheryl Casati, 62, who retired from the Air Force after 20 years, watched it all unfold on television back in November 1963. She said she’s “extremely sure” there was a conspiracy. The killing of Oswald, the accused shooter, just days after the assassination is part of the reason why.
”There’s too many holes in explanations,” the Phoenix-area woman said. “That just could not have happened easily in that time and place. And (Jack) Ruby shooting (Oswald) could not have happened as easily as it did.”
Pat Sicinski sees it differently. She and her husband recently visited the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas. Looking out the sixth-floor window from which Oswald allegedly fired on Kennedy’s motorcade helped reaffirm the retired school employee’s faith in the Warren Commission conclusion that Oswald was the lone gunman.
”Some skepticism is always justified,” the 68-year-old Houston-area woman said. “I just think when people take it to extremes, they lose me.”
According to the AP-GfK survey, conducted in mid-April, 59 percent of Americans think multiple people were involved in a conspiracy to kill the president, while 24 percent think Oswald acted alone, and 16 percent are unsure. A 2003 Gallup poll found that 75 percent of Americans felt there was a conspiracy.
The Oswald-acted-alone results, meanwhile, are the highest since the period three years after the assassination, when 36 percent said one man was responsible for Kennedy’s death.
Robert Mawyer of Blairsville, Ga., is one of them. The 44-year-old IT salesman recently finished reading Bill O’Reilly’s “Killing Kennedy.” Assuming all of that information is correct, he has no problem accepting that Oswald went solo.
”The Warren Commission says that’s what happened, so I tend to believe that, I guess,” he said. But, he added, “I don’t suppose anybody can be completely positive.”
Jon Genova is positive that no one person could have pulled off this crime.
”There are just a number of factors that don’t seem to zero out in my mind,” the 46-year-old Denver mechanical engineer said. “How some evidence seemed to be suppressed, and the results are sealed for how many years? And the fact that … it just seemed like the whole political winds change at the point when Kennedy was assassinated. It just seemed as if he was probably an impediment.”
Those who were adults in 1963 were almost as likely as younger Americans to say that Kennedy’s killing was a conspiracy involving multiple people _ 55 percent, compared to 61 percent.
As for who might have been behind a conspiracy, Genova’s money is on the Central Intelligence Agency. Casati, who wouldn’t divulge her rank or military occupation, was a little more circumspect.
”I will tell you that Jack Kennedy was too much of his own person,” she said. “And he made decisions that were not popular with some agencies, as far as I’m concerned.”
The Associated Press-GfK Poll was conducted April 11-15, 2013 by GfK Roper Public Affairs and Corporate Communications. It involved landline and cellphone interviews with 1,004 adults nationwide. Results for the full sample have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.9 percentage points; it is larger for subgroups.
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AP Director of Polling Jennifer Agiesta and News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius contributed to this report.
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Online:
How the AP-GfK poll on the assassination of John F. Kennedy was conducted
The Associated Press-GfK poll on the assassination of John F. Kennedy was conducted by GfK Roper Public Affairs & Corporate Communications on April 11-15. It is based on landline telephone and cellphone interviews with a nationally representative random sample of 1,004 adults. Interviews were conducted with 601 respondents on landline telephones and 403 on cellular telephones.
Digits in the phone numbers dialed were generated randomly to reach households with unlisted and listed landline and cellphone numbers.
Interviews were conducted in both English and Spanish.
As is done routinely in surveys, results were weighted, or adjusted, to ensure that responses accurately reflect the population’s makeup by factors such as age, sex, education and race. In addition, the weighting took into account patterns of phone use — landline only, cell only and both types — by region.
No more than 1 time in 20 should chance variations in the sample cause the results to vary by more than plus or minus 3.9 percentage points from the answers that would be obtained if all adults in the U.S. were polled.
There are other sources of potential error in polls, including the wording and order of questions.
Topline results are available at http://www.ap-gfkpoll.com and http://surveys.ap.org.
The questions and results are available at http://www.ap-gfkpoll.com.
02
By BEN NUCKOLS, Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — It’s been a rough offseason for the Washington Redskins, and not just because of the knee injury to star quarterback Robert Griffin III.
The team’s nickname, which some consider a derogatory term for Native Americans, has faced a barrage of criticism. Local leaders and pundits have called for a name change. Opponents have launched a legal challenge intended to deny the team federal trademark protection. A bill introduced in Congress in March would do the same, though it appears unlikely to pass.
But a new Associated Press-GfK poll shows that nationally, “Redskins” still enjoys widespread support. Nearly four in five Americans don’t think the team should change its name, the survey found. Only 11 percent think it should be changed, while 8 percent weren’t sure and 2 percent didn’t answer.
Although 79 percent favor keeping the name, that does represent a 10 percentage point drop from the last national poll on the subject, conducted in 1992 by The Washington Post and ABC News just before the team won its most recent Super Bowl. Then, 89 percent said the name should not be changed, and 7 percent said it should.
The AP-GfK poll was conducted from April 11-15 and included interviews with 1,004 adults on both land lines and cell phones. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.
Several poll respondents told The AP that they did not consider the name offensive and cited tradition in arguing that it shouldn’t change.
“That’s who they’ve been forever. That’s who they’re known as,” said Sarah Lee, a 36-year-old stay-at-home mom from Osceola, Ind. “I think we as a people make race out to be a bigger issue than it is.”
But those who think the name should be changed say the word is obviously derogatory.
“With everything that Native Americans have gone through in this country, to have a sports team named the Redskins — come on, now. It’s bad,” said Pamela Rogal, 56, a writer from Boston. “Much farther down the road, we’re going to look back on this and say, ‘Are you serious? Did they really call them the Washington Redskins?’ It’s a no-brainer.”
Among football fans, 11 percent said the name should be changed — the same as among non-fans. Among nonwhite football fans, 18 percent said it should change, about double the percentage of white football fans who oppose the name.
In Washington, debate over the name has increased in recent months. In February, the National Museum of the American Indian held a daylong symposium on the use of Indian mascots by sports teams. Museum Director Kevin Gover, of the Pawnee Nation, said the word “redskin” was “the equivalent of the n-word.”
District of Columbia Mayor Vincent Gray, a Democrat, suggested that the team would have to consider changing the name if it wanted to play its home games in the city again. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Democrat who represents the district in Congress, said she’s a fan of the team but avoids saying “Redskins.” Just this week, a D.C. councilmember introduced a resolution calling for a name change, and it appears to have enough support to pass, although the council has no power over the team.
“We need to get rid of it,” said longtime local news anchor Jim Vance in a commentary that aired in February. Vance, of WRC-TV, revealed that he has avoided using the name on the air for the past few years.
Other media outlets have done the same. The Washington City Paper substitutes the name “Pigskins,” and DCist.com announced in February that it would avoid using the name in print. The Kansas City Star also has a policy against printing “Redskins.”
In March, a three-judge panel heard arguments from a group of five Native American petitioners that the team shouldn’t have federal trademark protection, which could force owner Daniel Snyder into a change by weakening him financially. A decision isn’t expected for up to a year, and the Redskins are sure to appeal if it doesn’t go their way. A similar case, ultimately won by the team, was filed in 1992 and needed 17 years to go through the legal system before the Supreme Court declined to intervene.
Several poll respondents told AP that they were unaware of the ongoing debate.
“If we’re going to say that ‘Redskins’ is an offensive term, like the n-word or something like that, I haven’t heard that,” said David Black, 38, a football fan from Edmond, Okla., who doesn’t think a change is necessary.
George Strange, 52, of Jacksonville, Fla., who feels the name should change, said people might change their minds if they become more educated about the word and its history.
“My opinion, as I’ve gotten older, has changed. When I was younger, it was not a big deal. I can’t get past the fact that it’s a racial slur,” Strange said. “I do have friends that are Redskins fans and … they can’t step aside and just look at it from a different perspective.”
There’s precedent for a Washington team changing its name because of cultural sensitivities. The late Washington Bullets owner Abe Pollin decided the nickname was inappropriate because of its association with urban violence, and in 1997, the NBA team was rechristened the Wizards.
Other professional sports teams have Native American nicknames, including the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs and baseball’s Atlanta Braves and Cleveland Indians. But former U.S. Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado, who is Native American, said “Redskins” is much worse because of its origins and its use in connection with bounties on Indians.
“There’s a derogatory name for every ethnic group in America, and we shouldn’t be using those words,” Campbell said, adding that many people don’t realize how offensive the word is. “We probably haven’t gotten our message out as well as it should be gotten out.”
Numerous colleges and universities have changed names that reference Native Americans. St. John’s changed its mascot from the Redmen to the Red Storm, Marquette is now the Golden Eagles instead of the Warriors and Stanford switched from the Indians to the Cardinal.
Synder, however, has been adamant that the name should not change, and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has said he supports the team’s stance. General Manager Bruce Allen said in March that the team isn’t considering a new name.
Following the symposium at the museum, the team posted a series of articles on its official website that spotlighted some of the 70 U.S. high schools that use the nickname Redskins.
“There is nothing that we feel is offensive,” Allen said. “And we’re proud of our history.”
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AP Sports Writer Joseph White, AP Director of Polling Jennifer Agiesta and News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius contributed to this report.
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Follow Ben Nuckols on Twitter at https://twitter.com/APBenNuckols.
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Online:
The questions and answers from the poll: http://www.ap-gfkpoll.com
How the AP-GfK poll on the Washington Redskins was conducted
The Associated Press-GfK poll on the Washington Redskins was conducted by GfK Roper Public Affairs & Corporate Communications from April 11-15. It is based on landline telephone and cellphone interviews with a nationally representative random sample of 1,004 adults. Interviews were conducted with 601 respondents on landline telephones and 403 on cellular telephones.
Digits in the phone numbers dialed were generated randomly to reach households with unlisted and listed landline and cellphone numbers.
Interviews were conducted in both English and Spanish.
As is done routinely in surveys, results were weighted, or adjusted, to ensure that responses accurately reflect the population’s makeup by factors such as age, sex, education and race. In addition, the weighting took into account patterns of phone use — landline only, cellphone only and both types — by region.
No more than 1 time in 20 should chance variations in the sample cause the results to vary by more than plus or minus 3.9 percentage points from the answers that would be obtained if all adults in the U.S. were polled.
There are other sources of potential error in polls, including the wording and order of questions.
The questions and results are available at http://www.ap-gfkpoll.com.
Topline results http://www.ap-gfkpoll.com and http://surveys.ap.org
