"JFK had a capacity for backing off and watching himself perform, and later commenting on what he’d seen and heard with a quick, half-sublimated sense of humor that often made him seem like a pillar of sanity in the thieving, swinish chaos of American politics. He seemed like the only man who knew what was happening, and although there was rarely any way to guess what he might decide to do about it, there was always the chance that he might find an opening to do something right. His killing has put me in a state of shock. The rage is trebled. I was not prepared at this time for the death of hope, but here it is. This is the end of reason, the dirtiest hour in our time. From now until the 1964 elections every man with balls should be on the firing line. No matter what, today is the end of an era. No more fair play. From now on it is dirty pool in the clinches. The savage nuts have shattered the great myth of American decency. Fiction is dead. The stakes are now too high and the time too short. Politics will become a cockfight and reason will go by the boards. There will have to be somebody to carry the flag. My concept of the new novel would have fit this situation, but now I see no hope for getting it done, if indeed, any publishing houses survive the Nazis scramble that is sure to come. How could we have known, or even guessed? I think we have come to that point. We now enter the era of President Johnson and the hardening of the arteries. Neither your children nor mine will ever be able to grasp what Gatsby was after. No more of that. -"Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967" (1997) by Hunter S. Thompson
Richard Nixon suffered a cerebrovascular accident on April 18, 1994, at his home in Park Ridge, New Jersey, and was taken to New York Hospital–Cornell Medical Center. After an initial favorable prognosis, Nixon slipped into a deep coma and died four days later. Jackie Kennedy was admitted twice at the New York Hospital-Cornell during the last months of her life. She was at the Stavros-Niarchos suite. The nurses remembered that Jackie, despite her deteriorated state, had a good laugh when they wheeled her up to the suite and she saw the big Stavros plaque on the door (The Stavros-Niarchos Greek family, the shipping clan who had been the greatest rivals of Aristotle Onassis, had made an important donation to the hospital and the Suite was named in their honor.) Jackie by then was suffering from gastric bleeds. One evening, the nurses wheeled her down to visit Richard Nixon, who had fallen into a coma. She mumbled then some words to Mr. Nixon, which he seemed to appreciate slightly. Jackie was released the next morning and—knowing she had just left a couple of weeks to live—she chose to stay at her apartment by arranging her assisted-death by a physician at home. When the President Kennedy had been killed, Richard Nixon had sent Jackie a telegram, assuring her: "I really admired your husband, Ms Kennedy. Despite the destiny lead us to become political enemies, I always admired him. I send your family my prayers."
At the White House, Richard Nixon had reached out to Jackie Kennedy several times. "Can you imagine the gift you gave me?" Jackie wrote in a thank-you note to Richard and Pat Nixon, dated the day after the family visited the White House (February 3, 1971). Jackie wrote: "To return to the White House privately with my little ones while they are still young enough to rediscover their childhood—with you both as guides—and with your daughters, such extraordinary young women." She added that the president and first lady had spoiled her kids Caroline and John Jr. "beyond belief" with a "superb dinner" that included a "precious bottle of Bordeaux." Source: www.nyp.org
As both sisters, Jackie and Lee Bouvier, came to define the parameters of modern celebrity culture, so they would experience its dark side in the ’70s. Jackie, widowed for a second time after Onassis’ death in 1975, moved back to New York and became a book editor at Doubleday. She was now dating Maurice Tempelsman, a Belgian-born industrialist and diamond merchant, but she remained a subject of endless speculation and gossip fodder; the proto-paparazzi photographer Ron Galella became her unofficial stalker, snatching hundreds of off-duty pictures of her, before she won a restraining order against him. Lee had become embroiled in a libel case that Gore Vidal had brought against Capote, after the latter had accused Vidal of being thrown out of a 1961 White House function after putting his arm around Jackie and insulting her mother, adding that Lee herself was the source of the story. Her response was imperious —“They're just a couple of fags fighting; it’s just the most disgusting thing”—goading Capote to turn attack-dog, accusing Lee of jealousy towards her sister (“The princess kind of had it in mind that she was going to marry Mr. Onassis herself”), and eviscerating her break-up with photographer Peter Beard, and on-again-off-again engagement to San Francisco hotelier Newton Cope (“She said he was a nobody who was riding on her coattails”).
In their latter years, the sisters maintained their lifelong commitment to discretion. Jackie died in 1994, of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma; her son, the ill-fated JFK Jr., announced that “she died surrounded by family and friends and the things she loved. She did it her own way, on her own terms.” Once Capote said of Gore Vidal: “I’m always sad about Gore—very sad that he has to breathe every day.” Vidal retorted: “Truman Capote made lying an art form—a minor art form.” The spat, legal and otherwise, springs from a 1975 Playgirl interview in which Capote charged that Vidal had been bounced from a 1961 White House party because of drunken and obnoxious behavior. Should it ever come to trial, the case could feature cameo court appearances by such eminent eyewitnesses as John Kenneth Galbraith, George Plimpton, Arthur Schlesinger Jr.—and even Jackie Kennedy herself. Guests at the party deny that Vidal was forcibly ejected, though they confirm that he squabbled with Bobby Kennedy. Capote kept attacking Lee Radziwill: "Lee really thought she had Onassis nailed down. Lee pretended to have great contempt for Onassis and the marriage. She wasn't in love with him. But she liked all those tankers. I'm not sure that Lee's ever been in love with anybody. Of course, Lee had a crush on Jack Kennedy. Why wouldn't she? Lee was always saying, 'Why do they always write about the Kennedys? They're so dull.'" Capote also added, "Men to both Lee and Jackie are to be totally controlled, nothing but foot slaves. Lee and Jackie really do think they are royalty.'" And neither of them was going to suffer for money, according to Capote.
"Lee owned a very valuable piece of land in Greece. I think she got it from Onassis. And she owns a lot of real estate in Long Island. She's the most extravagant girl I have ever met. No more than Jackie, though. They have the sense of the right to luxury." This whole experience with Radziwill made him think about friendship and what it meant. "Her conniving against me with Gore when I was the single most loyal friend she ever had, it's very hurtful to put it mildly," he said. When he heard that Radziwill had given a deposition to Vidal's lawyer saying she never told Capote the story that Vidal got thrown out of the White House, "She just said I was a liar, that's all. I called her to get an explanation. I talked to her secretary. She never called back." Capote says that he was Radziwill's No. 1 confidant until he went through "that long period when I was in and out of the hospital, I wasn't communicating with anybody. But of all my friends she never wrote me once to say she hoped I was getting well, or wished me luck with my problems. So far as I know there has never been any reason for this unbelievable conduct." Source: www.washingtonpost.com
Larry Hancock’s new book Tipping Point: The Conspiracy that Murdered President John Kennedy (2021) is a concise summary of his many decades long investigation into the assassination of President Kennedy. Those who want a taste of Tipping Point before purchasing it, you can read excerpts at the Mary Ferrell website here: www.maryferrell.org/pages/Tipping_Point.html
Hancock lays out a very believable alternative scenario, one that connects all of the main subjects to Cuba, and defines the essence of a covert intelligence operation, the means by which the conspirators achieved their goal, and got away with it. Tipping Point picks up where Josiah Thompson’s Last Second in Dallas leaves off, with the President’s head shattered by two almost simultaneous shots, one from the front and one from behind. While Thompson gives a micro analysis of the eyewitness reports, ballistics, medical evidence, and acoustics, fitting them all together without speculating who was behind the triggers, Hancock puts things in their Cuban context, lays out a chronology and gives names to those who are the most likely candidates for pulling off such an audacious triangulation of firepower. As with the subjects in his previous book Someone Would Have Talked, and as CIA official Rolf Mowatt-Larsen explained in his 2019 CAPA presentation in Dallas, the suspects are limited to those who had the capability to conduct such complex covert intelligence operations. James Angleton ran the CIA counter-intelligence office that kept particularly keen tabs on Lee Harvey Oswald before the assassination, counter-insurgency expert General Ed Lansdale, William Harvey director of the anti-Castro Cuban Task Force W, along with Rip Robertson, all of whom are associated with the CIA’s Miami station JMWAVE, where most of the intrigue stems from. Besides documenting most of the references to records released under the JFK Act, Hancock refers to the CIA crypt files that translates the codes into English. Besides the usual suspects, Larry brings some relatively new names into the fold – Carl Jenkins and John I.F. Harper, CIA trainers who prepared the Cuban Pathfinders for the Bay of Pigs and later Mongoose commando attacks against Cuba. And Gene Wheaton, Jenkins’ former housemate and proprietor of a CIA airline propriety company. Wheaton tried to blow the whistle on what he knew about renegade CIA operations but then CIA director William Casey was in on it, and the Assassination Records Review Board didn’t pay him any attention. Narrowing down the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro to the few that resemble the Dealey Plaza operation, Larry focuses on one particular plot – the Pathfinder Plan. From CIA technicians at the National Photo Interpretation Center (NPIC) we learn that Pathfinder was a plan to infiltrate anti-Castro Cuban commando snipers into Cuba and shoot Castro with high powered rifles as he rode by in an open jeep. Source: JFKCountercoup.blogspot.com
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