"On the Trial of Clay Shaw: Assassination of JFK" (2020) by Michelle Metta, "History has Begun" (2020) by Bruno Maçães

The CIA held JFK in contempt and believed he was a national security threat and was too soft on communism. The multi-national corporations hated JFK and fought tooth and nail to derail his agenda. Israel surely was probably one of the primary players in the operation to assassinate JFK but Michele Metta’s book On the Trail of Clay Shaw: The Italian Undercover CIA and Mossad Station and the Assassination of JFK shows with declassified Permindex documents, which Michael Piper did not have, although was very close to the truth, as was Jim Garrison, that this was a Internationalist team effort. It involved the Seligman Bank, Bloomfield through CMC-Permindex Inc. whose members included Zionist protestant preachers like Gigliotti, P2 lodge members, Mossad and CIA agents as well as wealthy Zionist bankers who hired, through liaisons, neo-fascists and former Mussolini alleys in Strategy of Tension operations to curtail communism. The CIA is very much opposed to communism. So much so, that detente and mere diplomacy of JFK, Fulbright and others, such as former director of the CIA Smith, who was sacked after Gigliotti sent a letter to Truman, was considered communist. Smith believed, like JFK and Fullbright, that diplomacy must be the first and final option. Only rarely should we use the military (not the CIA) for operations in foreign countries, only if Americans are gravely threatened. Frank Gigliotti and the pro-Irgun sect within the CIA felt otherwise. So, the CIA had all the reason to kill JFK and the government in Israel had all the reason too! Match made in heaven. Anyone telling you communists killed JFK is lying. Also, Gigliotti signed an anti-JFK pact with the P2 lodge in Italy, and various Zionists with close ties to Israel. In the recently published Journals: 1952-2000 of the late American historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., he writes a month after Kennedy’s election, Schlesinger recorded in his diary a resume of his conversations with the president-elect. When they reached the subject of who would be secretary of state, the name of David Bruce, a veteran diplomat, was mentioned, but Schlesinger thought he would “not have too many ideas of his own.” Later, at Kennedy’s house, the president-elect talked favorably about senator J.W. Fulbright. For Kennedy, the influence of Fulbright in the Senate “seemed a paramount consideration.” Schlesinger asked Kennedy if Fulbright would not “alienate the negroes and the Jews?” and Kennedy said, “I don’t care about the Jews.”

The JFK conspiracy was fueled by the CIA, Mossad, and Italian Intelligence. Michael Collins Piper was on the right track in Final Judgment: The Missing Link in the JFK, Metta proves who was in on the conspiracy and who was funding it: Simon Peres, Ben-Gurion, the Mossad, the CIA, the P2 lodge, World Brotherhood Incorporated, CMC and Permindex. Michele Metta lives in Rome. He is a historian, and a journalist for the Italian newspaper l’AntiDiplomatico, where he has distinguished himself for being author of many scoops on the assassinations of JFK and RFK. Louis Mortimer Bloomfield, a major shareholder in the Swiss company Permindex, died in 1984. A few years before his death donated 31 boxes of documents to the Library and Archives Canada. The one condition Bloomfield placed on the donation was that public access to the papers would be restricted for 20 years after his death. However, when researcher Maurice Phillips, attempted to gain access to these materials in 2004 he found that Bloomfield’s widow, Justine Stern Bloomfield Cartier, was still refusing permission for them to be released into the public domain. Permindex was comprised of:

(1) Solidarists and Eastern European exile organization.

(2) American Council of Christian Churches led by Haroldson L. Hunt.

(3) Free Cuba Committee headed by Carlos Prio.

(4) The Syndicate headed by Clifford Jones, ex-lieutenant governor of Nevada. This group also included Bobby Baker, George Smathers, Roy Cohn, Fred Black and Lewis McWillie.

(5) Security Division of NASA headed by Wernher von Braun.

Source: unz.com

In an essay published in March 1961 the novelist Philip Roth argued that the challenge for the American writer was not to expand real events but to contain them. “It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination.” And he gave the example of the famous television debate between Kennedy and Nixon: “All the machinations over make-up, rebuttal time, all the business over whether Mr. Nixon should look at Mr. Kennedy when he replied, or should look away—all of it was so fantastic, so weird and astonishing, that I found myself beginning to wish I had invented it.” In the 1925 novel The Great Gatsby - the culmination of the European way of life in America - the story is that of the lonely individual struggling against the forces of convention as he pursues his personal vision of happiness. That vision was bound to be defeated because no individual can stand up to the social whole and because only failure can certify that his or her vision was purely personal and subjective, divorced from the world of realities the moment it was first conceived.  

In The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1962), the historian Daniel Boorstin could already warn his contemporaries that “we risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so realistic that they can live in them. We are the most illusioned people on Earth. Yet we dare not become disillusioned, because our illusions are the very house in which we live; they are our news, our heroes, our adventure, our forms of art, our very experience.” In Infinite Jest, the sprawling 1996 novel by David Foster Wallace, the real story is the struggle to develop and cohere that story into a finished book. The author sets out the conflict in terms of the very largess of the story's range, swept across endless characters and topics. There is a terrorist group and a North American superstate, calendar years sponsored by corporations, and a movie so funny it can kill you. These elements are rather miraculously brought together in an overarching plot. The classical American hero rises up against convention and tradition in the search for absolute freedom. The individual search is now a search for meaning."

Americans have been leading a double life, Norman Mailer suggested in 1960, and American history has moved on two rivers, one visible, the other underground. There has been the history of politics, which is concrete, factual, practical and dull, and also a subterranean river of romantic desires, the dream life of the nation. The springs of this underground river he located in that moment when the frontier was finally conquered and the expansion turned inward, becoming part of an agitated, overexcited, superheated dream life, echoed by the Hollywood film studios. With Kennedy the subterranean river, its unstoppable force, was felt at the surface. When the candidate arrived at the Democratic convention in Los Angeles, Mailer detected a certain uneasiness. “America’s politics would now be also America’s favorite movie, America’s best-seller.” But everything stayed within limits—for the time being. Kennedy might look like a movie star, his manners elegant and his gestures strong and quick, but his public mind and his ideas were quite complex. As the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr put it in his classic book The Irony of American History (1952): “Reality is essentially an obstacle for heroism. Call it the Hollywood theatre of truth. Our dreams of bringing the whole of human history under the control of the human will are ironically refuted by the fact that no group of idealists can easily move the pattern of history toward the desired goal of peace and justice.” 

As Kurt Andersen puts it in Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History  (2017): “the American experiment, the original embodiment of the great Enlightenment idea of intellectual freedom, every individual free to believe anything she wishes, has metastasized out of control.” Since the eighteenth century, liberal culture has been increasingly impatient with the failure of human power to bring the total pattern of historical development under control. The United States happened to become the undisputed leader of the free world at the time when the goal finally seemed within reach—when the control of the atom seemed to render ludicrous the belief that human beings could not likewise be controlled. America became, as Niebuhr wrote, “the prime bearer of this hope and dream.” The element of irony lies in the fact that a strong America turned out to be much less the master of its own destiny than was the young republic, “rocking in the cradle of its continental security and serene in its infant innocence.” Writing in 1952, Niebuhr still felt confident that America had the patience and the shrewdness to “avoid the ultimate error of trying to bring the historical process to what would seem to us to be its ultimate conclusion.” —"History has Begun" (2020) by Bruno Maçães

JFK, The CIA & The Cult of Intelligence

JFK “New Frontier Speech” (November 8, 1960): We are not here to curse the darkness; we are here to light a candle. As Winston Churchill said on taking office some twenty years ago: If we open a quarrel between the present and the past, we shall be in danger of losing the future. Today our concern must be with that future. For the world is changing. The old era is ending. The old ways will not do. Abroad, the balance of power is shifting. New and more terrible weapons are coming into use. Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom promised our nation a new political and economic framework. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal promised security and succor to those in need. But the New Frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises. It is a set of challenges, a frontier of the mind. A tired nation, said David Lloyd George, is a Tory nation. And the United States today cannot afford to be either tired or Tory. The pioneers of old gave up their safety, their comfort and sometimes their lives to build a new world here in the West. They were not the captives of their own doubts, the prisoners of their own price tags. Their motto was not "every man for himself"--but "all for the common cause." 

John F. Kennedy's former Georgetown digs just got a new owner. Last month, the gorgeous colonial residency located at 1400 34th St NW in Washington D.C., sold for $4.2 million. While that's a heavy chunk of change for most, the three-bedroom, four-bathroom home had initially hit the market in February of this year for $4.675 million. The price was dialed back in July, and again in September. On November 30, the home sold. Michael Rankin of TTR Sotheby’s International Realty represented the buyer in the sale. Kennedy lived in the home with his sister Eunice from 1949 to 1951. At the time, he was serving in Congress and his newfound social status would eventually lead him to cross paths with Jacqueline Bouvier. According to the New York Post, Kennedy met Bouvier during his final year living in the Washington, D.C. residence. In May of 1951, he was introduced to Bouvier at a dinner party in the neighborhood. While they didn't officially meet at his home, there's a good chance they spent a lot of time there during their relationship's early days. In 1953, the couple tied the knot. Fast forward a decade and Kennedy is elected as the 35th president of the United States. While the 19th century home has since been brought-up-to-date technology-wise—as well as renovated by renowned architect Richard Foster and builder Tom Glass—it still exudes that Kennedy-era charm. Source: housebeautiful.com

Theoretical physicist Ron Keeva Unz made an unsuccessful bid for the Republican nomination in the California gubernatorial election, 1994. He received 707,431 votes (34.3 percent) in the primary race against the incumbent Pete Wilson, who won the primary with 1,266,832 votes (61.4 percent). The press referred to Unz's candidacy as a Revenge of the Nerds and often quoted his claim of a 214 IQ. In 1998, Unz sponsored California Proposition 227, which aimed to change the state's bilingual education to an opt-in structured English-language educational system. Unz launched his political campaign with his own initial funds of $1 million. His IQ had been estimated at 214, a statistic that intelligence experts describe as “one in a million.” Educated at Harvard, Cambridge and Stanford universities, Ron Unz mastered not only theoretical physics and computer programming, but also ancient Greek history, being the author of several scholarly papers on the Spartan naval empire and Plutarch. David Horowitz, the conservative activist, told him: ‘You’re an intellectual. Your passion is ideas. You’ll be murdered.’ Unz graduated in 1983 with a double major in theoretical physics and ancient history and headed to England. There on a Churchill Science Fellowship, he studied quantum gravitation under Stephen Hawking.

Ron Unz (author of the essay American Pravda: the JFK Assassination, 2018): Victor Marchetti had spent 20 years in US Intelligence, most of them at the CIA, and served as the personal aide to Richard Helms, the Deputy Director, before resigning in disgust and writing an important book on the CIA. In 1978, James Angleton and another senior CIA official leaked the story to Marchetti that the CIA had decided to blame its involvement in the JFK assassination conspiracy on E. Howard Hunt, claiming that he had acted as a rogue agent without official authorization. Marchetti wrote a long article about this in The Spotlight, which led Hunt to sue, ultimately resulting in the Lane trial. A scanned copy of the article is available on the CIA website (section library docs): CIA-RDP81M00980R000600230023-6.pdf. Why would the CIA have decided to blame Hunt for the CIA involvement in the JFK assassination conspiracy unless there actually was a JFK assassination conspiracy, and everyone knowledgeable was fully aware of that fact, even if they argued about the exact identity of the conspirators? and John D. Marks, a former State Department intelligence officer, then wrote a nonfiction book, “The C.I.A. and the Cult of Intelligence,” which was ultimately published in 1974. “The cult of intelligence is a secret fraternity of the American political aristocracy,” they wrote. “It seeks largely to advance America’s self-appointed role as the dominant arbiter of social, economic, and political change in the awakening regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.” In reviewing the manuscript in 1973 for “The C.I.A. and the Cult of Intelligence,” the agency cited 339 passages that it said had to be removed on the grounds that they jeopardized national security. The authors and their publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, challenged the agency in court, accusing it of violating their First Amendment rights. Over several months, the agency whittled down its objections to 168 passages. Knopf then published the book using blank spaces for passages that had been censored and using boldface type to indicate passages that the C.I.A. had initially wanted to censor but later allowed. In the end, a trial judge found that fewer than 30 passages had actually been classified while Mr. Marchetti was a C.I.A. employee.

Leaving aside the precise details of the JFK conspiracy, we have Marchetti, the top CIA officials, and Howard Hunt all pretty much agreeing that there was indeed a JFK conspiracy involving some CIA members. And RFK believed exactly the same thing, as did numerous other top people. It seems to me if all those knowledgeable, well-connected people quietly agree about something so controversial and so endlessly ridiculed by the MSM, well then, it’s probably true. For a variety of complex reasons, the leading national media organs—the commanding heights of “Our American Pravda”—almost immediately endorsed the “lone gunman theory” and with some exceptions generally maintained that stance throughout the next half-century. With few prominent critics willing to publicly dispute that idea and a strong media tendency to minimize those exceptions, casual observers such as myself had received a severely distorted view of the case. If the first two dozen pages of David Talbot's book completely overturned my understanding of the JFK assassination, I found the closing section almost equally shocking. With the Vietnam War as a political millstone about his neck, President LBJ decided not to seek reelection in 1968, opening the door to a last minute entry into the Democratic race by Robert Kennedy, who overcame considerable odds to win some important primaries. Then on June 4, 1968, he was led on an easy path to the nomination and the presidency itself, at which point he would finally be in a position to fully investigate his brother’s assassination. But minutes after his victory speech, he was shot and fatally wounded, allegedly by another lone gunman, this time a disoriented Palestinian named Sirhan Sirhan. Eyewitness testimony and acoustic evidence indicated that at least twelve bullets were fired although Sirhan’s revolver could hold only eight, and a combination of these factors led longtime LA Coroner Dr. Thomas Noguchi, who conducted the autopsy, to claim in his 1983 memoir that there was likely a second gunman. Meanwhile, eyewitnesses also reported seeing a security guard with his gun drawn standing right behind Kennedy during the attack, and that individual happened to have a deep political hatred of the Kennedys. The police investigators seemed uninterested in these highly suspicious elements, none of which came to light during the trial. With two Kennedy brothers now dead, neither any surviving members of the family nor most of their allies had any desire to investigate the details of this latest assassination. JFK’s widow Jackie confided in friends that she was terrified for the lives of her children, and quickly married Aristotle Onassis, a Greek billionaire, whom she felt would be able to protect them.

Less than a year after the assassination, JFK mistress Mary Meyer, the ex-wife of high-ranking CIA official Cord Meyer, was found shot to death in a Washington DC street-killing with no indications of attempted robbery or rape, and the case was never solved. Immediately afterwards, CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton was caught breaking into her home in search of her personal diary, which he later claimed to have destroyed. Dorothy Kilgallen was a nationally-syndicated newspaper columnist and television personality, and she managed to wrangle an exclusive interview with Jack Ruby, later boasting to her friends that she would break the JFK assassination case wide open in her new book, producing the biggest scoop of her career. Instead, she was found dead in her Upper East Side townhouse, having apparently succumbed to an overdose of alcohol and sleeping pills, with both the draft text and the notes to her Jack Ruby chapter missing. Over the years, my own writings had put me on friendly terms with a well-connected individual whom I considered a member of the elite establishment, and whose intelligence and judgment had always seemed extremely solid. So I decided to raise the JFK subject, and see whether he had ever doubted the “lone gunman” orthodoxy. To my total astonishment, he explained that as far back as the early 1990s, he’d become absolutely convinced of the reality of a “JFK conspiracy” and over the years had devoured a huge number of the books in that field, but had never breathed a word in public lest his credibility be ruined and his political effectiveness destroyed. A second friend, a veteran journalist known for his remarkably courageous stands on certain controversial topics, provided almost exactly the same response to my inquiry. For decades, he’d been almost 100% sure that JFK had died in a conspiracy, but once again had never written a word on the topic for fear that his influence would immediately collapse. I began to wonder whether a considerable fraction, perhaps even a majority, of the respectable establishment had long harbored private beliefs about the JFK assassination that were absolutely contrary to the seemingly uniform verdict presented in the media. 

In 2013 Professor Lance deHaven-Smith, past president of the Florida Political Science Association, published Conspiracy Theory in America, a fascinating exploration of the history of the concept and the likely origins of the term itself. He noted that during 1966 the CIA had become alarmed at the growing national skepticism of the Warren Commission findings, especially once the public began turning its suspicious eyes toward the intelligence agency itself. Therefore, in January 1967 top CIA officials distributed a memo to all their local stations, directing them to employ their media assets and elite contacts to refute such criticism by various arguments, notably including an emphasis on Robert Kennedy’s supposed endorsement of the “lone gunman” conclusion. This memo, obtained by a later FOIA request, repeatedly used the term “conspiracy” in a highly negative sense, suggesting that “conspiracy theories” and “conspiracy theorists” be portrayed as irresponsible and irrational. And as I wrote in 2016, "Soon afterward, there suddenly appeared statements in the media making those exact points, with some of the wording, arguments, and patterns of usage closely matching those CIA guidelines. The result was a huge spike in the pejorative use of the phrase, which spread throughout the American media, with the residual impact continuing right down to the present day." This possible cause-and-effect relationship is supported by other evidence. Shortly after leaving The Washington Post in 1977, famed Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein published a story entitled “The CIA and the Media” revealing that during the previous quarter century over 400 American journalists had secretly carried out assignments for the CIA according to documents on file at the headquarters of that organization. This influence project, known as “Operation Mockingbird,” had allegedly been launched near the end of the 1940s by high-ranking CIA official Frank Wisner, and included editors and publishers situated at the very top of the mainstream media hierarchy. Source: unz.com

American Tragedy: JFK, RFK, JFK Jr.

David Talbot’s influential 2007 book Brothers revealed that Robert F. Kennedy had been convinced that his brother had been struck down in a conspiracy, but he held his tongue, telling his circle of friends that he stood little chance of tracking down and punishing the guilty parties until he himself reached the White House. By June 1968, he seemed on the threshold of achieving that goal, but was felled by an assassin’s bullet just moments after winning the crucial California presidential primary. The logical assumption is that his death was engineered by the same enemies of JFK, who were now acting to protect themselves from the consequences of their earlier crime. A young Palestinian named Sirhan Sirhan was quickly arrested and convicted for the murder. But Talbot emphasizes that the coroner’s report revealed that the fatal bullet came from a completely different direction, while the acoustical record proves that far more shots were fired than the capacity of the alleged killer’s gun. Sirhan himself seemed dazed and confused, later claiming to have no memory of events, and Talbot mentions that various assassination researchers have long argued that he was merely a convenient patsy in the plot, perhaps acting under some form of hypnosis or conditioning. As an Irish-American, Joseph Kennedy Sr. had no love lost for Great Britain and was a non interventionist in the World War II. Just a week before the outbreak of hostilities, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s closest advisor, Sir Horace Wilson, went to Ambassador Kennedy with an urgent appeal to President Roosevelt. Regretting that Britain had unequivocally obligated itself to Poland in case of war, Chamberlain now turned in despair to Roosevelt as a last hope for peace. He wanted the American President to “put pressure on the Poles” to return to the negotiations with Germany they had walked out on. At that, Kennedy reported, the Prime Minister lost all hope. “The futility of it all,” Chamberlain told Kennedy, “The thing that is frightful, we cannot save the Poles. We can merely carry on a war of revenge that will mean the destruction of all Europe.”

Jim DiEugenio: David Talbot added that there was a meeting of the Kennedy clan in which RFK broached the subject of if they should openly question the Rush to Judgment on the Oswald matter. The consensus was that they should not. That they would likely be hounded and ridiculed and thus marginalized, and therefore could not do anything politically anymore. So Bobby went along with that decision while he privately conducted his own inquiry. And, according to Talbot, he was going to reopen the JFK case once he was inaugurated. Joseph Kennedy was an isolationist by nature. JFK was a pragmatist--a very bright, quick learning, pragmatist. In his view, any political policy that included "war" in its planning was fundamentally flawed. And he was right. "Planning for war" is, far and away, a different animal than is being "prepared for war". JFK subscribed not to the former, but to the latter--from the very beginning. JFK was using Lisa Howard and Jean Daniel to carry out secret negotiations with Castro’s government. On the way back from a 1969 Congressional junket to Alaska, Ted Kennedy said his aides: "They're going to shoot my ass off the way they shot Bobby." Chappaquiddick was indeed his political assassination. "They got my brothers and now they got me," he'd anticipated. There were only 21 Democratic Senators who had the courage and integrity to vote against the Iraq invasion in 2002. Senator Ted Kennedy was one of them. "My vote against this misbegotten war is the best vote I have cast in the United States Senate since I was elected in 1962," Kennedy said. 

As David Kaiser pointed out in his very important book, American Tragedy, JFK was the first president since the Second World War to deviate from the US foreign policy established by Harry Truman On 16th October, 1962, Kennedy was able to persuade Congress to pass an act that removed the distinction between repatriated profits and profits reinvested abroad. While this law applied to industry as a whole, it especially affected the oil companies. It was estimated that as a result of this legislation, wealthy oilmen saw a fall in their earnings on foreign investment from 30 per cent to 15 per cent. According to David Kaiser, it was not only the CIA and the Pentagon who wanted him to send troops to Laos and Vietnam. Members of his own administration, including Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, Alexis Johnson, McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow and Roswell Gilpatric, were also strongly in favour of Eisenhower’s policy of “intervention in remote areas backed by nuclear weapons”. Kennedy continued with his policy of trying to develop “independent” Third World countries. In September, 1962, Souvanna Phouma became head of a new coalition government in Laos. This included the appointment of the left-leaning Quinim Pholsena as Foreign Minister. On 17th January, 1963, President Kennedy presented his proposals for tax reform. This included relieving the tax burdens of low-income and elderly citizens. Kennedy also claimed he wanted to remove special privileges and loopholes. He even said he wanted to do away with the oil depletion allowance. It is estimated that the proposed removal of the oil depletion allowance would result in a loss of around $300 million a year to Texas oilmen. It is very interesting that at 2.10 pm, on 23rd November, 1963, Johnson phoned George Smathers, who was on the Senate committee discussing JFK tax proposals. They discussed possible strategies to undermine JFK’s proposals. As Arthur Schlesinger pointed out in an interview with Anthony Summers in 1978: “In 1963 the CIA was reviving the assassination plots at the very time President Kennedy was considering the possibility of normalization of relations with Cuba - an extraordinary action. I think the CIA must have known about this initiative. They must certainly have realized that Bill Attwood and the Cuban representative to the U.N. were doing more than exchanging daiquiri recipes…They had all the wires tapped at the Cuban delegation to the United Nations….Undoubtedly if word leaked of President Kennedy’s efforts, that might have been exactly the kind of thing to trigger some explosion of fanatical violence.” That “fanatical violence” was the assassination of John F. Kennedy. 

John Kennedy (1961): Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. Source: educationforum.ipbhost.com

Donald Jeffries: Thanks to Jackie Kennedy Onassis' butler in Athens, Greece, Christian Kafarakis, we know why Jackie had conducted her own investigation hiring a famous New York City detective agency into the assassination of JFK in 1964 - 1965. It was financed by Aristotle Onassis and resulted in a report in the spring of 1965 telling who the possible gunmen were and who was behind them. Jackie planned to give the report to LBJ but she was stopped by a threat to kill her and her children. Ted, Bobby and other family members knew about the report and the threats. The second clue is Chappaquiddick. A careful examination of the real evidence in this event shows that Ted Kennedy was framed in the death of Mary Joe Kopechne and probably had his life and his children's lives threatened. The facts in the case and the conclusions that can be drawn from them are contained in a book by Boston researcher Robert Cutler: You the Jury (1974) The third clue is Ted's withdrawal from the presidential race in November 1975. It is a fact that all of his and Robert's children were being protected by the Secret Service for five days in November 1975. A threat had been made against the children's lives unless he officially announced his withdrawal. He made the announcement and stuck to it ever since. E. Howard Hunt told of a strange trip to Hyannisport to see a local citizen there about the Chappaquiddick incident. Hunt's cover story on this trip was that he was digging up dirt on Ted Kennedy for use in the 1972 campaign. John Dean summed it up when he said to Richard Nixon as recorded on the White House tapes in 1973, published by The New York Times: "If Teddy knew the bear trap he was walking into at Chappaquiddick."

Donald Jeffries: When John F. Kennedy Jr.'s plane plummeted into the sea on July 16, 1999, we were told that it was his own recklessness. The Kennedy curse. My own investigation, however, determined that it actually was, in fact, another Kennedy assassination. Investigative reporter Wayne Madsen confirmed that he was scheduled to meet with JFK, Jr. the following week to discuss joining George magazine, where his primary focus would be investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. WCVB-TV reporter Steve Sbraccia, who covered the story, wrote in a 2006 email, "I've always felt there was something wrong about that crash...from the way the police swept through that beach forcing everyone off-to the way they kept the wreck site closely guarded until they pulled up every bit of debris...." Sbraccia had encountered the enigmatic reporter from the Martha's Vineyard Gazette, who claimed to have seen an explosion in the air and then seemingly vanished from the face of the earth. The mainstream media would drum home the point that Kennedy should never have flown because of bad weather. The evidence, however, shows otherwise. FAA Flight Specialist Edward Meyer took the unusual step of releasing a public statement. Meyer stated, "Nothing of what I have heard on mainstream media makes any sense to me... The weather along his flight was just fine." Initial news reports described a crucial 9:39 p.m. phone call from Kennedy to the FAA, in which he reported all was well and that he was awaiting landing instructions. WCVB even interviewed Coast Guard Petty Officer Todd Burgun about this conversation. The FAA would go on to claim that there never was a 9:39 p.m. communication from Kennedy, despite all the detailed local news reports and widely distributed accounts about it from UPI and ABC News. Needless to say, JFK Jr.'s plane cannot have been crashing into the water at the very instant he was reporting that everything was fine. I was fortunate enough to have videotapes of the original WCVB coverage, which included numerous references to the 9:39 p.m. phone call from JFK Jr. The prospect of this charismatic heir to Camelot, with the movie-star looks, must have set off alarm bells among the powerful forces that killed his father and uncle. Source: ratical.org

David Fincher: Mank, The Game, Gone Girl

David Fincher’s Mank (2020) is a somewhat morbid, at times formidably cold and clinical portrayal of an empire constantly reinventing itself to stay relevant. Designed as a visual evocation of Citizen Kane itself, Fincher seems to be appealing to the specter behind Welles’ personification of Hearst, inextricable from the energies and judgement of Herman Mankiewicz (the older brother of Joseph L. Mankiewicz, screenwriter and director of All About Eve, Suddenly Last Summer, Sleuth...). “Mank” does not chronicle his fall from grace. Right off the bat he’s a lost soul. Whether with or without honor in Hollywood, he is no prophet. In an early scene of drunken besottedness, he proclaims to his wife that “The Wizard of Oz” is going to “sink” MGM. Mankiewicz’s isolation (underscored by a poignant music score by Fincher regulars Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor) gives Fincher the opportunity, in the movie’s last third, to concoct discrete narrative modules in which Mankiewicz is visited by various personages who entreat him to abandon his folly. Hearst is still a powerful man, and can ruin him. But Mankiewicz clearly doesn’t believe he can be ruined any further than he already is. Ultimately, Fincher’s revelation is more a suggestion of how the faces may have changed but the human trials and tribulations remain the same between the uneasy bedfellows of politics and celebrity. As Fincher writes Mankiewicz himself saying, “You cannot capture a man’s entire life in two hours. All you can hope is to leave the impression of one.”

Fincher’s latest is one that will surely polarize fans, which is why we’re here to make the grand and bold statement proclaiming it to be: pretty good! Mank is a chronicle of the years, rivalries, and old Hollywood exploits that went into the eponymous screenwriter completing the Citizen Kane script. But more than just being a backstory of “the greatest film ever made,” Mank is a touching tribute to those left out of the spotlight that simultaneously feels like a thriller. There isn’t necessarily a big mystery to be solved, but that doesn’t stop Fincher from exploiting all the twists and turns of history to their full dramatic effect. Characters are at once larger than life and wholly realized with nuance and humanity. Amanda Seyfried as starlet Marion Davies is an especially remarkable standout. She steals every scene she’s in with wisecracking antics and endlessly watchable charm. At the end of the day, Mank isn’t Fincher’s best, but it’s a richly enthralling film and a welcome return for the director after six years without a feature. "Mank" will premiere on Netflix on December 4th.

My go-to line when discussing Fincher with friends, family, and, frankly, anyone who will listen, is that Gone Girl isn’t his best, but it is my favorite. That’s not to say it isn’t one of the greatest films of the last decade. Gone Girl is in itself a treasure hunt for Nick Dunne and for the audience. Like Fincher’s previous thriller, The Game (one of John Kennedy Jr's favorite films), the film is predicated on a special occasion. In The Game, it's Nicholas’ (Michael Douglas) birthday. In Gone Girl, it's Amy and Nick’s anniversary. To hit the hammer over the head of the thematic string of games throughout, the film happens to open with Nick carrying a game into his bar to greet his sister Margo. Amy legitimately wants to give Nick an anniversary gift he will never forget. Nick gets the gift any narcissist would revel in: forgiveness and galvanization from the media just as long as he confesses his love for Amy on national television. What woman wouldn’t want their man to confess their love to 10 million people? In February 2015, British actress Rosamund Pike talked to Variety about her inspiration for her portrayal of the magnetic, aloof Amy Dunne in Gone Girl on the elusive Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy. Like Amy Dunne, the tragic Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy was an impossibly beautiful blonde whose personal warmth belied a puzzling remoteness. “There are quite a few photographs of Bessette,” Pike told editor Sam Kashner, “but I could find nothing of her persona in her own words.” Bessette was a celebrated minimalist fashion icon, yet somehow always, as Pike describes her, “a cipher.” Pike says she modeled her alter-ego Amazing Amy, at least in part, on Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, the alluring but somehow unknowable wife of John F. Kennedy Jr. “There’s not much out there about her. You never heard her speak in public,” Pike says, curled up on a sofa at Milk Studios in Hollywood. “You just see those pictures of her hiding her face. The mysterious way she moved... I used quite a lot of her body language and mood. She was a dream girl. That’s what Amy was for Nick. She’s the one you can’t get out of your head because she’s perfect.” Source: ew.com

Portia De Rossi characterized as Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy for the docudrama project America's Reluctant Prince (2003) by Eric Laneuville. It failed mainly due to a contrived script and Daryl Hannah's contention with the representation of her character onscreen. Laneuville seemed to take inspiration from Christopher Andersen's book "The Day John Died" (2000) and "Four Blondes" (2000) by Candace Bushnell. Apparently the chapter "Platinum" of "Four Blondes" has certain similarities to Carolyn Bessette's life. In Platinum, a former salesgirl at Ralph Lauren weds a good-looking heir who happens to be a real prince. Cecilia (the new blonde princess) disintegrates behind the doors, with paranoia and drugs becoming her calling card, but high society still wants her sitting at its table. Although Candace Bushnell was not friends with Carolyn Bessette, she knew the tabloids scene and she wrote a column for The New York Observer; Bushnell also had dated Michael Bergin (former lover of Carolyn Bessette). Bushnell implies not only CBK used cocaine, also her husband (the affable son of JFK) secretly dabbled with fractal drugs (LSD). Bushnell alludes to a tormentous yet highly passional marriage that was tainted with self-destructive traits of two bipolar personalities. John Kennedy Jr had known Carolyn Bessette since November 1992 (around the release of David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me) in the nightclub Rex at Soho. They officially started dating in late December 1994, and she moved to his Tribeca loft in July 1995. According to Billy Way, John Jr fell hard for Carolyn, but he felt insecure if Carolyn was ready for his political aspirations and lifestyle, and after a tumultuous courtship, they had distanced in 1993. 

In the interim, John was always asking about Carolyn's whereabouts through mutual friends. Richard Wiese had tried to hook him up with models Amber Norman and Ashley Richardson, short flings with little success. John and Carolyn re-encountered each other in a Calvin Klein event and this time John, not having got over his feelings for Carolyn, decided to reanudate their relationship. Despite the usual up and downs, the couple's closest friends (Sasha Chermayeff, Robert Littell, John Perry Barlow, Carole Radziwill, Rose Marie Terenzio) deny they had serious problems in their marriage. Indeed, they knew of their intention of becoming parents soon, and John had revealed he preferred Flynn as a name for a son and Fleur for a daughter. Carolyn had confided to Jessica Weinstein (no relation to Harvey Weinstein) she was taking prenatal vitamins. Source: variety.com

David Lynch: Wisteria, Laura Palmer

Rumors have been swirling lately that David Lynch is at work on a new television series for Netflix. It would mark the first original series for the filmmaker since Twin Peaks debuted in 1990. But is Wisteria actually an original program? Or is it really another Twin Peaks series? Lynch’s projects are always super secretive. So there’s a good chance we won’t know what Wisteria is until it appears on our TV screens. But there are a few clues that point to this possibly being a continuation of Twin Peaks. And it might just center on a character we met in the show’s final episode. A character named Carrie Page, who is actually an alternate reality Laura Palmer. Here’s some speculation about Wisteria, the mysterious new David Lynch project, and why it could be another Twin Peaks story. During a Q&A at the Theatre at ACE Hotel in Los Angeles, David Lynch said he was interested in continuing Carrie Page’s story. It’s possible Showtime, the network that aired The Return, was nervous about pouring money into another long, esoteric season of TV. Either way, Carrie’s story is still largely untold. Even there is a street in Odessa, Texas called Wisteria. In Twin Peaks: The Return‘s final episode, Part 18, Dale Cooper attempts to prevent Laura Palmer’s murder. In doing so, he winds up traveling through a portal and into another reality. There, he meets a diner waitress named Carrie Page, who lives in Odessa, Texas and looks identical to an adult Laura Palmer. He attempts to convince her that she’s actually Laura, and desperate to leave Odessa, Carrie agrees to travel with Cooper back to Twin Peaks. They drive to the town and arrive at Laura Palmer’s house, which is now owned by a strange woman who doesn’t recall the Palmers. As they’re about to leave, Carrie hears Laura’s mother Sarah call out her name from the house. Suddenly aware that she is, indeed, Laura Palmer, Carrie screams into the night and everything plunges into darkness. Source: nerdist.com

Laura Palmer’s revealed “sins” required, by the moral logic of American mass entertainment, that the circumstances of her death turn out to be causally related to her sins. We always knew Laura was a wild girl, the homecoming femme fatale who was crazy for cocaine and screwed roadhouse drunks for the sheer depravity of it, but the movie is finally not so much interested in the titillation of that depravity as in her torment, depicted in a performance by Sheryl Lee so vixenish and demonic it's a tour de force. Her fit of the giggles over the body of a man whose head has just been blown off might be an act of innocence, of damnation, or [get ready] both. This is what Lynch is about in this movie: both innocence and damnation; both sinned-against and sinning. Laura Palmer in Fire Walk with Me is both “good” and “bad,” and yet also neither. The Globe and Mail called the film "A disgusting, misanthropic movie." This transformation of Laura from object to subject was actually the most morally ambitious thing a Lynch movie has ever tried to do—and it required complex and contradictory and probably impossible things from Sheryl Lee, who in my opinion deserved an Oscar nomination just for showing up and trying. —"David Lynch Keeps His Head" (1996) by David Foster Wallace

In 2017, Vice called James Hurley (Laura Palmer's secret boyfriend) “the original sad lad”. Hurley is clearly meant to be a walking cliche, a cypher of American masculine teenage rebellion a la James Dean: you can tell because he wears a biker jacket and shades, and drives a motorcycle. Spooner points to Hurley’s biker jacket as an item that operates symbolically. Reprising his guitar playing for the new series, the jacket was noticeably absent – perhaps because a middle-aged man wearing one might spell something different, namely a mid-life crisis. James’ love for Laura was sincere. But it’s unclear whether Laura’s love for him was equally authentic. On an audiotape sent to Dr Jacoby Laura says “God, James is sweet, but he’s so dumb, and right now I can only take so much of sweet.” In the end James Hurley was too much of a sweet boy to really understand Laura’s world. He couldn’t control her dark thoughts or protect her from the things she was involved with. “I remember this one night when we first started seeing each other. She was still doing drugs then. We were in the woods when she started saying this scary poem, over and over, about fire.” Source: visittwinpeaks.com

When she first walked into the offices of Random Ventures in 1995, John Kennedy Jr's assistant Rose Marie Terenzio recalls how Carolyn Bessette looked like a model, effortlessly perfect in an unstudied yet elegant outfit, carrying a velvet purse that had belonged to Jackie Kennedy, with an aura of mystery like Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks. John Perry Barlow: John wanted to maintain a platonic relationship with Carolyn until he and Daryl Hannah had broken up. In fact, there were not many women in his life that he took seriously. And there were even fewer that he took casually. In this regard John was anything but a Kennedy. It's kind of goofy to say, but he was like a Norman Rockwell character. I didn't meet Carolyn until the fall of 1994. At once, I found her to be as charismatic as John was. "Charisma" was once a theological term meaning "grace." She had that quality. I was also impressed with the fact that she was more than a little eccentric. She was not conventional in any sense. I think she was actually some kind of angel. But like many angels, her empathy was her main enemy. She was too raw to the pain of others. She felt it as deeply herself. John was ecstatic in Carolyn's company. John told us they'd barely left the hotel room during their honeymoon. John was truly a monogamous guy. And he was a loyal guy. And it wasn't just loyalty amongst guys. It wasn't like he was just a great pal with men and not with women. He respected women probably more than he did guys. —NY Fix News interview by Sheila Tasco (2004)

Happy 60th Anniversary, John Kennedy Jr!

In a week where John F. Kennedy Jr. would have celebrated his 60th birthday (on 25th November), his friends are lamenting that the world never got to see what the dashing presidential son would have become. His death marked the latest big loss in a family that has experienced much of it over the generations. "His legacy was really about who he would've become," friend Brian Steel, a former assistant district attorney in Manhattan with Kennedy, said to Today News. "But I just think America and also the world would have been a better place. Now you look back, and you think of what might have been." This past Sunday marked the 57th anniversary of his father's assassination. John Kennedy Jr. had been mulling over a foray into politics, the stock in trade of his famous family, but had not yet made the leap. He had become a New York City fixture as one of the most debonair bachelors before marrying Carolyn Bessette in a fairy tale wedding in 1996. A run for high-profile political office in New York was most likely in his future with an eye on one day returning the Kennedy family to the White House. "There's no doubt he was thinking about running for governor," Steel said. "We had that discussion a couple times in the months before he passed away. He also had given sort of fleeting thought for running for that Senate seat in 2000. The White House could have been his destiny." "I think anytime you go into politics, you have to make sure the rest of your life will accommodate that decision," John Kennedy Jr. told NBC's Tom Brokaw in 1995. "There is a whole generation that has now grown up without knowing Kennedy Jr. as a public figure, but his memory lives on. I mean, there was no one that compared in the world to John," Steel added. "Everything that he did with his power, his fame, it was all about some greater good," Rose Marie Terenzio (his former executive assistant at George magazine) said. "He's truly missed for the way that he gracefully took that mantle of responsibility and lived an honorable life full of integrity—and he's missed for what we all want, which is somebody to look up to and to be proud of." 

JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette had been married for less than three years when they were killed in a plane crash on July 16, 1999, but their romance remains the stuff of legend. According to America's Reluctant Prince by historian Steve Gillon, Carolyn's mother, Ann Freeman, had openly questioned during her wedding toast whether John Kennedy Jr was the right man for her daughter. Anthony Radziwill tempered the awkwardness with his best man toast. "We all know why John would marry Carolyn," he said. "She is smart, beautiful and charming... What does she see in John? Well, some of the things that I guess might have attracted Carolyn to John are his caring, his charm, and his very big heart of gold." Carolyn had become increasingly involved with George magazine, much to the consternation of John's partner, Michael Berman, who ended up selling his half of the magazine in 1997 after exchanging some bitter arguments. Incidentally, Carolyn had left her own career, but she wasn't sure what she wanted to do next. According to Stephen Styles, a friend of John and Carolyn, in April 1997, a female reporter attended a luncheon at the Robin Hood Foundation, and tried to pry into Bessette's plans: "As for the job prospects Carolyn might have considered, she shook her head and simply said 'I can`t comment on that.' John then interrupted this conversation to say with his peculiar brand of humor: 'I won't let her work!' Asked  by the reporter about his seemingly dominance, John shrugged it off, and Carolyn laughed while rolled her eyes in amusement." 

Carolyn loved John, but in what would become a point of contention for the rest of their lives, she didn't particularly enjoy going to spend holidays with his sprawling family on the Cape, formally presided over by matriarch Ethel Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy's widow, and the Kennedy men, who with their touch football games and clambakes seemed lifted from a Ralph Lauren ad. John had officially met Carolyn in 1994 at a Calvin Klein-hosted event and was instantly smitten. "Early on, he would be frustrated with Carolyn," attorney Brian Steel, who met John when they both worked in the Manhattan District Attorney's office, recalled. "He would say, 'I called her and she hasn't called me back.' And John did not like that." Gustavo Paredes told People magazine that "Carolyn didn't think he was serious. And he couldn't believe she had turned him down. It had never happened to him before." "She was exactly the kind of girl I imagined would date someone like John Kennedy Jr.," Rose Marie Terenzio recalled in her 2012 memoir Fairy Tale Interrupted, "she actually intimidated the hell out of me." When she first met Carolyn, Terenzio realized Carolyn "was different from the typical trendy girls you see around Manhattan. She wasn't trying too hard to be cool. She wasn't trying at all." 

Although numerous issues would plague John and Carolyn's relationship in the years to come, by all accounts infidelity wasn't one of them—though, according to some rumors, Carolyn would hint John during their fights that she was thinking of seeing her ex-boyfriend. Her friends didn't think she would actually cheat on John, though. "Carolyn, more than anyone who John had been with, would stand up to him, and confront him, and I think that John to an extent needed that," historian Steven M. Gillon, a classmate of John's at Brown University who was later a contributing editor at George, told InStyle in 2019. That being said, John was still a headstrong Kennedy, and sometimes possessed an explosive temper that wasn't usually mentioned in the usual accounts—though his friends and ex-girlfriends knew better. "I knew that John had a temper and that Carolyn was no shrinking violet," Richard Blow recalled in American Son:A Portrait of John F. Kennedy Jr. "But the violence and their rage of the video presented a harsh contrast to the tenderness I'd seen between them. John was a nice, compassionate and warm guy." Ted Kennedy delivered the eulogy after the plane crash at a memorial service held on July 23 at the Church of St. Thomas More, New York City: "John was a devoted son and brother, and he was a husband who adored the wife who became his perfect soul mate," the senator, who later died in 2009, said. "John's father taught us all to reach for the moon and the stars. John did just that in all he did—and he found his shining star when he married Carolyn Bessette—the new pride of the Kennedys. We loved John and Carolyn. The Bessettes and Freeman families will always be part of ours." In Ted Kennedy's assessment, Carolyn had always fit right with the Kennedy clan. And that's certainly how John had wanted her to feel. Source: www.today.com

Style Icons: Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, Pam Courson (Love Her Madly)

 

Most people would jump at the chance to spend any time at all at the Kennedy compound with one of America’s most prominent families. But Carolyn Bessette was not like most people. According to The Kennedy Heirs by J. Randy Taraborrelli, John F. Kennedy Jr.’s wife resisted visiting his relatives in Hyannis Port often when the topic was broached. Taraborrelli described Bessette’s reluctance to visit the compound and Kennedy’s insistence that she do so as the “recurring argument” the couple “just couldn’t seem to settle no matter how many times they tried.” Part of the reason Bessette objected to these visits was because she didn’t feel that she fit in with the athletic Kennedy crew. But perhaps the more pressing reason she wanted to avoid the Cape compound was to avoid the paparazzi. Bessette and Kennedy were hounded by the photographers almost constantly, and Carolyn was deeply affected by the invasion of privacy. Though at first she thought the Kennedy compound was a hideaway from the media, she changed her mind after seeing a photographer shoot her from the pier one day. “Now she felt she had to put on an act for public consumption, which added a new level of angst to going to the compound,” Taraborrelli wrote. “She was taking antidepressant pills just to get through it, she confided in her friends.” 

And John wasn’t always understanding of Carolyn’s objections. According to Taraborrelli, Kennedy once brought up their recurring disagreement at dinner with friends, telling her, “Fine. Don’t come with me, hell if I care.” When she began to cry, he told her, “You’re crying because you don’t want to have fun on the beach with my family? I don’t understand you, Carolyn.” He thought she’d at least appeared to be having a good time during their family trips. Other friends think another reason was the resistance of Carolyn to accept the future role in politics his husband would have adopted at last. The most improbable source of their rows was romantic jealousy - although some not very credible acquaintances insisted Carolyn was very jealous of John's former girlfriend Julie Baker, whom she forbade of visiting their apartment. In fairness, Baker had been disrespectful when she was seen sitting one evening on John's lap in a quite inappropriate way. Longtime friends Sasha Chermayeff and Santina Goodman found Julie Baker's behaviour rude. On the other hand, the mere mention of Michael Bergin's name could unearth intense rage from John, according to these same anonymous friends. Source: www.instyle.com

John Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette were married at a Baptist church illuminated by candlelights, so dim inside that the Reverend Charles J. O’Byrne of Manhattan’s Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, where Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s funeral was held, had to read the service by flashlight. John’s cousin and closest friend, Anthony Radziwill, served as best man (as John had served as best man at Anthony’s wedding to Carole Ann Radziwill), and at the end of the ceremony John turned to Anthony to tell him that he had never been happier in his life. The man who could have had many women of high caliber had chosen as his bride one who was not rich or famous or ennobled by family background or particularly distinguished by any professional accomplishment. What Carolyn Bessette had were certain charismatic qualities—remarkable beauty, a unique sense of style, and a sharp intelligence. The media played the marriage as a Cinderella story, casting Carolyn as the commoner who had found true love with Prince Charming. —"The Newest Kennedy, the Stylish Carolyn Bessette" (September 29, 1996) by Elisabeth Bumiller 

In Love Her Madly, Jim Morrison, Mary, and Me, author Bill Cosgrave talks about the summer he spent hanging out with the future Lizard King a couple of years before The Doors achieved stardom. “He was so shy you would not believe it was the same guy who would romp and scream around the stage,” Cosgrave remembers. “He was a gentle, lovely human being.” The “Mary” the title of the book refers to is Mary Werbelow. “I left home when I was 15 [and] ended up in Clearwater, Florida. I was staying with some friends. Mary was three years older than me. Long story short, I couldn’t get my eyes off her,” explains Cosgrave. Fast forward a few years and Mary lures him away from college in Montreal and out to Los Angeles where she’s living with her then-fiancé. “An hour later, Jim walked in. And we became fast friends.” Soon Mary would throw Jim out of their shared Venice apartment and he ended up sleeping under the Santa Monica Pier. When he wasn’t doing that, he was hanging out with Cosgrave or another pal, Dennis C. Jakob. A couple of years go by, Bill is in Canada in the travel business, and Jim is world-famous. “Without Mary Werbelow, let’s face it, you wouldn’t have The Doors,” he says. “He wrote The End, one of his most famous songs, about his break-up with Mary. I was particularly in love with Mary. She was my dream girl,” he admits. “I spent many years trying to find her and I did find her 43 years later. In 1965, I was totally OK with our platonic relationship, because there was no other option. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t find her unbearably desirable. Jim Morrison was a welcoming, kind, and open person. He was courteous, respectful, and very polite with Mary. We clicked, we quickly bonded. I think that Jim was particularly open to me because Mary and I were good friends. After his break-up with Mary, he had met a wild child named Pam Courson. I know the official version of Jim's death is he died of a heart attack. But there are many theories for how he ended up in that bathtub. One theory is that he mistook Pamela’s heroin for cocaine, and that the heroin killed him." Source: www.forewordreviews.com 

Once Pam Courson and I left Jim Morrison and his ex-girlfriend Mary Werbelow alone for awhile, and Pam said something I will never forget: “I feel sorry for Mary.” I knew it meant she was not threatened by the emergence of Mary. I knew that something had long been settled between her and Jim. Their relationship was deeper than either one of them had ever had before. I’d begun to suspect that something had been settled between the two of them – something unbreakable except by death itself. —"Summer with Morrison: The Early Life and Times of James Douglas Morrison, A Memoir" (2011) by Dennis C. Jakob