The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes (Analysis by Donald R. McGovern)

Cassette 93B: Eunice Murray, Marilyn Monroe's housekeeper and author of Marilyn: The Last Months (1975)

The taped testimony offered by Eunice Murray, at least the testimony included by Anthony Summers in his recent documentary Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes appeared to confirm that Robert Kennedy visited Marilyn; but did Marilyn’s housekeeper actually say on August the 4th? Well, no she did not. We know that Robert Kennedy visited Marilyn, accompanied by Pat and Peter Lawford, on the 27th of June in 1962. Eunice Murray recounted the attorney general’s brief visit on that Wednesday for biographer Donald Spoto: the Lawfords arrived at Fifth Helena that afternoon to collect Marilyn, and Robert Kennedy was with them: Marilyn wanted them to see her new home. 

After a brief tour of Marilyn’s humble hacienda, the group proceeded to the Lawford’s beachside mansion for a dinner party. That June visit, residential tour and dinner party was the fourth and final meeting of Bobby and Marilyn. Certainly the president and the attorney general knew that anything they said about Marilyn’s death would have been promptly misconstrued, would only have served as a potent fertilizer fomenting more suspicion, speculation and rumor. Furthermore, the fact that Tony Summers included the statements of Harry Hall and James Doyle showed a lack of balance plus an eagerness to accept the most illogical and ahistorical kind of testimony. For instance, that somehow there were FBI agents on the scene of her home in the early morning hours of August the 5th, which no credible author has ever noted. FBI Counter-intelligence chief William Sullivan said his boss J. Edgar Hoover tried to inflame rumors about an affair between Bobby Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. The problem was, neither the boss nor his minions could find any evidence of an affair. Why did Hoover want to do this? Because Bobby Kennedy was the only attorney general  who actually acted like he was Hoover’s boss. For instance, Hoover wanted to do next to nothing on civil rights, but Bobby Kennedy ordered him to. But even at that, Hoover would not reveal undercover information that could have prevented bloody violence during the Freedom Rides. (See Irving Bernstein, Promises Kept, 1991)

When President Kennedy went up against steel executives in 1962, FBI agents served subpoenas to J. Edgar Hoover in the wee hours of the morning. Hoover got back at the Kennedys by doing things like spreading rumors about the president and Ellen Rometsch, a reputed East German spy working out of Washington. When ace researcher Peter Vea discovered the raw FBI reports on Rometsch, there was nothing in there about an affair between her and the president. The testimony of friends and confidants, those who actually knew Marilyn Monroe, would at least cast reasonable doubt, if not virtually disprove, all the malarkey posited by those who have used her for financial gain and yet never knew her nor even met her. But more importantly, why has Marilyn’s own testimony been omitted, why has her own voice been silenced by the conspiracists? Because every conspiracy theory and virtually every allegation of affairs with the middle Kennedy brothers and sundry mobsters began after Marilyn’s death; it began with rumors and innuendo; and the actual testimony offered by the woman involved, limited though it is, contradicted all the wild allegations. 

On a Friday afternoon in Chicago, August the 3rd, Robert Kennedy boarded an American Airlines flight in Chicago connecting from Washington, DC. The attorney general joined his wife, Ethel, and his four eldest children, Kathleen, Joseph II, Robert Jr., and David. The American flight proceeded to San Francisco where the Bates family awaited their weekend guests. John Bates, Sr. then drove the group southeast from San Francisco to Gilroy, a pleasant two hours drive into the picturesque Santa Cruz Mountains. From Gilroy they drove an additional twenty minutes West to the Bates Ranch located just north of Mount Madonna. The Ken­nedy family spent the entire weekend with the Bates family on their bucolic ranch. The preceding account is an irrefutable fact. Also on the flight was the FBI’s liaison to the attorney general, Courtney A. Evans. An FBI file no. 77-51387-300, written by Evans, memorialized the Kennedy’s weekend excursion: The Attorney General and his family spent the weekend at the Bates ranch located about sixty miles south of San Francisco.  

In the 1985 print version of Goddess, Summers mentioned the Kennedy family’s visit to the Gilroy ranch; but exactly how the families occupied themselves on Saturday, August the 4th, would not be revealed for eight years, appearing finally in Donald Spoto’s 1993 publication. According to John Bates, Sr., they returned to the ranch where the afternoon included a BBQ, swimming and a game of touch football. Due to the ranch’s hilly terrain, the participants had to locate a spot with a relatively level topography. That search consumed two hours of their trip. After the football contest, the group enjoyed more swimming; and then, the attorney general tossed his children into the swimming pool. Once the children had been put to bed, the adults enjoyed a peaceful dinner. The conversation during dinner focused predominantly on a speech the attorney general would deliver to the American Bar Association in San Francisco on Monday, August the 6th. According to John and Nancy Bates, dinner ended at approximately 10:30 PM, after which the fatigued adults retired.

John Bates, Sr. and Nancy along with John Bates, Jr. and Roland Snyder, the ranch foreman, testified on more than one occasion that Robert Kennedy never left the ranch during that fun-filled Saturday. More importantly, though, a group of ten photographs taken that day clearly depicted each activity as described by the Bates family and clearly confirmed that Rob­ert Kennedy was at the ranch all day; and he was an active participant in all the day’s activities; therefore, how could anybody contend that Robert Kennedy was in Brentwood on August the 4th and visited Marilyn in the afternoon or night? It is mystifying indeed since any absence by Robert Kennedy would have been immediately noticed by any and all present, particularly Robert Kennedy’s children. Roland Snyder stated emphatically: "They were here all weekend, that’s certain. By God, he wasn’t anywhere near L.A." John Bates, Jr. recalled: "I was fourteen at the time and was about to go off to boarding school. I remember Bob Kennedy teasing me about it, saying, “Oh, John, you’ll hate it!” The senior Bates told Donald Spoto: "I remember Bobby sitting with the children as they ate and telling them stories. He truly loved his children." August the 5th was a significant requirement: the group attended an early morning Mass in Gilroy. On August the 6th, the local newspaper The Gilroy Dispatch printed a brief article entitled “Robert Kennedys Visits Local Ranch.” After commenting on the attorney general’s Monday speech, the article noted: "Robert Kennedy, his wife and four oldest children have been the guests of Mr. and Mrs. Jack Bates of Piedmont at their Gilroy ranch on Sanders Rd. They are expected to leave tonight when they fly on to the Seattle World’s Fair. Sunday morning the Kennedys attended 9 o’clock mass at St. Mary’s Church in Gilroy."

In 1973, to the Ladies Home Journal and The Chicago Tribune, Eunice Murray reported that Robert Kennedy did not appear at Fifth Helena on August the 4th, a position that she also maintained in her 1975 memoir. During an interview with Maurice Zolotow, published by the Chicago Tribune on September the 11th in 1973, Mrs. Murray asserted that the stories about Marilyn and Robert Kennedy were the most evil gossip of all before declaring: "It is not true that Marilyn had a secret love affair with Mr. Kennedy and I would tell you if it were so." She recalled the Wednesday visit in June of 1962 when the attorney general, accompanied by the Lawfords, came to see the house, finally adding that Marilyn certainly didn’t have a love affair with him. When asked directly by Zolotow if Bobby Kennedy was in the house that Saturday night, Eunice answered: No. After Zolotow posed the same question about Peter Lawford and Pat Newcomb, Eunice answered: No. Absolutely not. There was nobody in the house that night except Eunice Murray and Marilyn. The doors were locked. The windows locked. The French window in her room locked. And the gate was shut. 

 

On March the 21st of 2022, Megyn Kelly interviewed Robert Kennedy, Jr. a mere six decades after the events of 1962; and to her everlasting credit, she broached the topic of Marilyn Monroe. Robert Jr. admitted: There’s not much I can tell you about Marilyn Monroe. But Megyn Kelly pressed the issue: The rumors are that she had an affair with your dad, that she had an affair with your uncle and even possibly that your dad was somehow there the night that she died out in California. Robert Jr. responded as follows: "Those are rumors that have been time and again proven completely untrue. There’s two days … my father’s schedule, every minute of his day is known. So people know where he was every moment of the day and it happens that the day that they say that my father, you know, that these people who are selling books and these things … that day that they say my father was with her he was with us at a camping trip up in Oregon and northern California and it would have been impossible for him to be there, though that was the day she died. These authors, who are just bogus authors, are making money by saying these things, all the days that they claim my father could have been with Marilyn Monroe are days when we know exactly where he was". Unfortunately, Megyn Kelly lapsed into the same fallacious argument employed by many persons who suffer from faulty reasoning based on weak analogies: since John Kennedy was an inveterate philanderer, then his brother must have been as well. But then, many of Robert Kennedy’s friends and associates have asserted over the years that he was disinclined to engage in extramarital activities. In 1973, Norman Mailer published his biographical novel of Marilyn Monroe. Concealed within Mailer’s lavender prose and his frequent flights of whirligig rhetoric, he of­fered the following proclamation: If the thousand days of Jack Kennedy might yet be equally famous for its nights, the same cannot be said of Bobby. He was devout, well married, and prudent. While John Kennedy would, in today’s enlightened society, undeniably be diagnosed a sex addict, his younger brother might be diagnosed a puritan. 

Biographer Ronald Steel speculated that if Robert Kennedy had been born into a poor family without a power-hungry patriarch driving the boys into politics, he might have been a priest. Steel described Robert Kennedy’s religious ideology as a fierce brand of Irish Catholicism and that the attorney general was in his heart―and always was―a Catholic conservative deeply suspicious of the moral license of the radical left. Robert Kennedy did not embrace the drug culture and sexual permissiveness of the ’60s. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. offered the following: Robert Kennedy lived through a time of unusual turbulence in American history; and he responded to that turbulence more directly and sensitively than any other political leader of that era. He was equipped with the certitudes of family and faith―certitudes that sustained him till his death. According to Richard Goodwin, advisor to both John and Robert Kennedy, the attorney general, unlike the president, was temperamentally disinclined to philander or engage in extramarital activities, even with Marilyn Monroe. 

The boast often proclaimed by Anthony Summers to extol his Marilyn pathography is that his research for Goddess included six-hundred and fifty interviews. However, in his Netflix doc, Summers included a mere twenty-seven of the recorded interviews. Of the interviews Summers tape recorded, six-hundred and twenty-three, the vast majority, remain unheard. An inquiring mind would immediately ask several questions. What, for instance, is the testimony on the vast majority of the still unheard tapes? According to Marilyn biog­rapher Gary Vitacco-Robles, Summers omits interviews which contradict the interviews he chose to include. He uses interviews to support Kennedy was at Peter Lawford’s house in August 4; however, he interviewed all of Lawford’s guests that night and all reported Kennedy was not there. A case in point is the tape recording of Summers’ interview with Milt Ebbins. Several persons have heard it. Along with all of Summers’ tapes, the Ebbins tape is housed at the Margaret Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, California. Why was that interview excluded from the Netflix flick? Also, it is painfully clear that at least one tape presented by Summers had been edited, and that tape was not the product of a Summers conducted interview: it was the product of an interview conducted by the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office. So, this imperative question follows: had any of the other tapes been edited especially for inclusion in the Netflix documentary?

Moreover, it should be obvious, and also troubling, that Summers withheld, excluded testimony from witnesses who actually knew Marilyn and, unlike Arthur James, could prove they knew her: Pat Newcomb would be a case in point. Others would be Ralph Roberts, Norman Rosten and Whitey Snyder. According to Summers’ source notes, he interviewed all of the preceding persons. Did he fail to tape record those interviews? But even more egregious is the exclusion of the first-hand, eye-witness testimony of the Bates family and Roland Snyder, all of whom spent that early August weekend with the Kennedys; and dare I even mention the exclusion of the Bates family photographs, ten of them, that memorialized and created a historical record of what happened at the Bates Ranch on Saturday, August the 4th, created a documentary record that Summers did not even deign to mention, much less pursue. Those photographs have been available since 1962; and Susan Bernard published them in 2011. If the purpose of his documentary was to present the facts, then why was essential and pertinent information withheld? The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes is not a documentary. It is a sensationalized melodrama featuring dramatized pantomime by unidentified actors, a cheesy and distracting tactic one reviewer noted; and viewers are treated to maudlin music and grimy film-noir-like cinematography. 

The sensationalized melodrama is the result of Summers’ repeated suggestions that perhaps Marilyn’s death was the result of activi­ties more diabolical than an overdose—Then at the seventy-eight minute mark, Summers announced: "So, I’m not at all of the mind of the loony people who write books saying she was murdered. I did not find out anything that convinced me that she had been deliberately killed." Legerdemain Summers certainly rivals Norman Mailer’s use of paralipsis on a narrative scale, in which the novelist indulged himself with insinuation and innuendo, theories of conspiracy to the point of tedium before finally admitting that Marilyn more than likely killed herself; and Mailer’s Kennedy narrative, like Summers’ Kennedy narrative, ends up being  fundamentally incidental. Summers wrote in Goddess, Marilyn's mystery hinges on “scandal”―and scandal is a gaping excavation from which the sparkly twinkly jewels of insinuation and speculation can be mined almost without end, the actual truth notwithstanding. But then, ironically, as Marilyn said at the beginning of the documentary: "True things rarely get into circulation. It’s usually the false things." Source: marilynfromthe22ndrow.com

Marilyn Monroe: 65th Anniversary of "Bus Stop"

Picture Marilyn Monroe and you'll see platinum blonde hair, bright red lipstick, and a white dress fluttering over a subway grate. But right after immortalizing exactly that image in 1955's The Seven Year Itch, Monroe reinvented herself. Under her own company, Marilyn Monroe Productions, and with a new studio contract under her belt, Marilyn Monroe delivered what remains one of her best performances in Bus Stop. Marilyn Monroe makes it worth remembering on the 65th anniversary of its premiere: August 31, 1956. The film, penned by The Seven Year Itch co-writer George Axelrod and directed by Joshua Logan, is based on a William Inge play. It follows Beau Decker (Don Murray), a bad mannered and rambunctious cowboy who's never left his ranch before. He sets out by bus from Montana to Arizona in the hopes of winning a rodeo – and bagging himself a woman. 

When he sees Monroe's Chérie performing at a bar, he's immediately smitten, and decides they'll be married the very next day. No matter how often Chérie turns him down or tries to escape, Beau won't be deterred, and she is eventually won over at the film's titular bus stop on their way back to Montana. Despite branching out into other genres earlier in her career, playing the femme fatale in 1953's Niagara and appearing in noirs The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and Don't Bother to Knock (1952), 20th Century Fox was determined to keep her pigeonholed in the airy, comedic roles she was so adept at playing. This didn't work for Monroe, who was intent on being taken seriously as an actor. Her contract at Fox had her underpaid, with no say in what she appeared in. She refused to film the comedy The Girl in the Pink Tights, so Fox suspended her. A resolution seemed to have been reached when Monroe agreed to play a supporting role in 1954's There’s No Business Like Show Business and star in Billy Wilder's The Seven Year Itch (complete with a hefty bonus) – but the battle was far from over. Monroe made her commitment to changing her image clear. She ditched her acting coach and took up classes at the prestigious NYC Actors Studio. She would not appear in Fox's next choice for her, a comedy called How to Be Very, Very Popular. 

Eventually, Monroe proved to be too big a star to lose, and she got a new contract with Fox at the end of '55. It was a huge win, paying far better and giving her more control over her career, including approval over directors and her films' subjects. MMP's first picture would be Bus Stop, and before cameras rolled, its leading lady put the final stamp on her transformation with a legal name change from Norma Jeane Mortenson to Marilyn Monroe.  If Bus Stop had starred anyone else, it's doubtful the film would stand the test of time. Monroe disappears into her role, with her signature blonde hair dyed a darker shade, her famous low, breathy voice exchanged for a high-pitched Ozark accent, her skin tone made chalky with makeup (Chérie works nights and hardly sees the sun), her singing warbly, and her dancing awkward – just contrast her faltering performance of the film's "That Old Black Magic" with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes' knockout "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend." Monroe even found her own bedraggled costume, turning down one she thought looked too polished, and putting her own holes into her fishnets. Behind the scenes, she worked busily with her acting coach Paula Strasberg to perfect her performance, painstakingly going over every line of every scene. 

The hard work paid off. Director Joshua Logan, who before the cameras rolled protested that "Marilyn can’t act!", was entirely won over, going so far as to call her "one of the great talents of all time." The New York Time's review mirrored his about-face: "Marilyn Monroe has finally proved herself an actress in Bus Stop. She and the picture are swell! This piece of professional information may seem both implausible and absurd to those who have gauged the lady's talents by her performances in such films as Niagara, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and even The Seven Year Itch." By modern standards, Chérie's storyline is entirely misogynistic. It's disturbing to watch her give in to Beau's advances because he's the first person to accept her history with other men (apparently, it "averages out" because he has never had a girlfriend). Beau's "I like you the way you are, so what do I care how you got that way" would be sweet if not for all the time he's spent harassing – and literally abducting – Chérie, his inability to even pronounce her name right, and the fact that her transgression in his eyes is having been with other men. "That's the sweetest, tenderest thing anyone's ever said to me," Chérie replies.

That doesn't mean that Chérie is a character undeserving of Monroe's talents, though. There's something tragic in her speech on the bus about wanting whoever she marries to have "some real regard for me," as well as her dreams of making it to Hollywood when her talents aren't quite up to scratch. There is a meta tongue-in-cheek moment in which Chérie talks about her big plan to make it to Hollywood where “you get treated with a little respect.” It’s an overt dig at Zanuck and 20th Century Fox (which Marilyn famously called 19th Century Fox for its backward treatment of female stars). And one imagines that’s what the ingenue version of Marilyn might have initially thought with her grand plans to become a star. Except, unlike Chérie, she already grew up right next to Hollywood, her own mother a film cutter at RKO. Don Murray (Marilyn's co-star) was nominated to Best Actor in a Supporting Role. Source: www.gamesradar.com

James DiEugenio: Concerning Marilyn Monroe, there is no evidence of her closeness to the Mafia, or RFK. And there is no evidence of her doing a tell all on the Kennedy brothers. And if you read Donald McGovern's current article, she was not murdered. The pills were ingested, not injected. And what Mark Shaw does to try and get RFK into Brentwood was exposed by McGovern as nothing but photographic trickery. I say that because it is difficult to imagine that a lawyer/author could be that stupid. Also, there were many people who were not invited to her last rites proceeding, as Joe DiMaggio only invited 26. A lot of cheap hucksters have created a lot of smoke and mirrors out of a lot of nothing in order to create what, in reality, is a wild and lurid fantasy which libels Marilyn Monroe, RFK and JFK. Marilyn was not a Mob moll and she was not some kind of intel asset, or being tossed around by, of all people, RFK--who Hoover could not find anything on, even though he had agents following him around. What is incredible to me is that some people in the JFK critical community have actually take this rubbish seriously as Paul Hoch.

But the diary tale is actually worse than all the above. Because it turned out that Marilyn did have a diary. It was recovered in one of her storage boxes years after a dispute was resolved over her estate. It was nothing like Lionel Grandison, Robert Slatzer, or Jeanne Carmen said it was. The bulk of her estate was given over to the Strasberg family, since Monroe greatly appreciated what her acting coach, Lee Strasberg, had done for her. Those notebooks were compiled in a book called Fragments in 2010. There is no mention of Giancana, Roselli, Hoover, or Tony Accardo. Frank Sinatra is not in there and neither is Castro. Nothing about any romance with the Kennedy brothers or her desire to be First Lady. The only mention of the Kennedys was in notes she made for an interview, in which she said she admired them, as she did Eleanor Roosevelt, because they represented hope for young people. Grandison then surpassed himself. Not only did he find the diary, but there was also a publicity release in her purse. The release said that there would be a press conference at the LA Press Club. Marilyn would answer questions based upon her Diary of Secrets. I am not kidding. That is what it said and McGovern reproduces it in his book. Of course, no one ever saw it except Lionel Grandison. One wonders, since there was no such Diary of Secrets, what was the conference going to be about? Her failed marriages? Her thoughts on her acting career? Because, as one can see, that is what she wrote about in her diary, her real one, not the Slatzerian creation. Source: www.kennedysandking.com

Refuting Rothmiller's Bombshell, Murder Orthodoxies by Donald McGovern

During the half century, plus nine years, that have elapsed since Marilyn’s untimely death, the debate concerning the why and how of that tragic event has continued loudly and unabated, almost attaining the ear piercing level of a cacophony. The theories that have attempted to answer all the lingering questions and thereby solve the lingering mystery have become even more bizarre and more sensational while becoming less substantiated. In short, the passing of time has not given rise to a clearer understanding of the facts, just foggier and goofier opinions. The last opportunist release is former LAPD police officer Michael Rothmiller's Bombshell (2021). The case is neither Robert Slatzer nor Jeanne Carmen nor Samir Muqaddin nor the 1982 LADA Summary Report regarding that investigation mentioned Michael Rothmiller. But then, the mythology surrounding Marilyn’s diary, as it relates to her death, is so ingrained in her story and so well known by most of humanity, it is entirely remarkable that more persons have not appeared with odd stories similar to Rothmiller’s. The secret diary mythology has flourished in the unusually fertile firmament of distrust and paranoia; and it has been continuously fertilized by a voyeuristic media and opportunistic individuals adept at manipulating the confusion caused by misinterpretation and misunderstanding, manipulated by those who can invariably grind confusion into monetary benefit. Marilyn’s death is not a complex polynomial nor a mysterious mathematical expression: it only appears to be one due to the overabundance of conflicting and contradictory testimony contained in the numerous pathographies written about her life and what has become her perversely sexualized death. But perhaps the most incredible and startling aspect of Marilyn Monroe is this: despite the horrid tales, despite the defamation, despite her lurid sexualization, she continues to thrive. However, I for one think it’s time for all the muckraking to end, even though, I admit sadly, I know it never will; and undoubtedly, the murder debates will also continue.

Reopening the investigation into the facts surrounding Marilyn's death, in 1982, the Assistant District Attorney at the time, Ronald H. Carroll, and an investigator, Alan B. Tomich, along with several other investigators, reviewed the case files in 1982 between the months of August and December, conducted additional interviews and addressed all the questions raised by various conspiracists. The district attorney’s office then published, in December of 1982, a twenty-nine page summary report, The Death of Marilyn Monroe: Report to the District Attorney, a copy of which I obtained directly from the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office. The published LADA report concluded: "Although factual discrepancies exist, the cumulative evidence available to us fails to support any theory of criminal conduct relating to her death. Based on the information available, no further criminal investigation appears required into Miss Monroe’s death."

It is rich indeed that Joyce Carol Oates, who wrote Blonde—one of the most loathsome books ever written about Marilyn Monroe—should object to the proliferation of destructive literary works masquerading as biographies; but Oates’ corruption perfectly represented the horns of my dilemma: should I employ the word biography in relation to the books about Marilyn Monroe written by Ted Jordan, C. David Heymann, Anthony Summers and several others?  Most of the books written about Marilyn Monroe are, in fact, pathographies. Blonde is certainly and clearly a case in point; considering the number of books written about Marilyn Monroe, over one-thousand; yet it is difficult to find one that does not have a heavy and undeniable smell of offal. Jay Margolis and Richard Buskin, for example, reported that Ralph Roberts gave Marilyn her regular Saturday massage between 9:00 AM and 10:15 AM, before leaving by the front door. Carl Rollyson cited Ralph Robert’s presence along with Marilyn’s massage; but Rollyson reported that Laurence Schiller did not appear at Fifth Helena until 10:30 AM, a time which completely contradicted Schiller’s memoir. However, Donald Spoto, who interviewed Marilyn’s good friend and masseur, did not mention Ralph’s presence that morning or that alleged massage. Additionally, Gary Vitacco-Robles reported that Schiller arrived sometime before noon and that Marilyn took the photographer on a tour of Fifth Helena during his August the 4th visit. 

Gary Vitacco-Robles in Icon, considered by many the best Monroe biography, or at least one of the top three, also failed to mention that Marilyn received an early morning massage. Biographer Michelle Morgan mentioned a Schiller visit in her Marilyn biography; but she did not mention a tour of Fifth Helena. Donald Spoto did not mention a residential tour and neither did Schiller in his written memoir. Marilyn biographer, Randy Taraborrelli, did not mention a visit by Schiller at all. Likewise, the murder theorists Jay Margolis and Richard Buskin also excluded Schiller’s visit from their accounting of August the 4th’s events. I implicitly trust the assiduously researched, two volume Marilyn biography written by Gary Vitacco-Robles. I also trust Donald Spoto’s biography along with the volume published by Michelle Morgan and, to an extent, the one published by Stacy Eubank; on the other hand, I am not as trusting of Randy Taraborrelli or Lawrence Schiller's. On 16th July, according to Heymann, Marilyn attended a celebratory party thrown by the Senior Kennedy at Romanoff’s, a restaurant in Beverly Hills. Heymann alleged that Kennedy and Marilyn were together during that entire Saturday before the future president elect flew back to Boston, departure time not divulged.

On the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum website, those that are interested can view a video of his twenty-two minute acceptance speech as it was broadcast by CBS television in 1960. Occasionally, the television cameras scan the large crowd, probably searching for attending celebrities, considering the proximity to Hollywood. If Marilyn Monroe was there, arguably the biggest movie star in the world in 1960, the cameras never located her; and I find that strange indeed. Also, there are no contemporaneous media reports that Marilyn attended the Democrat convention in 1960; and that media void leads to obvious and pertinent questions: where was Marilyn and what was she doing during July of that year? She was attending pre-production meetings for filming The Misfits, to begin in late July, Marilyn departed for New York City on June the 25th. She arrived in Manhattan the following day. During the first week in July, Arthur Miller joined Marilyn in New York City where, beginning on the 5th, she performed several screen tests for The Misfits. On July the 13th, the fourth day of the Los Angeles convention, Marilyn located Ralph Roberts playing poker in Maureen Stapleton’s Manhattan apartment. Roberts agreed to give Marilyn a massage. Upon entering the Miller’s apartment, also in Manhattan, Roberts found her watching the Democrat National Convention via her television set as Arthur Miller slept in the couple’s adjoining bedroom. On July the 14th, Thursday, the conventions fifth day, Marilyn sent Ralph Greenson a telegram from Manhattan, accompanied by a bouquet of roses. The telegram noted that she would be in Los Angeles on Sunday evening, July the 17th. According to Donald Spoto, Marilyn attended a therapy session with Dr. Greenson on the 18th of July, and kept an appointment with her internist, Dr. Hyman Engelberg. She departed for Reno, Nevada, by airplane on July the 20th. 

The following day, John Huston filmed the first scene of The Misfits in Nevada. Regardless of the actual date Marilyn left New York City, she obviously did not participate in the events and shenanigans as asserted by C. David Heymann. Marilyn was not in Los Angeles during the week of July the 10th and she was not with John Kennedy during the Democratic National Convention in 1960. According to Gary Vitacco-Robles, Marilyn was en-route to Los Angeles on July the 15th; and therefore, she could not have attended John Kennedy’s acceptance speech at the Los Angeles Coliseum nor met him backstage on July the 15th. The lack of credible evidence to support a love affair between actress and attorney general should come as no surprise: Norman Mailer confessed in 1973 that he fundamentally fabricated that romantic link between Marilyn and Robert Kennedy. Besides, Marilyn invariably spoke highly of John Kennedy and his brother. Simply put, it is more than doubtful that she would ever have participated in such a fabled press conference. Neither John Fitzgerald nor Robert Francis Kennedy were involved in Marilyn’s death. Robert Francis did not visit Marilyn along with Peter Lawford on August the 4th in Los Angeles.  

Additionally, Pat Newcomb, Peter Lawford, Eunice Murray and Dr. Greenson did not induce Marilyn to commit suicide. Doing that would not have been possible, frankly, once we consider Marilyn’s willfulness. Anthony Summers admitted that Peter Lawford refuted the tales regarding John Kennedy’s affair with Marilyn. The ill and aging English actor termed the allegations thereof nothing but balls; and yet, since Lawford’s repudiation contradicted Summers’ entrenched belief, Summers asserted that the facts suggested otherwise. I am not exactly sure which facts Summers meant. Summers relied on quotations from various witnesses, Deborah Gould, for instance, who was married to Lawford in 1976; but as husband and wife, Peter and Deborah only cohabited for two months. Patricia Seaton informed David Johnston, a vocal critic of Heymann’s frequent use of fabricated and deceased sources, that Lawford could not have been interviewed by Heymann as the author had alleged. According to Patricia, Peter was close to death and hardly able to make coherent statements, much less conduct a lengthy interview. Did Heymann interview the dying actor? More than likely, I here assert, never. According to Patricia Seaton, Heymann invented all the quotations he attributed to her husband; and a considerable amount of what Heymann quoted, what he alleged came directed from Lawford, found its way onto the pages of Marilyn pathographies written thereafter; but the quotation most often mentioned in the same breath as the name Peter Lawford became the title of a BBC television documentary, Say Goodbye to the President, broadcast in October of 1985. 

Marilyn Monroe was not a fan of Peter Lawford. Their unique history suggests that Lawford fell romantically for Marilyn at the beginning of her movie career and he pursued her while they were both a part of the local surfing community; but she was simply disinterested. She apparently referred to him as a beach wolf more than once. LAPD interviewed Peter Lawford on 16th October 1974 at 5:00 PM. During that interview, Lawford asserted that Marilyn's last words had been: 'Say goodbye to Pat, say goodbye to Jack and say goodbye to yourself, because you’re a nice guy.' The preceding quotation is not exactly the same as the one reported by Summers and other conspiracists. Moreover, during his LAPD interview, Mr. Lawford also stated that most of what has been written by various authors, such as Robert Slatzer, Anthony Scaduto, Norman Mailer and others regarding the last days in the life of Marilyn Monroe were ‘pure fantasy’. Odd. No conspiracist of which I am aware has ever mentioned or quoted Lawford’s interview with the LAPD. A few conspiracists have alleged that Ralph Greenson and his associates wanted to gain control of Marilyn’s estate and the millions of dollars it would generate after her death; and so they murdered her. Such an orthodoxy, however, has a central flaw: how could those persons have known prior to Marilyn’s death that her estate would generate any income for any entity other than 20th Century-Fox Film Corporation or the photographer, Milton H. Greene? In fact, they could not have known that Marilyn would become, in death, the icon and symbol that she became. —"Murder Orthodoxies: A Non-Conspiracist’s View of Marilyn Monroe’s Death" (2018) by Donald R. McGovern

Joseph Kennedy Sr (The Patriarch), John Kennedy Jr (the sexiest and the sweetest Kennedy man)

On 17 December, 2012, David Nasaw (author of The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy) dismissed on Chicago Tonight (Chicago Public Television) the myth of Joe Kennedy's alleged bootlegging. In another interview with NPR, Nasaw explains with detail his complex subject: "Joseph P. Kennedy was a man of boundless talents, magnetic charm, relentless energy, and unbridled ambition. His life was punctuated by meteoric rises, catastrophic falls, and numerous rebirths, by cascading joys and blinding sorrows, and by a tragic ending which was Shakespearean in its pathos. An Irish Catholic from East Boston, Joe Kennedy was proud of his heritage but refused to be defined by it. He fought to open doors that were closed to him, then having forced his way inside, he refused to play by the rules. He spoke his mind — when he should not have. Too often, he let his fears speak for him. He was distrustful, often contemptuous of those in power — and did not disguise it. His anger and his hatreds were legendary, especially at those whom he believed had betrayed him. Joseph Kennedy had wanted to exert his influence in a positive way. His children entered public service with verve and single-mindedness because that was what he raised them to do. He told his children over and over again, 'I'm making all this money so you don't have to make money, so that you can go into public service. He impressed on them that those who are privileged with money, with education, with good looks, have to give something back to those who don't have those privileges, and he truly believed that," Nasaw tells NPR: "And all of these kids grew up knowing they were not going to go into business. They didn't want to go into business. They were going to do some sort of public service and, in the end, they did." 

"On graduation, he crossed to Cambridge and Harvard College, where he found himself for the first time in his life the odd man out. It was only when he graduates from Harvard that he begins to understand what it means to be an Irish Catholic from East Boston, whose father is a local ward leader. He wants to go into banking or finance. He cannot get a job. Cannot get an interview. His friends, who happen to be Protestant with the same degree that he has and not as good a head for numbers as he has, they have no problem getting jobs. So it's at that moment in 1912 that he realizes — really for the first time — that there are going to be a lot of doors closed to him, and only because he is Irish Catholic in Boston." By the time Joe Kennedy left college, he knew who he was: the smartest man in the room, the one who would come out ahead in every negotiation he entered into. His ambition was to secure a place in a major Boston bank or financial house, but such positions, he discovered on graduation from Harvard, were reserved for "proper Bostonians," not the sons of East Boston Irish Catholic ward leaders. He made the best of the situation by getting a civil service job as the youngest assistant bank examiner at age 25." 

"During the 1920s, Joe Kennedy was a major player in the nation's fastest growing industry, moving pictures, and one of the few Irish Catholics to own or run a studio. The Hollywood he encountered was not a dream factory. It was a town and an industry focused on raising funds to finance the transition to sound and organizing itself to repel attempts at censorship. Kennedy arrived as the head of a minor debt-ridden studio and positioned himself as a non-Jewish white knight who would rescue the industry from those who questioned its taste and its morals. He promised to apply a banker's good sense to making pictures: to cut production costs, raise studio profits, and boost share prices. His rise was meteoric, but after only a few years in the industry, he retired — with Gloria Swanson as his long time mistress and millions of dollars in stock options."

"Trusting no one, with no allegiance to any industry or firm or producer, he made a fortune in Hollywood by selling RKO to Howard Hughes and then in New York, buying and selling options, stocks, and bonds to the companies with which he was associated. A multimillionaire by the age of forty, his outlook on the world was transformed in the early years of the Depression from one of hopeful expectation to an almost unshakeable pessimism. His fears for the future of capitalism after the Depression deepened and prompted him to abandon the private sector in 1932 to campaign for Franklin Roosevelt's election as president. A conservative banker and stock trader with no experience in national politics, he was the odd man out on the campaign trail and, later, in New Deal Washington. Few government appointments have been as universally condemned as was President Roosevelt's choice of Joseph P. Kennedy, a Wall Street operator, to be the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934. And few were as universally acclaimed as Kennedy's was within months of his assuming his post. His years in Washington as chairman of the SEC, then chairman of the Maritime Commission, were marked by triumph, his reputation as a truth-telling nonpartisan with analytical approach enhanced to the point where he was prominently mentioned as a possible presidential candidate."

"Joe Kennedy was rewarded for his service in Washington with appointment as ambassador to the Court of St. James's. The first Irish American to be named to London, with no experience whatsoever to prepare him for the post, he was an outsider again, but this time he reveled in it. He returned to Washington in disgrace. He tried to be of service to his country after Pearl Harbor, but there was no place for him in the Roosevelt administration that he believed worthy of his talents.  In the postwar period, his pessimism became more corrosive still, as did his conviction that he had been right all along to oppose the war against the dictators. He stridently, proudly, renewed his calls for appeasement, this time of the Soviet Union, and for isolation from rather than engagement in the world outside the western hemisphere, and did all he could to provoke a "great debate" on the wisdom of fighting a cold war that, he feared, might turn hot at any moment. He took his role as the parent of nine seriously. He was an active, loving, attentive, sometimes intrusive father. He pushed his children forward, giving them good advice whether they solicited it or not, gently chided them to do better, and taught them that family was sacred." 

"Joe Kennedy raised his kids to be as confident and as stubborn as he was, and as relentlessly optimistic as he was pessimistic — and, for the most part, they were. One cannot help but admire a man who from such humble origins back to Dunganstown (Ireland) became so wealthy, powerful and politically influential. This most articulate, most dominant man, in December of 1961 — less than a year into his son's first term as president — has a massive stroke. They perform the last rites. Nobody thinks he'll last more than 24 hours; he lasts eight years. But during those eight years, he is unable to communicate through language. He can't write, he can't speak, though he seems to understand everything he's told. And it is during those eight years that he witnesses the assassinations—the violent deaths—of his second and his third sons. An unimaginable horror after another. And there's no way for him to express his feelings except to sob. And he cries and he suffers, but he knows it won't bring back those lost sons." Source: www.npr.org 

Robert T. Littell: John and I shared similarities that connected us quickly. My grandfather was an old-line WASP from Barrington Hills, Illinois, where he’d made his name and fortune in banking, the same than John's grandfather Joe Sr. We had both turbulent childhoods and emerged with the confidence of survivors. Neither of us could we really talk about our fathers’ deaths. We’d been raised by strong-willed mothers and brainy sisters. And we shared a belief in our own future greatness. My big Teflon-coated ego was an important part of our fast friendship. Irreverent and cocky, I believed that I was John’s equal or better. I can’t explain this and don’t defend it; it’s just the way I was then. And John liked it. We found our friendship easy. From the start, we were each other’s best audience. We each knew the other to be hilarious, brave, and brilliant. That’s one of the key conditions for male bonding—deep, unconditional admiration. Add a constant stream of well-intentioned jokes and you’ve got the recipe for a great friendship. 

On one hand, John was the only son of the most accomplished member of a very prominent, accomplished clan like the Kennedys were. John was also, without question, the media’s favorite Kennedy: the “sexiest” one, the one who never got in trouble. On the other hand, John was something of an outsider within the Kennedy family. Though very close to Anthony Radziwiłł, and close to several of his cousins, especially Bobby Kennedy Jr., Timmy Shriver and Willie Smith, John had a slightly strained relationship with the tight-knit crew as a whole. He’d been raised outside of their Massachusetts world, kept apart by his protective and New York–based mother. She saw to it that her children were as independent as she was. It wasn’t long after our game that Jackie took the decision of occupy her own home on Martha’s Vineyard—close to the family, but still separate. The Hyannis Port gang teased John not for lack of love but, in my opinion, out of envy. This didn’t bother him a bit. He had the best of two worlds and he knew it. He could be tough when someone trespassed his boundaries, but in essence he was a sweet, compassionate and generous friend.

When John had to introduce Carolyn officially to the Kennedy clan, I was convinced she was going to have difficulties in adjusting that tense, suffocating atmosphere in Hyannis Port. I know Ethel Kennedy and Eunice Shriver tried hard to implicate her in the family activities, but Carolyn was seen as this modern, non-traditional young woman who didn't conform to the typical Kennedy wife in many aspects. John was a monogamous and loyal guy. Frankly, his loyalty with his friends was the same than his loyalty with his girlfriends. I know first hand he had many skirts thrown at him, but with women he was quite innocent, he was very innocent on that level. He even had blocked Madonna's advances. John gave me a very funny account of himself and Madonna stuck in a hotel room in Chicago, saying to the Material Girl he hadn't brought condoms, that was the excuse he used to stiff her. On another occasion, he gave Melanie Griffith a fake phone number, for Christ sake! I suppose some journalists would have liked to paint John as more of a playboy, or more of a Kennedy or more mysterious, but frankly he was rather transparent and I believe he stuck to his vows with Carolyn. —The Men We Became: My Friendship with John F. Kennedy, Jr. (2004) by Robert T. Littell

Merry Christmas in The House of Kennedy

1960: John F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy receive an early Christmas present. The President-elect and his wife Jackie Kennedy welcomed their second child, John F. Kennedy Jr., at the start of the holiday season on November 25. The couple returned to their Georgetown residence with their newborn son on December 10, 1960. 

In 1961, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy began the tradition of selecting a theme for the official White House Christmas tree. She decorated a tree placed in the oval Blue Room with ornamental toys, birds and angels modeled after Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker" ballet. Mrs. Kennedy reused these ornaments in 1962 for her children's theme tree. Set up in the North Entrance, this festive tree also featured brightly wrapped packages, candy canes, gingerbread cookies and straw ornaments made by disabled or senior citizen craftspeople throughout the US. 

Jackie Kennedy shows off the Christmas seals. In 1962, the First Lady posed with the Postal Service's Christmas seals. The limited edition stamps were sold around the holidays to raise money for charity. The First Lady stayed at the famous Carlyle hotel during her shopping trip.

1962: The Kennedys spend Christmas morning with the Radziwills. The Kennedy family was joined by Jackie's sister, Lee Radziwill, and her family at the White House in 1962. Here, the extended family gathering looks like your typical Christmas celebration. John F. Kennedy Jr. and Caroline Kennedy were busy opening their Christmas stockings while still in their pajamas on Christmas morning.

1965: Robert Francis Kennedy plays Santa in New York City. New York Senator Robert Kennedy accompanied his sister-in-law, Jackie Kennedy, to the Bronx community Christmas party in 1965 and handed out presents to the children. 

Aged 42, Robert Kennedy was shot and killed after winning the Democratic primary in California in June 1968. In an interview, John Lewis said: “I remember I just started crying and the next day I got up and I travelled to Atlanta; I think I cried all the way from Los Angeles to Atlanta. It was a dark, dark period.” Lewis, 78, who had joined Kennedy’s campaign for the Democratic nomination, remains convinced that he would have gone on to win the 1968 presidential election, where Republican Richard Nixon eventually prevailed. I got to know Robert Kennedy during the spring and summer of 1963. Lewis recalls: “Robert Kennedy was just a wonderful human being, a wonderful man. He had a great sense of humor, and he came across with the sense that he really believed, he had this great sense of passion, and I identified with that. When I was chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, better known as SNCC, at some of our meetings, we would have little skits. During the midst of the Freedom Rides, President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy became fully committed to the cause of civil rights. Bobby Kennedy tried his best. I saw this man grow, and during that time he had a tremendous influence on his brother, the President. When we heard that President Kennedy had been assassinated, we all cried. I cried because I felt I lost not just my President, but someone who was so inspiring to me, and such a wonderful human being. My organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, was to hold a meeting in D.C. the weekend of President Kennedy’s funeral at Arlington Cemetery. Sadly, many couldn't attend. The presidency was truly in Bobby's bag had he lived, it really makes me sad to think of what could've been. After the Kennedy brothers' deaths, I think something died in America, and something died within all of us really. We probably would never, ever, live the way we lived again, because these men had so much to offer, not just to America and not just to the American people, but to the world community. I feel even today that we were robbed of something, denied something, because of their untimely deaths.” Source: emkinstitute.org/resources/john-lewis

An all-grown-up JFK Jr. commutes in New York City during the holiday season, December 1993.

Fashion designer Susan Erneta: In 1993, I was 21 and living in New York City where I had just moved from Massachusetts. As a young girl dreaming of working in the fashion industry, I felt so lucky to land an internship with Fern Mallis of the Council of Fashion Designers of America. The CFDA was responsible for staging the runway shows in Bryant Park and it as the first year it had been done there.I was at the tents with Fern for a late night rehearsal one night with Mr. Calvin Klein. He was running this rehearsal with his new muse Kate Moss. All of the publicists were chic and good looking but there was one that stood out. She was so effortlessly gorgeous, blonde, and stylish and I remember thinking 'Why is she not on that runway?' She was classy and stunning and she had on the sickest outfit that I can still picture to this day. She was wearing a floor-length sweeping velvet skirt, black Adidas sneakers and a chunky black oversized turtleneck sweater.I attempted to emulate that outfit 1000 different ways and I often wondered who that amazingly stylish girl was. About a year later, I read that JFK Jr. had started dating a beautiful blonde, how a middle class girl whisked him away, and I was not surprised when I saw her face in the tabloids. It was the girl who worked for Calvin Klein! Carolyn Bessette took the Jackie's torch and she had a similar style of elegance. 

I knew John Jr. had dated a few models in the early 90s, one of them my friend Jennifer Kusner. In an article for Glamour magazine in 1999, they cover the time of his 30th birthday (1990), when he was dating my close friend Jenny, who was described in the article as a "good-looking, ginger-haired model". Jenny frequently threw dinner parties at her Manhattan townhouse. At one such event, John carried the evening with all his charm and reserve. There was something about him, observed writer Karen Duffy (a former Coney Island Mermaid Queen, chosen one of People Magazine's "50 Most Beautiful People" in 1993), "that tacitly asked for a bit of distance and respect." Despite his stunning looks, John Jr. was not an easy man or given to frivolous adventures, so that says a lot of Carolyn Bessette's formidable character to conquer him. The funny thing it was John who was stalking Carolyn. It was him who had some friends spying on her at nightclubs, and reporting back to John. He frequently asked his friends with connections to the fashion world about her. Source: issuu.com

Across decades and generations, the Kennedys have occupied a unique place in the American imagination: charmed, cursed, at once familiar and unknowable. The House of Kennedy (2020) by James Patterson, tries to shed light on the dual family motto: "To whom much is given, much is expected" and they did—but at a high price. James Patterson: Joe Kennedy Sr. and his wife Rose demanded that everybody in the family do the best they can be, be the best they could be, strive for something better and bigger and higher. And that's hard to live up to. They all had to strive to be as good as they could be and take risks. If I wrote an outline for a novel and if I had the things happen to a family that happened to this one, I think my publisher Little Brown would say, "This is silly. All of this couldn't possibly happen to one family." One of the things that drove me to write the book is I just felt that this is the great American family story because the characters are so vibrant and interesting. It covers a period from the Depression right through to present day. TV producer Barbara Hall wants to turn this into one of those series like "The Crown," so this would be like the American "Crown." I loved "The Crown," but these people were a lot more interesting really than Queen Elizabeth. The culture inside the family is more interesting than the royal family. One great anecdote was the notion of this patriarch, Joe Kennedy Sr., and he's had a stroke and he's in this bedroom up in Hyannis Port [Massachusetts] and he's really cold, but he can't communicate to anybody. And finally he communicates to a niece that he's cold, and she goes rummaging around the bedroom and finds this flag and covers him with this flag. I'm sure he recognized it was the flag that had covered the coffin of his son John F. Kennedy. There are a lot of incidents like that. The fact that when JFK was president, he would call up Judy Garland more than once and ask her to sing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" over the phone. Or the fact of Bobby literally saving his son from drowning and then that night being assassinated. Source: usatoday.com

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