The JFK Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill Kennedy―and Why It Failed

“Richard Pavlick can now be discussed in the same breath with other of America’s would-be presidential assassins . . .”

In It’s a Wonderful Life, viewers get to see how the world would have existed had Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey never been born. Twelve-year-old George never would have rescued little brother Harry from drowning, so there would have been no fighter pilot Harry to prevent a kamikaze attack on a World War II troopship that killed its crew. Charming Bedford Falls would have become sleazy Pottersville, the Bailey Building and Loan would have failed, and George’s Uncle Billy would have been institutionalized. Perhaps worst of all, his beloved wife Mary would have become a spinster librarian.

What would the world have looked like if president-elect John Fitzgerald Kennedy had never occupied the White House? Would the Bay of Pigs fiasco have happened? Would Nikita Khrushchev have successfully planted a nuclear arsenal in Cuba? Would “Camelot” have been merely a dream? Would the Civil Rights Act have been passed, under his or a succeeding presidency? Would the Vietnam conflict have escalated? Would terms like “grassy knoll” and “magic bullet” have become part of our pop culture lexicon?

In The JFK Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill Kennedy—and Why It Failed, Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch tell us that the world very nearly got a chance to find out when Richard Pavlick, a deranged, retired postal worker with a grudge against all things Catholic, came within a hair of exploding—literally—a Kennedy presidency before it even got started.

The authors provide much JFK history that is already widely known but is critical to understanding the historical context of the near assassination of president-elect Kennedy. From World War II hero on PT-109 to rising political star to unlikely candidate for president, he aspired to be the first Roman Catholic to attain this nation’s highest office. Not that he was the first to try as the nominee of a major party—Al Smith broke that ground in 1928—but he seemed to be the most likely to succeed despite the same anti-Catholic backlash that derailed Smith.

This anti-Catholicism had first been spawned by the Ku Klux Klan but morphed into a bigotry that, by 1960, was fed by mainstream Protestantism. Norman Vincent Peale, the power-of-positive-thinking Protestant clergyman and spokesperson for the Conference of Citizens for Religious Freedom, said it bluntly: “Faced with the election of a Catholic, our culture is at stake.”

The concern? That a Catholic president would follow marching orders from the Vatican rather than the pronouncements of the Constitution and the best interests of the American people. Schools were just one example. According to the Conference’s written statement issued to the press in the run-up to the election: “Catholics have seized control of the public schools, staffed them with nun teachers wearing their church garb, and introduced the catechism and practices of their church.” Catholics just might, the Conference warned, “breach the wall of separation of church and state.”

And Kennedy’s support for immigration and the Civil Rights Movement seemed proof enough of the reality of the threat. As the authors write, in a warning that seems to be equally as relevant in today’s America, “. . . you never knew where those hateful words would play—or whom exactly they’d incite.”

Richard Pavlick was just one of multitudes of Americans who took those fears to heart. A New Englander who already held preconceived biases against Catholics, immigrants, and other groups, Pavlick latched on to those “hateful words,” which “only heightened and legitimized his manner of fear and prejudice.” And he was determined to do something about it.

Sometimes one has to see the final picture before the pieces can be recognized. In The JFK Conspiracy, the authors retrospectively piece together the clues that finally added up to the threat on Kennedy’s life. The pieces include Pavlick’s rabid anti-Catholicism; vague threats—such as his statement that, if Kennedy won, he would “put a hex on Kennedy and his family millions; his anti-Kennedy and anti-Catholic ramblings to his hometown postmaster; and a letter-writing campaign.

Retired postal employee Pavlick seems to fit into the stereotype of “going postal.” On the television show Seinfeld, George Costanza, upon first learning that fellow-character Newman was a United States Postal worker, asked, “Aren’t those the guys that always go crazy and come back with a gun and shoot everybody?” Newman’s response? “Sometimes.”

And sometimes they come back in a 1950 Buick with seven sticks of dynamite.

Had the clues not come together at the last moment, and had the Secret Service not acted quickly and decisively, the country might have had its George Bailey It’s a Wonderful Life moment. And “grassy knoll” and “magic bullet” might have been replaced in our pop culture lexicon with “Palm Beach” and “dynamite.”

It’s unlikely that Richard Pavlick’s name has ever surfaced heretofore in cocktail party discussion, but that’s probably about to change with publication of The JFK Conspiracy. Rcihard Pavlick can now be discussed in the same breath with other of America’s would-be presidential assassins, like Richard Lawrence (who shot at Andrew Jackson), Giuseppe Zangara (who shot at FDR), John Hinckley (who shot Ronald Reagan) and Squeaky Fromme and Sara Jane Moore (who each took shots, on separate occasions, at Gerald Ford).

Which reader will be the first to invoke Pavlick as a bit of until-now-unknown trivia?