NADSP John F Kennedy Jr. Awards

“It does not take a majority to prevail… but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.” —Samuel Adams 

“People said I should accept the world. Bullshit! I don't accept the world.” ―Political activist Richard M. Stallman

Gerald Celente (The Trends Research Institute, November 2019): By the time I met Governor John Connally, I had lost my naiveté and harbored deep doubts about government. And my disdain for most politicians was growing. It was not just what Connally said that moved me, but the authority and gravity of the way he said it. He was my epiphany. We all went up to his suite and had a couple of drinks, a few snacks and some small talk. Hooker was trying to sign Connally onto the Board of Directors for a chain of steak houses he wanted to develop. Caddell, a Washington pollster, and Connally traded tales of political days gone by. I half listened and said nothing. My brain was back in the hotel lobby replaying Connally’s statement: “If the American people knew what was going on in this government, there’d be a revolution.” That line reinforced my political atheism. —The JFK files: What Governor Connally told Gerald Celente (2019)

John F. Kennedy Jr rode his bike through the streets of Manhattan, played softball and Frisbee in Central Park, and sometimes made grand entrances at black-tie galas. But John F. Kennedy Jr. also worked hard--quietly but very intensively, his associates say--with several charity groups that have donated millions of dollars and helped thousands of people in the city to make their own. In 1988, Kennedy Jr. formed Reaching Up, an organization to improve care for the mentally handicapped. Three years later, he joined the board of the Robin Hood Foundation, a group that gives more than $1 million a month to programs to help the city's impoverished people, especially children. "This was no resume-builder for him," Peter Kiernan, Robin Hood's chairman, said: "This was not a subtle, slight involvement. He was completely engaged. He was a full partner. Quite often, he kept us focused on our mission when we started to drift away." For some of the group's causes, including a school in Harlem for the disfavored classes, Kennedy was the one who initiated the contact and encouraged the board to act. "He came to every board meeting, went to look at every place we invested in," Kiernan said. "When we went to a school, he'd talk with the strategic-planning people, and John was very good, very adept at that. But he'd also plunge right in there with the schoolchildren, visiting them frequently `Hey, kids, what's going on.' He'd get into conversations with them and play with them, sometimes bringing them all to ice skating at Rockefeller Center. So we certainly lost a great man here." Reaching Up grew out of the Kennedy family's longstanding charity work with the mentally disabled, which began as a tribute to his father's sister, Rosemary, who had been institutionalized for many years. "John spent about a year investigating how to get involved in this," said Bill Ebenstein, the executive director of Reaching Up. "And he realized the best way to support people with disabilities was to support the workers who provided services for them, by creating a program for them in higher education and helping them pay for it." Barbara Anselm, now the director of an adult day care program for United Cerebral Palsy in Brooklyn, was a caseworker and advocate for the handicapped and mentally ill in 1991, when Kennedy awarded her a funds grant, one of the first. "It helped me pay the tuition so I could go to classes at night," Anselm recalled. "I met John Kennedy. He told me he had selected my application himself. It was nice to know -- it encouraged me to know -- that people of that stature were supporting me." Before Reaching Up, Ebenstein said, people like Anselm had few professional prospects. "These were people with low-wage jobs, poverty jobs really," he said. "There was no career ladder." 

Politicians were talking then about `quality health care,' but John realized you could never build a quality system of services unless you had quality jobs for the front-line workers." So, John Kennedy Jr. funded -- and persuaded professionals in a variety of fields to develop -- a series of courses on disabilities at the City University of New York, especially its East Side Manhattan branch at Hunter College. "He'd bring public and private entities together to work out how to do this: city and state agencies, the public universities, the hospital workers' unions," Ebenstein said. "He could hold a coalition like this together. He led these meetings, visited all the places, knew all the executive directors." Ebenstein was unsure whether the organization can continue without Kennedy. "Keeping these entities together -- you've got all this infighting and politics -- you need someone who can transcend that," he said. "I'm hoping we can keep doing it, but I don't know." Kennedy played down his involvement in these areas. David Saltzman, who is executive director of the Robin Hood Foundation and went to Brown University with Kennedy in the 1980s, declined to talk specifically about his role in the organization. "He was a friend of mine," Saltzman said. "He asked me to respect his privacy, and I'm going to continue doing that." Ebenstein made the same point: "He did not seek publicity. We'd win an award, and I'd say, `Can't we put out a news release?' He'd say, `No, stop that.' He feared people would just focus on him and miss the substance of what he was doing." Source: nadsp.org/jfkjr-award-2020/

In the past when someone had upset her, Caroline Kennedy simply cut them off of her life. The handwritten thank-you cards for which she was famous stopped, her phone was suddenly blocked, and she rarely forgave anyone who had crossed her. She fell out with her sister-in-law Carolyn Bessette during a party at her Park Avenue apartment when she discovered Carolyn had posed outside for the photographers while holding three-year-old Jack. And she was furious when her brother John sided with his wife. Although gossip was Caroline was not very fond of Carolyn Bessette, it was not comparable with the contempt John felt towards his brother-in-law Edwin Schlossberg. John's good friend Sasha Chermayeff recalled: "John thought Caroline's husband was a jerk. He mocked him and called him 'Edwina.' One day I heard fuming about him: 'I hate that jerk. I don't know what my sister saw in him.´" Their relationship became so strained that at one stage, when they were auctioning off their late mother Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s effects, John and Caroline only communicated through their lawyers. Chermayeff remarks: "When her brother wanted to run for the Senate, Caroline needled John saying his wife Carolyn's erratic behaviour would destroy any chances he had. Caroline even told him: "They'll shoot you, just like they shot our father and uncle." One of their most serious blow-ups occurred in the fall of 1998. RoseMarie Terenzio received a phone call from HBO, revealing that Edwin Schlossberg sought to be an executive producer of a documentary about the assassination of the President Kennedy and Schlossberg had suggested John as narrator. 

John exploded, Terenzio recalls, "John could not believe that Ed was so dumb, or Caroline so clueless, as to get involved in such a controversial project. I had not never seen John so mad as that day." What infuriated John most was that Ed was crossing the line by thinking that because he had married a Kennedy, he was one of them. "Who the fuck is that guy to say me how to honor my father's legacy?" he shouted to Caroline on the phone: "You would never be doing this if Mom were alive," he bellowed before slamming the receiver. John stewed for weeks before he decided to tackle the problem head-on by summoning Caroline and Ed into his office. Although Schlossberg sat at the head of the conference table, John refused to even look at his brother-in-law or acknowledge his presence. According to his assistant RoseMarie Terenzio, John looked directly to his sister, admonishing her for entertaining such an idea: "Your husband will not interfere in my relationship with my father's legacy. Is that clear, is that understood?" John’s sudden death at the age of 38 hit Caroline Kennedy hard and left a massive void in her life. 

From then on, Caroline distanced herself from the Kennedy clan – and refused to spend time at the family compound in Hyannis Port, Cape Cod. Since the late 70's, Caroline Kennedy's husband, Edwin Schlossberg had been designing museum and game park exhibits. For a ''learning environment'' at the Brooklyn Children's Museum, he created exhibits as a playground based on the structure of a molecule. For the now-shuttered Macomber Farm, run by the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, he developed games that simulated the gait, vision and social interactions of farm animals. In one, visitors pulled a Conestoga wagon to learn the meaning of horsepower. At the time, Mr. Schlossberg only thought up exhibits to be built by others. ''He had inspiration,'' Mr. Pockell recalled, ''but the execution and mechanics didn't interest him as much.'' Brent Saville, a designer now based in Los Angeles, made the exhibits at the Brooklyn Children's Museum. Mr. Schlossberg's plan was ''sort of wispy,'' he recalled. ''Nobody understood what it meant.'' —The Day John Died (2007) by Christopher Andersen

Teri Norris (Amazon Reviews): According to the unreliable memoir The Other Man, Carolyn Bessette spent Christmas 1994 with Michael Bergin. It's very possible he took that story and fast forwarded it to fit the narrative of CBK being an attached friend after their break-up. In reality she spent Christmas 1996, 1997, and 1998 all with her husband John Kennedy and also with the Radziwills on Vero Beach. None with Bergin. So basically he twisted the truth, yes he spent one Christmas with Carolyn but only during their dating years, notice how he never mentions explicitly any dates/years in his book, he leaves it up to the reader. It's a mish mash of stories with no orderly timeline. Bergin, not the most articulate person (self-confessed, not my criticism), states that Carolyn was even less communicative within the context of their relationship, other than sexually. From the start to finish in this book, Carolyn is hardly ever portrayed (by him) as actually talking to him, in fact, quite the contrary. Time and time again, she refuses to talk to him, even when he tries to share personal experiences. How could he humanize Carolyn if one of the basic elements of human contact, communication, is totally missing? When one considers that the time frame of this book was between 1993-1998, it seems obvious that either Michael Bergin read too much into this relationship or that Carolyn was neurotic beyond belief. Either can be true, but if you've been involved with someone over a period of 5 years (on/off) and you know them not much better than you did when you met, perhaps there's more than a little delusion involved on someone's part. In short, this guy really didn't know Carolyn Bessette... she never let him in her inner thoughts. Her reasons for keeping him emotionally isolated in this relationship are anyone's guess, but since he's writing the book, he should be able to give us the answers. But he can't and that the book's main failing. Bergin constantly refers to himself as "the other man" and yet he continues (obviously) pining for her to this day (his wife and two kids aside). Why, one wonders, as they read this book?! The one feeling you walk away with is that he was simply a friend with benefits to her, to put it kindly... a situation that firmly held until their breakup. Bergin has done nothing more than highlight (and rehash) Carolyn's personal quirks without shedding any light on why she behaved this way. One can easily conclude he didn't simply couldn't because he never got to know the real Carolyn. Bergin doesn't seem to realize that either. What we can see is that Carolyn Bessette was not interested in Michael Bergin, and we can easily understand why she chose someone else to share her life with, especially if that person was John Kennedy Jr. Sadly, this book is a testament to the saying that "silence is golden". Source: www.amazon.com

The history of Joseph Kennedy's bootlegger past was an invention of Samuel Halpern from the CIA, who worked with the Warren Commission in the investigation of JFK's assassination. Gerald Posner is a proven fraud who literally got away with fabricating interviews. He once claimed that he got to interview Dr. Humes and Dr. Boswell, and that they said there was an entry wound on the top of the head, contrary to their previous statements that this wound existed on the base of the head. A real researcher named Dr. Gary Aguilar contacted both of them, Dr. Humes denied telling him he changed his mind about the location of the wound, and Dr. Boswell denied ever talking to Posner. Gerald Posner also claimed to interview James Tague, the passerby man who reported being hit by a small piece of debris. Real researcher Harold Weisberg contacted James Tague, who later became a personal friend of Weisberg, and he denied ever talking to Posner. Fabricating sources is the most serious offense in writing so Case Closed is indefensible. It can be noticed that the hole in Kennedy's back in this demonstration is anatomically was lower than the hole in his throat, indicating that a bullet from the Sixth Floor could not have entered the back and exited the throat. The debate over the anatomical location of Kennedy's back wound falls into three camps: The C7s, the T1s, and the T3s. The C7s and T1s debate over whether the official autopsy photographs show the hole in the skin of the back to be slightly anatomically higher or lower than the throat wound below the Adam's apple. The JFK autopsy photographs are notoriously confusing and open to interpretation, so it can be difficult to differentiate the top of the shoulder from an area just below the shoulder line. The T3 photo probably was altered because the hole in the skin is shown to be higher than the holes in Kennedy's suit jacket and shirt, and the pictures of Kennedy just before the shooting support the notion that such a peculiar fold in Kennedy's clothing at the time of the back shot is highly unlikely or impossible. The T3 photos show the back wound, where a shot unquestionably could not have exited the throat. Source:educationforum.ipbhost.com