Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut

by Paul Krassner

  He told me, “I thought it might be wise, for the White House to acknowledge the rumor and to squelch it at this point.”

  I published the genealogy excerpt together with the White House denial in the March issue. The New York Times sent a reporter to my office to make sure that The Realist had gotten into the mail and onto the newsstands. Later, the night city editor of the Times sent a messenger to pick up a copy of the Daily News as soon as it hit the streets, because there was a rumor that the News was going to break the story, and if it did, then the Times would too, but the News didn’t, so the Times didn’t either.

  Newsweek sent over a pair of researchers who interviewed me for two hours. “We’ve been waiting for somebody to break this story,” said one. I asked, “Why didn’t you break it?”—and the answer was one word: “Fear.” A Time magazine researcher told me, “If anybody picks up this story from The Realist, then Time will jump in with both feet.”

  In September, Parade, a Sunday supplement to seventy papers, carried an item about the rumor after receiving twelve thousand inquiries. A few weeks later, Newsweek broke the story, with a reprint in advance by The Washington Post. The Newsweek report stated: “The story first appeared in a beatnik Greenwich Village magazine of slight circulation, The Realist.”

  The next issue of Time carried a two-page article, which stated: “In the absence of forthright denials, the story—and the rumors—grew. Last March, The Realist, a shabby Greenwich Village periodical, published the fact of the Blauvelt genealogical entry as an ‘expose.’”

  Between the Newsweek and Time articles, AP dispatched the story and it became front-page news. The New York Post headline: “JFK Wed Before? White House Says No.” The Times carried a long article, mentioning that The Realist had “published the text of the entry.” The following paragraph appeared in the Monday night “early bird” edition of the Times but was cut out of all succeeding editions:Some members of the far-flung family do not believe Mr. Blauvelt [deceased compiler of the genealogy] was in error. James Blauvelt told a member of The New York Times Washington Bureau that some of the family believed Howard Ira Durie [who assisted in the compilation] had been “paid off ” by the Kennedys.

  The News-Bulletin, published by the Cinema Educational Guild, stated:We have received a number of letters from old friends of the Kennedy family in Massachusetts and Cape Cod. Several of the letters distinctly verified the marriage, all of them stating that it made Rose, Jack’s mother, very unhappy. However, she looked upon the marriage as just “one of Jack’s youthful escapades,” which she was sure “wouldn’t last long”—and it didn’t . . . In conversation with a close friend, John Bersbach, Durie’s first husband, expressed full knowledge of her marriage with Kennedy.

  When the genealogy-denial story hit the newspapers, it also broke on radio and TV. A Washington commentator on the Huntley-Brinkley Report added that NBC had the story for a long time but had the good sense not to use it. Actually, there was a memo on the bulletin board in the NBC newsroom ordering broadcasters not to carry the story in any form until it broke in some other medium or on some other network.

  The executive committee of the Free Speech Movement on the Berkeley campus had been debating whether it would be appropriate for Mario Savio to lead protesting students in to occupy the Administration Building.

  Barbara Garson announced, “I don’t believe in the cult of personality, but if you’ve got one, use it.”

  At the final sit-in of the Free Speech Movement in December 1964, Marvin Garson, Barbara’s husband, was noticeably missing. He had gone to Dallas to work for Mark Lane, who was investigating a possible conspiracy behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In the February 1965 issue of The Realist, I published Lane’s claim that the bullet had really been fired from in front of the president’s limousine because the doctors first said that the bullet hole in the throat was an entrance wound. He implied that there was chicanery when the federal pathologists later developed the wound-from-the-rear theory.

  Meanwhile, in the memorial market, a John F. Kennedy salt-and-pepper shaker set went on sale. The pepper was in a china rocking chair; the salt was in a removable china figure of the president sitting in the rocking chair, with three holes in his back for pouring out the salt.

  Four months after Kennedy was killed, his former press secretary, Pierre Salinger, called William Manchester to tell him that the family was authorizing him to write a book on the assassination. Manchester had not been their first choice. He would be playing a sloppy third to historians Theodore White and Walter Lord, dangling somewhere between the making of a president and the sinking of the Titanic. Bobby Kennedy made the official announcement in March 1964. He didn’t mention an agreement giving him and Jackie Kennedy power to approve the manuscript.

  Lyndon Johnson and Marina Oswald, widow of the alleged assassin, refused to grant interviews to Manchester, but Jackie submitted to ten hours of intimacy with his tape recorder. Two years later she would insist on cutting material that was too personal for publication. Bobby sent a telegram to Evan Thomas, editor in chief at Harper & Row, suggesting that the book “should neither be published nor serialized.”

  Thomas wrote to Kennedy advisers, asking for help in revising the manuscript, which he felt was “gratuitously and tastelessly insulting” to Johnson. Bennett Cerf of Random House read an unedited manuscript and said it contained “unbelievable things that happened after the assassination.” Jackie filed a lawsuit.

  She proclaimed, “Anyone who is against me will look like a rat, unless I run off with Eddie Fisher.”

  And indeed, the case was settled out of court in January 1967. Harper & Row made the requested deletions. So did Look magazine, which had purchased serialization rights for $665,000.

  However, Stern, a German magazine with foreign serialization rights for the book, refused to make the deletions. Look described the last night of President Kennedy’s life in a Texas hotel, but Stern went into detail about the special mattress that had been installed for his back problem. It was a double bed with a single mattress. Jackie had to sleep in another room. But why should American readers be denied the irony of what Lee Harvey Oswald and John Kennedy had in common—that on the night before one allegedly killed the other, neither had slept with his wife?

  Then, in the middle of serialization, even Stern yielded to Jackie’s lawyers and agreed to omit certain passages that she found unbearably offensive. The public’s curiosity became even more aroused. This was a job for The Realist. I set about the task of obtaining the missing portions of Manchester’s book.

  Finally, on a brisk Saturday afternoon in February 1967, I took a long walk west to my printer in Greenwich Village. I was both exhilarated and frightened, but my only alternative would’ve been not to publish, and that was a totally unacceptable alternative. I delivered the following manuscript:

  THE PARTS LEFT OUT OF THE KENNEDY BOOK

  An executive in the publishing industry, who obviously must remain anonymous, has made available to The Realist a Photostat copy of the original manuscript of William Manchester’s book, The Death of a President. Those passages which are printed here were marked for deletion months before Harper & Row sold the serialization rights to Look magazine; hence they do not appear even in the so-called “complete” version published by the German magazine Stern.

  At the Democratic National Convention in the summer of 1960, Los Angeles was the scene of a political visitation of the alleged sins of the father upon the son. Lyndon Johnson found himself battling for the presidential nomination with a young, handsome, charming, and witty adversary, John F. Kennedy.

  The Texan in his understandable anxiety degenerated to a strange campaign tactic. He attacked his opponent on the grounds that his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, was a Nazi sympathizer during the time he was United States Ambassador to Great Britain, from 1938 to 1940. The senior Kennedy had predicted that Germany would defeat England, and he therefore urged President Franklin D. Roosevelt t
o withhold aid. Now Johnson found himself fighting pragmatism with pragmatism. It did not work; he lost the nomination.

  Ironically, the vicissitudes of regional bloc voting forced Kennedy into selecting Johnson as his running mate. Jack rationalized the practicality of the situation, but Jackie was constitutionally unable to forgive Johnson. Her attitude toward him always remained one of controlled paroxysm.

  It was common knowledge in Washington social circles that the Chief Executive was something of a ladies’ man. His staff included a Secret Service agent, referred to by the code name Dentist, whose duties virtually centered around escorting to and from a rendezvous site—either in the District of Columbia or while traveling—the models, actresses, and other strikingly attractive females chosen by the president for his not at all infrequent trysts. “Get me that,” he had said of a certain former Dallas beauty contest winner when plans for the tour were first being discussed. That particular aspect of the itinerary was changed, of course, when Mrs. Kennedy decided to accompany her husband.

  She was aware of his philandering, but would cover up her dismay by joking, “It runs in the family.” The story had gotten back to her about the late Marilyn Monroe using the telephone in her Hollywood bathroom to make a long distance call to New York Post film-gossip columnist Sidney Skolsky.

  “Sid, you won’t believe this,” she had whispered, “but the Attorney General of our country is waiting for me in my bed this very minute—I just had to tell you.”

  It is difficult to ascertain where on the continuum of Lyndon Johnson’s personality innocent boorishness ends and deliberate sadism begins. To have summoned then-Secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon for a conference wherein he, the new president, sat defecating as he spoke, might charitably be an example of the former; but to challenge under the same circumstances Senator J. William Fulbright for his opposition to Administration policy in Vietnam is considered by insiders to be a frightening instance of the latter. The more Jacqueline Kennedy has tried to erase the crudeness of her husband’s successor from consciousness, the more it has impinged upon her memories and reinforced her resentment.

  “It’s beyond style,” she would confide to friends. “Jack had style, but this is beyond style.”

  When Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. related to her an incident that he had witnessed firsthand—Mr. Johnson had actually placed his penis over the railing of the yacht, bragging to onlookers, “Watch it touch bottom!”—Mrs. Kennedy could not help but shiver with disgust. Capitol Hill reporters have observed the logical extension of Mr. Johnson boasting about his six-o’clock-in-the-morning forays with Lady Bird, to his bursts of phallic exhibitionism, whether it be on a boat or at the swimming pool or in the lavatory.

  Apropos of this tendency, Drew Pearson’s assistant, Jack Anderson, has remarked: “When Lyndon announces there’s going to be a joint session of Congress, everybody cringes.”

  It is true that Mrs. Kennedy withstood the pressures of publicized scandal, ranging from the woman who picketed the White House carrying a blown-up photograph supposedly of Jack Kennedy sneaking away from the home of Jackie’s press secretary, Pamela Turnure, to The Blauvelt Family Genealogy which claimed on page 884, under Eleventh Generation, that one Durie Malcolm had “married, third, John F. Kennedy, son of Joseph P. Kennedy, one time Ambassador to England.”

  But it was the personal infidelities that gnawed away at her—as indeed they would gnaw away at any wife who has been shaped by this culture—until finally Jackie left in exasperation. Her father-in-law offered her one million dollars to reconcile. She came back, not for the money, but because she sincerely believed that the nation needed Jack Kennedy, and she didn’t want to bear the burden of losing enough public favor to forestall his winning the presidency.

  Consequently, she was destined to bear a quite different burden—with great ambivalence—the paradox of fame. She enjoyed playing her role to the hilt, but complained, “Can’t they get it into their heads that there’s a difference between being the First Lady and being Elizabeth Taylor?” Even after she became First Widow, the movie magazines would not—or could not—leave her alone.

  Probably the most bizarre invasion of her privacy occurred in Photoplay, which asked the question, “Too Soon for Love?”—then proceeded to print a coupon that readers were requested to answer and send in. They had a multiple choice: “Should Jackie (1) Devote her life exclusively to her children and the memory of her husband? (2) Begin to date—privately or publicly—and eventually remarry? (3) Marry right away?”

  Mrs. Kennedy fumed. “Why don’t they give them some more decisions to make for me? Some real ones. Should I live in occasional sin? Should I use a diaphragm or the pill? Should I keep it in the medicine cabinet or the bureau drawer?” But she would never lose her dignity in public; she had too deep a faith in her own image.

  American leaders seem to have a schizophrenic approach toward each other. They want to expose their human frailties at the same time that they do not want to remove them from their pedestals. Bobby Kennedy privately abhors Lyndon Johnson, but publicly calls him “great, and I mean that in every sense of the word.” Johnson has referred to Bobby as “that little shit” in private, but continues to laud him for the media.

  Gore Vidal has no such restraint. On a television program in London, he explained why Jacqueline Kennedy would never relate to Lyndon Johnson. During that tense flight from Dallas to Washington after the assassination, she inadvertently walked in on him as he was standing over the casket of his predecessor and chuckling. This disclosure was the talk of London, but did not reach these shores.

  Of course, President Johnson is often given to inappropriate response—witness the puzzled timing of his smiles when he speaks of grave matters—but we must also assume that Mrs. Kennedy had been traumatized that day and her perception was likely to have been colored by the tragedy. This state of shock must have underlain an incident on Air Force One which this writer conceives to be delirium, but which Mrs. Kennedy insists she actually saw. “I’m telling you this for the historical record,” she said, “so that people a hundred years from now will know what I had to go through.”

  She corroborated Gore Vidal’s story, continuing: “That man [Johnson] was crouching over the corpse, no longer chuckling but breathing hard and moving his body rhythmically. At first I thought he must be performing some mysterious symbolic rite he’d learned from Mexicans or Indians as a boy. And then I realized—there is only one way to say this—he was literally fucking my husband in the throat. In the bullet wound in the front of his throat. He reached a climax and dismounted. I froze. The next thing I remember, he was being sworn in as the new president.”

  [Handwritten marginal notes: 1. Check with Rankin—did secret autopsy show semen in throat wound? 2. Is this simply necrophilia, or was LBJ trying to change entry wound from grassy knoll into exit wound from Book Depository by enlarging it?]

  The glaze lifted from Jacqueline Kennedy’s eyes.

  “I don’t believe that Lyndon Johnson had anything to do with a conspiracy, but I do know this—Jack taught me about the nuances of power—if he were miraculously to come back to life and suddenly appear in front of him, the first thing Johnson would do now is kill him.” She smiled sardonically, adding, “Unless Bobby beat him to it.”

  Barbara and Marvin Garson had moved from Berkeley to New York City, but she wouldn’t allow him to smoke marijuana in the house, so he had to go elsewhere. On one particular occasion, he was turning on with Kate Coleman, an old friend from the Free Speech Movement, and later the Yippies. She was now a researcher at Newsweek. When Vice President Hubert Humphrey visited their offices, she refused to shake his hand, calling him a “war criminal.”

  It was really good dope. Marvin was practically tripping as he rambled on about the Kennedy assassination and the Manchester book. The controversy over Jacqueline Kennedy as censor tantalized his imagination as it had mine. Since I was unable to obtain the actual portions deleted from The Death
of a President, I had decided to write them myself, trying to imitate William Manchester’s style.

  I started with a news item from The New York Times, which had been brought to my attention by Bob Abel, who was listed in The Realist as “Featherbedder.” I remembered exactly where I had left that clipping—on the sofa in my loft, because I didn’t have a bulletin board. The report was about Lyndon Johnson claiming that Joseph Kennedy was a Nazi sympathizer.

  Next I began improvising on stories that White House correspondents knew to be true but which had remained unpublished, peeling off layer after layer of verisimilitude, getting closer and closer with each new paragraph to some unknown core at the center of this apocryphal onion. And then Marvin Garson called.

  He had written up his stoned rap and thought maybe I could use it in The Realist. He proceeded to read it to me over the phone. When he came to that scene of what must be spelled neckrophilia, I screamed out loud–“Yaaagghh!”—an utterly spontaneous reaction to my having just stumbled upon an astounding metaphorical truth.

  With Marvin’s permission, I boiled his five typewritten pages down to one paragraph, so that I could attempt to nurture the incredible in a context of credibility. During the period I was writing the piece, I began spreading a rumor about the crucial scene so that underground gossip would build up and, when it finally appeared in print, there would already be a certain degree of familiarity.

  I talked about it onstage at the Village Theater, and I mentioned it to friends on the phone. One of those I told was Terry Southern. A week later he called back and asked if I wanted him to write it up for The Realist. I said I had already done so, but he obviously had his own version of that infamous scene in mind and, not wanting to waste his creativity, he eventually molded it into a short story, “The Blood of a Wig.”