After all these years, we still don’t know for sure who killed President John F. Kennedy, though I have my own view.
Can’t say who fired the shots, but I can say who, in my opinion, ordered the hit.
We will know more any day, now that Trump wants those documents declassified.
When it comes to JFK and the 1960s altogether, humbly I propose that the best source material comes from “The Days of the Bitter End,” a book that I wrote…and it starts like this:
“This was morning in America. America was a nation on the move, happy to leave behind the torpor of the Eisenhower years to heed this new president’s call for sacrifice and greatness.
“Not since Washington and Jefferson had America felt such a surge of renewal as embodied in this president and even more glamorous First Lady, Jackie.
“Together they gave us style, romance, adventure, a vision of glittering greatness without end.
“Even rational minds presumed that no mere bullet was strong enough to bring down the most powerful man on earth, certainly not this president, so youthful, so handsome and so virile, for JFK was more than a mortal in terms of America. He was a star! As such he was impregnable and as for power, wasn’t he second only to God?”
Re-read that, interpose one name for another, and up to a point, that would be Trump I was writing about.
But I wrote the book in 1974.
Back then, of course I did not foresee another “morning in America,” nor another “surge of renewal” as today we have it under Trump.
Go ahead say it…history repeats itself, only this one took some 60 years to happen again.
From JFK’s inaugural address, Jan. 20, 1961, with surely the Soviets in mind: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
Sounds like Trump.
From the point of view of the book, the Kennedy years were the best years of our lives, yes, Camelot, and we did not know or care about his Nazi-doting father.
Nor did we know about his love life. Jackie wasn’t enough?
We did indeed celebrate ourselves, before it all came crashing down. It was a time to celebrate poets and musicians and writers.
Mostly, it was a time to be young…regardless how old you really were. JFK set the tempo.
JFK was a class act. The flaws would show up later. Meantime we frolicked. Bob Dylan was here, and the Beatles were coming.
The folk tunes celebrated peace and love, as meanwhile the Soviets threatened us with annihilation.
We were blessed, and we were doomed.
JFK got the Peace Corps started…a call to the young to share our bounty with the rest of the world.
Vietnam was looming over the horizon.
We were high on our sense of greatness, and some were high on drugs.
If you don’t know Lenny Bruce, then you don’t know the 1960s, and if you don’t know the 1960s, you don’t know America.
Together with JFK, it was hip to be anti-Establishment, and it was cool to be pro-Israel.
Ditto Trump.
The bungled Bay of Pigs invasion, and the Cuban Missile Crisis were there to remind us that great as we were, we did not have the world to ourselves.
JFK’s new frontier included the moon, and by the end of the decade, mission accomplished.
JFK, and the rest of us still had promises to keep, but then came November 22, 1963, and as I have it in the book: “By the time they reached their Sullivan Street hideaway, the President of the United States was indeed Lyndon Johnson, seen taking the oath of office on television next to a stricken and blood-soaked Jackie Kennedy. Johnson was sworn in at 3:38 p.m. aboard Air Force One.”
No doubt in my mind that it was LBJ.
He despised JFK. By hook or by crook, he finally got what he wanted.
New York-based bestselling American novelistJack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.
He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal.” His novel, “Compulsive,” motivated John W. Cassell to declare “Jack Engelhard is a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Contact here
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