WHO KILLED JFK? Joe Kennedy did it — because the kid had gone liberal on him. It’s my favourite Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory, and it’s presented in a wonderful novel, Winter Kills, by Richard Condon. Condon is best known as the author of The Manchurian Candidate, the presidential assassination conspiracy novel made into an unforgettable movie starring Frank Sinatra, with Laurence Harvey as the brainwashed shooter. That book came out in 1959, and when JFK was killed four years later, Condon became the world’s most famous writer of political thrillers.

Winter Kills didn’t come out until 1974, 11 years after that day in Dallas. In the novel, President Tom Kegan is shot from the sixth floor of the TV centre warehouse when his motorcade moved through Hunt Plaza in Philadelphia on February 22, 1960. An assassin is quickly apprehended, but the president’s younger brother Nick soon learns that a second sniper confessed on his deathbed, and that a third had been shooting from a grassy knoll. As he digs deeper, he learns about the secret deals his brother had made with the rich and powerful men who really run the country.

Finally, after many twists and turns of the plot, he uncovers the shocking truth and confronts his father. “Pa” tells him he put his son in the White House as “a cold-assed business proposition just like everything else in life. [...] What they hell do you think American politics is all about, kidoo?” But after the first year “it went to his head. [...] He peed all over his quotas. He decided to teach the niggers to read. He began to think we were all living in a democracy. He double-crossed me while he double-crossed himself.” So “I let him trade in the Presidency for a sainthood,” Pa explains. “I gave him open-end immortality in exchange for spitting in my eye. That was more that fair, wasn’t it?”

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