JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century

“Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.” ―Aeschylus

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Fredrik Logevall goes on to pardon “our hero,” as he chummily refers to JFK, for some marital truancy. Jackie Kennedy, to her credit, had already paid JFK back for his womanizing. After hurriedly losing her virginity to the novelist John P Marquand in a lift that had stalled between floors, she flitted off for a refresher fling with him just before her marriage. “Say what one will about Joseph P. Kennedy,” Logevall writes, “it’s not every multimillionaire father who takes such broad interest in his children and who, together with his wife, instills in them, from a young age, a firm commitment to public service.” At one of his shiftiest moments, JFK hesitated about openly attacking the commie-baiting charlatan Joe McCarthy. But his evasive dodges only sharpen the contrast between his nimble ingenuity and the crude belligerence of McCarthy, whose foul-mouthed enforcer Roy Cohn became Donald Trump’s tutor in villainy and vengeance. As it happens, Logevall’s scornful characterisation of McCarthy and Cohn reads like a glance ahead to America’s present moral morass: Trump has inherited their thuggish bigotry, while JFK serves as a reminder that politics is not necessarily the preserve of cynical self-publicists and can be, as he said, a “most honourable adventure”, fit calling for a modern Lancelot. We know how it will end, as the Lincoln convertible passes the Dallas Book Depository, turns beside the hump of a grassy knoll and approaches a doomy-looking traffic tunnel – not quite the Arthurian cavalcade evoked by Steinbeck’s elegy, but the story of how JFK reached what he called his “rendezvous with death”. Source: www.theguardian.com

John F. Kennedy came of age in a second world war, then rose all the way to the presidency, only to be cut down at forty-six while leading a United States that stood at the zenith of its power. Through his magnetic leadership and inspirational rhetoric, he elevated Americans’ belief in the capacity of politics to solve big problems and speak to society’s highest aspirations, while in foreign affairs he showed it was possible to move from bitter hostility toward the Soviet Union to coexistence. By the middle of 1963, close to 60 percent of Americans claimed that they had voted for Kennedy in 1960, although only although only 49.7 percent had actually done so. After his death, his landslide grew to 65 percent. Kennedy’s average approval rating of 70 percent while in office puts him at the top among post-1945 American presidents, and later generations would rate his performance higher still. The more we understand Kennedy and his coming of age, in short, the more we understand the United States in the middle decades of the century. I am struck by historian and Kennedy adviser Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s remark, in his memoirs, A Life in the 20th Century: “For my generation, four dates remain indelibly scarred on memory: Pearl Harbor, the death of Franklin Roosevelt, the death of John Kennedy, and the landing of men on the moon.” 

JFK was, from the start, a man of the world, deeply inquisitive about other political systems and cultures, comfortable with competing conceptions of national interest. This was partly an outgrowth of his Irish heritage and the sensibility of his parents, who looked outward, beyond the nation’s shores. Partly, too, it resulted from his expansive reading as a bedridden child and teenager, which tilted toward European history and statecraft. Most of all, the internationalist ethos emerged from Kennedy’s travels during and after his college years—in addition to his grand excursion in 1939, there were substantial trips in 1937, 1938, and 1941. These trips broadened his horizons, as did his subsequent combat experience in the South Pacific. Herein lies a third theme: on matters of politics and policy, JFK was always his own master. He was the daydreamer, the introspective son, the one who relished words and their meaning, who liked poetry. Alone among the older kids, he had a romantic imagination, a feel for the things of the spirit, for the intangibles in human affairs. Source: www.nytimes.com

Joseph McBride: I find it highly suspicious that March 31 1968, LBJ announces he will not seek a second term and then immediately thereafter we have MLK (4/4/68) assassinated and RFK assassinated (6/5/68). To me this was some sort of cabal at the height of their power flexing. Later on, in 1983, the USSR was convinced that the United States was going to carry out a nuclear first-strike on them. In TV programs about this people always say "it's boggling that they believed we would do that" but if you look at it a certain way you can see why they would definitely believe that. Assuming JFK, RFK, and MLK were all assassinated as the result of a conspiracy and foisted upon the public and the world, you can see how the Russians would view us as irrational and violent and certainly capable of doing a first strike. Surely the Soviets knew the truth about these assassinations and the coup, and so it's with these things in mind that we have to consider their suspicions in 1983. Peter Dale Scott writes in Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, “In each case an incumbent President was removed from office, after a build-up of suspicion and resentment inside his administration because of his announced plans and/or negotiations for disengagement from Vietnam.” In fact, as I was beginning to recognize at the time of Nixon’s resignation in 1974, three presidents in a row -- Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon -- had been removed from office. 

It was becoming hard not to notice how the political system had changed with the Coup of ’63 and the coverup that followed. The calamitous turn in the Vietnam War when the Vietcong mounted the Tet Offensive in January 1968 led to President Johnson’s forced withdrawal from that year’s presidential race at the behest of his senior advisers, “The Wise Men.” That group was largely drawn from the leadership of the eastern establishment and including Clark Clifford, Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman, Henry Cabot Lodge, Douglas Dillon, and George Ball. Henry Brandon, the chief American correspondent of the Sunday Times of London, reports in his autobiography, Special Relationships: A Foreign Correspondent’s Memoirs from Roosevelt to Reagan (1988), about a conversation he had with President Johnson in 1968, after that decision was made: “LBJ, aware by then of his public repudiation, seemed to drag a burden of anguish in his wake when he spoke his own epitaph during a flight to visit President Truman in Independence, Missouri. ‘The only difference between Kennedy’s assassination and mine is that mine was a little more torturing.’” Carl Oglesby in The Yankee and Cowboy War interprets what he calls Johnson’s forced “abdication” as a Yankee power play by the Wise Men to “break off from the Cowboys a war believed to be unwinnable except through an internal police state, both sides fighting for control of the levers of military and state-police power through control of the presidency. Johnson’s Ides of March was a less bloody Dallas: it came of a concerted effort of conspirators to install a new national policy by clandestine means.” Source: educationforum.ipbhost.com

In the summer of 1988, JFK Jr. poured his inner anguish on his friend Sasha Chermayeff: “You know, you never get over it,” (reflecting on his father's assassination). There was an impenetrable core of John to which no tragedy, no sadness seemed to have ever broken him up. But John explained to her: “When I was growing up, I learned a person only reaches a total perspective after he's suffered. I realized I had to be broken to be whole.” When his wife Carolyn had gone several weeks without leaving their Tribeca apartment, John asked Sasha to talk with his wife. Carolyn was in bad shape when Sasha arrived. John could philosophically shrug the unrequited attention off, but Carolyn was different. He was anguished at the way she flinched under the pressure, recoiling back. On one occasion on the Cape he became so enraged at a photographer that he rushed at the man and broke his camera. “Fuck with me, but leave my wife alone!” he yelled, furious. John was so upset at the paparazzi that he talked to the district attorney’s office about getting them out of there, but that was legally impossible. Jackie had visited Istanbul, Turkey in 1985 and had told John that if he ever married, it was an ideal place to honeymoon. Traveling as “Mr. and Mrs. Hyannis,” Mr. and Mrs. John F. Kennedy Jr. arrived in Istanbul and checked into their penthouse suite atop the five-star Ciragan Palace Hotel, a former palazzo on the shores of the Bosporus.

Christiane Amanpour said: “I knew the manager, so I called him and expressed the need for privacy.” Upon arriving, the couple hired a cabdriver to give them a guided tour, visiting the Blue Mosque, the Hagia Sophia Church, and the Grand Bazaar, where John bought Carolyn jewelry. That evening they dined on the patio at the Tugra, one of several chic restaurants owned by the Ciragan Palace. The next day, they stopped at a café for honey cake and cups of Turkish coffee. At lunchtime they dropped into a local McDonald’s for a taste of home. Looking like typical American tourists, they went largely unnoticed and unrecognized except by other American tourists. That afternoon, while Carolyn napped, JFK Jr. lounged next to the hotel’s outdoor swimming pool when he saw a familiar face. The Globe had dispatched New York photographer Russell Turiak to Turkey in search of the newlyweds.

Despite her commitment to psychological therapy, Carolyn hadn’t yet become immune to the constant scrutiny exerted by the press, a process that obviously took time. “Carolyn used to hang out at her sister Lauren’s house in Tribeca and complain about the invasion of her privacy,” said mutual friend William Peter Owen. “She’d stay until late some nights. John would return to 20 North Moore Street, and she wouldn’t be there for him. This happened on several occasions. Carolyn feared he might abandon his magazine and enter politics overnight. As I understood it, he planned on a political career, and she intended to support him. She'd had a similar block against having children. I’d say that had they lived the next year or two, she’d have been both a mother and the wife of a senator.” Another charge levied against Carolyn by author Edward Klein in The Kennedy Curse, was cocaine use. The stories that periodically had surfaced—and later in Klein’s book—were, according to Littell, “wildly exaggerated. Carolyn may have done an occasional line of cocaine, but I saw no evidence that she had an addiction. I never saw her intoxicated from alcohol or incapacitated from drugs, and I’m certain John would have told me if there had been a problem, or if she’d done hard drugs like heroin or crack.” None of John’s other friends, including Richard Wiese, Chris Overbeck, John Hare, or John Perry Barlow, ever encountered Carolyn on a drug binge. Carole Radziwill, one of Carolyn’s closest companions, dismissed Edward Klein’s “unscrupulous” conjectures as “sheer nonsense.” Carole wondered: “Who is this group of anonymous friends of John and Carolyn’s who were so helpful in writing Klein’s book? No one in the Bessette or Kennedy family spoke to him, and I have spoken to many of Carolyn’s closest friends—none of us were asked to cooperate. Klein’s assertion of ‘hard drug’ abuse on Carolyn’s part is ludicrous. In the ten years that I knew Carolyn, I never once saw her use drugs. She was as much a ‘cokehead’ as Klein is a biographer. Some columns whispered they weren’t having sex any longer; that was the most ridiculous part, since no matter how their fights began, they ended in only one way. ”

Caroline Kennedy proved herself to be influential in rousing his brother's desire to eventually enter the political arena. In private John told friends and colleagues that the prospect interested him, that sooner or later he intended to make the transition from magazine editor to political candidate. Carolyn Maloney, New York Democratic congresswoman for the 14th District, heard that when John learned of Hillary Clinton’s interest in entering the senatorial race in New York in 2000, he polled for Maloney’s seat. He considered several other possibilities as well, among them the race for governor of New York. When Ted Kennedy suggested he consider running for office in Rhode Island, John responded, “That’ll put me in the same boat as Hillary—I’ll be regarded as a carpetbagger.” “Don’t be silly,” said Ted Kennedy. “Bobby was accused of being a carpetbagger when he ran for the Senate in New York in the mid-1960s. It didn’t stop him from winning.” John obviously also feared he would end up like his uncle Bobby if he ran for the Senate. On April 22 1998, John fulfilled the requirements for a private pilot’s license and purchased his first plane, the Cessna 182. Caroline Kennedy warned his brother by insisting that he took flights with extreme caution. “After all,” a family friend overheard Caroline say to him, “you’re no longer alone—you have a wife to worry about.” Caroline recognized that his brother was crazy about Carolyn. “‘Whenever she’s around,’ said once Caroline, ‘he’s got that goofy, fool-in-love expression on his face.’” —The Day John Died (2007) by Christopher Andersen

Jackie's Girl: Memoirs of Jackie Kennedy

“Kathy McKeon's delightful memories have been tucked away for fifty years, and thankfully, she has brought them out to share the enchanting magic of Camelot with us all.” —Kirkus Reviews

"An endearing coming-of-age memoir by a young woman who spent thirteen years as Jackie Kennedy’s personal assistant and occasional nanny—and the lessons about life and love she learned from the glamorous first lady. In 1964, Kathy McKeon was just nineteen and newly arrived from Ireland when she was hired as the personal assistant to former first lady Jackie Kennedy. Kathy not only played a crucial role in raising young Caroline and John Jr., but also had a front-row seat to some of the twentieth century’s most significant events. Because Kathy was always at Jackie’s side, Rose Kennedy deemed her “Jackie’s girl.” And although Kathy called Jackie “Madam,” she considered her employer more like a big sister who was also her mentor. Kathy witnessed Jackie and Aristotle Onassis’s courtship and marriage and Robert Kennedy’s assassination, dutifully supporting Jackie and the children during these tumultuous times in history. A rare and engrossing look at the private life of one of the most famous women of the twentieth century, Jackie’s Girl is also a moving personal story of a young woman finding her identity in a new country, along with the help of the most elegant woman in America." amazon.com

Shoes were actually the very first thing Jackie Kennedy and I bonded over. I somehow convinced myself that the thick-soled nurse’s shoes I bought were as stylish as they were practical. Off to the kitchen I picked up Jackie’s tray of tea, toast, a soft-boiled egg, and the daily newspapers. Her corner bedroom faced the broad sweep of Fifth Avenue and Central Park along the front, and the narrower, quieter Eighty-fifth Street to the side. But as I walked from window to window I became aware of a persistent little squeaking sound. The realization that it was coming from my feet, which were perspiring against the rubber of my new shoes made me more nervous. I hurried into the bathroom, hoping Jackie would think I was merely arranging towels, and frantically rummaged through her cupboards until I found the talcum powder. I sat down on the closed toilet lid and thoroughly dusted the inside of each shoe. I hurried back into the master bedroom, my shoes blissfully quiet. All that powder felt silky on my feet, too. No cheap drugstore stuff in that bathroom. My relief was short-lived when I noticed something floating around my feet at ground level, like a little white cloud. Jackie was busy with her breakfast by then and hadn’t noticed what I now spotted—powder marks all over her carpet. I took a few tentative steps and saw white puffs shooting out of my shoes. I darted back into the bathroom, shutting the door this time, and sat on the toilet lid again, trying to figure out what to do, now that my shoes were emitting what looked like smoke. Now I was trapped in Jacqueline Kennedy’s bathroom. I put my head in my hands and started laughing uncontrollably. “Kathy, is everything all right?” I heard the door open, and the worry in Jackie’s voice as she took in the sight of me with my face still buried in my hands, shoulders shaking. “What’s wrong?” she asked kindly. I was too embarrassed to answer, and in the midst of my giggling fit I wouldn’t have been able to get an intelligible sentence out anyway, so I jumped up and ran past her, shooting puffs of powder from my shoes as I fled. I was losing too much powder, though, and the squeaking noises were back, sounding louder and more urgent as I sprinted to my room. I collapsed on the bed, burying my face in the pillow to muffle my laughter. “Kathy?” Jackie tapped on the closed door. She stepped in, her perfectly arched brows furrowed with concern. The look on her face quickly turned to bewilderment when she realized that I was laughing, not sobbing. Unless I wanted a Secret Service escort to the loony bin, it was time to come clean. As I started to explain the whole story, Jackie burst into laughter, which sent me into another spasm of hysterics, and by the time I led her into the hallway to point out my telltale trail of powdered footprints, both of us had tears running down our cheeks.The rest of the staff took turns peeking around the corner, trying to see what was so amusing. We finally composed ourselves, and Jackie was still chuckling when she ventured into the kitchen, where the rest of the staff were clamoring to know what had just happened with the new girl. “Oh, that Kath is just too funny,” I overheard Jackie say.

While we were on holiday in Ireland, I would take John and Caroline on long walks through the green countryside, and they would delight in the sheep ranging free in the hills around us. I explained how the different-colored x’s painted on their backs helped identify which farmer they belonged to. John and Caroline had a deep compassion for all living things. One of John’s favorite toys was that big semi-truck he used to roll noisily down the hallway at the crack of dawn in hopes of rousing Maud Shaw, or me to come keep him company. It opened and closed like a garage in the back, and John often shut his hamster inside to give it joy rides, the joy being likely more John’s than the hamster's. One day he took a break from playing to wander into the kitchen for a midafternoon snack. He parked his truck by the back elevator and forgot about it. The next morning, when he went to get his hamster out of its cage and discovered it empty, he raced to me in tears. We went and found the truck. The guinea pig was alive, but wobbly. Caroline pounced on her forgetful brother. “How could you do such a horrible thing, John? she wailed. “I didn’t mean to!” John cried. The guinea pig was revived with food and water, and he lived to ride again.

Despite his intense gaze and coarse exterior, Mr. Onassis quickly proved to be a true gentleman; I had expected such a rich, important man to be cold and demanding, but he was friendly to the help, which always says something promising about a person’s character. He was also extremely generous. I knocked gently on Caroline’s door and went to sit on her bed, where she was curled up with her face in the pillow, her small shoulders heaving with her sobs. I couldn’t begin to imagine how she felt. A framed picture of JFK was always on her nightstand. I knew that however great a hero he was considered as president, he would always be ten times that hero to Caroline and John as a father. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’ll all work out good. He’s a nice man.” Hollow as the words must have sounded to a despairing ten-year-old, I meant every one. From what little I had seen of Aristotle Onassis, he seemed to genuinely want the children to like him. “We’re going to Greece,” Caroline said desperately. Caroline, always the good girl who minded her mother, composed herself and got up to pack for whatever new life was awaiting her now. “She told me I would need a couple of nice dresses.” We pulled out some shorts and bathing suits, too, and I went to see about John, who was hanging close to his mother but didn’t seem visibly upset by the prospect of getting a stepfather. 

It took some doing for John to dislike anyone, and Onassis had shown him only kindness. By the time she returned from her honeymoon cruising the Greek isles, Jackie Kennedy had become Jackie O. I was touched when Jackie went out of her way to make me feel special, surprising me with a strawberry and whipped cream cake and some lovely gifts—two turtleneck sweaters, a suede purse and a silver cigarette holder—for my twenty-first birthday.

“I envy you two starting out, doing it all your way,” Jackie said wistfully one day. She was hungry to hear all about my plans for setting up house with Seamus. I realized for the first time that she must have felt the same way I had, though on a much grander level, about the magnetic force of the Kennedy family pulling you close. She had famously redecorated and restored the White House, but here she was wondering what it was like to pick out tea towels at Gimbels. “Kathy, why don’t you and Seamus come down to my storage unit and see what you could use?” Jackie offered. She didn’t have to ask twice. The unit, it turned out, was more like a warehouse, packed with art, furniture, and all kinds of crates and boxes. She led us through the maze of things she’d even forgotten she had, making a list of what we were getting as she went. It was like winning a TV game show starring our very own host, Jacqueline Onassis. She arranged for everything to be loaded onto a truck and delivered to our apartment. Her thoughtfulness touched me more deeply than she could have known. My mother wasn’t going to make it for the wedding, and it felt nice to have Jackie’s attention and interest in my big new beginning. Her generosity didn’t stop there. “Where are you two going on your honeymoon?” she asked. “Someplace warm,” Seamus said. I wondered what lottery he’d won and not told me about. At the rate we were burning through our budget, he could scratch tropical paradise off his list unless Coney Island had palm trees and hula girls. “You should go to Barbados!” Jackie exclaimed. “I have a friend there who runs a resort. Let me book it for you as my wedding gift.” We were floored. Nancy Tuckerman swiftly followed through on the offer, making all the arrangements. 

Everything was being taken care of, from our flights and the gorgeous villa to our meals and even a rented cabana around the island. Mr. Onassis was wishing me well, and said he looked forward to meeting the gentleman lucky enough to marry me, and how lucky I was to have a carpenter as a husband, because I would always have a nice home and someone who was handy at fixing things. Did I know Saint Joseph was a carpenter? he went on. “Do you know what my first job was?” he asked. “I was a busboy cleaning tables. You always have to start from the bottom up to make something of yourself.” There was a check inside the cornflower envelope, too. It was one thousand dollars. His generosity blew me away. This was ten times the annual bonus I had always received from Jackie at Christmastime! John and Caroline had each written me little notes, too, wishing me a happy wedding. I was at home opening RSVPs when several names fluttered out of one envelope. “Seamus, they’re coming to our wedding.” I was in shock. “Oh my God, what do we do now?” He knew exactly who “they” were. I fanned out the response cards: Jacqueline and Aristotle Onassis, John Kennedy, Caroline Kennedy. We decided not to tell anybody. If we did and they didn’t show, we’d look like foolish braggarts. And if they were coming, we didn’t want word to leak out ahead of time, or the Astoria Manor would get overrun with paparazzi and crowds of looky-loos. Jackie had lost her Secret Service protection when she remarried. John and Caroline would keep their Secret Service until they were sixteen. 

“Why don’t you bring your family for the summer and stay in the Cape house?” Jackie suggested. We would be the caretakers for the season, and that way the house would always be ready whenever John or Caroline wanted to come. Seamus, she also knew, would ensure that the historic home was well maintained. It was a win-win proposition all around, and every June thereafter, we’d pile the kids, the dog, and all our gear for the summer into our van, bicycles strapped to the roof, and drive up to the Cape. John came back more frequently than Caroline, but the Cape was where she chose to have her wedding in the summer of 1986. I was touched to receive an invitation. John was staying over at the Cape house and immediately offered to babysit our kids Clare, Heather, and Shane; the kids were crazy about John. He was practically a superhero in his eyes. One very funny anecdote was when John admitted that he’d been making hamburgers and left the pan on the burner when he went to take a shower. John had a checkered history of combining showering and cooking; his attention disorder tended to sabotage that kind of multitasking. Seamus and me still remembered that time he had been fresh out of the shower with a towel around his waist when he fired up the grill to make us hamburgers. He’d turned around and lost his towel, causing Seamus to drily remark, “I thought you were making us hamburgers, John, but it looks like we’re getting wieners instead.” John laughed it off, a bit embarassed.

I still saw Jackie every so often, and we were in regular contact by phone, but it had probably been a year since I’d last seen her when I picked up the newspaper and read that she had cancer. There was a paparazzi shot of her in the park. She looked terribly thin and frail. I immediately dialed 1040. John came on the line. “Hi, Kathy,” he said. “It’s so nice of you to think of my mom.” I asked how she was doing, and he told me it didn’t look good. “She’s very, very ill.” We talked for a while, and I hung up, heartsick. I bought a get-well card and mailed it to her with my prayers. One of Jackie’s blue note cards arrived in the mail. On it was a typewritten message thanking me for my lovely card. “I think of you and Seamus and your children often,” it said, “and I hope we can all get together before long.” The last two words, handwritten, were her last to me: Much love. She died just two weeks later. I called Nancy Tuckerman, who told me I could come at two-thirty the next afternoon for the pre-funeral viewing. Jackie’s coffin was in the living room, draped with her favourite floral bedspread. I felt a deep pain in my heart. I had lost a great lady who had been so kind and made me feel like a friend so many times. John came out to greet us warmly. Caroline was at home with her children; the oldest of the three the same age she had been when I first met her. Caroline had sent gifts for my children over the years as well, and her graciousness reminded me so much of her mother.

John and his wife, Carolyn Bessette, were spending more time at Martha's Vineyard, and the place desperately needed some updating to suit a modern young couple. The big burn mark a hot pan had left on the Formica countertop in the kitchen had been hidden by a cutting board for decades, and that was just for starters. John had called Seamus to ask if Seamus could come give him some advice about renovations on the house. The stereo was blasting “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” when Seamus and I walked up the familiar path to the house at the Cape. John had been playing that same Rolling Stones record for a good quarter century—the song was his all-time favorite. How was it even possible that John was now thirty-eight years old? I hadn’t met Carolyn Bessette before, though of course I’d seen pictures of her all over the magazines. She was imposing and very pretty, but different from the other girls John had romanced over the years. Carolyn was harder to read, more distant and mysterious in a way. Her skin was almost as white and translucent as fine porcelain. She wore beige shorts and a black cashmere sweater. She was holding a fluffy tuxedo cat as he shed all over her sweater and cardigan. Seamus later told me John had confided how hurt he was by Carolyn’s apparent disinterest in the house remodeling, which John had tackled with enthusiasm. Carolyn never came up to offer her input. “Isn’t that strange?” John asked. I found it odd, too. You could tell with one glance that Carolyn had flawless taste and a great sense of style. Provi’s Dominican roots made her the absolute queen of daiquiri-making. She insisted on buying the best rum, dozens of fresh limes she squeezed by hand, plus bags of brown sugar. We sat down to dinner, with John insisting I take the seat at the head of the table, the one that had always been Jackie's, back when I was Jackie’s girl.

Carolyn opened up about feeling besieged by the paparazzis. John was clearly worried about his high-strung wife. “Kath, tell Carolyn how Mom used to handle them,” he prompted me. Provi jumped in to answer first, but John cut her off. “No, wait, I want to hear from Kathy,” he said. “When she was up here, she’d leave the gate smiling, give them one good picture, and they’d let her go,” I remembered. “No!” Carolyn nearly shouted. “I hate those bastards! I’d rather just scream and curse at them.” “That’s exactly what they want you to do,” I argued. “They’ll get great pictures.” She described how she had gotten chased down the sidewalk by a wolf pack of photographers, and ducked into a building to escape them. They cornered her by the elevator as she frantically pushed the button. “I can’t take it!,” she said exasperated. John interjected: “You gotta just take it easy,” he insisted. “Relax.” I told Carolyn how Jackie perfected the art of not responding to Ron Galella when he stalked her. “She knew if she kept the same blank expression on her face, he wouldn’t have a picture to sell,” I explained. “They all need something different. That’s why they yell things and try to scare you. They want a reaction. They want to get a picture showing you angry or scared.” We finished up dinner, and John soothed Provi’s ruffled feathers by complimenting her cooking. “This fish is delicious, Provi,” he told her. “The flavors are fantastic.” The gin and all that lime had made it more delectable. The Stones were still playing in the background, the volume lower, but the song was the same. It would finish then start again. I knew it was because John had done what he used to do as a boy with that very record player, adjusting a little pin on the arm so the needle set down in the same groove each time. With John and Carolyn making it their second home, we no longer moved up to the Cape with our family for the summer, but Seamus gave John fatherly advice about the work he was having done and John would ask for estimates and contractor’s bids on his behalf. “If they see my name, they think they’ve hit the lottery and the price gets jacked up four times what it should be,” John said. When they last spoke in the summer of 1999, John was eager to get the place in shape, a few weeks before he and Carolyn went for his cousin Rory’s impending wedding.

Seamus turned on the TV and the screen instantly filled with the image of John’s face with the words BREAKING NEWS beneath it. The reporter was saying the single-engine plane John was piloting had vanished the night before on a flight from the airport in New Jersey up to the Cape for Rory’s wedding. John, Carolyn, and Carolyn’s sister, Lauren, were aboard. I called Provi, who was summering at the compound with her son Gustavo. Provi told me she had dinner ready for John and Carolyn the night before, that Gustavo had left John’s Jeep for him at the airport earlier so it would be there when he landed. On Saturday afternoon, the news reported some piece of luggage bearing Lauren’s ID had washed up on a beach at Martha’s Vineyard. A coast guard admiral delivered a press briefing at the Pentagon, describing all the search efforts under way. Seamus and I had moved out from Queens when the children were growing up, buying a house a block from the shore in Rocky Point, Long Island. Seamus was sure the flight path John had taken would have had him flying right past our house. The night would have still been clear and beautiful then. He would have been safe with us. At Mass on Sunday, we prayed with our congregation for the Kennedy family, and for the Bessettes. The priest left prayer cards and red roses at the back of the church to take on our way out. Later that night, the coast guard admiral was back on TV, announcing that they were shifting their focus from search and rescue to search and recovery, official words to say they had given up hope. On the fifth day, the bodies of John, Carolyn, and Lauren were recovered and cremated. Their ashes were scattered at sea the next morning. Attending the funeral service at St. Thomas More, we ran into Ethel Kennedy. “We lost a good man today,” Seamus told her. “Seamus, we don’t know what we lost today,” she replied urgently. “We have no idea.” “That’s the end of Camelot,” I said, sobbing. I woke up convinced I had dreamed it all, or maybe blacked out. It didn’t happen, none of it. It couldn’t happen again. —"Jackie's Girl: My Life with the Kennedy Family" (2017) by Kathy McKeon

Vincent Salandria discussing the Kennedy case, JFK Jr (Fairytale Interrupted)

Vincent Salandria was a history teacher at Bartram in the 1960s; he was also a Penn-trained lawyer who spent decades independently investigating the JFK assassination and believes the CIA assassinated Kennedy with the military’s approval because he was moving toward ending the Cold War with the Soviet Union and the war in Vietnam. Vince began to feel his safety was at risk—he had received threats and he'd doubled his life insurance before taking his mid-’60s trips to Dallas. He would eventually learn the FBI created a file on him. The most daunting warning came, as Vince would tell a writer chronicling conspiracy theorists, after a panel discussion with Yale professor Jacob Cohen, in Boston in 1966. Late that night, there was a knock on Vince’s hotel door. It was Cohen. “I feel horrible,” he told Vince. “I feel like a crumb. Debating the assassination is horrible.” “We need to become more American,” Vince said. “We need to stop trying to act like a police state and go back to some of our original virtues, like skepticism of government and power. I can’t live in a police state—not Russian, Cuban or American.” “It’s not a question of whether you want to live in a police state,” Cohen said. “You’ll have to be killed.” This idea didn’t sound, to Vince, like an intellectual exercise. It sounded like Cohen was warning him of a potential threat.

Vince Salandria: The job for the American media was, to make this case look so complex, so prolix, so difficult to comprehend, so subject to debate, that the public would weary of trying to know. When in fact, the public did believe, always did believe that there was a conspiracy. And the public was permitted to believe, but it was not permitted to know the obvious. Only the center of the American power structure could have effectuated this conspiracy and expected that the American press would play along with it. Only the CIA could manipulate us internally and seek to provide hegemony over the whole world in terms of American military power. We would become more militarized. We would become more aggressive, more imperial. And at home we would become just a façade of a democratic structure.

David Starks: Why is this case still so important three decades later?

Vincent Salandria: I think it’s most relevant to our society. I think that what happened in Dealey Plaza was that a duly elected President was fired. Because this affects not only this country, but around the world. Perhaps a million South Vietnamese died as a consequence of what happened in Dealey Plaza. The world, hanging always, between peace and war. And it’s the interests of the people who killed Kennedy of maintaining war. That the constitutional process was relegated to a paper-thin façade. That what was left at that time, to American democracy, was relegated to theatrics; to the theatre of the absurd. And that what is happening now is a continuation of what was set forth then and that is, that we became more a militarized society. Under the guise of Cold War we were told that the increase of governmental expenditures to the military sector of the economy was necessary. So we began to spend on the order of 300 billion dollars of national wealth per year on the military industrial complex which caused us to neglect the private sector, neglect education, neglect health service delivery to the poor, neglect increasing poverty, neglect an effort to make the society fair, and to make the wealth of the country more equally and equitably distributed so that we’d have a state which we could be proud of, where the needs of our people would be met. Whether it be upward social mobility, which I enjoyed, and the future of the society could enjoy. Instead, we became militarized. Instead, rather than being competitive economically and maintaining our competitive edge and being able to maintain the highest standard of living in the world, we have been slipping. And now we have slipped to eleventh or twelfth in our standard of living. The number of poor increases. The injustice of this unequal distribution of wealth escalates. Public education is neglected. And we see that although the Cold War has dissipated, the military expenditures remain pretty much flat, hanging close to a 300 billion dollar a year point. That’s why it’s so significant. The people who seized power, November 22, 1963 at Dealey Plaza, are still in power and are still distorting the quality of the American constitutional structure and are still destroying the quality of life in this society. That’s why it’s so important. Additionally, some FBI files on Oswald from 1959-1960 remain classified, and could give us a better understanding of what the CIA didn’t want to relay to its Mexico station.

Democracy means you can believe anything. But if you purport to know this government is illegitimate because it is really controlled by the military industrial intelligence complex, and you act accordingly then the media will deal with you and then you’ll feel the weight of American governmental power. Allen Dulles was involved in a clear crime and covering it up. When Harold Feldman wrote that article, “Oswald and the FBI,” that prompted a secret executive session of the Warren Commission, during the course of this executive session, someone makes mention that Marina Oswald was going to testify before the Commission that Oswald was a double agent. Allen Dulles said, ‘That’s not going to happen.’ Issac Don Levine, who was an old Czarist right-winger, came to the United States and had solid US intelligence connections. Dulles said, ‘Isaac Don Levine has been assigned by LIFE magazine to write an article about Marina.’ Incidentally he never wrote such an article. He was assigned—I’m sure by American Intelligence, not LIFE magazine—to Marina Oswald to keep her quiet. Dulles said of Levine: ‘I have known him. I will talk to him. She will not so testify.’ That’s suborning perjury. That’s a crime. So Allen Dulles was clearly a criminal. The leading candidate for the killing of Kennedy always was the CIA. None other. Preserving democracy by destroying democracy was important. Preserving Vietnam by destroying My Lai and its people. This is the reasoning of the Military-Industrial Complex. This is the reasoning of these people of enormous power, enormous arrogance and murderous in their instincts.

The power of intelligence agencies increases in direct proportion to the degree of sickness of a nation. A healthy and united people can localize the cancer of a power-usurping intelligence agency and eventually extirpate its malignant cells from the nation’s political life. Therefore, the intelligence apparatus which killed Kennedy has a need to keep our society in turmoil. It has — in order to maintain its power — to generate a high degree of chaos. Chaos is required to make a people willing to accept such strong medicine as is administered by the secret police in order to restore order and to stabilize a disintegrating society. It takes an acutely sick society to be able to accept as palatable the terrible cure — totalitarianism. Source: ratical.org

"Ah come on, you know I don't deserve it." That was John F. Kennedy Jr.'s answer for why he refused an honorary degree from Maryland's Washington College just two months before his untimely death. That took grace, humility and a sense of perspective, three qualities that exist in short supply. Even Paul Bloustein, JFK Jr's plumber down the street, said that the man wanted to live his life simply. After his untimely death, John Jr went from being the affable son of a fallen president, a hard working district attorney and the editor of a political magazine to a secular savior. JFK Jr. was looking for a new house in New Canaan, Connecticut. He wanted to make his wife Carolyn happy. Perhaps because a privileged brain, charm, a sense of humor and good looks are insufficient explanations, dozens of commentators attributed the source of John Kennedy Jr's appeal to his lack of cynicism. "In many ways, JFK Jr. was on the threshold of a new chapter in his life. George just had been a stepping stone to public office," Michael Beschloss wrote in The Wallstreet Journal: "I think there has been this sort of unspoken assumption that John Kennedy Jr. at one point in his life might have run for president. And if he won, it would be a restoration of the Kennedy era." It should be no surprise that the press has used this tragedy to make John F. Kennedy Jr. "the blank slate for other people's dreams," were the words of NBC's Keith Morrison. JFK Jr was unpretentious, decent, socially aware and a dozen other good qualities. JFK Jr. sought none of his fame yet managed to live gracefully in spite of what must have been an incredible burden. He possessed a quality of character that few could maintain under such a magnifying glass, including his own father. 

John Jr never got caught in any disgraceful scandals, despite being under a magnifying glass his whole life. He didn't take an easy route (Jackie had discouraged his actor career), he persevered and got a law degree and spent 6 years in public service. He was very philanthropic and volunteered with a number of non-profit organizations, along with sitting on the boards of numerous family foundations. Senator Ted Kennedy said in the funeral that John Jr. had "found his shining star when he married Carolyn Bessette. His beautiful young wife -- the new pride of the Kennedys -- would cheer for John's team and delight her nieces and nephews with her somersaults. We dared to think, in that other Irish phrase, that this John Kennedy would live to comb gray hair, with his beloved Carolyn by his side. But like his father, he had every gift but length of years." John Jr had the charisma, the humility and a brilliant mind. But maybe politics, despite being his fate, would had been rough on him, because good men don't usually triumph or survive in a political arena. Source: www.nationalreview.com

RoseMarie Terenzio (John Jr's assistant at George magazine): Every morning, I found John Jr. going through the stack of mail that I had covered in notes with various questions. The whole of Central Park and the Upper West Side skyline was his backdrop as I sat across from him and the office’s wall of windows. I started in on his day: an editorial meeting at noon; lunch immediately after at Limoncello with Jeff Sachs, his friend and the executive director of Reaching Up, the charity they cofounded; then a 3:00 p.m. meeting with Biz Mitchell, executive editor of George. The office had new furniture, big ashtrays, Diet Coke, and a sofa—all the makings of a good lounge. That’s where Carolyn hung out whenever she visited John’s office. She’d flop down on the couch, a whirlwind of handbags and stories, and spent hours leafing through magazines and smoking, so that by the time she left, George’s office looked like a nightclub. The two of us had quickly developed a friendly rapport in the time I had been working for John. We talked almost every day, first brief conversations when she called for John, then longer gossip sessions when she called for me. “Did John apologize?” Carolyn asked. “He came home last night a nervous wreck and I said to him that I couldn’t believe he showed all those other losers the magazine first and left you sitting outside like the redheaded stepchild. I told him, ‘Oh no. You need to go in and apologize to her in the morning.’” Carolyn came to my defense by making John feel bad about what he’d done, which was so typical of her. 

When she first walked into the offices of Random Ventures, she looked like a model, effortlessly perfect in an unstudied yet elegant outfit, with an aura of mystery like Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks. Carolyn held her black patent-leather Prada purse behind her back with one hand, while absentmindedly twisting a lock of hair with the other. She wasn’t trying too hard. In fact, she wasn’t trying at all. From my point of view, John was happier when Carolyn was around him. I hadn't seen him so happy with his previous girlfriends. And Carolyn, like any smart woman, had a way of making John pay attention to sensible matters. She got him to differentiate between the people taking advantage of his generosity and those who needed a little extra attention from him. Once Carolyn treated me to Barneys, and when we were headed to the cashier with thousands of dollars’ worth of merchandise, I realized I couldn’t afford any of it. “You know what, Carolyn? I’m just going to take the shirt,” I said, trying not to be obvious while picking the least expensive thing in the pile. “I don’t need the rest of it.” “No,” she said firmly, and handed her credit card to the salesperson. “We’re going to take all of it.” Carolyn understood how lucky she was to be able to afford beautiful clothes, and she wanted to share the wealth with those she cared about. I loved the clothes and her generosity, even if I was uncomfortable with the extravagance of the gesture. 

Sometimes things could get really heated between John & Carolyn; for example, he would go crazy when she was on the phone all day while he was trying to get through, getting busy signal after busy signal since they didn’t have call waiting; or it upset him when Carolyn, a big-sister type to her friends, would spend an entire weekend dealing with someone else’s problems, which took her attention away from John. But no matter the issue, John and Carolyn always defused the situation with a joke. They never took anything so seriously that they couldn’t laugh at themselves. That, combined with the respect Carolyn had for John (and viceversa), took their relationship from dating casually to seeing each other every week at night to living together within a year. Carolyn was also worried that marriage would change their dynamic. She understood that the formality meant something, especially to John and his lifestyle; he was pretty old-fashioned indeed. As John’s girlfriend, she could skip a benefit or advertiser dinner without her absence being considered an insult. Once she was his wife, everything would have to be more carefully considered and planned. —"Fairytale Interrupted" (2011) by RoseMarie Terenzio

RIP Vincent Salandria

Vincent J. Salandria (1928 – 2020) was one of the first Warren Commission critics, and a persistent researcher of President John F. Kennedy's causes of assassination. Vincent J. Salandria has died at his home in Philadelphia, PA. He was 92 years old. “Vince Salandria is the greatest teacher we have on JFK. His False Mystery is our classic foundation for understanding President Kennedy’s assassination by his national security state for choosing peace. Read it and learn.” —Jim Douglass, author of JFK and the Unspeakable. A fierce and formidable critic of the U. S. government’s version of the events surrounding the president’s murder, Salandria is rightfully considered one of the first and most influential citizen activists who sought to challenge the official version of events. Salandria was born in Philadelphia in 1926. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1951 he became a lawyer. A pacifist, Salandria had a long record of campaigning for civil rights. Member of the American Civil Liberties Union, in 1964 Salandria published an article in the Legal Intelligencer where he argued that the wounds of President John Kennedy suggested he had not been killed by a lone gunman. Salandria argued that Kennedy had been assassinated by "the national security state" because he was trying to bring an end to the Cold War. Salandria also rejected the idea that the assassination was organized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Mafia, the Soviet Union, Fidel Castro or Lyndon B. Johnson. In 1975 Salandria told Gaeton Fonzi: "I'm afraid we were misled. All the critics, myself included, were misled very early. I see that now. We spent too much time and effort microanalyzing the details of the assassination when all the time it was obvious, it was blatantly obvious that it was a conspiracy. Don't you think that the men who killed Kennedy had the means to do it in the most sophisticated and subtle way? They chose not to. Instead, they picked the shooting gallery that was Dealey Plaza and did it in the most barbarous and openly arrogant manner. The cover story was transparent and designed not to hold, to fall apart at the slightest scrutiny. The forces that killed Kennedy wanted the message clear: 'We are in control and no one - not the President, nor Congress, nor any elected official - no one can do anything about it.' It was a message to the people that their Government was powerless." Source: spartacus-educational.com

In Retrospect: The Vietnam War, JFK

"The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding. You will continue to suffer if you have an emotional reaction to everything that is said to you. True power is sitting back and observing everything with logic." -Albert Camus

540,000 American combat troops arrived to Vietnam by 1968. There were no combat troops in Vietnam the day President Kennedy was assassinated. Vietnam was a Rubicon that Kennedy never showed any signs of crossing. As the advisors who were noted, LBJ’s tone and attitude were much more militaristic, compromising and controlling than John Kennedy’s. (Robert McNamara, In Retrospect) LBJ said, “I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way that China went.” Kennedy had appointed his Defense Secretary to supervise the withdrawal plan until its completion in 1965. Johnson not only ignored NSAM 263, he actually increased the advisors there to over 20,000. There is another manipulative statement Johnson made to McNamara that is probably the most revealing of all. He said, “How the hell does McNamara think he can—when he’s losing a war—he can pull men out of there?” It shows that Johnson was reading the Pentagon’s back channel reports about the true state of the war: namely Saigon was losing. Secondly, it shows that Johnson thought that Vietnam figured among America’s vital interests and it had to be defended at all costs. Because if we lost there, it would embolden the international communist conspiracy. This illustrates the difference between JFK and LBJ. 

Johnson was a classic Cold Warrior who completely bought into the Domino Theory. As National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy told his biographer, that was not the case with John Kennedy. (Gordon Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster, pp. 230-32) By the end of 1965, Johnson had committed over 175,000 American ground troops into theater. Ken O’Donnell later wrote a book with Dave Powers where he specifically stated that Johnson had broken with Kennedy’s policy on Vietnam. After Nixon resigned, Gerald Ford took office. The Warren Commission cover-up veteran brought with him two young conservative firebrands: Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Those two did not care for Kissinger’s foreign policy. They actually considered him too moderate. Thus began the neoconservative movement. Which eventually took over Washington, including the Public Broadcasting System. Source: kennedysandking.com

Jim DiEugenio: Robert Loomis was a former top editor at Random House who was known for sanctioning books that specialized in concealing true facts about the assassinations of the 60's: in 1993 he sponsored Gerald Posner's infamous Case Closed; in 1970 it was Robert Houghton's book on the RFK case, Special Unit Senator; and then again, he helped publish Posner's 1998 book Killing the Dream. Not only did Loomis help get these spurious books published, he got them out at timely moments in history. The Houghton book was published right after the trial of Sirhan Sirhan. The John F. Kennedy book was out at the 30th anniversary of his death. The King book was also published at the 30th anniversary, in the midst of a swirling controversy. Loomis was also the editor of James Phelan's 1982 book The casebook of an investigative reporter, which featured a derogatory chapter on Jim Garrison. Before Phelan ever got to New Orleans for Clay Shaw's preliminary hearing, he had already done work for government agencies." (p. 244,  Destiny Betrayed). Albert Rossi's 2013 review of Destiny Betrayed: "DiEugenio shows the deliberate theft of JFK's terms of US foreign policy and how the unravelling of five decades has "betrayed" the character of John Kennedy."

That journalistic duo, Phelan and Aynesworth, were both on the scene: Phelan as a witness for the defense and Aynesworth to help Shaw's attorneys. Phelan's job was to put the spin on each day's testimony for the residing press, thereby controlling the entire national media reportage on the Shaw trial. He would invite all the reporters over to his rented house. On the day the Zapruder film, depicting Kennedy's body being violently knocked back, Phelan really shook up the press. It appeared Jim Garrison was right, that it had been a conspiracy. But then Phelan pulled a proverbial rabbit out of his hat. He began to outline the dynamics of the socalled 'jet-effect' explanation for the action on the film. That is, if Oswald was firing from behind Kennedy, why does Kennedy's body recoil with tremendous force to the rear of the car? This is how determined Phelan was to keep a lid on what came out of the trial. One can only assume where the reporter got his quick course in physics to dream up such a theory in a matter of hours.

The Kennedys were different, and that's why they were killed. Those who conspired to do so recognized that assassinating their characters would be a crucial part of the ongoing cover-up. I think they were fighting evil forces, and I will always consider them heroes. I'm usually very cynical about politics, and there are very few politicians I have admired during my lifetime. In comparison to their contemporaries, the Kennedys were about as honest as political figures can be. They actually did try to work for the greater good, and they were murdered because of it. If there are such things as "good guys," then John and Robert Kennedy fall into that category. In 1978, according to John Malcolm Blair’s definitive study The Control of Oil, the Rockefeller family had controlling interest in four oil companies of the top eight in the world. They were also in control of Chase Manhattan Bank, one of the biggest in the nation then and the largest today. 

They also owned the single most expensive piece of real estate in the country, Rockefeller Center in New York City. Among the list of private companies they own are IBM and Eastern Airlines. As Mort Sahl relates, before the 1960 election, he liked to say that Kennedy was the scion of a multimillionaire. Kennedy cornered him once on this topic and asked him point blank how much he thought his family was worth. Sahl replied, “Near two hundred million.” Kennedy then asked him how much he thought the Rockefellers were worth. Sahl said he had no idea. Kennedy replied sharply, “Try about four billion. Now that’s money, Mort.” The Rockefellers minions were John J. McCloy, Allen Dulles, with close ties to the Texas oil men who, along with the CIA, probably arranged the JFK assassination. If General Ed Lansdale was involved, then Allen Dulles very likely was (look at Dulles outrageous behavior on the Warren Commission farce), and if Allen Dulles was then Nelson Rockefeller very likely was. And if Nelson Rockefeller was involved in the JFK assassination, then I think it is very likely that Henry Kissinger knew exactly what was happening. Kissinger went to Harvard with McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy's NSC advisor who acted extremely suspiciously in promoting the "lone nutter" fantasy within hours of JFK's murder, not a reasonable thing to do base on the overwhelming real time evidence of multiple shots and shooters (plural). McGeorge Bundy was the secretary of the CFR at the same time future CIA head Allen Dulles was the president of the CFR. The CFR was heavily influenced, almost controlled by the Rockefellers. It's possible the Rockefellers used the CIA/military to kill JFK. Then Allen Dulles, Gerald Ford and John McCloy covered it up on the Warren Commission farce.

About Mimi Alford's story, it is clear that Robert Dallek's conclusion that Alford had an affair with President Kennedy is not borne out by what Barbara Gamarekian actually said in her oral interview archived in the JFK Library.  Yet it is remarkable how many journalists cited Dallek in their articles as if this story was true. It speaks to the lazy state of journalism in today's internet world and it speaks poorly of Dallek that he would write what he did. What Gamarekian said in 1964? Here are a few statements she made in that interview: "It could have been one of the special assistants who was interested in Mimi and flew her down to Nassau. I don't know if JFK wasn‘t implicated in it. I like to think that as far as the President was concerned, he indulged in this all sort of vicariously and it was fun to have pretty girls around." Even someone like Edward Jay Epstein could figure it out. A couple of excerpts from his 1997 article that appeared in the Los Angeles Times: "The conclusions Hersh drew about a sexual relationship between JFK and Marilyn Monroe had no basis except for unsubstantiated celebrity rumors. Hersh's other discoveries all involve recovering snatches of lost memories from distant or defective witnesses, a questionable technique of reporting that he pushes to the limit of credibility. About Robert Kennedy and Marilyn, Hersh must have invented these facts. Such license may serve to expand the universe of creative journalism, but it unfortunately does not produce credible history. When his pretensions fade away on scrutiny, this book turns out to be, alas, more about the deficiencies of investigative journalism than about the deficiencies of John F. Kennedy."  Source: educationforum.ipbhost.com

John Kennedy Jr. signed his will on December 19, 1997, some 15 months after his marriage to Carolyn Bessette, who died with him in the tragic plane crash on July 16, 1999. JFK Jr's will had the heading: "I name my cousin Anthony Radziwill as executor of my will; and if for any reason, he fails to qualify in that capacity, I name my cousin Timothy Shriver as my executor in his place. I give all my tangible personal property, wherever it is located, to my wife Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy." In the event his wife didn't outlive him, his will provided that his belongings would go to their children, if they had any. If not, he directed that all the property go to Caroline Kennedy's children. Christopher Andersen, author of The Day John Died (2000) refuted reports of discord between John Kennedy Jr and his wife Carolyn Bessette. "All this talk about them headed for a divorce was baloney," he says. "John Jr was an astoundingly moral and ethical person and he wanted this marriage to work." Andersen found no evidence to support rumors that Bessette abused cocaine. "I've talked to people who knew that Carolyn was taking antidepressants, but there was no indication of drug abuse. It's awful that she continues to be defamed."

Andersen says another misconception about John Kennedy Jr, founding editor of George magazine, was his intellectual prowess: "John Jr had a tremendous wit and native intelligence, and above all, he was a really nice guy." "I'm a warts-and-all writer," Anderson reckons, "and I couldn't really find any warts in John's life. He was loved by everybody." JFK Jr's godmother, Martha Bartlett, called Carolyn's ex Michael Bergin's book The Other Man "Pure fiction and hogwash. In my day, we would call this Bergin character a cad, especially since John and Carolyn are no longer around to defend themselves." Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's cousin John H. Davis also weighed in: "I'm horrified by this book," Davis said. "It's really horrible these things are being said, and they're not true." Likewise, Painting Horses: A Memoir by Sybil Hill was discontinued (out of print) in 2016 due to its dubious veracity. Source: www.usatoday.com

The Devil All the Time, The Unmaking of America

Netflix has a new psychological thriller starring Tom Holland and Robert Pattinson that is set to hit the screen on September 16. The Devil All the Time features the Spider-Man: Homecoming actor in the role of Arvin Russell, a young man forced to fight the sinister characters that threaten him and his loved ones in a Midwestern Gothic tale that takes place over the course of two decades. The official premise alludes to the ominous tale that was adapted for the screen from Donald Ray Pollock’s novel of the same name. “In Knockemstiff, Ohio and its neighboring backwoods, sinister characters — an unholy preacher (Robert Pattinson), twisted couple (Jason Clarke and Riley Keough), and crooked sheriff (Sebastian Stan) — converge around young Arvin Russell (Tom Holland) as he fights the evil forces that threaten him and his family. Spanning the time between World War II and the Vietnam war, director Antonio Campos’ The Devil All the Time renders a seductive and horrific landscape that pits the just against the corrupted,” the official Netflix description reads.  

Much like his previous credits would suggest, director Antonio Campos is not crafting something breezy, with the trailer alone filling you with a sense of dread as Arvin Russell's tortured soul battles for some sense of justice. "It was a hard book to adapt also because there was so much that we loved," Campos said of the project earlier this month whilst discussing adapting Pollock's novel with brother and co-writer Paulo Campos. "I'm a big fan of southern gothic and noir and this was a perfect marriage of the two. Sometimes you might be adapting a piece and you think like, Well, there is a seed of a good idea here and I'll just throw everything away and start from scratch. In this case it was like, we love everything!" The Devil All the Time is scheduled to be released onto Netflix on September 16. Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

How the ‘Useful Idiots’ of Liberal New York Fueled Income Inequality: Kurt Andersen, founder of Spy magazine and the author of “Evil Geniuses,” on how affluent lefties slept through the escalating inequality crisis. In his new best-selling book, “Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History,’’ the author and cultural critic Kurt Andersen performs a deep excavation of the country’s inequality crisis. He finds the roots not only in the balance-tilting schemes of Wall Street and the champions of right-wing political economics but also in the obliviousness of the liberal professional class. Kurt Andersen cops to his own part in the profound social reordering that has taken place since the 1980s. Anderson: Wall Street is the problem here. You’ve got all this money sloshing around — backing restaurants, theater, everything. Among my cohort — Gen Xers in New York — there was a great premium placed on irony and detachment over earnest engagement with pretty much anything. As soon as we turn the clock back on economic inequality and insecurity and immobility and de-rig the system and reduce Wall Street power, as soon we go back and replace market values as the supreme values in America, I’ll stop. Until that happens I'll follow the critique of a system that disadvantages almost everyone. Source: www.nytimes.com