Palm Beach Winter White House No. 1: JFK’s first would-be assassin was arrested here
Little more than a month into the transition to the presidency in 1960, John F. Kennedy’s life was threatened in Palm Beach by a mental patient intent on turning himself into a “human bomb,” detonating his explosives in JFK’s presence in order to kill him.
Richard Pavlick, 73, a one-time postal clerk from Belmont, New Hampshire, was arrested on Dec. 15, 1960, on the Royal Park Bridge between Palm Beach and the mainland, driving a car lined with seven sticks of dynamite, reportedly capable of blowing up a small mountain. Police found three more sticks in his hotel room and other explosive devices.
Kennedy had been due to return from Washington, D.C., the next day.
President-elect Donald Trump isn’t the first to hold his Winter White House and conduct his transition on the island. And both he and JFK survived assassination attempts, though, sadly, JFK didn’t live through the second one. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., JFK’s nephew, has been nominated by Trump to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
RFK Jr. has spent time on the island with his family. He was 9 when his uncle was assassinated in 1963. His father, Robert Kennedy Sr., would be felled by another assassin’s bullet in 1968.
Pavlick considered St. Edward’s Church as place to assassinate JFK but didn’t want to harm innocents
Pavlick told police he had scouted places in Massachusetts, Washington and Palm Beach to get close to JFK. He thought about St. Edward’s Catholic Church on Palm Beach where JFK attended Mass as a place to blow up himself but decided against it because he didn’t want innocent people to get hurt. That included JFK’s family — wife, Jackie, and his two children, Caroline and newborn John Jr.
Pavlick was held on the county’s highest-ever bond of $100,000 while local authorities waited for federal law enforcement to travel from Miami and pick him up.
Pavlick told authorities that he felt like the Kennedys had bought the election.
“I wanted to teach the United States the presidency is not for sale,” he said.
Pavlick spoke freely with reporters at the Palm Beach County Jail. He said, “I felt the Kennedy money was the way he got the White House.”
Kennedy’s win over then-Vice President Richard Nixon on Nov. 8 was among the closest in history when it came to the popular vote. Kennedy won by only 112,000. The Electoral College tally wasn’t close. Kennedy easily defeated Nixon 303 to 219.
Neighbors said Pavlick was a constant complainer. Postmaster figured out what he was up to
Pavlick arrived in Palm Beach County a week before he was arrested. He waited outside the Kennedys’ compound on the North End of Palm Beach with his car, hoping to catch the president-elect as he made his way to church.
But JFK ducked into a limo along with Jackie and the kids.
The Secret Service had already been tipped by Thomas Murphy, an astute postmaster in Belmont.
Pavlick had given his property to a youth camp in Belmont, then traveled down the East Coast, sending deranged postcards to Murphy along the way. One said their town soon would hear from Pavlick “in a big way.”
Murphy noticed that the postmarks were in the same places that Kennedy was. So Murphy alerted the Secret Service in early December, setting off a national manhunt.
The Secret Service knew when Pavlick arrived in Palm Beach and sent his license plate number to Palm Beach police.
Patrol officer Lester Free saw the car and stopped it on the bridge.
Raging against the Kennedys, Catholics
Belmont neighbors described Pavlick as a constant complainer. He would yell at community meetings about the Kennedys’ wealth and disparage Catholicism.
JFK was the first Catholic to be elected U.S. president.
Pavlick often wrote angry letters to the editor. He told officers in Palm Beach County that he’d been in psychiatric hospitals three times for manic depression, known today as bipolar disorder.
Pavlick was sent to a federal medical center in Missouri in January 1961 and was indicted seven days later.
Ten days after Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald in November 1963, though, a judge dropped the charges. He ordered Pavlick into a mental hospital, where he stayed until 1966. A World War I veteran, Pavlick died in 1975 in a VA hospital at age 88.
Holly Baltz, who has a passion for history, is the investigations editor at The Palm Beach Post. You can reach her at hbaltz@pbpost.com.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Palm Beach Winter White House No. 1: JFK’s first would-be assassin was arrested here
