Fifty years ago today, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I still remember the day, even though I was only 6. We were living in Rio de Janiero. My parents held each other and cried as they listened to the news. I didn’t understand much of what was actually going on, but I remember feeling a tremendous sense of loss which the passing decades have done little to alleviate. Reading my dad Leonard Gross‘ new novel The Memoirs of JFK, which is available now as an e-book and which will be available in paperback by mid-December, only makes that sense more acute.
The Memoirs of JFK assumes that JFK doesn’t die in Dallas. Instead, he completes his presidency, able to push through his political agenda due to the nationwide mandate he receives once he recovers from the assassination attempt. Yes, unfortunately, this is fiction. Yet in Dad’s novel, facts about JFK garnered from top-notch reporting inform all the rest of the conjectures.
As an award-winning journalist who served on the staff of LOOK magazine for twelve years as a senior editor, Latin American correspondent, European editor and West Coast editor, Dad knows how to report. So when the idea for this novel hit some 30 years ago, he started reaching out to JFK’s inner circle to find out all he could about JFK’s thoughts and plans. Dad had worked with JFK’s former press secretary Pierre Salinger on three different books, so he was trusted. That gave him unparalleled access.
Dad interviewed 50 sources close to JFK—many of them members of Kennedy’s administration, some of them journalists he favored, a few of them close friends. In the process, he discovered facts about JFK that few people know to this day. And he put them all in his novel.
The Memoirs of JFK’s plot revolves around the notion that JFK has written a memoir in which he has sidestepped most of the controversy related to his presidency and his personal life. A seasoned ghostwriter is sent out to convince Kennedy to confront these omissions. Through their battle, we see how different our country, and indeed our world, would have been had JFK completed his presidency.
“No one, of course, can know for certain what decisions Kennedy would have taken,” says Dad. “But given the nature of the man and his expressed intent, the world described in the novel is one we might well have lived in had he survived Dallas.”
What I wouldn’t give to be living in that world now.
Sorry, comments are closed for this post.