THE VALUE OF 7
CONSPIRACY: THE DEATH OF MARILYN
MONROE, JFK AND LADY DIANA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxqFOU-8kMM
JFK was shot on November 22, 1963, as his open-top motorcade travelled through Dallas, Texas. He was both the youngest US president, and the youngest to die.
Mrs Kennedy gave a series of seven undisclosed interviews in the early part of 1964 during which she talked about JFK’s early campaigns to the Cuban Missile Crisis, including an evolving sense of herself and her role as First Lady; family and married life in the White House; and the president’s plans for a second term.
To mark the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy administration, Mrs Kennedy’s family is making available both the interview transcripts and the six-and-a-half hours of audio recordings of those interviews.
US television channel ABC will broadcast the interviews this September.
Prof Robert Dallek claimed the ominous anecdote was uncovered when the oral history was being examined.
He said JFK had previously been told by an historian that Abraham Lincoln’s reputation may not have been as great had he lived long enough to become embroiled in tough domestic challenges.
“He had heard a lecture at the White House by distinguished historian David Herbert Donald, a Lincoln, Civil War expert,” Prof Dallek said.
“At that lecture, Kennedy asked Professor Donald if Lincoln had lived, would his reputation be as great as it currently is in the United States? And predictably, Donald said probably not because he would have had to have wrestled with the problems of reconstruction, the post Civil War era.
“And Kennedy remembering that said to Mrs Kennedy after his success in the Cuban Missile Crisis, he said if anyone’s going to kill me, it should happen now.”
A book is also being released based upon the oral history, with a forward by Caroline Kennedy, JFK’s daughter.
Prof Dallek, author of Mr Kennedy’s biography An Unfinished Life, was in Dublin to mark the 50th anniversary of JFK’s inauguration and deliver the John F Kennedy Memorial Lecture for the University College Dublin Clinton Institute.
Previous speakers of the Kennedy Memorial Lecture include Dan Fenn, former staff assistant to Mr Kennedy.
Artefacts of Mr Kennedy’s historic visit to Ireland in 1963 will also be shown to Taoiseach Enda Kenny by Prof Dallek after being brought from Queens University to Dublin.
These include a hand-written poem about the River Shannon, which Mr Kennedy scribbled on the back of a diary schedule after hearing it recited by Sinead de Valera — wife of then-president Eamon de Valera — and a copy of the speech Mr Kennedy delivered to the Dail on June 28 1963 — just five months before he was shot dead.