Book review: The Kennedy plot that you may not know

It will be 62 years next November since USA president John F Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

There have been hundreds of books written on every conceivable aspect of that day. It is unlikely that there is any new ground left to explore. 

This book, The JFK Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill Kennedy — And Why it Failed is not about what happened in Dallas. 

It is about a little publicised assassination attempt in the weeks between the voting day, November 8, 1960, and the inauguration on January 20, 1961.

The authors of The JFK Conspiracy, Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch, are no strangers to conspiracy and assassinations. 

They have also published books on the failed attempts on the lives of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and a Nazi plot to kill Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin.

The JFK Conspiracy tells the story of a retired postal worker, Richard Pavlick, who lived in Belmont, New Hampshire, a typical citizen of small-town New England. 

He voted Republican. He also believed that the Catholic, Jewish, and African American communities, had agendas which were anti-American.

He feared the election of a Catholic president and, when his greatest fears were realised, he decided that he had to do something about it. 

Pavlick believed that Kennedy would take orders from Rome, and that this would not serve the USA well. 

The irony here, as Meltzer and Mensch go out of their way to explain, is that JFK’s most earnest prayer at his weekly Sunday Mass was that of Augustine of Hippo: “Lord, make me chaste, but not yet”.

Meltzer and Mensch capture the story of Pavlick’s assassination attempt very well. The text has a punchy style and short chapters keep the story moving quickly.

The book begins with JFK’s ordeal in the Solomon Islands during the Second World War, and explains how that experience helped him to cope with the anti-Catholic groundswell, which was organised by the Rev Billy Graham and others, in the lead up to the 1960 election.

The core of the book is Richard Pavlick’s attempt to stop the Kennedy presidency before it began. 

He may have succeeded too but for a number of seemingly minor events and individual actions.

Pavlick could have been successful on his first attempt. He aborted his mission for an interesting reason, one which readers will not easily associate with an assassin.

He would have had plenty of time for a second try but the local post master in Pavlick’s town, Belmont, informed the secret service of his suspicions about him. 

The subsequent enquiries led to Pavlick’s arrest in the days after his aborted first attempt.

The book is very sympathetic to JFK’s wife, Jacqueline Kennedy, and it is through this angle that another hero in the story, special agent Clint Hill, emerges.

We are told why Hill was specially assigned to take care of Jacqueline. 

Initially unenthusiastic about his assignment, he warmed to it, and maintained a remarkable standard of duty through to JFK’s assassination in 1963.

One possible reason why the assassination attempt has been largely forgotten is that Pavlick’s actions seemed far-fetched at the time. 

Unfortunately, as we have seen repeatedly since, in such places as Oklahoma, Wako, and Sandy Hook, it only takes one disgruntled or deranged person, to carry out the most horrendous slaughter of innocent people.

It is also true that the three years that following Pavlick’s attempt were full of events that dominated the international stage for years.

The JFK Conspiracy shows that the Kennedy presidency could easily have been still-born.

The only book that now remains unwritten is the one of conjecture as to how different the last seven decades would have been if John F Kennedy had lived to lead the USA through the dramatic and traumatic years of the sixties.