Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Kennedy: the only American presidents to be assassinated. Ken Del Vecchio's 2020 documentary 4 Presidents asks whether something beyond coincidence links the four deaths, and it answers with a theory about who controls the issuing of money.
What is 4 Presidents about?
The film is organised around one argument. According to 4 Presidents, the four murdered leaders share a policy decision: each, it says, moved the power to issue currency away from private banks and placed it with the U.S. Treasury. The documentary then lays out a timeline it considers too neat to ignore. In its account, every one of the four was killed less than a year after taking that step, and each vice president who inherited the office handed the power back to the banks within months. From there the film treats the assassinations as chapters of a single story instead of separate events spread across a century, and it describes its own work as the first in-depth analysis of that possible conspiracy. These are the claims the documentary sets out to make; this page reports them as the film's thesis and nothing more.
About the cast
Ken Del Vecchio directs and is also listed among the on-screen participants, alongside Oriana D'Agostino, Buddy Fitzpatrick and Andrew Gause. As is usual for an argument-led documentary, the people on camera are there to present and discuss the case, not to play characters.
Context & significance
4 Presidents is a United States production from 2020, catalogued as both Documentary and Historical, and it runs about 100 minutes. It belongs to a familiar branch of non-fiction filmmaking: the conspiracy-theory documentary, which gathers historical episodes and reads them through one unifying explanation. Films of this kind are built as a case for a position, so the natural way to watch is with the claim in view as a claim, weighing the dates and decisions the film cites against what a viewer already knows of the period. The subject matter covers more than a century of American political history, from the era of Lincoln to that of Kennedy, and the questions it raises about banking, the Treasury and presidential power are ones that long predate this film.
Watching 4 Presidents on Ktime
4 Presidents can be streamed on K-Time by signing in to a K-Time account; reading this page does not require one. K-Time is a Persian-focused service for viewers in the diaspora, and its menus, search and title pages are available in Farsi on TV, phone and web.