Marilyn Monroe, Madonna, JFK, JFK Jr

A passionate love affair between Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy has been assumed for so long that it has achieved as solid a place in public awareness as almost any other event in the man’s presidency. All that can be known for certain is that on four occasions between October 1961 and August 1962, the president and the actress met, and that during one of those meetings they telephoned one of Marilyn’s friends from a bedroom; soon after, Marilyn confided this one sexual encounter to her closest confidants, making clear that it was the extent of their involvement. In October 1961, after a photography session for a magazine, Marilyn asked Allan Snyder to deliver her to a party at Patricia and Peter Lawford’s Santa Monica beach house. The occasion was a dinner party honoring President Kennedy, and among the other guests were several blond movie stars—Kim Novak, Janet Leigh and Angie Dickinson, for all of whom the president had a keen appreciation. All contrary allegations notwithstanding, this was the first meeting between Marilyn Monroe and John Kennedy; hearsay about any earlier introduction simply cannot be substantiated. The schedules of Monroe and Kennedy since his January 1961 inauguration reveal wide geographic distances between them. That October night, Marilyn was driven back to her apartment by one of the Lawfords’ staff.

The second encounter occurred during February 1962, when Marilyn was again invited to a dinner party for the president, this time at the Manhattan home of Fifi Fell, the wealthy socialite widow of a famous industrialist. She was escorted to the Fell residence by Milton Ebbins. The third meeting occurred on Saturday, March 24, 1962, when both the president and Marilyn were houseguests of Bing Crosby in Palm Springs. On that occasion, she telephoned Ralph Roberts from the bedroom she was sharing with Kennedy. “She asked me about the solus muscle,” according to Roberts, “which she knew something about from the book The Thinking Body, and she had obviously been talking about this with the president, who was known to have all sorts of ailments, muscle and back trouble.” That night in March was the only time of her “affair” with JFK. “A great many people thought, after that weekend, that there was more to it. But Marilyn gave me the impression that it was not a major event for either of them: it happened once, that weekend, and that was that,” said Roberts. Accounts of a more enduring affair with John Kennedy, stretching anywhere from a year to a decade, owe to fanciful supermarket journalists and tales told by those eager for quick cash or quicker notoriety: those who fail to check the facts of history and are thus easily dispatched as reliable sources.

“Marilyn liked President Kennedy, the man as well as the office,” according to Sidney Skolsky, among the first friends to be informed of the March tryst; he added that she also enjoyed the fantasy that this experience carried—“the little orphan waif indulging in free love with the leader of the free world.” And as she soon after told Earl Wilson, Rupert Allan and Ralph Roberts, she found John Kennedy amusing, pleasant, interesting and enjoyable company, not to say immensely flattering. As for Mrs. Kennedy, as Skolsky added, “Marilyn did not regard her with envy or animosity.” The exaggeration of his “affair” with Marilyn is part of the myth of King Arthur’s Camelot. There was a need to believe in the tradition of courtly intrigues and infidelities—Lancelot and Guinevere, Charles II and Nell Gwynn, Edward VII and Lily Langtry. But in this case there was but one rendezvous between the attractive, princely president and the reigning movie queen; to follow the Arthurian simile: the mists of Avalon are easily dispersed by shining reality’s clear light onto the scene. It is important to establish definitively the truth of this matter not only for the sake of historical accuracy but also because of a far more damaging rumor that began after Marilyn Monroe’s death. 

The unfounded and scurrilous accounts of a concomitant or subsequent sexual affair with Robert F. Kennedy, has been even more persistent than that of the presidential liaison. It has also led to the completely groundless assertion of a link between Robert Kennedy and Marilyn’s death—a connection so outrageous as to be hilarious were it not also injurious to the man’s reputation. The rumors of an affair with Robert Kennedy are based on the simple fact that he met Marilyn Monroe four times, as their schedules during 1961 and 1962 reveal, complementing the testimony of Edwin Guthman, Kennedy’s closest associate during this time. But Robert Kennedy probably never shared a bed with Marilyn Monroe. Guthman, a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter and journalist, was Special Assistant for Public Information in the Kennedy administration as well as senior press officer for the Justice Department. The travel logs of the attorney general’s schedule for 1961–62 (preserved in the John F. Kennedy Library and in the National Archives) support the detailed accounts provided by Guthman. These, collectively, attest to the fact that Robert Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe enjoyed a socially polite relationship—four meetings and several phone calls over a period of less than ten months. But their respective whereabouts during this time made anything else impossible—even had they both been inclined to a dalliance, which is itself far from the truth on both counts.

Marilyn’s first meeting with Robert Kennedy occurred several weeks before her introduction to the president. “On either October 2 or 3, 1961,” said Guthman: “Kennedy and I were attending a series of meetings with United States attorneys and members of the FBI in Albuquerque, Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle. The attorney general and I attended a dinner party at the Lawfords, and around midnight Marilyn decided to go home. But she had drunk too much champagne, and we were worried for her. Bobby and I would not let her drive her car, and we did so together, delivering her safely to her door.” The second meeting between the attorney general and Marilyn occurred on Wednesday evening, February 1, 1962, when he and his entourage dined at the Lawfords en route from Washington to the Far East on a diplomatic journey. “That evening,” according to Guthman, “Marilyn was quite sober—a terrifically nice person, really—fun to talk with, warm and interested in serious issues.” Pat Newcomb, also present at the dinner, remembered that Marilyn really cared about learning. The day before [the dinner party], Marilyn told me, “I want to be in touch, Pat—I want to really know what’s going on in the country. She was especially concerned about civil rights. She had a list of questions prepared. When the press reported that Bobby was talking to her more than anyone else, that’s what they meant. I saw the questions and I knew what they were talking about. She identified with all the people who were denied civil rights.” —Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (2014) by Donald Spoto

Madonna has finally confirmed that the mystery project she's been writing throughout quarantine with Oscar-winning Juno scribe Diablo Cody is in fact a movie about her life. In a Thursday evening Instagram Live session, the pop icon revealed extensive details about the film's plot, describing its focus as a tale of the making of a superstar. The 62-year-old confirmed the pair have so far written 107 pages of the script, which they said will likely end up with a two-hour runtime. "We do talk about Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Martin Burgoyne and the whole coming up as an artist in Manhattan, downtown, Lower East Side in the early '80s," Madonna said of the project. "Honestly, it's one of the best times of my life, and one of the worst times. I hope I can portray or express what a thrilling time that was for me in every way." It appears Cody's signature wit and signature comedic edge will make their way into the movie, given that Madonna describes Warhol's dialogue as "monosyllabic". The currently untitled movie is set to feature scenes about the creations of some of Madonna's most memorable works like True Blue, Material Girl (inspired by Marilyn), including a "great scene of me writing Like a Prayer with Pat Leonard," and her devastating experience with Pepsi, referencing the soft drink company infamously severing its sponsorship contract with the superstar after intense social backlash over the 1989 single.

Over the years, fans have speculated as to who could potentially play the singer-songwriter in an eventual biopic, and in recent weeks their focus turned to Ozark actress Julia Garner (Emmy Award winner) after it was discovered that both Madonna and her manager, Guy Oseary, had followed the 26-year-old on Instagram. In her Instagram video Madonna begins by joking, 'I'm writing a different script.' Cody, 42, laughs at this and says, 'What if you're writing someone else's life story, while I write yours?' Source: ew.com

At a newsstand, JFK Jr. looked at the latest edition of Vanity Fair with a provocatively blonde Madonna on the cover. Inside she had posed for a photoshoot as part of an “Homage to Norma Jean/Marilyn” pin-up layout. JFK Jr. and Madonna were seen working out together at a gym called Plus One, in Manhattan’s Soho district, after which they were also spotted jogging together at Central Park. Here was America’s most eligible bachelor, dating the world’s “most glamorous and exciting singer.” However, Madonna had hesitated to pose again as Marilyn for John's magazine George, maybe sensing a looming curse if she did. Ever since the 1940s, Jackie had read Life magazine and the issue that most shocked her was the one featuring Madonna imitating the physicality of Marilyn Monroe. Ted Sorensen said, “It was like Marilyn coming back from the grave to haunt Jackie. Marilyn had an adventure with her husband. Now Madonna was trying to take her son away.” During her son’s affair with Madonna, John didn’t keep her abreast of developments, so Jackie had to read about him in the papers.

“Madonna realized that adding John F. Kennedy Jr.’s scalp to her sexual belt would be another good publicity coup,” said author Wendy Leigh. In his biography of Madonna, Andrew Morton wrote: “Although JFK Jr. and Madonna dated for a brief period, the affair was not a success. John Junior was intimidated by Madonna’s reputation and she was not really his type. His psychology therapist had explained him Madonna represented insurrection for him, not romance, just a way of acting out his rebellious ways against his mother. Rather ruefully, Madonna explained to some friends that John Kennedy Jr was just too nervous in her presence for them to click sexually. The chemistry certainly wasn’t there. ‘Some guys can handle the fame, others can’t,’ she said. “And he couldn’t.” Even if passion wasn’t there, Madonna knew a hunk when she saw one: “He is extraordinarily handsome, and when he looks down at you with those bedroom eyes, you melt.” Author J. Randy Taraborrelli quotes a friend of John who claimed, “I heard from good sources that Madonna did what she could to interest John, but he didn’t take the bait and kept his distance.” According to former law school classmate Christopher Mayer, John had confessed: “I don't want to be alone with her. She scares the hell out of me.” Besides, Madonna was still married to Sean Penn, an estranged husband prone to jealousy. Penn had an arsenal of handguns in the basement of his Malibu villa. At one point he put up a poster of John and fired with bullets from his .357 magnum. He got John right between the eyes.

John F. Kennedy Jr. was considered a perfect specimen of young American manhood. But was he really? Similar to the medical handicaps that had plagued his father JFK, it's not difficult to infer he had inherited some of his health ailments, in his case Graves Disease. Although less serious than JFK's Addison disease, when it flared, it left him depleted of energy for long periods of time. Despite his seemingly social charisma, there were hidden signals of a traumatized youth who was often overly medicated, taking Ritalin for Attention Deficit Disorder when he was a kid and antidepressives (Wellbutrin) in his adult age. It seems that in some respects, his mother Jackie had been his harshest critic, and to some extent his sister Caroline echoed these sentiments. Jackie had called him “an underachiever.” He defended himself by claiming he was dyslexic. Jackie equivocally thought Onassis would leave his son a $15 million trust fund when he passed away. But when the Onassis will was published on June 6, 1975, the Greek magnate had left JFK Jr. only a meagre bequeath of $ 25,000. Jackie had warned her son that if he wanted to be president, “You’ve got to stop dating all those floozies. America likes its First Ladies respectable. Posing nude for Playboy is not the way to go if you want to sit in the Oval Office one day.” He did not want to remind his mother that her own nude pictures taken in Skorpios had been put in circulation in 1972 by Hustler magazine. Jackie Kennedy, in fact, had the dubious honor of being the first First Lady ever featured in a nude centerfold.

Christina Haag dated JFK Jr. since 1985-1989: In the intimacy, John demonstrated me a great deal of masculine energy which made me immediately connect to my feminine energy, and I truly loved it. He demonstrated enough curiosity when I gave him a book about Tantric sex for Christmas. John always was more interested on the romantic side during the relationship, but he seemed to be very fascinated by the possibilities that Tantric tecniques offered us. He always took responsibility for my pleasure first and he was most attentive, with a fondness for lenghty cuddly sessions. John believed his father actually had not been that great of a lover. But he also thought men were supposed to take action and take the lead. Since the beginning, I had realized he would be great husband material someday. Leadership was a quality so important and attractive for me. —Come to the Edge: The Love Story of John Kennedy Jr. and Christina Haag (2011)

During his first semester at Phillips Academy in Andover, John Jr met Sasha Chermayeff, who would become one of his closest friends. He would later refer to her as the “platonic love of my life” and “the coolest, least stuck-up girl I know.” She had attended the prestigious Dalton School while John was at Collegiate, and they had both made the unusual decision to transfer to Andover in the eleventh grade. “It was unusual,” she reflected, “because most people did not go to Andover for only two years.” Since both of them were new to campus, John and Sasha naturally bonded, ending up enrolled in many of the same classes. She described him as “this funny, sweet, loving guy.” “Two weeks into that first semester, we were already quite friendly,” Sasha recalled. “We made out once but we didn't go further.” It was Jackie’s decision to transfer John from Collegiate, where he was performing well with high grades, to a new school in rural Massachusetts. “His mother was very anxious about safety in Manhattan,” recalled Collegiate history teacher Bruce Breimer. “She was afraid he was going to get hurt, that some nut was going to find him.” John had lost his Secret Service protection and he could become an obvious target. Soon Sasha and John engaged in long conversations, and she quickly realized that he was more complicated than he appeared. “John didn’t have a carefree background,” she reflected, “yet he came off like this carefree guy.” About John's interest to study film, “I really think that’s just a myth,” reflected Sasha. “I think he enjoyed acting. But he had no intention of pursuing acting professionally, ever. I never ever heard him say anything seriously about wanting to pursue it as a real life’s work.” She learned from their conversations “that there were big difficulties in his life,” and his problems became “more complex as he got older. It wasn’t easy being John, but he carried his burden with such enormous grace.” On 8 July 1999, Sasha Chermayeff joined her close friend John F. Kennedy Jr. for a dinner in Manhattan. Afterward, as the two walked home through the city streets, Kennedy turned to her and said: “I really want to have a child with Carolyn.” Eight days later Sasha had lost John forever. —The Day John Died (2007) by Christopher Andersen

The Inheritance, JFK vs. Allen Dulles

The Inheritance – Poisoned Fruit of JFK’s Assassination (2018) by Christopher Fulton with an Introduction by Dick Russell. The Inheritance concerns some of the most important and significant records and evidence in the assassination of President Kennedy that remained out of government control for a long time, and crushed the lives of everyone who crossed paths with it, including RFK, Evelyn Lincoln, Robert White and Christopher Fulton. Only Fulton is left alive to tell the story and a convoluted one it is, but one that is factually well-documented and confirmed by other sources, at least the key aspects we are concerned with. The list of coincidences between the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy first garnered my interest, one being Lincoln’s secretary was named Kennedy and Kennedy’s secretary was named Lincoln. The basic facts that can be acknowledged and elaborated on is that RFK knew that his brother was the victim of a conspiracy, one that was being covered up by the federal government, and he began collecting evidence and records on the assassination he wanted kept out of the government's control and left them with Mrs. Lincoln. We knew that RFK didn’t even trust the National Archives when he instructed the secretary at the National Photo Interpretation Center (NPIC) to collect, box and deliver the NPIC records on the assassination to the Smithsonian, instead of the NARA where they belonged. Fulton says that because the Cartier watch was only inches from JFK's head when he was shot, traces of the mercury coated bullet that exploded through JFK’s head could be found on the watch's surface, proof of a conspiracy having taken place. Source: jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com

“The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it.” -John F. Kennedy

I don't know if you'd call it a coup from the inside but Abraham Lincoln did have the Treasury print money rather than borrow from the Federal banks. That way kind of a coup in that without that change the North might have had a lot more trouble. During the Civil War (1861-1865), President Lincoln needed money to finance the War from the North. The Bankers were going to charge him 24% to 36% interest. Lincoln was horrified and went away greatly distressed, for he was a man of principle and would not think of plunging his beloved country into a debt that the country would find impossible to pay back. Eventually President Lincoln was advised to get Congress to pass a law authorizing the printing of full legal Treasury notes to pay for the War effort. Lincoln recognized the great benefits of this issue. At one point he wrote: “We gave the people of this Republic the greatest blessing they have ever had – their own paper money to pay their own debts.” In America's Secret History by Steve Harris, the author argues that 20th president of the United States James Garfield's assassination was the first American coup. Source: educationforum.ipbhost.com

JFK vs. Allen Dulles: Battleground Indonesia (2020) by Greg Poulgrain, with Foreword by Oliver Stone and Afterword by James DiEugenio. "In 1936, an Allen Dulles-established company discovered the world's largest gold deposit in remote Netherlands New Guinea. In 1962, President Kennedy intervened, and Netherlands New Guinea was added to President Sukarno's Indonesia. Neither Sukarno nor JFK was aware of the gold reserves, since Dulles had not informed Kennedy. Dulles planned a complicated and ruthless CIA regime-change strategy to seize control of Indonesia's vast resources, including its gold. Yet Kennedy's plan to visit Jakarta in early 1964 would have sunk Dulles' master plan, which included the destruction of the Indonesian communist party as a wedge to split Moscow and Beijing. Did Allen Dulles arrange for JFK to be killed to save his plan? Using archival records as a basis, Greg Poulgrain adds word-of-mouth evidence from those people who were directly involved—such as Dean Rusk who worked with President Kennedy and Allen Dulles at the time; or Michael Rockefeller when he disappeared in West New Guinea during this whole affair. What many people do not realize is that large US corporations were the ones who essentially yelled and screamed at Eisenhower and Dulles to do something about Castro, since he knew they were undervaluing the price of land under Batista."

In 1959, Cuba’s Nicaro nickel-and-cobalt operation, abiding at Moa Bay, was the fourth-largest in the world. The Nicaro nickel plant, through various subsidies cost American taxpayers $100,000,000. The rest of the money came from a group of American steel companies and major automobile makers. The Batista Government made lucrative deals with Freeport Sulphur Co. to grant tax exemptions and other privileges (Time Magazine, 1958). The tax break led to charges that the U.S. Ambassador to Cuba and Langbourne Williams of Freeport had made a special deal with Batista. The contract would eventually lead Freeport into a Senate investigation and a confrontation with President Kennedy over the issue of stockpiling. (Batista's Tax Break for Freeport Sulphur, September 12, 1960 issue of The New Republic). Kennedy asked Congress to look into the war-emergency stockpiling program, stating it was "a potential source of excessive and unconscionable profits." JFK said he was "astonished" to discover that the program had accumulated $7.7 billion worth of stockpiled material, exceeding projected needs by $3.4 billion. Kennedy also pledged full executive cooperation with the investigation. After the revolution by the Castro brothers, Allen Dulles reported that the Freeport Sulphur Company would close down their operations in the country because the new government had demanded a tax on all facilities. Since the deal was negotiated under Batista's regime, the Castro government wanted to end the special tax exemption. Atomic Energy Commission Chairman John McCone (post CIA Director) explained that Freeport’s Moa Bay plant could not operate alone. Undersecretary of State Douglas Dillon also said the refinery in Louisiana could not operate independently. Freeport considered the takeover a battle cry and wanted to invoke international law to protect its rights to the plant. Therefore, United States ends attempting to invade Cuba under the ill-fated Bay of Pigs operation. One of the planners of the BOP, as well as an advocate for assassinating Castro, was Admiral Arleigh Burke. Burke later become a director of Freeport Sulphur. Press Secretary Pierre Salinger stated that the Kennedy administration planned to make stockpiling and monopoly an issue in the 1964 campaign. As we know, JFK didn't live long enough in order to fulfill that promise. —JFK vs. Allen Dulles: Battleground Indonesia (2020) by Greg Poulgrain

The Brilliant Disaster: JFK, Castro, and America's Doomed Invasion of Cuba's Bay of Pigs (2011) by Jim Rasenberger: A balanced, engrossing account of the Bay of Pigs crisis drawing on long-hidden CIA documents and delivering the vivid truth of five pivotal days in April 1961. JFK did not want any air strikes and he made this clear to the CIA, according to the plans he signed off in mid March. This is one reason they moved the landing site. Given that the operation's military commanders had been screened from the high level briefings that meant that JFK was not getting the full details on how exposed the landing ships were to attack. Richard Bissell had also made sure JFK and McGeorge Bundy were not told that those operational commanders had only stayed on because Bissell assured them he would obtain expanded air strikes from JFK. Although there would have been time to call off the landings, neither Bissell nor Cabell chose to talk to JFK about the issue of the last minute strike cancellation. The fact that JFK was not fully briefed on the importance of the total destruction of the Cuban Air Force nor by the initial raids failure to do so was critical. Even the JCS staff report had pointed out that risk,  stating that the total success of the landings would be at risk if even a single Cuban aircraft was able to attack the supply ships. The JCS assessment also stressed the absolute necessity for a simultaneous, major Cuban resistance effort - the CIA chose not to inform JFK or his staff. JFK was also not told that mainline American Army tanks were being landed on the beach - a fact which would have overridden any concept of "deniablity" in the landings. Decades later, with access to documents, Jacob Esterline finally concluded that Bissell had made sure he was not in key meetings because his comments would likely have exposed the serious operational risks, and JFK likely would have cancelled the whole thing. Neither of the two operational commanders were in direct contact with JFK as the operation launched, if they had been issues would have come up which would likely have aborted the landings - and ended Bissell's career then and there. To sum it up, JFK refused to be blackmailed by CIA and the Joint Chiefs who set him up with false information about the Bay of Pigs. —The Brilliant Disaster: JFK, Castro, and America's Doomed Invasion of Cuba's Bay of Pigs (2011) by Jim Rasenberger

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