This is still especially for John, my English darling, but also for anyone else who wants to read on and not give me flak for my conclusions. There is no more contentious, infighting body on the face of the earth than the Kennedy researchers, except for The Brontë Society.
Fortunately, I’m not a “Kennedy researcher”. But I remember the Friday lunchtime when President Kennedy was killed in Dallas, and initial memories turn out to be very important in reconstructing what really happened way back then. Even the memory of an eight year-old girl in 4th grade class 900 miles away counts.
So that Friday before Thanksgiving. Mrs Weisberg got a call and told us the President was dead and we went into the library to watch the TV coverage. Like a good police procedural, the suspect was apprehended almost right away, and after that all seemed to proceed as normally as a TV show: bad guy caught, law prevails, life back to normal, only normal+a little mourning (Oh, God! “Salute your father’s coffin, John-John”)+a new head of the country. Which was going to be the same country as always anyway, right?
What a different world that was then. What a bunch of saps those murdering thugs took us for.
But I want to talk about what I saw and heard in the first broadcasts, when the police and newspeople brought out Oswald and informed us that he was 24, an ex-Marine, from New Orleans, well-traveled, the father of two, with a foreign wife. (They got that info pretty fast, didn’t they. Within minutes. This before the internet. Talaga.) My kind of male? I was already interested in boys, I wanted to check him out.
He was strangely resolute in front of the camera. “Did you shoot the President and Officer Tippit?” demanded the newsman.
“No, I did not,” he replied firmly, and I was impressed by his looks, his composure, his educated, non-regionally-accented speech. The boys around me were gathering for a Hate Minute: Of course he did it! Otherwise he’d be jumping up and down hollering his innocence!
But at the age of eight-going-on-nine I had two weird revelations staring at that thin pale face.
- One: He knows something.
- Two: I’m probably going to marry a man like that.
So by golly, number two came true: A white southener, self-educated, self-composed, brilliant but secretive, an average-looking, average-sized man who could pass for thousands of other average men—
And—an operative of Army Intelligence. I’m looking at my blind bearded baby in front of me right now, grateful the Ruskies didn’t shoot him down on some wintry street in Prague in 1968.
In Part Two I’ll talk about ex-friend Hollywood director Stephen Gyllenhaal, his shockingly idiotic, insulting, slightly treasonous project, and Abraham Bolden, for whom I wrote the screenplay, at his personal request, Bolden: The Untold Story of JFK’s Assassination.
There is a Meredith Willson-John Kennedy connection! It’s this peppy number, which was commissioned by President Kennedy for his Council on Physical Fitness for kids like us to do their daily school calisthenics to. Some people remember this number with affection, many don’t. Robert Preston sang it and the Warner Bros orchestra played it. It’s called “Chicken Fat”. Ten times!
"I'll Be Dead Before You Break My Heart" 