Published November 29, 2023

Peter Black, Local Journalism Initiative reporter

peterblack@qctonline.com

Those who were old enough to remember, remember.

We were in class that Friday morning, itching for the noon bell to send us home for lunch. Someone came to the door and whispered something to the teacher. He settled us down and told us President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas, Texas.

We went home and watched coverage on our small black-and-white TVs. We all knew, children though we were, that the world had changed, and likely not for the better.

What followed in the ensuing days were the indelible images: Oswald’s murder; Jackie’s grief; Bobby comforting the family, the weight of destiny already upon him; John-John saluting his father’s coffin. The Kennedy clan, cursed by tragedy and folly, at its most dire moment.

Years later, having read one of the early books exposing factual improbabilities surrounding the lone gunman theory of who killed Kennedy, I became a low-level JFK assassination buff and followed the various revelations as they cast more and more doubt on the official version.

I have a modest collection of works about the event, including a copy of the debunked and ridiculed Warren Commission report.

There’s also William Manchester’s The Death of a President, which, though rich in fascinating detail and featuring exclusive interviews with Jackie Kennedy – revealing she was a smoker! – still unquestioningly accepted the notion Oswald acted alone. “Oswald was correctly identified as the assassin; the absence of a cabal was established.”

In 1991, the world of JFK assassination skeptics changed with the release of Oliver Stone’s controversial movie JFK, starring Kevin Costner as Jim Garrison, the dogged DA investigating the murder, and Gary Oldman as the “patsy” Oswald.

The movie was so compelling in its destruction of the lone gunman theory that it influenced the U.S. Congress to set up a committee to investigate the assassination.

As circumstances would have it, the assassination buff in me had three opportunities later in life to have a brush with folks familiar with the epic drama 60 years ago.

One was interviewing Stone himself last year when he came to Quebec City to present his documentary updating research into the assassination.

A few years earlier, I had a chance to interview the director of another important film about the assassination, Parkland, which dramatized the shock, chaos and conflict behind the scenes in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, especially at Parkland Hospital, where Kennedy was rushed.

In one scene there is literally a stand-off, with guns at the ready, over who would take possession of the slain president’s body. Another scene depicts Oswald’s lonely funeral.

Coincidentally, there is a brand new documentary series out featuring the testimony of doctors at Parkland, several of whom are still alive.

The documentary concludes, “The government did everything it could do to negate, intimidate and threaten the Parkland doctors, because their observations contradicted the single ‘magic bullet’ theory of the Warren Commission.”

The other brush with the JFK saga was more personal, and frankly, astonishing. I wrote a column about an aspect of the tale last year on the 60th anniversary of the death of Marilyn Monroe, one of Kennedy’s not-so-secret affairs.

In 2013, for the 50th anniversary of the assassination, I interviewed and did a radio documentary about Charles Foster, Monroe’s one-time publicist and subsequent friend, TV scriptwriter and later Moncton-based newspaperman. Foster claimed Kennedy first met Monroe in the flesh by crazy coincidence in his Hollywood apartment when JFK was in Los Angeles in June 1960, to accept the Democratic Party nomination.

Foster had recounted his adventures with MM before in a story published in a local seniors’ magazine, but never revealed the nature of his relationship with Kennedy that followed that chance encounter in his apartment.

He said he was a confidant to the president and from time to time would get personal calls from Kennedy seeking his advice.

Why did he keep the full story of his friendship with Kennedy and Monroe to himself for so many years? “I think mainly I was unhappy with the ending. I cried twice. And I lost two great friends … I want to remember two remarkable people who were very good people and very kind people, and living their own lives at a time when both of them needed to live their own lives.”

For a lifelong assassination buff, hearing Foster’s intimate memories of Kennedy was about as close to the slain president as one could ever dream of getting.

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