Author Brad Meltzer’s latest book tackles real-life failed JFK assassination in Palm Beach

Dec. 20, 1960: John F. Kennedy’s family estate in Palm Beach is abuzz with big shots, big plans and a newborn baby. 

The front page of The Palm Beach Post tells all about it. One headline declares: “It’s Official! Jack Is President” — ending weeks of squabbling over “election stealing” in Kennedy’s squeaker of a race against Richard Nixon. 

Also noted on Page 1: Lyndon B. Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, were visiting the Kennedy compound. LBJ shared breakfast with JFK and his 3-year-old daughter, Caroline. Jacqueline Kennedy and Lady Bird cooed over 3-week-old John-John, then sunbathed on the lawn overlooking the ocean. 

Tucked away on page 2 is a small headline: “Kennedy Death Plot Tied to Sunday Mass.”  

A violently anti-Catholic retired postal worker from New Hampshire, Richard Pavlick, had loaded his car with dynamite, driven to Palm Beach, staked out a spot along North County Road and waited for his moment to blow up JFK — by ramming his 1950 Buick sedan into Kennedy’s car as he headed to St. Edward Catholic Church. 

Pavlick, 73, had been radicalized by hate. 

He wanted to kill Kennedy, he told local police, because of “the underhanded way he was elected. Kennedy money bought the White House and the presidency. I had the crazy idea I wanted to stop Kennedy from being president.” 

First, Pavlick stalked the president-elect in Hyannis Port. He chose Palm Beach instead because of “lousy security.”  

Pavlick’s plot to murder JFK almost succeeded. A glitch in his plan — no spoilers, but it involved Jackie — saved JFK’s life. 

It’s all there in the latest heart-pounding, page-turning thriller by Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch, “The JFK Conspiracy.” 

“It’s the craziest JFK story you’ve never heard in your life,” Meltzer said on a recent podcast.  

This is a true story and a warning about how history repeats itself. 

Plotting against presidents in Palm Beach

“The America of 1960 was bitterly divided, with people on each side thinking those on the other side were morons,” Meltzer said in a phone interview from his home in Fort Lauderdale. “When you unleash venom and hatred, you have to expect that will activate someone with evil intent. You have to expect that people will start hating each other.” 

Religion and racism fueled the divide. Powerful Protestant preachers, including Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale, tried to squelch Kennedy’s election, because Kennedy was Catholic — and, as Peale said at the time, “our culture is at stake.” 

By “culture,” he meant the way of life touted in Protestant churches by white pastors. They rallied 150 Christian leaders from 37 Protestant denominations to try to undermine Kennedy’s campaign. They said they were afraid JFK might take orders from the Vatican. “We’re just raising the question as to how free he could be,” Peale said. 

Meanwhile, as Meltzer’s book points out, the Ku Klux Klan believed “true patriots” had to protect white Christian America from the rise of Blacks, Jews, Catholics and other immigrants. The Klan’s slogan: “America First.” 

“You have people like Graham and Peale hating Kennedy because he’s Catholic, and the KKK hating him because they consider him an immigrant,” Meltzer said.  

Almost everyone who remembers details of these divisive times is dead now, so historians must remind us how fear and anger factor into elections. 

“The reason we tell these stories,” Meltzer said, “is because they have something to say about where we are today.” 

A lifelong fascination with JFK 

Meltzer’s fascination with Kennedy began when he was in 11th grade at North Miami Beach High School, and he saw a film about the 1963 assassination.  

When he went to University of Michigan in the late ‘80s, Meltzer found a deeper connection: on that campus, in an impromptu speech at 2 a.m. on Oct. 14, 1960, then-Senator Kennedy challenged students to devote a few years of their lives to working in developing countries around the world. That speech launched the Peace Corps. 

A year later, as president, Kennedy started the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) for global health and disaster relief — an agency now being dismantled by President Trump and Elon Musk. 

“Kennedy was saying, ‘all of us in the world, we are in this together,’ and those thoughts are not lost on me,” Meltzer said. “You can’t just trash it all and act like nothing’s changed.” 

But the trashings and thrashings of politics make for juicy thrillers, and Meltzer has written dozens, from his first best-seller, a novel, “The Tenth Justice,” in 1997, to “The JFK Conspiracy,” the fourth true tale of conspiracy he’s written with Josh Mensch.  

Meltzer is a creative machine. After he writes a novel, he’ll “scrub his brain” by writing comics (check out his “Justice League America” series) or a children’s book — his “Ordinary People Change the World” series is a collaboration with artist Chris Eliopoulus. Perhaps you’ve seen “Brad Meltzer’s Lost History” on the History Channel, or streamed “Brad Meltzer’s Decoded” or watched “Jack and Bobby” on the WB Network.  

This year marks the first time he’s had a trio of books out in three months: “The JFK Conspiracy” in January, the children’s book “I Am Sally Ride” in February and “Make Magic: The Book of Inspiration You Didn’t Know You Needed” in March. 

“Make Magic” is a surprise book, a happy trick Meltzer pulled out of his hat — or, in this case, his mortarboard.  

It’s the text of the 2024 graduation speech he gave at his alma mater, University of Michigan. Brad graduated in 1992. Jonas — his son with his high-school-sweetheart wife and best editor, Cori — was in Michigan’s 2024 graduating class. 

“People started asking, ‘Can I have the text of the ‘make magic’ speech?’” Meltzer said. “I’ve written 25 books, and no one has ever asked me for the text of anything, so we thought, maybe we’ve got a book here.” 

And maybe we need Meltzer’s advice. 

“The world needs more empathy, more humility and certainly more decency,” he said. “If you really want to shock the world, unleash your kindness.” 

Heroes, humans and hope 

“Every life makes history. Every life is a story.” That’s one of Meltzer’s mottos, stated up front on bradmeltzer.com. 

To tell the truth about a life, an author must show all sides of a person’s character. He shows JFK’s easy-going nature — for example, he got short-sleeve shirts out of his own closet to give to the Secret Service agents, sweating in their suits around the pool in Palm Beach. On the flip side, the same agents witnessed JFK’s infidelities. 

“My responsibility is not to create heroes. We do people a huge disservice when we turn them into cliches,” Meltzer said. “My job is to show you that JFK and Jackie were human beings. You see the best parts and the worst parts of them.” 

The Kennedys were the “first celebrity president and first lady,” Meltzer said — as beautiful and charming as Hollywood stars. All presidential couples since, from the Reagans to the Trumps, have been “cos-playing” the Kennedys, he said, dressing up to fit an image created by them … specifically, by Jackie. 

“Jackie is the hidden star of this book,” Meltzer said. 

We all know about Mrs. Kennedy’s style and her exquisite taste. What surprised Meltzer was Jackie’s skill as a myth maker.  

“The JFK Conspiracy” begins with Pavlick’s secret plot, foiled in December 1960, and ends with Kennedy’s assassination on Nov. 22, 1963.  

The brilliance of Jackie Kennedy

One week after her husband’s murder, Mrs. Kennedy asked journalist Theodore H. White to come to Hyannis Port. She had some things to say, things she would like Life magazine to document for the sake of history. 

“The chief memory I have is of her composure; of her beauty (dressed in black trim slacks, beige pullover sweater, her eyes wider than pools); and of her calm voice and total recall,” White wrote.  

They talked from 8:30 p.m. to 2 a.m., about every detail she could remember from that day in Dallas. She thought the gunshots were motorcycles backfiring. Then she heard Texas Gov. John Connally cry out: “No, no, no, no, no.” 

“Then Jack turned and I turned … I could see a piece of his skull coming off. It was flesh-colored, not white – he was holding out his hand — and I can see this perfectly clean piece detaching itself from his head. Then he slumped in my lap, his blood and his brains were in my lap …” 

She kept talking to him. “Jack, Jack, Jack. I love you, Jack. But I knew he was dead.” 

And then she told White about “Camelot” — and how JFK loved the Broadway cast album, and how they’d play it on their Victrola.  

White typed the transcript of their interview on pink paper — almost as pink as the suit Jackie wore that terrible day. It’s in the digital archive of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, the very archive Meltzer and Mensch used to research “The JFK Conspiracy.” 

“Jackie created JFK’s legacy,” Meltzer said. 

“Camelot” is fiction, of course. “It’s a place that never existed, a hollow pursuit. But what isn’t hollow is hope. Kennedy unlocked the fact that we wanted Camelot to exist. That’s something no one else could have done, and it’s certainly not where we are now.” 

And, yet, don’t let it be forgot. As Meltzer writes:  

“All that boundless hope and optimism — the beautiful ideal — as a country, as a culture, as people, is still worth striving for.” 

Jan Tuckwood is the former associate editor of The Palm Beach Post and the author of the upcoming book “Dressing Jackie: The Story of Two Southern Belles, One First Lady and a Pink Suit.”