Killing Kennedy

I learned long ago, in some American history class or another during my school days, that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Yet it remained just another fact to memorize prior to an exam and nothing more until I read Killing Kennedy. This historical thriller, written by a coalition of Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard, had me anxiously clutching the sides of my seat despite knowing full-well in advance the end of the story. I kept hoping that somehow, JFK was going to make it.  I almost wouldn’t oppose an alternate ending allowing his life to be spared as I grew to love the man and the First Lady as so many Americans did during his presidency.

O’Reilly and Dugard introduce their readers to a scraggly young Kennedy and lead us through the pivotal moments of his political and personal life up until it is cut short by Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullet.  We learn the good, the bad and the ugly of President Kennedy- his physical struggles with serious health detriments stemming from Addison’s disease and back problems to his major moral lapses while bedding with too many women to count (despite being married to arguably one of the classiest women to walk the White House halls). Thus, Kennedy becomes something real and tangible even to those born long after his untimely death. For this reason, the graphic description of his death is all the more painful to grapple with. All of a sudden, it feels as though I lost someone I knew personally. How Jacqueline Kennedy, who was covered with the brains and blood of her own husband, could surface from such a grotesquely scarring incident slides further and further from comprehension with each paragraph.

The authors of this non-stop narrative sprinkle it with facts and tidbits to truly round out the figure of John F. Kennedy. His therapeutic nude swims in the White House, the way he rough-housed with his two children in the morning and other facts of his private life add life to the two-dimensional textbook figure we learn about in school.

I never thought that an event seemingly so distant from my own life could affect me in such a way. Every time the authors mention some potential way his death could have been avoided jarred me to ponder how different things could be today. What if Kennedy had listened to warnings not to visit Dallas? What if his killer, Lee Harvey Oswald and his Communist dealings were investigated more closely by the intelligence community? This book certainly brings questions to its readers’ attentions. Questions, however, that simply have no answer.