In this long-awaited follow-up to his critically acclaimed 1967 classic, Six Seconds in Dallas, Josiah Thompson reveals major new forensic discoveries since the year 2000 that overturn previously accepted “facts” about the Kennedy assassination. It provides incontrovertible proof that JFK was killed in a crossfire. Last Second in Dallas is not a conspiracy book. No theory of who did it is offered or discussed. Among the new discoveries: The test showing that all recovered bullet fragments came from Oswald’s rifle was mistaken. Several fragments could have come from bullets of any manufacturer and any caliber. The sudden two-inch forward movement of the president’s head in the Zapruder film just before his head explodes is revealed to be an optical illusion caused by the movement of Zapruder’s camera. This leaves without further challenge clear evidence that this shot came from a specific location to the right front of the limousine. Detailed analysis of film frames matched by the newly validated acoustic evidence show a second shot struck the president’s head from behind less than a second later. Result: two killing shots to the head from opposite directions in the final second of the shooting—hence the book’s title. At once a historical detective story and a deeply personal narrative by a major figure in the field, Last Second in Dallas captures the drama and sweep of events, detailing government missteps and political bias as well as the junk science, hubris, and controversy that have dogged the investigation from the beginning. Into this account Thompson weaves his own eventful journey, that of a Yale-educated scholar who in 1976 resigned his tenured professorship in philosophy to become a private investigator in San Francisco. Profusely illustrated, Last Second in Dallas features dozens of archive photographs, including Zapruder film frames reproduced at the highest clarity ever published.
Jim DiEugenio: It's pretty obvious now that director/producer Joel Surnow could not control his Herhsian mania to place every piece of weakly sourced or discredited piece of tripe that Kennedy's enemies have manufactured in this pile of TV cliches named The Kennedys. What is so interesting is that History Channel hired historians as fact checkers and were going to reward them if they approved the film! They could not do so even for money. That is how over the top Surnow is in this regard. And this fact checking process started with the script, and then went to a rough cut. So knowing that History Channel was watching him all the way, Surnow still could not contain himself. Richard Reeves, I believe, is not a really good historian--especially when it comes to JFK's foreign policy ideas. But the fact that even Reeves could not swallow this anti Kennedy, Rush Limbaugh inspired farrago says a lot. If the History Channel hired Limbaugh's buddy Surnow to begin with, they knew approximately what they were going to get. Therefore, the movers and shakers were not going to give Caroline Kennedy the time of the day if they liked Surnow. But it's clear that Surnow had no interest in facts or history. He just wanted to recycle Horowitz, Davis, Matthews, the Blairs, Thomas Reeves and Hersh's nutty books. This was not going to be real history at all. It was a reactionary political statement all the way. Surnow admitted that not all of Mr. Gillon and Mr. Dallek’s recommendations were taken. As if we didn't know it! Ted Sorensen, one of the closest advisers of JFK, opined the show was indeed "malicious and vindictive."
Reading Donald Spoto's book on Marilyn Monroe one can see a good example of why this stuff that appears repeatedly on TV documentaries or films that cannot be trusted. Then read how Judith Exner kept on exaggerating and exaggerating her story after the Church Committee. In other words they got her to lie for money. To the point that toward the end, she could not even keep up with all the lies she'd told. She actually forgot JFK had impregnated her in previous books-a story she directly contradicted many times, but should we believe Kitty Kelley's version? Do you really think that after all had happened that Caroline Kennedy or RFK Jr. don't know about the conspiracy against their family? They do. But acting on it publicly carries a potent warning to it. So few of us are really martyrs. Personally, I don't know of any, do you?
Larry Hancock: Of many coincidences I actually refer in Tipping Point, Allen Dulles was in Dallas five weeks prior to the assassination. Invited to speak at the Dallas Council on World Affairs (of which George de Mohrenschildt was a member.) The remarks by David Morales's life long friend Frankie Knuckles and Bill Harvey's wife seem to me to carry strong weight. I think these people just didn't dislike JFK's policies, they considered him a traitor and literally hated him. The interview of Harvey's widow to Jefferson Morley sounds like the old woman slipped up and told the truth when she said about John Rosselli "...he was recruited for assassination purposes on Kennedy..." Then she caught herself and said, "I mean Castro." According to Clara Grace Harvey, Rosselli had been recruited by "another guy from the FBI for assassination purposes on Kennedy". Clara Grace Harvey thinks her husband was buddies with a mafia hit man, thought the mafioso was a "patriot?" Harvey was stationed in Miami to oversee operations regarding Cuba. During the Missile Crisis, he dispatched a crew to enter Cuba for suspicious reasons; however, when RFK & JFK found out about it, he was reassigned to the Rome CIA post. There in Rome, Harvey's drinking problem got worse. I'm sure Harvey was full of hate toward the Kennedys. Also, Clara Grace Harvey seems to have a problem about Jackie being at a drugstore sipping on a Coke... like the First Lady can't go down to a drugstore, sit at a counter and sip on a Coke?? Nuts! Of course, Ms Harvey talks about JFK's womanizing, but do you notice that all of JFK's mistresses talked good of him, all of them, and even Jackie remembered him with so much affect. A year before his death Jackie told John "Please don't order us to a bomb shelter on Camp David. Me and the kids want to die with you!" In 1978 I had Thanksgiving dinner with a high-ranking special agent of the FBI. I was living and working in Washington DC, and the gal who invited me led me to the family farm for dinner. She had always bragged to me that her father had been buddies with J. Edgar Hoover. In the guy's den, before dinner, me and his son were having a couple of drinks. I innocently asked the guy what he thought "really happened" to Kennedy. His face got beet red and he lapsed into a tirade in which he called JFK a "goddamned communist". He said something to the effect that JFK and Bobby got what they deserved - he seemed to be gloating to me. He hated the Kennedy's in a way that shocked me to death. It was like it was personal - the Kennedy's weren't dead enough for this guy.... I found his obituary recently and I tried to research a bit about the guy. He was a special agent of the FBI at the time of the assassination named Leonard Spears.
Douglas Caddy: William K. Harvey was one of the big men of CIA in it earliest days. A former FBI agent, Harvey was the agency's first chief of counterintelligence. He ran the CIA's Berlin base in the 1950s and in 1960 was put in charge of ZR RIFLE, the agency's assassination program. He was openly hostile to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy who forced the CIA to transfer him to Rome in 1963. He died in 1976. Mathilde Krim was LBJ’s mistress in the 1960s. She also just happened to be a fanatical supporter of the interests of Israel. In the late 1940s, she had been an active promoter of the Israeli terror group The Irgun. Mathilde Krim was also most likely a Mossad agent with long-time contacts to the highest levels of the Israeli government. I would have loved to hear the “pillow talk” between these two total opposites: the incredibly crude, uncultured and flabby LBJ and the cultured, sleek and highly educated Krim. You can bet that she was able to supply Israel with all sorts of top secret information that she was able to extract out of her bedmate. Maybe she also gave advice to LBJ about who exactly to blackmail or what transgressions by Israel for LBJ to ignore (like the USS Liberty attack). Mathilde Krim’s husband was the very wealthy Arthur Krim, one of the most powerful supporters of Israel in the USA. Mathilde Krim’s relationship with LBJ was most likely known by her husband but was “overlooked” by him because of its huge value to Israel as both as a source of information as well as for its potential use as blackmail. The heads of MSM at the time apparently knew all about the relationship between Krim and LBJ but “wisely” chose to ignore it unlike what they had done for JFK and his affairs. You can also bet that Krim dropped her lover LBJ like a hot potato once he left office and was no longer of use to her friends.
Here’s Mathilde Krim with a soirée of Fine Folks to include LBJ & Lady Bird. She certainly made the rounds. Definitely an Intelligence Operative considering her prodigious network of contacts. It reminds me of a scene from Rosemary’s Baby. Behind the JFK and RFK assassinations is the Allen Dulles gang: Richard Helms, David Atlee Phillips, and James Angleton. It is true that Angleton had deep ties with the Mossad. It is also true that since the end of the second world war, Israeli skulduggery in the US and Europe has been massive. But these two political murders were planned and executed by the above Dulles cabal. Oswald was a CIA asset since his time as Marine serving at the US Atsugi base in Japan. Researcher HP Albarelli connects Oswald to right-wing Agency operative David Ferrie as far back as the early 1950s. Oswald was also part of Angleton’s false defector program, which inserted him into the USSR in the late 1950s. The grooming and handling of Sirhan Sirhan in California in the mid 1960s speaks of a well-entrenched domestic network of CIA assets. He was picked for patsydom for a number reasons, and Angleton, again, a prince of an ally for Mossad, liked Sirhan’s Palestinian background, which amped up the Arab threat, in the eyes of the US audience, to his Israeli friends. The author is correct that Thane Caesar was the real assassin of RFK. Previous to the RFK hit, Caesar had worked for the Hughes corporation in Burbank. The sprawling Howard Hughes business empire partially had served as a CIA cover since the 1950s.
Laurent Guyenot (a French highly-educated professional engineer, who shares an interest in political writing): Finally, through years of research on other contemporary “deep history”, I came to find a pattern in Israel’s tremendous capacity to engineer history. “Psychological profiling” is important in any criminal case, and I believe that Israel has that profile. Jewish hatred for anything Catholic adds to the profile, not to mention the Kennedys’ vague Judeophobia (“The Jews have won the war”, Joe Kennedy said after resigning his Ambassador position, JFK himself had praised Robert Taft for his courage to denounce the Nuremberg trials) and their war waged on the Jewish Lobby by RFK’s team. JFK threatened the flawed Jews narrative on Hitler too. From JFK diary (published on Time magazine in 2017), his diary reveals that during his time in Berlin, Kennedy wrote about visiting Hitler’s bunker only months after Germany surrendered in the Second World War. “You can easily understand how that within a few years Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived,” Kennedy wrote in his diary in 1945. “He had boundless ambition for his country which rendered him a menace to the peace of the world, but he had a mystery about him in the way he lived and in the manner of his death that will live and grow after him,” he added. “He had in him the stuff of which legends are made.”
RFK was especially vocal about his goal of ending the Vietnam war on the ’68 campaign trail. And then there’s Richard Nixon: a national security state favorite since his time as congressman during the so-called Red Scare of the early 195os, Nixon was their favored candidate in the ’68 election. RFK’s death sealed the deal for Nixon. Nixon would go on to incur the wrath of his former national security state allies with his secret negotiations with China and the USSR while president. Because of his previous good works for them, a political death was arranged rather than a violent physical one. And the “manufacturer” of the single bullet theory was Jewish Senator Arlen Specter of the Warren Commission. Another point about the Kennedy’s dislike of Israel it was much greater than anyone thought especially coming from the old man Joe. Lyndon Johnson’s great-grandparents, on the maternal side, were Jewish and Johnson helped smuggle Jews legally and illegally into Texas. “Israel,” in Kent’s analysis, “would use all the means at its command to persuade the U.S. to acquiesce in, and even to support, its possession of nuclear capability.” In short, Israel would use its immense political power – especially through its lobby in Washington – to force the United States to accede to Israel’s nuclear intentions. Stephen Green believes that Kennedy’s position vis-a-vis Israel was an important stand: “It was a remarkable exchange, and the last time in many, many years in which an American president precisely distinguished for the government of Israel the differences between U.S. and Israeli national security interests.”
Thus it was that John F. Kennedy informed Israel, in no uncertain terms, that he intended – first and foremost – to place America’s interests – not Israel’s interests – at the center of U.S. Middle East policy. Kennedy’s friendly overtures to the Arab states were only a public aspect of what ultimately developed into an all-out ‘secret war’ between Kennedy and Israel. Another part of the all secret war between Kennedy and Israel was Ben-Gurion hated Kennedy because he consider his father an anti semite and Hitler supporter. Hersh wrote, “The Israeli prime minister, in subsequent private communications to the White House, began to refer to the President as ‘young man.’ Kennedy made clear to associates that he found the letters to be offensive.” Kennedy himself told his close friend, Charles Bartlett, that he was getting fed up with the fact that the Israeli “sons of bitches lie to me constantly about their nuclear capability.” Obviously, to say the very least, there was no love lost between the two leaders. The U.S.-Israeli relationship was at an ever-growing and disastrous impasse, although virtually nothing was known about this to the American public at the time. On his part, RFK was admirable for his bravery in confronting corruption and the mob. But it might very well have been the Kennedy’s un-doing: RFK’s morality. On the other hand, I came to doubt that Pentagon generals, whom James Douglass incriminate, would plot to assassinate their own president: a question of psychological profile. They may have wished him dead, and rejoiced over his death, but that is totally different. What I find interesting is Nixon’s observations, or perhaps cryptic messages, on both assassinations. Nixon was no real “friend” of Israel either. Recall the tape of his conversation with Billy Graham. Mark Felt, a Hoover insider and Jewish, was passed over by Nixon for top dog at the FBI, which was complicit in the coverup of both assassinations. Mark Felt became Deep Throat and kept the pot boiling on Watergate. Could Nixon have been suspicious about the official narratives of the assassinations? I strongly advise getting a copy of Greg Poulgrain 'JFK vs Allen Dulles' which documents the links between Dulles and de Mohrenschildt going as far back as the 1930's. Information that George de Mohrenschildt didn't disclose to the WC's Albert Jenner commission sessions attended by Dulles. Source: educationforum.ipbhost.com
1. (Highest IQ ranking) President John Quincy Adams - IQ score: 168. While studying law at Harvard University, America's future sixth president (1825-1829) became romantically involved with a local woman, but his parents advised him to establish his career before marrying her. Brokenhearted or not, Adams listened to the advice — and went on to his duty to become one of the most respected and productive presidents ever. He's remembered for his diplomatic skills: he settled the Treaty of Ghent and ended the War of 1812; negotiated with Britain over the location of the U.S. border with Canada; and purchased Florida from Spain.
2. President Thomas Jefferson. IQ score: 153. Officially, Thomas Jefferson was a planter, lawyer and politician — but he also had in-depth knowledge of mechanics, several languages and architecture, and he was a talented surveyor and mathematician. He was an extremely busy man with a huge range of interests that he kept under control with a very strict schedule: He rose with the sun, ate breakfast strictly at 8, had a big lunch at 3, and kept track of everything in a trusty notebook. Jefferson's achievements include writing the Declaration of Independence when he was in his early 30s. As the third president (1801-1809), he: doubled the country’s territory; negotiated peace with France; and developed American trade. He remained an overachiever after retiring from office, when he founded the University of Virginia.
3. President John F. Kennedy - IQ score: 150. JFK was not just very smart—he was a real trooper who fought chronic illnesses his whole life and refused to give in. He pursued an interest in political philosophy at Harvard, then served with distinction in the Naval Reserve in World War II. During his abbreviated presidency (1961-1963), he faced some intense political situations. Kennedy steered the U.S. through the Cold War, struggles with Cuba and the Middle East, and the rising civil rights and women's equality movements. As the country was becoming more woke, the 35th president managed to push it toward a more equitable future by signing the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and proposing what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
David Talbot: In recent years, the Kennedy legacy has been clouded by a spate of books, documentaries, and articles that have attempted to demythologize Camelot by presenting JFK as a drug-addled, sex-addict, with capricious character. This pathological interpretation misses the essential story of his presidency. There was a heroic grandeur to John F. Kennedy's administration that had nothing to do with the mists of Camelot. It was a presidency that clashed with its own times, and in the end found some measure of greatness. Coming to office at the height of the Cold War and held hostage by their party's powerful Southern racist wing, the Kennedy brothers steadily grew in vision and courage - prodded by the social movements of the sixties - until they were in such sharp conflict with the national security bureaucracy and Southern Democrats that they risked splitting their own administration and party. This is the fundamental historical truth about the presidency of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. And yet, caught up in the fashionable anti-Kennedy backlash of the times, prominent journalists like Christopher Hitchens dismissed JFK as a vulgar playboy. One result of this relentless Kennedy bashing has been to diminish the public outrage over JFK's unsolved murder. After all, if President Kennedy really was such a sleazy character, where is the tragedy in his violent demise? It has also become fashionable in all the media babble about Dallas that fills the air each year around November 22 for commentators to opine that 'we will probably never know the truth about John F. Kennedy's assassination'—a self-fulfilling prophecy that relieves them of any responsibility to search for the truth. From Dallas to Vietnam to Iraq, the truth has consistently been avoided, the perpetrators have never been found. When the nation has mustered the courage to impanel commissions, these investigations soon come up against locked doors that remain firmly shut to this day. The stage for this reign of secrecy was set on November 22, 1963. The lesson of Dallas was clear. If a president can be shot down with impunity at high noon in the sunny streets of an American city, then any kind of deceit is possible. The CIA should be required to disclose the phone and travel records of agents suspected of involvement in the JFK - and RFK - assassinations, such as David Morales. Lingering technical disputes about the events in Dealey Plaza - such as the hotly debated 'acoustic fingerprints' on the Dallas police motorcycle Dictabelt that apparently indicated that as many as five shots were fired that day - should be resolved by utilizing the most sophisticated forensic resources, including those of the federal Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, which oddly refused to take on the case. The assassination researchers are, of course, indefatigable by nature. That's what has allowed them to carry on, through years of government obstruction, media ridicule, and the bewilderment of family and friends. But outside this shrinking community of hardy souls, a malaise hangs over the JFK crusade. Do Americans still want the truth - starting with Dallas and going all the way to Guantanamo? Do they want to take back their country? I don't know for certain. But I have to be optimistic. Just because there really is no other way, is there? —David Talbott, author of Brothers - The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years.
"In real life, the big gesture isn't enough. You need to be consistent, you need to be dependably good." —JFK Jr (Estimated IQ according to his SAT tests in Brown University: 129). John Kennedy Jr was passionate about history and one of his favorite readings was Roman Imperialism in the Late Republic by Ernst Badian (an Austrian-born classical scholar who served as a professor at Harvard University from 1971 to 1998). "John's legacy was really about who he would've become," friend Brian Steel, a former assistant district attorney in Manhattan with John Kennedy Jr, 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." 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."
Brian Steel: Calling out a random woman in public angered John, and you can see clearly John going off on the paparazzo who'd shouted Carolyn's name while they were vacationing in Hyannisport. I can’t believe a minute later, John apologized to that annoying photographer, which shows you what a classy man he was. Not only he apologized for losing his temper, John also offered to pay for his broken camera. Not too many high status people would do that. And you can tell he really felt bad, he first had yelled "I don't give a fuck about your camera!" and then he asks him politely: "Can I pay for it? How much it costs?" Very rare sympathy that is not found in celebrated public figures these days.
Douglas Caddy: Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, recalling a discussion he and Kennedy had about the Bay of Pigs said, "This episode seared him. He had experienced the extreme power these groups had, these various insidious influences of the CIA and the Pentagon on civilian policy, and I think it raised in his own mind the specter: Can Jack Kennedy, President of the United States, ever be strong enough to really rule these two powerful agencies? I think it had a profound effect... it shook him up." John Stockwell (former CIA officer) discussed his role in Oliver Stone's movie, JFK, and their eventual parting of ways over differences in belief about the mechanics of the assassination plot. Though both agreed that Kennedy was killed by a group of conspirators, Stockwell argued that it was a group of "renegades" whereas Stone, using the Jim Garrison investigation and Fletcher L. Prouty's recollections as starting points, argued that the conspiracy went to the highest levels of the US government. Stockwell faults Stone and Garrison for leaving out the mafia connection to the assassination plot and the Miami nexus of Cuban-exiles. Stockwell focused on how the CIA targeted six countries for destabilization in order to put its favorites in command of their governments. What he described fits to a T of what America under Trump has gone through. The only difference being that it was a former KGB Colonel named Putin and not the CIA that targeted America for destabilization.
Jim DiEugenio: A few days ago, I wrote a brief article for Kennedys and King.com about the upcoming parole hearing for Sirhan Sirhan. I posted it on the RFK section. Since it is dealing with a current topic--the hearing is in March--and since people have queried me about it and emailed me their letters, I decided to check on its popularity. At Google, it is nowhere to be seen. I thought that was odd. It makes me wonder, are we living in The Truman Show? Is Google really that rigged against people like us? I mean I know all about Wikipedia. But now this? If so, break Google up. The Corbett Report had the most popular video on youtube in regard to the federal reserve, explaining the origins of fractional reserve banking and money creation so a layman could understand. It was top search and then it just vanished from searches but, it’s still there on the authors page, you just can’t find it even if you type the exact title. There was nothing factually incorrect about the video, it just didn’t make the FED look good. Some book sites have removed peoples audiobooks and refunded them, with no explanation. Clearly the books were fine for publication, or they never would have been available in the first place. Youtube, FB and Twitter have all just removed people's accounts with no warnings, the only general explanation you get is that policy was broken, no laws were broken though. Essentially, where this is going is that big tech is shaping our thoughts and ideas, manipulating public discourse. Society is so reliant on google for results, it has lost the ability to critically think or research. This is the future, you’ll only find what google wants you to find and people will wish they had hard copy of books again.
Larry Hancock: The Carlos Lechuga / Silvia Duran / Harvey Oswald story deserves far more attention than it has received and is based in deep research by Bill Simpich and Stu Wexler, now continued by David Boylan (who is working the Moore lead as well). I would say it is one of the deepest and perhaps the most seminal leads to explain events in Mexico City (including Emilio Rodriguez, Tony Sforza, the AMOTS and the impersonation of Oswald) than anything else I've seen. More importantly, it provides a very specific path by which Oswald would have been selected as the ideal patsy for Dallas....a path leading back directly to Miami and SAS/WAVE personnel. So in terms of tensions and a deep seated mistrust of JFK you only need to look at how Esterline communicated that to those in the chain of command and follow him down to Miami, to Moore, to Morales, and to the exiles in the maritime operations there. Whatever anyone suspected or knew about JFK's plot was overridden by personal concerns and by fears of survival of the CIA as a whole - whom everyone still saw as a front line unit in the fight against global communism. I imagine that was used as the justification for just moving on. Even after his exit from CIA in November 1961, Allen Dulles was still able to input his agenda in 1963? We know Eisenhower gave green lights to get rid of Lumumba and Trujillo. But the killing of Dag Hammarskjold in September '61 was given no presidential authority, yet Dulles and ZR/RIFLE were involved. The day after the crash, former U.S. President Harry Truman commented that Hammarskjöld "was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said 'when they killed him'." Having read the recent brilliant publication by Greg Poulgrain 'JFK vs Allen Dulles' that documents the 30 years of Dulles overtaking of Indonesia, that required the removal of both Sukarno & JFK, which resulted in the regime change in '65. So there were odds that the ex CIA Director could also set the Dallas plot in motion! Presidential authority got lost in the world of subtle conversations and indirect dialogue in the Director's office at CIA. J.C. King was the first CIA officer to propose killing Castro - and was the senior officer that approved the TILT mission, a political action which could have eviscerated the Kennedy administration had it succeeded. Frankly I think King doesn't get nearly enough attention, a man with extreme views who was operationally in charge of Western Hemisphere for way to long. All I can postulate in Tipping Point is there were conversations which would have involved Dulles, Angleton, Harvey and Helms about their concerns over JFK's drift towards negotiation and neutrality in international relations, which they considered both extremely naive and actually dangerous. Those conversations were repeated within Operations, likely to King and down stream to officers in SAS/WAVE. Source: https://educationforum.ipbhost.com
Ron Unz: The JFK Assassination (2018) by James DiEugenio is a devastating critique of Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History: The Assassination of John F Kennedy (2008). One of DiEugenio's chief complaints is that Bugliosi uses extreme verbosity to try to overwhelm readers, the intemperate way in which Bugliosi insults those with whom he disagrees and the underlying theme of the DiEugenio book is disclosing Bugliosi’s intellectual dishonesty. At Parkland Hospital, JFK was lying supine, or face up in the emergency room at Parkland, and Dr. Malcolm Perry had ample opportunity and good reason to inspect the wound to Pres. Kennedy’s throat carefully before performing the tracheotomy, which led him to declare unambiguously that “The wound appeared to be an entrance wound in the front of the throat,” and none of Bugliosi's voluminous but sophomoric sophistry, special pleading, and outright fibbing here can change that. JFK was hit at least three times, with wounds in his throat, back, and head. Gov. Connally sustained additional wounds, and several other shots missed the motorcade entirely, one leaving a scar on a manhole cover that pointed back to the Country Records Building on Houston St. as the spot from which the bullet had been fired. Bugliosi got a huge advance of a million dollars for “Reclaiming History”. No doubt he got a lot more when Peter Landesman, Tom Hanks et al. made the movie Parkland from the book. In Imdb it appears as "A recounting of the chaotic events that occurred at Dallas' Parkland Hospital on the day U.S. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated."
Keith Uhlich from Time magazine panned it: "The tone never stops waffling, the script rarely makes the case that their versions are compelling enough to warrant a film and nothing truly revelatory ever emerges about those terrible few days in Texas. What we’re left with is the Disney theme-park version of history—all waxworks and weepiness." As I mentioned in my original JFK article, when I first began getting a little suspicious a few years ago, I (very gingerly) raised the possibility of a conspiracy with a very well-connected member of the elite establishment, with whom I’d gotten a little friendly, and was absolutely shocked to hear him say he’d been absolutely convinced of a JFK conspiracy for decades. But he’s never even said a word to his friends or colleagues, lest he risk his “elite establishment” membership card and no longer have influence in his own areas of work. As another example, last year after the Epstein controversy, a fairly prominent public figure came to Palo Alto and had dinner with me. He said flat out he was convinced that JFK had been killed by the Mossad over the nuclear issue. But never in a million years would he say something like that in public. So there’s a huge difference between what someone like Gerald Ford would say in public and what he would say in private, with a fellow world leader like French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing. Many years after the Warren Report came out, Ford did admit that the CIA hid information from the Commission Warren and also added: “I recognize that no all questions will ever be answered.” During a May 1976 state meeting with French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, a great admirer of JFK, Ford told VGE that the assassination “had been planned”. The House Assassinations Committee was established in 1976 and a couple of years later suggested the plausibility of a conspiracy. “It was a conspiracy, but we haven’t been able to identify the organisation that commissioned it,” said Ford to Giscard. This is what Ford said to historian David Brinkley in 2003, just three years before his death: “75 percent of the people don’t believe the Warren Commission anymore. It just makes me sad and unhappy.”
President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, who was born in Germany, spoke an excellent English and German too. He made a speech in English on the same night of his election in 1974, and often carried press conferences in either of these languages. He was actually known for his fluency in English, and often derided for it by some, who disliked his proximity to the Anglo-Saxon centres of power. His popularity suffered from the economic downturn that followed the 1973 energy crisis, marking the end of the "Trente Glorieuses" (thirty glorious years of prosperity after 1945). Like Margaret Thatcher, Giscard was forced to impose austerity budgets. Furthermore, VGE as president would have had access to fine analysts within French intelligence and military experts, and he would have checked their opinions on the JFK assassination. VGE publicly repeated Gerald Ford’s confidences that JFK was murdered following an organised conspiracy at least on two occasions, on foremost mainstream media, first live on RTL radio, and then to “Le Parisien” newspaper in 2013. His words have been translated by honest, fringe American websites and have never been challenged during his lifetime (he just passed away 3 weeks ago). And for the record, Lyndon Johnson himself said that others in addition to Oswald were involved in the JFK assassination. In a 1969 post-presidential interview with CBS, LBJ told Walter Cronkite that he had never been convinced that a lone gunman killed Kennedy, suggesting that “others could have been involved” in the JFK assassination. Immediately after the taping, he and his staff successfully pushed CBS to delete those comments from the broadcast version for reasons of “national security.” There is a reason why these words by LBJ have been culled from the accessible records to the day, and this reason is the systematic cover-up by those who own the MSM.
We know that LBJ was speaking sincerely when he spoke to Cronkite. He mentioned several times privately during his life that he thought there was a conspiracy to murder JFK, including to his good friend and Commission member Senator Richard Russell. Pierre Salinger first endorsed the Warren Report, but later thought there was a conspiracy. Ted Sorensen was initially agnostic, but said he had never seen any hard evidence that Oswald acted alone. On the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s death, John Kerry stated: “To this day, I have serious doubts that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone,” Kerry told NBC’s Tom Brokaw, in a program timed to coincide with the anniversary of the tragedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Kerry echoed the same view in an interview aired on NBC with the journalist David Gregory. Général De Gaulle, for instance, expressed his opinion that JFK died as the result of a conspiracy to Alain Peyrefitte, then Minister of Information, upon return from the USA, where he spent 48 hours for JFK’s funerals. He said: «Vous savez, tout ça n’est pas une affaire de cowboy, c’est une affaire d’OAS.» «De toute façon, on ne saura jamais la vérité, parce que si on connaît la vérité, il n’y a plus d’Etats-Unis.» / “You know, this was not the act of a cowboy, it was the an OAS-style affair. Anyway, we will never know the truth, because if we knew, that would be the end of the United States”. So in summary, we have two French Presidents, De Gaulle and Giscard, and two US Presidents, Johnson and Ford, all known to have expressed their opinion/belief that JFK died as result of a conspiracy. For example, the Emperor Guangxu was killed by arsenic poison administered by a conspiracy led by Dowager Empress Cixi. History is full of such examples.
It reminds me of this famous sequence when George H. W. Bush can’t help laughing while mentioning the lone gunman theory of the Warren Commission, in his eulogy of Gerald Ford on the 2nd of January, 2007: Even the New York Times reporter mentioned in his transcript of the speech: “After a deluded gunman assassinated President Kennedy, Bush laughed!... our nation turned to Gerald Ford and a select handful of others to make sense of that madness.” I discovered the CIA has always had free lancers at nearly every level of the organization who did what they wanted to do. A lot of that is explained by the covert nature of the organization. By design, there aren’t many people looking over their shoulders after they’re given a mission unless you are part of a tight team assigned with a specific short-term task. A high-level example of this was Richard Bissell’s decision to continue U-2 flights over the Soviet Union even after Eisenhower told him to take a break. Ike had left it in his sole power to decide when the U-2 flights over the USSR could be made, and he often vetoed them for reasons he never explained. After one such veto, Bissell decided on his own to transfer at least one of the U-2 planes to a Great Britain air base where it was outside the normal Agency chain of command. He then continued the flights over the Soviet Union on his own orders. He told neither Dulles, his immediate superior in the CIA, nor Eisenhower of his decision. He just did it. Think of the momentous consequences of some subordinate just deciding on his own to overfly the Soviet Union. The flights were common enough by that time that Bissell would’ve known the Soviets were merely irritated by them and trying to shoot them down, but also making no diplomatic fuss. Lucky for Bissell, none of these unauthorized flights were the doomed Gary Powers’ mission. Republican activist Roger Stone was very close to Richard Nixon.
In his book “Nixon’s secrets”, packed with revelations and insider information, Stone reveals in particular how Nixon avoided prosecution after the Watergate scandal. According to Stone, Nixon used General Alexander Haig as his intermediary to let VP Gerald Ford know that he would expose the CIA’s involvement in the JFK assassination, as well as Ford’s role in altering autopsy records for the Warren Commission if ever he was sent to trial in the Watergate scandal. “Tell them if Dick Nixon’s going down I’m taking everyone down with me, that prick [CIA Director] Richard Helms, Lyndon, and Jerry Ford are going down with me,” was the way Haig phrased it. Nixon would have used this information about the JFK conspiracy to avoid prosecution and to obtain Gerald Ford unconditional pardon. James Angleton was the link between Israel and the CIA. For Angleton’s key role in the assassination conspiracy, see John Newman’s Oswald and the CIA, especially the last chapter. John Newman is a retired Army major in intelligence, whose last position was as an aide to NSA Director General William Odom, Newman has since then been a professor of history at the University of Maryland and George Mason University. At least 40 suspicious deaths of witnesses occurred in the three years after Dallas, of which at least 33 were unnatural (homicide, accident, suicide, unknown causes). The probability of 33 unnatural deaths within the 1400 JFK witnesses population is lower than one hundred thousand trillions to one.
JFK was a very charismatic president and was much liked and loved outside the US. Recently Bob Dylan had a number 1 hit this year with a single about that day in which he describes him as the King. This morning I was reading an ancient Egyptian text from 2000 BC in which a man instructs his son about the nature of the King and his role in the afterlife “Whoever does not attack him has already touched land…” which refers to the recently deceased as a sailor looking to land in a happy afterlife. It displays a generosity of spirit with no exacting demands and JFK had, as did David, a generous heart. Going back even earlier there is an epithet of the King as Osiris “He Whose Face Suffered” who has been struck down but rises again. Those images of Jesus with bloody head have old precursors. The spiritual imagery and symbols surrounding Dallas are very deep.
James DiEugenio: The thing is, Clay Risen's book, The Bill of the Century shows that LBJ was not even all that active in getting the Civil Rights BIll of 1964 passed. Risen's book shows that LBJ made maybe one phone call. And that he did not attend the celebratory rally after the final vote that summer. The extension of the Housing Act had been begun by Kennedy. These are the facts: from 1937-1956, LBJ voted against each and every civil rights bill that attempted to pass congress. And he was not a passive opponent. He actively voiced the good old southern shibboleth of it being an intrusion on States Rights. Which would mean, of course, that there would never be any progress on civil rights. In 1957 two things happened that changed his tune. First, Nixon and Eisenhower decided to submit a very mild, almost blooper ball pitch type of civil rights bill. LBJ was entertaining thoughts on running for the highest office in 1960. He saw what had happened to his pal Richard Russell's ambitions due to his anti civil rights views. So he knew that to make himself palatable to the liberals in the party, he had to change. Those are the two reasons LBJ first came around on civil rights. It was reasons of realpolitik. Especially since Nixon and Eisenhower designed it as a stunt and though they did set up a civil rights division in the DOJ, the amount of cases they brought forward was miniscule. During Ike's entire two terms, they would be brought something like 10 civil rights cases; really nine, because the tenth one was filed on the last day of his second term, probably to make it double digits. It's because of this mindframe that the Kennedys faced such huge resistance and incredible friction from all sides when they began to turn around the issue. As some writers have finally suggested, much of the blame should go to Eisenhower. He was in a position to really accomplish something in the field. With the two Brown decisions, plus the insurrection by Faubus at Central High. Yet he did next to nothing. As Risen says in his book, the people who performed the incredible act of passing the Civil Rights Bill were JFK, RFK, Hubert Humphrey and US Senator Tom Kuchel of California.
RFK stayed on for that particular reason, since he knew all the work his brother had put into the effort. By that reason, when JFK was in Dallas, Bobby penned a resignation letter. He thought it would be easier to pass the bill with him out of office since he had become such a lightning rod on the issue. contrary to what establishment historians have written, Kennedy's fellow southern senators realized who he was on the issue of civil rights. And they did not want him in the White House. Kennedy had endorsed the Brown vs Board decision as a senator twice in public. Once in NYC, and once, in of all places, Jackson Mississippi. He also did not want to go along with Johnson's rather tepid 1957 civil rights act, but he did at LBJ's behest. Kennedy won 303 electoral college votes to Nixon’s 219. Byrd got only 15 votes, one from Oklahoma’s Irwin and 14 from the Alabama and Mississippi electors. All 14 electors voted for South Carolina Democratic Senator Strom Thurmond for Vice President. Nixon didn't want to take part in any of the vote challenges and told a reporter that “our country cannot afford the agony of a constitutional crisis.”
As I found out through the archival work of Malcolm Blunt, JFK gave a warning to Israel three times. Twice to Ben Gurion. And after the second one, Ben Gurion resigned. Once to Eshkol, who succeeded Ben Gurion. There is a debate as to whether or not Ben Gurion resigned due to the second letter. But I find it interesting he resigned the day after he got it. The other issue was over the right to return for Palestinian refugees. Kennedy was pushing the Joseph Johnson plan of the UN, which Ben Gurion had already rejected. Kennedy pushed it for months after that. IMO, I think he was doing this not just for the Palestinians, but also to balance the relationship with Nasser. Who he knew favored it as a way to a Palestinian homeland. Kennedy had explicitly told Nasser that he did not object to his efforts to form a Pan Arab union. Which was not just a reversal of Foster Dulles, but it was what the Israelis had nightmares about. The British backed the Muslim Brotherhood first, and then the Saudis did. Nasser went to war with them, expelled them, executed some of the leaders and imprisoned the rest. But the Muslim Brotherhood was useful to the petroleum rich monarchies. Anyway, this is what appealed to Kennedy about Nasser. That someone like him could moderate what JFK called the tendency toward feudalism and fanaticism in the Arab world.
Chappaquiddick Speaks (2017) by Bill Pinney: Something I never understood was why Ted Kennedy took the blame if he was not actually the driver when the car went into the water. Mary Jo Kopechne had access to very sensitive information and phone calls between George Smathers and his nefarious associates like Ed Ball of the DuPont fortune in Florida, as well as business partners like his high school classmate Bebe Rebozo. In fact, Smathers and his father oversaw local OPA regulations that together illicitly made Rebozo a multi-millionaire. Smathers also helped manage LBJ's media assets, allowing him favorable FCC rulings in his monopolistic Texas broadcast operations, which made him a millionaire. Meanwhile Kopechne was extremely perspicacious and diligent in her duties handling Smathers’ calendar and files. Terribly ambitious and notoriously corrupt, Smathers used Jack Kennedy during his stay as representant of the state of Florida in the United States Senate from 1951 until 1969, ever-ready to supply his Addison’ Disease associate with new drugs, but, as Kopechne noted much to her dismay, the right-wing Florida solon voted against Jack Kennedy's legislative proposals 62% of the time, and incessantly pushed Castro's assassination to JFK, until finally, one evening, Kennedy so forcefully replied in the negative to his alleged friend, that the normally imperturbable president broke his White House dinner plate with the thrust of his fork downward in emphasizing his anger at Smathers' ceaseless insistence. Smathers was deeply tied into the CIA's anti-Castro ops, accepted an invitation to be the keynote speaker at CIA agent Bill Buckley's inaugural convention of his newly-formed arch-conservative Young Americans for Freedom, which had recently formed an alliance with anti-Castro paramilitary groups, financed in no small part by JFK assassination co-conspirator Joseph Milteer.
Mary Jo Kopechne had taken the job as Smathers’ secretary only because she had initially believed him to be a close persona friend of the president. What she discovered, deeply disturbed her. A few days before JFK’s departure to engage in pre-election-year appearances in Florida and Texas, John Kennedy stopped by Smathers’ Senate office to complain to him his irritation at having to try to resolve internecine party spats that he felt, as he said, “You and Lyndon should be handling. I don’t want to go.” Smathers grandly made a show of it by grinning broadly and warmly hugging the president. “Nonsense,” he replied, “You have to make these trips, Jack. The people will love you down there. They want to see their president.” Kennedy wasn’t entirely mollified. He was aware of the various plots against him, had chided the Secret Service about his protection, and had been repeatedly warned against these trips that followed his June 11, nationwide civil rights address. But Smathers continued to flatter, cajole, and insist to him the absolute necessity of his taking these trips. Kennedy finally relented. Watching all this was Kopechne, who took the opportunity to ask JFK for an autograph on the photo of him that she kept posted above her desk. Smathers took the opportunity to chide his “friend.” “There, you see, Jack? She’s my secretary, but you don’t see a portrait of me above her desk. You see how the people love you?”
Meanwhile, as George Smathers’ name was being mentioned in the Senate’s deepening inquiry into the nefarious mob-related business dealings of LBJ’s secretary, Bobby Baker, and an explosive Life magazine article was being prepared to publicly expose this scandal, Milteer’s Florida anti-Castro assassins awaited the president’s arrival, having Lee Oswald, who had infiltrated their group. picked out as their patsy. Fortunately, undercover police informant, William Somerset, secretly tape-recorded his conversation with Milteer and reported it to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and some precautions were taken to spare JFK’s life in Florida. Bobby already had information on Baker’s links to LBJ financier, Clint Murchison and several Mafia bosses like New Orleans Mafioso Carlos Marcello. Another case of LBJ's corrupt maneuvers included the awarding of a $7 billion contract for a fighter plane, the F-111, to General Dynamics, a company based in Texas for whom the father of John Connally’s son-in-law Bobby Hale worked. A month prior to JFK’s visit to Smathers’ office, Bobby Baker was forced to resign his post, as did Naval Secretary John Connally’s replacement, Texan Fred Korth. Not to pun, but it was all coming to an explosive head, when Kennedy visited Smathers office and for the first time, met Mary Jo Kopechne, who adored him. And as the Milteer plot was exposed, and as Lee Oswald, in Dallas, dispatched a warning (his second within the past month, of a pending assassination attempt against the president), the assassination locale shifted to its secondary back-up site (following Chicago and Tampa): Dallas. When JFK was killed, a number of those in Smathers’ office, wept. But not Mary Jo. She simply stared out into space, deeply contemplative, “as though she saw things the rest of us didn’t.” Shortly after, Mary Jo Kopechne resigned her position with Smathers and went to work for Robert Kennedy. In short order, her ex-roommate, Nancy Carole Tyler, former secretary to Bobby Baker, was terminated. Mary Jo did intelligence work for RFK in his ’68 campaign to attain the presidency and thus bring to justice his brothers’ assassins. Shortly after, he was sacrificed too. The following year, having her first opportunity to speak privately with Ted Kennedy about all this, Mary Jo Kopechne and the 1972 Democratic presidential front-runner Ted Kennedy would be conveniently terminated.
Larry Hancock: As a history writer I've come to feel that "history" ("a study of past events") can be accurate, but that accurate history is not necessarily popular history ("a broad genre of historiography that takes a popular approach, aims at a wide readership, and usually emphasizes narrative, personality and vivid detail over scholarly analysis"). I can recall a historiography professor making that quite clear in discussing source material - warning us about relying too much on news articles, since media news has its factual limitations. If it's reporting directly from the scene it may have certain value, otherwise it's likely contaminated by editorial agendas. We were warned that popular histories run the same risks, since they are often written for large circulations and may be constrained by the publishers objective's (these days by politicized school book review committees). Academic histories should be superior but reality wades in even then because academic works are often limited to academia. Academic publishers hardly ever make a profit and have to be subsidized, while other publishers find a very limited market for works that meet the source and citation standards for academic publication. Having said all that its easy to slam the media, or popular history publishers or even popular history authors. The other side of the coin are the readers who demand personal, intimate details and sensationalism. Plenty of room for blame on both sides. Having lived through the Camelot era I can say that it does really bring back good memories and it's not just naive nostalgia. Even though my family were hard nosed conservatives and opposed many of JFK's actions - including school integration - there was never the sort of personal bitterness we see nowadays.
There were snarky comments about the Kennedys but the social life at the White House, Jackie's personality, JFK's football games, they were all viewed as very real and in a sympathetic light by many people. While we often focus on the hate against the Kennedys found in certain circles, the national tone was quite different. While we tend to dwell on conservatives who demonized the New Frontier, or the Space Race or the Test Ban treaty, the general sense of new beginnings was quite real. I simply maintain that if the Zapruder film, along with many of the other early public remarks out of Dallas including Oswald being driven away in a station wagon and witnesses seeing smoke and apparent shooting from the fence-line, had been widely seen by the public it would have made life much more difficult for the lone nut story. I can say from personal experience that the shooting of Oswald by Ruby raised considerable doubt in the public mind about the lone nut line that was emerging that weekend. The Z film would have given further push to public skepticism. I thought I was clear that it was open to frame removal, frame manipulation and even to the possibility to tampering the wound in the rear of the head. My experience with public viewings of the film leads me to believe that the general public often responds to the film with the impression that the president has been shot from the front. I believe the Z-film has frames missing after Z-312. Two remarkable events make the removal possible. Firstly I believe the car was stationary and secondly it was directly in front of Zapruder. The only way I see to remove witness anomalies, car slowing/acceleration effects, and witnessed injuries is to add frames back in. I have always maintained that the best evidence for conspiracy comes from the number of shots that missed, not the number of shots that hit. If you have more than one shot that missed, that's prima facie evidence for conspiracy. I think Allen Dulles and Richard Helms are identified as the ones likeliest to have been at the top of the conspiracy food chain. But in terms of the conspiracy I explore in my book Tipping Point, (to be published in 2021) neither film manipulation nor film alteration was anticipated or desirable.
Part of my reasoning is based on (reporter and author of JFK: Secrets from the Sixth Floor Window) Connie Kritzberg's experience with one of her articles quoting Dr Malcolm Perry and Dr Kemp Clark from Parkland. Dr. Perry described a shot from the front after treating the President and was very clear to her. Kritzberg wrote it up and submitted her article before 9 PM that evening. When published the wording was slightly changed to obfuscate the Doctor's remarks. When she protested to her editor he referred her to the FBI. Later research by Connie Kritzberg suggests that newspaper reports were being referred to the FBI even before midnight. In the segment 5 of Tipping Point, you will find a case for a national security directive ordering that evidence of conspiracy be controlled and suppressed beginning on Saturday. That is consistent with what happened to the autopsy materials over the weekend, with the FBI change in direction to order a total focus on Oswald and the order on Sunday to build a case against him. Indeed the cover-up was so poor that it almost didn't hold together in 1964 - and we can now deconstruct it in extensive detail. Source: https://educationforum.ipbhost.com
1960: John F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy receive an early Christmas present. The President-elect and his wife Jackie Kennedy welcomed their second child, John F. Kennedy Jr., at the start of the holiday season on November 25. The couple returned to their Georgetown residence with their newborn son on December 10, 1960.
In 1961, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy began the tradition of selecting a theme for the official White House Christmas tree. She decorated a tree placed in the oval Blue Room with ornamental toys, birds and angels modeled after Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker" ballet. Mrs. Kennedy reused these ornaments in 1962 for her children's theme tree. Set up in the North Entrance, this festive tree also featured brightly wrapped packages, candy canes, gingerbread cookies and straw ornaments made by disabled or senior citizen craftspeople throughout the US.
Jackie Kennedy shows off the Christmas seals. In 1962, the First Lady posed with the Postal Service's Christmas seals. The limited edition stamps were sold around the holidays to raise money for charity. The First Lady stayed at the famous Carlyle hotel during her shopping trip.
1962: The Kennedys spend Christmas morning with the Radziwills. The Kennedy family was joined by Jackie's sister, Lee Radziwill, and her family at the White House in 1962. Here, the extended family gathering looks like your typical Christmas celebration. John F. Kennedy Jr. and Caroline Kennedy were busy opening their Christmas stockings while still in their pajamas on Christmas morning.
1965: Robert Francis Kennedy plays Santa in New York City. New York Senator Robert Kennedy accompanied his sister-in-law, Jackie Kennedy, to the Bronx community Christmas party in 1965 and handed out presents to the children.
Aged 42, Robert Kennedy was shot and killed after winning the Democratic primary in California in June 1968. In an interview, John Lewis said: “I remember I just started crying and the next day I got up and I travelled to Atlanta; I think I cried all the way from Los Angeles to Atlanta. It was a dark, dark period.” Lewis, 78, who had joined Kennedy’s campaign for the Democratic nomination, remains convinced that he would have gone on to win the 1968 presidential election, where Republican Richard Nixon eventually prevailed. I got to know Robert Kennedy during the spring and summer of 1963. Lewis recalls: “Robert Kennedy was just a wonderful human being, a wonderful man. He had a great sense of humor, and he came across with the sense that he really believed, he had this great sense of passion, and I identified with that. When I was chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, better known as SNCC, at some of our meetings, we would have little skits. During the midst of the Freedom Rides, President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy became fully committed to the cause of civil rights. Bobby Kennedy tried his best. I saw this man grow, and during that time he had a tremendous influence on his brother, the President. When we heard that President Kennedy had been assassinated, we all cried. I cried because I felt I lost not just my President, but someone who was so inspiring to me, and such a wonderful human being. My organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, was to hold a meeting in D.C. the weekend of President Kennedy’s funeral at Arlington Cemetery. Sadly, many couldn't attend. The presidency was truly in Bobby's bag had he lived, it really makes me sad to think of what could've been. After the Kennedy brothers' deaths, I think something died in America, and something died within all of us really. We probably would never, ever, live the way we lived again, because these men had so much to offer, not just to America and not just to the American people, but to the world community. I feel even today that we were robbed of something, denied something, because of their untimely deaths.” Source: emkinstitute.org/resources/john-lewis
An all-grown-up JFK Jr. commutes in New York City during the holiday season, December 1993.
Fashion designer Susan Erneta: In 1993, I was 21 and living in New York City where I had just moved from Massachusetts. As a young girl dreaming of working in the fashion industry, I felt so lucky to land an internship with Fern Mallis of the Council of Fashion Designers of America. The CFDA was responsible for staging the runway shows in Bryant Park and it as the first year it had been done there.I was at the tents with Fern for a late night rehearsal one night with Mr. Calvin Klein. He was running this rehearsal with his new muse Kate Moss. All of the publicists were chic and good looking but there was one that stood out. She was so effortlessly gorgeous, blonde, and stylish and I remember thinking 'Why is she not on that runway?' She was classy and stunning and she had on the sickest outfit that I can still picture to this day. She was wearing a floor-length sweeping velvet skirt, black Adidas sneakers and a chunky black oversized turtleneck sweater.I attempted to emulate that outfit 1000 different ways and I often wondered who that amazingly stylish girl was. About a year later, I read that JFK Jr. had started dating a beautiful blonde, how a middle class girl whisked him away, and I was not surprised when I saw her face in the tabloids. It was the girl who worked for Calvin Klein! Carolyn Bessette took the Jackie's torch and she had a similar style of elegance.
I knew John Jr. had dated a few models in the early 90s, one of them my friend Jennifer Kusner. In an article for Glamour magazine in 1999, they cover the time of his 30th birthday (1990), when he was dating my close friend Jenny, who was described in the article as a "good-looking, ginger-haired model". Jenny frequently threw dinner parties at her Manhattan townhouse. At one such event, John carried the evening with all his charm and reserve. There was something about him, observed writer Karen Duffy (a former Coney Island Mermaid Queen, chosen one of People Magazine's "50 Most Beautiful People" in 1993), "that tacitly asked for a bit of distance and respect." Despite his stunning looks, John Jr. was not an easy man or given to frivolous adventures, so that says a lot of Carolyn Bessette's formidable character to conquer him. The funny thing it was John who was stalking Carolyn. It was him who had some friends spying on her at nightclubs, and reporting back to John. He frequently asked his friends with connections to the fashion world about her. Source: issuu.com
Across decades and generations, the Kennedys have occupied a unique place in the American imagination: charmed, cursed, at once familiar and unknowable. The House of Kennedy (2020) by James Patterson, tries to shed light on the dual family motto: "To whom much is given, much is expected" and they did—but at a high price. James Patterson: Joe Kennedy Sr. and his wife Rose demanded that everybody in the family do the best they can be, be the best they could be, strive for something better and bigger and higher. And that's hard to live up to. They all had to strive to be as good as they could be and take risks. If I wrote an outline for a novel and if I had the things happen to a family that happened to this one, I think my publisher Little Brown would say, "This is silly. All of this couldn't possibly happen to one family." One of the things that drove me to write the book is I just felt that this is the great American family story because the characters are so vibrant and interesting. It covers a period from the Depression right through to present day. TV producer Barbara Hall wants to turn this into one of those series like "The Crown," so this would be like the American "Crown." I loved "The Crown," but these people were a lot more interesting really than Queen Elizabeth. The culture inside the family is more interesting than the royal family. One great anecdote was the notion of this patriarch, Joe Kennedy Sr., and he's had a stroke and he's in this bedroom up in Hyannis Port [Massachusetts] and he's really cold, but he can't communicate to anybody. And finally he communicates to a niece that he's cold, and she goes rummaging around the bedroom and finds this flag and covers him with this flag. I'm sure he recognized it was the flag that had covered the coffin of his son John F. Kennedy. There are a lot of incidents like that. The fact that when JFK was president, he would call up Judy Garland more than once and ask her to sing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" over the phone. Or the fact of Bobby literally saving his son from drowning and then that night being assassinated. Source: usatoday.com
