John F. Kennedy's Overlooked Legacy

by Thomas A. Droleskey

Today, Friday, November 22, 2013, is the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy as he rode in the open Lincoln limousine that is on display at the Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, a photograph of which, taken in 2007, is appended below. Although there is much dispute and controversy over the person or persons responsible for his assassination that may never be resolved until the Last Day at the General Judgment of the living and the dead and will not play any part in this commentary, what is indisputable is that the thirty-fifth President of the United States of America, for whose immortal soul I pray every day, led a reckless life of wanton immorality that played a large role in his sudden, violent death.

Responsibility for the recklessness of John F. Kennedy's misspent life of endless "pleasures" in violation of the Sixth and Ninth Commandments, documented in so many books, including Thomas Reeves' A Question of Character and Nigel Hamilton's Reckless Youth, both of which I used in a course I taught on political psychology at the C. W. Post Campus of Long Island University in the Fall 1994 Semester, falls squarely on shoulders of his philandering, corrupt father, Joseph Patrick Kennedy, Sr., and his mother, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. Joe Kennedy, Sr., for example, took each of his four sons (Joseph Patrick Kennedy, Jr., John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Robert Francis Kennedy and Edward Moore Kennedy) to a "professional" establishment, shall we say, on their thirteenth birthday so that they could become "men." Such a paternal exercise in corrupting the morals of his sons is the work of the devil as each of the boys was, to a greater or lesser extent, drawn to lives of sinful behavior as a result.

Although John F. Kennedy was fairly intelligent and had a superb wit that he used ably in the public forum, his college thesis at Harvard University, Why England Slept, was ghost-written in its published form as a book by a Kennedy "house journalist," Arthur Krock, who later campaigned vigorously for Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, which was ghost-written by Kennedy sycophant Theodore Sorensen, a Talmudist, to receive a Pulitzer Prize. Why England Slept only became a best-seller because Joe Kennedy, Sr., who institutionalized his mildly retarded daughter Rosemary and then had her lobotomized, bought up copies from retail bookstores to store in a warehouse, thus creating an artificial appearance that the book had been a best-seller when it was not.

John Kennedy's gratitude for ghost-writing the published form of Why England Slept and campaigning for him to win the Pulitzer Prize for Profiles in Courage was very short-lived, something that a review of a boon written by columnist Garry Wills, a Catholic who does not believe in Papal Infallibility who helped the late William F. Buckley, Jr., develop his "mater si, magister no" rejection of Catholic teaching on various issues, including contraception, attests:

And when young John F., home from the wars (having been dismissed from his intelligence post after F.B.I. tapes disclosed his intimacy with the tainted European beauty queen), described, with much embellishment, his PT-109 misadventure (''We were kind of ashamed of our performance,'' a crew member said), an awe-struck John Hersey, hearing the tale over dinner at the Stork Club, transformed it into a New Yorker article that - though more flattering than accurate, Mr. Wills contends - became not only the basis of a legend but a foundation stone of Kennedy's career. ''Not since Theodore Roosevelt charged up San Juan Hill with two journalists at his side,'' Mr. Wills writes, ''had a military episode been so expertly merchandized for its political value.''

FOR a full generation the beat went on, as the best and the brightest elbowed furiously for position within the Kennedy penumbra. ''Honorary Kennedy'' emeritus Arthur Krock (who was also The New York Times Washington bureau chief) rewrote, without credit, ''While England Slept,'' thereby rendering it publishable, awarded his personal valet to the young Congressman John Kennedy upon his arrival in Washington and, later, ''worked like hell,'' in his own words, in a successful lobbying effort to obtain the Pulitzer Prize for ''Profiles in Courage.'' (Mr. Krock, incidentally, earned only fleeting gratitude; as President, Kennedy urged Benjamin Bradlee of Newsweek to ''bust it off in old Arthur,'' by attacking the columnist in print.) (Stomping on Camelot.)

"Camelot" itself, of course, was a carefully crafted invention by Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy after the murder of her husband.

Dr. James Piereson, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute and the president of the William E. Simon Foundation (and who taught in then-named Graduate School of Public Affairs at the State University of New York at Albany in 1975 when I was a graduate teaching assistant pursuing my doctorate in political science), explained the background of the invention of "Camelot" by Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy:

But by far the most potent element of the Kennedy legacy was the one that associated JFK with the legend of King Arthur and Camelot. As with many of the myths and legends surrounding President Kennedy, this one was the creative contribution of Jacqueline Kennedy who imagined and artfully circulated it in those grief-filled days following her husband’s death.

On the weekend following the assassination and state funeral, Mrs. Kennedy invited the journalist Theodore White to the Kennedy compound in Hyannis for an exclusive interview to serve as the basis for an essay in a forthcoming issue of Life magazine dedicated to President Kennedy. White was a respected journalist and the author of the best selling chronicle of the 1960 campaign, The Making of the President, 1960, that portrayed candidate Kennedy in an especially favorable light and his opponent (Richard Nixon) in a decidedly negative light. White had also known Joseph Kennedy, Jr. (John F. Kennedy’s older brother) while a student at Harvard in the late 1930s. Mrs. Kennedy reached out to White in the reasonable belief that he was a journalist friendly to the Kennedy family.

In that interview Mrs. Kennedy pressed upon White the Camelot image that would prove so influential in shaping the public memory of JFK and his administration. President Kennedy, she told the journalist, was especially fond of the music from the popular Broadway musical, Camelot, the lyrics of which were the work of Alan Jay Lerner, JFK’s classmate at Harvard. The musical, which featured Richard Burton as Arthur, Julie Andrews as Guinevere, and Robert Goulet as Lancelot, had a successful run on Broadway from 1960 to 1963. According to Mrs. Kennedy, the couple enjoyed listening to a recording of the title song before going to bed at night. JFK was especially fond of the concluding couplet: “Don’t ever let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was Camelot.” President Kennedy, she said, was strongly attracted to the Camelot legend because he was an idealist who saw history as something made by heroes like King Arthur (a claim White knew to be untrue). “There will be great presidents again,” she told White, “but there will never be another Camelot.” In this way, and to her credit, Mrs. Kennedy sought to attach a morally uplifting message to one of the more ugly events in American history.

Following the interview, White retreated to a guest room in the Kennedy mansion to review his notes and compose a draft of the essay. His editors were at this hour (late on a Saturday evening) holding the presses open at great expense while waiting to receive his copy over the telephone. When White later phoned his editors to dictate his text (with Mrs. Kennedy standing nearby), he was surprised by their reaction for they initially rejected the Camelot references as sentimental and inappropriate to the occasion. Mrs. Kennedy, interpreting the gist of the exchange, signaled to White that Camelot must be kept in the text. The editors quickly relented. White later wrote that he regretted the role he played in transmitting the Camelot myth to the public.

These images were contained in White’s essay in the special issue of Life that hit the newsstands on December 3, 1963. Life at that time had a weekly circulation of seven million and a readership of more than 30 million. The extensive distribution of the issue guaranteed that the essay would receive the widest possible circulation here and abroad. Though the Arthurian motif has been ridiculed over the years as a distortion of the actual record, it has nevertheless etched the Kennedy years in the public memory as a magical era that will never be repeated.

Camelot, the Broadway musical (later a Hollywood movie), was adapted from T. H. White’s (no relation to the journalist) Arthurian novel, The Once and Future King, published in 1958 but made up of four parts that the author wrote separately beginning in 1938. White’s novel has proved to be one of the most popular and widely read books of our time. Reviewers called it “a literary miracle” and “a queer kind of masterpiece.” The reviewer for the New York Times called it “a glorious dream of the Middle Ages as they never were but as they ought to have been, an inspired and exhilarating mixture of farce, fantasy, psychological insight, medieval lore and satire all involved in a marvelously peculiar retelling of the Arthurian legend.” In contrast to traditional versions of the Arthurian legend, which celebrated knighthood and chivalry and portrayed Arthur as a brave warrior, White’s modern version poked fun at the pretensions of knights and princes and pointedly criticized war, militarism, and nationalism. White presented King Arthur less as a brave warrior and military leader than as a peacemaker who tried (but failed) to subdue the war-making passions of mankind.

Mrs. Kennedy very likely read The Once and Future King and perhaps saw or showed to her children the cartoon version of The Sword and the Stone (the first chapter of the four part novel) that Walt Disney produced in 1963. There were biting ironies in her attraction to a legendary kingship that unravels due to the consequences of betrayal and infidelity and to her association of the central myth of English nationality with the United States’ first Irish president. Nevertheless, she looked past these contradictions to focus on the central message of White’s novel that portrayed war as pointless and absurd. President Kennedy, as his widow wanted him to be remembered, was like King Arthur—a peacemaker who died in a campaign to pacify the warring factions of mankind.

One must admire Mrs. Kennedy for the skill with which she deployed these images in the difficult aftermath of her husband’s death. Our retrospective view of President Kennedy is now filtered through the legends and symbols she put forward at that time. The hardheaded politician devoted to step-by- step progress was transformed in death into the consummate liberal idealist. The Cold War leader who would “bear any price to insure the survival of liberty” was subsequently viewed as an idealistic peacemaker in the image of The Once and Future King. Difficult as it may be to accept, the posthumous image of JFK reflected more the idealistic beliefs of Mrs. Kennedy than the practical political liberalism of the man himself.

But the Camelot image as applied to the Kennedy presidency had some unfortunate and unforeseen consequences. By turning President Kennedy into a liberal idealist (which he was not) and a near legendary figure, Mrs. Kennedy inadvertently contributed to the unwinding of the tradition of American liberalism that her husband represented in life. The images she advanced had a double effect: first, to establish Kennedy as a transcendent political figure far superior to any contemporary rival; and, second, to highlight what the nation had lost when he was killed. The two elements were mirror images of one another. The Camelot myth magnified the sense of loss felt as a consequence of Kennedy’s death and the dashing of liberal hopes and possibilities. If one accepted the image (and many did, despite their better judgment), then the best of times were now in the past and could not be recovered. Life would go on but the future could never match the magical chapter that had been brought to an unnatural end. As Mrs. Kennedy said, “there will never be another Camelot.”

The Camelot myth posed a challenge to the liberal idea of history as a progressive enterprise, always moving forward despite setbacks here and there toward the elusive goal of perfecting the American experiment in self-government. Mrs. Kennedy’s image fostered nostalgia for the past in the belief that the Kennedy administration represented a peak of achievement that could not be duplicated. The legend of the Kennedy years as unique or magical was, in addition, divorced from real accomplishments as measured by important programs passed or difficult problems solved. The magical aspect of the New Frontier was located, by contrast, in its style and sophisticated attitude rather than in its concrete achievements. Mrs. Kennedy, without intending to do so and without understanding the consequences of her image making, put forward an interpretation of John F. Kennedy’s life and death that magnified the consequences of the assassination while leaving his successors with little upon which to build. (How Jackie Kennedy Invented the Camelot Legend After JFK's Death.)

The Droleskey family at 39 Kings Point Road in Great Neck, New York, was not in the thrall of the Kennedys.

My late father, Dr. Albert Henry Martin Droleskey, had a few Secret Service agents as clients at his veterinary practice who had protected Kennedy during his presidential campaign. Although they should not have not so, these men spoke of Kennedy's secret dalliances when visiting the City of New York. I learned of this later in life as my father simply said at the dinner table one time after driving home from his practice in Queens Village to eat prior to returning to his practice for evening hours that Kennedy cheated on his wife. I did not know at the age of nine what that met. However, I knew that it was not a good thing. My father was also critical of Kennedy's superficial glibness and of old man Joe's background who had made his money serving a a rum runner for bootleggers during Prohibition, thus giving him vast underworld connections.

As I learned in the 1990s from a New York Daily News photographer, Alan Aaronson, Kennedy loved sneaking around the underground tunnels that connected hotels one to another. A real New Yorker, Al Aaronson once went up to a Secret Service agent guarding the door to the presidential suite at one hotel, asking, "Hey, why aren't you guys with the President?" Al knew where Kennedy had gone the agents made a beeline over to the other hotel. This was simply part of Kennedy's recklessness. He loved outwitting the Secret Service, including sneaking off from the White House during the middle of the day on some occasions.

We saw him on one of these drives as he drove himself across the Potomac River on the Fourteenth Street Bridge in Washington, District of Columbia, in 1961 when in town to attend the wedding of my late mother's adoptive first cousin, Miss Mary Louise Humes, the blood niece of my adoptive maternal grandfather, Chief Red Fox, to Dr. Rolando Goco. My father saw Kennedy southbound across the bridge as we were driving back into Washington from the Arlington National Cemetery. "Don't look now," my father said. "There goes the President."

Kennedy got to be president, however, as a result of massive voter fraud in Cook County, Illinois, then under the political control of the Mayor of the City of Chicago, Richard J. Daley, and in the State of Texas over then Vice President Richard Milhous Nixon, that was engineered by his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., who worked in conjunction with Mafia figures and the Teamsters Union to do so. Seymour Hersh, a journalist of the false opposite of the naturalist "left," provided a narrative that is summarized in a book review of his The Dark Side of Camelot:

Kennedy's link to Giancana through the president's relationship with Exner, who was also Giancana's lover, has been reported. But Hersh breaks new ground with allegations linking Giancana and other Mafia leaders to the 1960 election.

Joseph Kennedy was the catalyst in setting up the alliance with the Mafia, by Hersh's account. The elder Kennedy allegedly got a Chicago judge and old friend, William J. Touhy, to arrange a meeting with Giancana. Joseph Kennedy purportedly sought to tap into the mob's influence with local labor unions, part of what Hersh calls "a huge manpower base that could be mobilized on demand."

Hersh reports that, according to Tina Sinatra, the elder Kennedy also persuaded Frank Sinatra to act as a go-between in the campaign's contacts with Giancana. "I believe in this man [John Kennedy], and I think he's going to make us a good president," Sinatra told Giancana, whom he met on a golf course to escape FBI surveillance, Tina Sinatra said.

Efforts to contact Sinatra and his daughter on Saturday for comment were unsuccessful.

The decision by the Mafia to commit resources to the Kennedy campaign was made at a summit of the crime bosses in Chicago, according to Jeanne Humphreys, widow of mob figure Murray Humphreys, who cast the only negative vote at the meeting.

Robert G. Blakey, a former Justice Department special prosecutor, told Hersh that FBI wiretaps confirmed that the Mafia had been active in Kennedy's Illinois campaign, providing financial backing and stuffing ballot boxes. "Can you say that mob money made a difference?" Blakey asks rhetorically. "My judgment is yes."

Kennedy carried Illinois--a crucial win in the electoral-vote contests--by fewer than 9,000 votes out of more than 4.6 million cast. At the time, many Republicans charged that the Chicago Democratic machine, led by then-Mayor Richard J. Daley, had rigged Kennedy's victory.

Hersh writes that Sen. Everett Dirksen (R-Ill.), the GOP Senate leader, called Cartha DeLoach, then-deputy director of the FBI, claiming he had evidence of fraud and demanding an investigation. DeLoach told Hersh that when he informed Dirksen he would turn the matter over to the Justice Department--then headed by Robert Kennedy--the senator snapped: "Thanks a hell of a lot" and slammed down the phone.

"Dirksen probably knew that the Justice Department had already advised the FBI not to the conduct any further investigation," DeLoach told Hersh.

The reason Mafia leaders were willing to aid Kennedy's candidacy was their belief, according to Blakey, that "the Kennedys would do something for them," specifically, Hersh writes, "reduce FBI pressure on their activities."

If that was the case, the mob made a bad bargain because once in charge of the Justice Department, Robert Kennedy made fighting organized crime a priority. Victor Navasky wrote in his book, "Kennedy Justice," that "ever since Prohibition . . . attorneys general have been 'declaring war' on organized crime, but Robert Kennedy was the first to fight one." (Mafia Helped JFK Win Election, Book Claims. Efforts to copy and paste Hersh's own  summary of his book were not successful as the .pdf text was garbled. Readers can access it at: The Dark Side of Camelot.)

John F. Kennedy's recklessness led him to rely on a steady stream of painkillers to fight various ailments. Indeed, he had become addicted to some for a time as President:

Vigor was the byword of the Kennedy years. After the wrinkled decorum of Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy's America would feature people like him, the kind whose hair waved in the wind as they scrimmaged on the lawn at Hyannis Port, Mass. But for more than a decade now, as biographers have burrowed under the New Frontier, another J.F.K. has come into the picture. That would be the one with a multitude of serious illnesses whose life was a hidden ordeal of pills and injections, the one whose severe chronic back pain led him eventually to find relief in amphetamine shots from Max Jacobson, the celebrity physician later known as Dr. Feelgood. "I don't care if it's horse [water]," Kennedy is reported to have told his disapproving brother Bobby. "It works."

Now enter Robert Dallek, a well-known historian of the presidency, bearing another stack of evidence and more bad news. At work on a Kennedy biography, Dallek became the first scholar to examine J.F.K.'s medical records on file at the Kennedy presidential library in Boston. Somewhat to Dallek's surprise, a summation of his discoveries published in the December issue of the Atlantic Monthly has set off a firestorm. It's not news that J.F.K. was in poor health much of the time, but Dallek paints the fullest and most unnerving picture yet of a President in constant pain from degenerative bone disease and heavily medicated. It raises the obvious question of whether voters should have known more about the health of a man who Dallek says often could barely climb a flight of stairs and could not put on his own socks. Dallek describes X rays showing that some of J.F.K.'s vertebrae collapsed while he was still in his 30s. The historian also learned that J.F.K. had nine secret hospital stays during a 2 1/2-year period in the mid-1950s.

"When I read about the hospitalizations, my eyes widened," says Dallek. "We never knew about this." Another revelation was the sheer quantity of medications Kennedy took daily during his presidency. "Steroids for his Addison's disease," Dallek writes, "pain-killers for his back, antispasmodics for his colitis, antibiotics for urinary-tract infections, antihistamines for allergies and, on at least one occasion, an antipsychotic (though only for two days) for a severe mood change that Jackie Kennedy believed had been brought on by the antihistamines." Johnny, we hardly knew ye.

Dallek believes that many of Kennedy's worst difficulties can be traced to the corticosteroids he took, perhaps starting as early as 1937, to relieve his colitis, an ulcerous inflammation of the upper bowel. Their heavy long-term use can promote osteoporosis — progressive bone disintegration. They also suppress the body's immune system, leading to the kind of serious infections Kennedy frequently suffered. But other common side effects are hair that stays thick and dark, plus skin that turns the yellow-gold of a permanent suntan. Another would be intensified [desires to sin against Holy Purity]. All of which suggest that Kennedy's very Kennedy-ness was partly a side effect of his medication.

In 1947 J.F.K., then 30, learned he had Addison's disease, a dysfunction of the adrenal glands that, among other things, regulate blood sugar and the body's response to stress. The treatment? More corticosteroids. In the years that followed, as he rose from Congressman to Senator to presidential hopeful, Kennedy denied rumors of Addison's, some of them passed along to reporters by political opponents like Lyndon Johnson. He finally admitted to it in 1960, more or less, when he issued a statement acknowledging an "adrenal deficiency."

Kennedy's bad back was harder to deny, especially after near-fatal back surgery in 1954, when he was a Senator too much in the public eye to disappear for the eight months he needed to recover. But the back was absorbed into his legend, laid to football injuries and his indisputable heroism during World War II, explanations that merely buffed the chrome of J.F.K.'s image.

Historians have long complained that Kennedy's inner circle has been secretive and worse about his health. While preparing his 1993 book President Kennedy: Profile of Power, Richard Reeves requested access to J.F.K.'s medical records but was refused. He did succeed in interviewing the surgeons who performed the 1954 back operation, as well as Dr. Hans Kraus, who oversaw J.F.K.'s physical therapy in the last months of his presidency. "All of them told me they were asked to destroy certain records," says Reeves. "And they did. (How Sick Was J.F.K.? - TIME)

Recklessness in his private life led Kennedy as president to undertake numerous foreign policy disasters, each of which led up to the Cuban Missile Crisis that, far being a "victory" for the United States of America, helped to expedite the 1964 peaceful coup against Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Premier and First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet (CPSU) Union Nikita Sergei Khrushchev, which was followed by the most massive arms build-up in the history of the world as Khrushchev's successor as the First Secretary of the CPSU, Leonid Brezhnev, vowed never to have the Soviet Union placed in a position of strategic inferiority again.

Specifically, Kennedy's decision at the last minute to withdraw American air cover for the Cubans who attempted to overthrow Fidel Castro in 1961 resulted in the the massacre of these Cubans at the Bay of Pigs fiasco from April 17 to 19, 1961, and the weak impression that Kennedy gave to Soviet dictator Nikita S. Khrushchev in their Vienna Summit meeting of June 4, 1961, which led directly to Khrushchev's erection of the Berlin Wall  starting on August 13, 1961 in full violation of the Quadripartite Agreements after World War II to maintain access to all quarters of Berlin, emboldened Khrushchev to place missiles into Cuba that with warheads that could reach the East Coast of the United States of America. The crisis itself was the result of the vacillation of the reckless Kennedy and a gamble made by the man who had engineered the starvation of six million Ukrainians in the 1930s, Nikita Khrushchev, that he could capitalize on it.

As is well known, of course, Kennedy's death was transformed by his successor, Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson, whom the Kennedys loathed just as much as he loathed them (Johnson did, however, have great love for the State of Israel--see Lyndon Johnson Had Emotional Attachment to Counterfeit Israel), into an opportunity to continue the expansion of the size, power and the scope of the government of the United States of America that began during the War between the States and expedited during the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Woodrow Wilson and, of course, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Johnson used the "martyred" Kennedy's assassination to push through the programs of the Great Society and the War on Poverty that reduced the sovereignty of the individual states and that of the liberty of ordinary citizens while further institutionalizing statism and creating more of a culture of dependency than had thereto existed in this country at a time that Johnson was escalating a ground war in Southeast Asia that he had promised in 1964 to end, although such escalation came with no policy of winning the war, thus assuring the ultimate Communist takeover of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam), Cambodia and Laos on April 30, 1975. Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro is simply finishing the job of a de facto Communist takeover of the United States of America to which Johnson had contributed mightily in his own right as he capitalized on the murder of a man he despised and whom he had held in contempt when he, Johnson, had been the Senate Majority Leader from 1955 until the time of his election as Vice President and Kennedy was his mostly absentee party member.

Obviously, the farce that is American electoral politics and the ultimate triumph of statism, which is pretty irreversible in human terms, is the consequence of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King that was wrought by the Protestant Revolution in the Sixteenth Century and institutionalized by array of naturalistic forces that can be categorized as Judeo-Masonry. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was part and parcel of that naturalistic environment, and he received the enthusiastic support and protection of two powerful American bishops, Francis Cardinal Spellman, the Archbishop of New York, and Richard Cardinal Cushing, both of whom went to the extraordinary lengths of denouncing an effort by Puerto Rican bishops in 1960 to defeat Commonwealth of Puerto Rico Governor Luis Munoz Marin's efforts to expand the Sangerite agenda of "population control,"  which had first made inroads in the Territory of Puerto Rico in the 1930s during the time that Rexford G. Tugwell, a Margaret Sanger acolyte, was its appointed governor from 1941 to 1946:

In 1960, the Puerto Rico hierarchy decided to make one last concerted effort to drive the Sangerite forces from the island. The Catholic resistance was lead by two American Bishops--James F. Davis of San Juan and James E. McManus of Ponce. The Catholic Church in Puerto Rico helped to organize a national political party--the Christian Action Party (CAP). The new political front was composed primarily of Catholic laymen and its platform included opposition to existing permissive legislation on birth control and sterilization.

When increasing numbers of CAP flags began to fly from the rooftops of Puerto Rico's Catholic homes, the leaders of the opposition parties, who favored turning Puerto Rico into an international Sangerite playground for massive U.S.-based contraceptive/abortifacient/sterilization experimental programs, became increasingly concerned for their own political futures. Then unexpected help arrived in the unlikely person of His Eminence Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York.

One month before the hotly contested national election, Spellman arrived in Puerto Rico ostensibly to preside over two formal Church functions. While on the island, Spellman agreed to meet with CAP's major political rival, Governor Luis Munoz Marin, leader of the Popular Democratic Party (PDP) and a supporter of federal population control programs for Puerto Rico.

In an interview that followed his meeting with Munoz, Spellman, known for years as FDR's errand boy with a miter, claimed that politics were outside his purview. The cardinal's statement was interpreted by the press as an indictment of the partisan politics of Bishops Davis and McManus. To underscore his message, as soon as Spellman returned to the States he made a public statement in opposition to the latest directives of the Puerto Rico bishops prohibiting Catholics from voting for Munoz and his anti-life PDP cohorts. Catholic voters in Puerto Rico should vote their conscience without the threat of Church penalties, Spellman said.

Boston's Cardinal Cushing, John F. Kennedy's "political godfather," joined Spellman in expressed "feigned horror" at the thought of ecclesiastical authority attempting to dictate political voting. "This has never been a part of our history, and I pray God that it will never be!" said Cushing. Cushing's main concern was not the Puerto Rican people. His main worry was that the flack caused by the Puerto Rican birth control affair might overflow into the upcoming presidential campaign and hurt John Kennedy's bid for the White House.

The national election turned out to be a political disaster for CAP. Munoz and the PDP won by a landslide. Bishop Davis was forced to end the tragic state of confusion among the Catholic laity by declaring just before the election that no penalties would be imposed on those who voted for PDP.

Two years later, with the knowledge and approval of the American hierarchy and the Holy See, the Puerto Rican hierarchy was pressured into singing a secret concordat of "non-interference" in government-sponsored birth control programs--a sop being that the programs would now include instruction in the "rhythm method." While insisting on their right to hold and express legitimate opposition to such programs, the Puerto Rican bishops promised they would "never impose their own moral doctrines upon individuals who do not accept the Catholic teaching."

When the Sangerite storm hit the mainland in the late 1960s, AmChurch would echo this same theme song, opening the floodgates to a multi-billion dollar federal-life-prevention (and destruction) program. (Randy Engel, The Rite of Sodomy, pp. 647-649)

Thank you, Angelo Roncalli/John XXIII, the allegedly "traditionalist" "pope" because he liked Latin (!), for undermining the faithful Catholic Catholics of Puerto Rico who had not been corrupted by the influences of American-style pluralism.

Thank you, Angelo Roncalli/John XXIII for supporting Francis Spellman and Richard Cushing, who once boasted shortly before he died that he had never made a single convert in his entire priestly life, and their utterly false belief that it is wrong to insist that the very binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ entrusted to His Catholic Church for their eternal safekeeping and infallible explication are the only foundation of just civil laws.

With Americanist enablers such as Cardinals Spellman and Cushing, John Fitzgerald Kennedy knew that he would suffer no consequences as a result of his hearty endorsement to the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic falsehood known as separation of Church and State that he gave in a speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on September 12, 1960:

While the so-called religious issue is necessarily and properly the chief topic here tonight, I want to emphasize from the outset that we have far more critical issues to face in the 1960 election; the spread of Communist influence, until it now festers 90 miles off the coast of Florida--the humiliating treatment of our President and Vice President by those who no longer respect our power--the hungry children I saw in West Virginia, the old people who cannot pay their doctor bills, the families forced to give up their farms--an America with too many slums, with too few schools, and too late to the moon and outer space.

These are the real issues which should decide this campaign. And they are not religious issues--for war and hunger and ignorance and despair know no religious barriers.

But because I am a Catholic, and no Catholic has ever been elected President, the real issues in this campaign have been obscured--perhaps deliberately, in some quarters less responsible than this. So it is apparently necessary for me to state once again--not what kind of church I believe in, for that should be important only to me--but what kind of America I believe in.

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute--where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote--where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference--and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish--where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source--where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials--and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew--or a Quaker--or a Unitarian--or a Baptist. It was Virginia's harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson's statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim- -but tomorrow it may be you--until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril.

Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end--where all men and all churches are treated as equal--where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice--where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind--and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood.

That is the kind of America in which I believe. And it represents the kind of Presidency in which I believe--a great office that must neither be humbled by making it the instrument of any one religious group nor tarnished by arbitrarily withholding its occupancy from the members of any one religious group. I believe in a President whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office.

I would not look with favor upon a President working to subvert the first amendment's guarantees of religious liberty. Nor would our system of checks and balances permit him to do so--and neither do I look with favor upon those who would work to subvert Article VI of the Constitution by requiring a religious test--even by indirection--for it. If they disagree with that safeguard they should be out openly working to repeal it.

I want a Chief Executive whose public acts are responsible to all groups and obligated to none--who can attend any ceremony, service or dinner his office may appropriately require of him--and whose fulfillment of his Presidential oath is not limited or conditioned by any religious oath, ritual or obligation.

This is the kind of America I believe in--and this is the kind I fought for in the South Pacific, and the kind my brother died for in Europe. No one suggested then that we may have a "divided loyalty," that we did "not believe in liberty," or that we belonged to a disloyal group that threatened the "freedoms for which our forefathers died."

And in fact this is the kind of America for which our forefathers died--when they fled here to escape religious test oaths that denied office to members of less favored churches--when they fought for the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom--and when they fought at the shrine I visited today, the Alamo. For side by side with Bowie and Crockett died McCafferty and Bailey and Carey--but no one knows whether they were Catholic or not. For there was no religious test at the Alamo.

I ask you tonight to follow in that tradition--to judge me on the basis of my record of 14 years in Congress--on my declared stands against an Ambassador to the Vatican, against unconstitutional aid to parochial schools, and against any boycott of the public schools (which I have attended myself)--instead of judging me on the basis of these pamphlets and publications we all have seen that carefully select quotations out of context from the statements of Catholic church leaders, usually in other countries, frequently in other centuries, and always omitting, of course, the statement of the American Bishops in 1948 which strongly endorsed church-state separation, and which more nearly reflects the views of almost every American Catholic.

I do not consider these other quotations binding upon my public acts--why should you? But let me say, with respect to other countries, that I am wholly opposed to the state being used by any religious group, Catholic or Protestant, to compel, prohibit, or persecute the free exercise of any other religion. And I hope that you and I condemn with equal fervor those nations which deny their Presidency to Protestants and those which deny it to Catholics. And rather than cite the misdeeds of those who differ, I would cite the record of the Catholic Church in such nations as Ireland and France--and the independence of such statesmen as Adenauer and De Gaulle.

But let me stress again that these are my views--for contrary to common newspaper usage, I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic Party's candidate for President who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters--and the church does not speak for me.

Whatever issue may come before me as President--on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or any other subject--I will make my decision in accordance with these views, in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates. And no power or threat of punishment could cause me to decide otherwise.

But if the time should ever come--and I do not concede any conflict to be even remotely possible--when my office would require me to either violate my conscience or violate the national interest, then I would resign the office; and I hope any conscientious public servant would do the same.

But I do not intend to apologize for these views to my critics of either Catholic or Protestant faith--nor do I intend to disavow either my views or my church in order to win this election.

If I should lose on the real issues, I shall return to my seat in the Senate, satisfied that I had tried my best and was fairly judged. But if this election is decided on the basis that 40 million Americans lost their chance of being President on the day they were baptized, then it is the whole nation that will be the loser, in the eyes of Catholics and non-Catholics around the world, in the eyes of history, and in the eyes of our own people.

But if, on the other hand, I should win the election, then I shall devote every effort of mind and spirit to fulfilling the oath of the Presidency--practically identical, I might add, to the oath I have taken for 14 years in the Congress. For without reservation, I can "solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution . . . so help me God. Address of Senator John F. Kennedy to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association

Even Father John Courtney Murray, S.J., a supporter of Kennedy's who would be one of the principal progenitors of the "Second" Vatican Council's Dignitatis Humanae (and the author of many of the interventions made by American cardinals and bishops in its behalf), found Kennedy's strict personal separation of religious belief from the making of public policy decisions to be too stringent. Murray favored the American concept of the separation of Church and State, believing, as the conciliarists Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI and Jorge Mario Bergoglio/Francis do, that such a separation permits Catholics to influence public policy and the direction of debate on it in the "marketplace of ideas." Leaving aside the inconvenient little truth that God and His true Church are owed recognition by the civil state, as summarized so succinctly by Pope Saint Pius X in Vehementer Nos, Father John Courtney Murray could not see that Kennedy's "more stringent" view of "separationism" was but the logical consequence of a religiously indifferentist civil state, as prophesied by Pope Leo XIII in Immortale Dei.

Oh, before I continue, it should be noted that Senator Kennedy gave that address, which was written by Kennedy speech writer Theodore Sorensen, was delivered on the Feast of the Holy Name of Mary, which commemorates the victory King Jan Sobieski of Catholic Poland over the Mohammedan hordes at the Gates of Vienna, Austria, on September 13, 1683, as he, King Jan Sobieski, held the Rosary aloft and urged men to pray this great spiritual weapon that Our Lady gave to Saint Dominic to fight the Albigenses heresy.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy's September 12, 1960, Address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, is the singularly most overlooked and ignored part of his tragic legacy. That speech, although considered too expansive by Father John Courtney Murray at the time, authored by a Talmudist, Theodore Sorensen, it is perfect conciliar orthodoxy today, more so now under Jorge Mario Bergoglio than it has been ever before under the previous conciliar "popes," each of whom supported "separation of Church and State," which was termed a "thesis absolutely false" by Pope Saint Pius X in Vehementer Nos, February 11, 1906. Bergoglio believes that that what he thinks is the Catholic Church has been "too obsessed" with "moral issues" such as as abortion an "gay rights," which is why he has said uttered not a word of criticism about the pro-abortion, pro-perversity policies of the civil leaders with whom he has met in the past eight months and for whom he has provided one smiling photo opportunity after another, usually replete with a hug and sometimes a kiss on the cheek. He would have personally telephoned John Kennedy to "congratulate" him on the address that he gave to the Protestant ministers on the Feast of the Holy Name of Mary fifty-three years ago. After all, the only thing that matters to God is "service to the poor," right?

It is hardly necessary to provide yet another full recitation of the litany of pro-abortion politicians of both organized crime families of naturalism in the United States of America,, including Vice President of the United States of America Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., United States Secretary of State John F. Kerry, United States Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, House Minority Leader Nancy Patricia D'Alesandro Pelosi, Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin, United States Senators Susan Collins, Christopher Murphy, Kirsten Gillebrand, Thomas Harkin, Patricia Murray, Barbara Mikulski, Robert Menendez and Jack Reed, Governors Andrew Mark Cuomo (D-NY), Edmund G. Brown, Jr. (D-CA), Patrick Quinn (D-IL), Daniel Malloy (D-CT) and Martin O'Malley (D-MD) to name just a few, you understand, whose ascent to power was made more possible by John F. Kennedy's September 12, 1960, address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association and who have been enabled, at least for the most part, noting a few exceptions here and then, by the conciliarist hierarchy in this country whose members have been and continue to be worthy successors of John Carroll, James Gibbons, John Ireland, Francis Spellman and Richard Cushing (see From John Carroll To James Gibbons To Timothy Dolan and Channeling John Ireland).

John F. Kennedy's overlooked legacy as a champion of the "separation of Church and State," which Pope Saint Pius X wrote in Vehementer Nos that his predecessors had never ceased to denounced as circumstances required them to do so, which is, of course, one of the correlative proofs that the conciliar "popes" are but pretenders and not legitimate Successors of Saint Peter, was continued after his death by none other than his late father's personal clerical consigliari, Richard Cardinal Cushing, who said the following in 1965 when the Commonwealth of Massachusetts General Court (the state legislature) was debating a bill, which had been introduced by State Senator Michael Dukakis, to sanction the sale of contraceptives:

Early in the summer of 1965, the Massachusetts legislature took up a proposal to repeal the state's Birth Control law, which barred the use of contraceptives. . . . In a state where Catholics constituted a voting majority, and dominated the legislature, the prospects for repeal appeared remote. Then on June 22, Cardinal Cushing appeared on a local radio program, 'An Afternoon with Haywood Vincent,' and effectively scuttled the opposition. Cardinal Cushing announced: 'My position in this matter is that birth control in accordance with artificial means is immoral, and not permissible. But this is Catholic teaching. I am also convinced that I should not impose my position upon those of other faiths'. Warming to the subject, the cardinal told his radio audience that 'I could not in conscience approve the legislation' that had been proposed. However, he quickly added, 'I will make no effort to impose my opinion upon others.' So there it was: the 'personally opposed' argument, in fully developed form, enunciated by a Prince of the Church nearly 40 years ago! Notice how the unvarying teaching of the Catholic Church, which condemned artificial contraception as an offense against natural law, is reduced here to a matter of the cardinal's personal belief. And notice how he makes no effort to persuade legislators with the force of his arguments; any such effort is condemned in advance as a bid to 'impose' his opinion. Cardinal Cushing conceded that in the past, Catholic leaders had opposed any effort to alter the Birth Control law. 'But my thinking has changed on that matter,' he reported, 'for the simple reason that I do not see where I have an obligation to impose my religious beliefs on people who just do not accept the same faith as I do'. . . . Before the end of his fateful radio broadcast, Cardinal Cushing gave his advice to the Catholic members of the Massachusetts legislature: 'If your constituents want this legislation, vote for it. You represent them. You don't represent the Catholic Church.' Dozens of Catholic legislators did vote for the bill, and the Birth Control law was abolished. Perhaps more important in the long run, the 'personally opposed' politician had his rationale." (Catholic World Report, 2003.)

There it is. An Americanist bishop, one who enabled the political careers of the Kennedys at every turn, invited Catholics who served in the Massachusetts General Court to betray the Faith in order to please their constituents and thus save their precious careers. It is all right there. (For an article describing Cushing's support for Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy's plans to enter into a sacramentally invalid marriage with Aristotle Onassis, please see Appendix B below).

Cushing's belief that he could not "impose" his "religious beliefs" on non-Catholics was a foretaste of the steady diet of such tripe that we have been fed for the past eight months by Jorge Mario Bergoglio. And it came less than a year after the Kennedy clan had met in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, to brainstorm with like-minded Catholic theologians to find a way to justify supporting the chemical and surgical execution of the innocent preborn in their mothers' wombs:

In some cases, church leaders actually started providing "cover" for Catholic pro-choice politicians who wanted to vote in favor of abortion rights. At a meeting at the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport, Mass., on a hot summer day in 1964, the Kennedy family and its advisers and allies were coached by leading theologians and Catholic college professors on how to accept and promote abortion with a "clear conscience."

The former Jesuit priest Albert Jonsen, emeritus professor of ethics at the University of Washington, recalls the meeting in his book "The Birth of Bioethics" (Oxford, 2003). He writes about how he joined with the Rev. Joseph Fuchs, a Catholic moral theologian; the Rev. Robert Drinan, then dean of Boston College Law School; and three academic theologians, the Revs. Giles Milhaven, Richard McCormick and Charles Curran, to enable the Kennedy family to redefine support for abortion.

Mr. Jonsen writes that the Hyannisport colloquium was influenced by the position of another Jesuit, the Rev. John Courtney Murray, a position that "distinguished between the moral aspects of an issue and the feasibility of enacting legislation about that issue." It was the consensus at the Hyannisport conclave that Catholic politicians "might tolerate legislation that would permit abortion under certain circumstances if political efforts to repress this moral error led to greater perils to social peace and order."

Father Milhaven later recalled the Hyannisport meeting during a 1984 breakfast briefing of Catholics for a Free Choice: "The theologians worked for a day and a half among ourselves at a nearby hotel. In the evening we answered questions from the Kennedys and the Shrivers. Though the theologians disagreed on many a point, they all concurred on certain basics . . . and that was that a Catholic politician could in good conscience vote in favor of abortion." (WSJ.com - Opinion: How Support for Abortion Became Kennedy Dogma.)

That's quite a cast of dissenting Catholics, is it not? " One wonders if Cushing was being advised by the same priests.

Father Death," Robert Drinan. Father Charles Curran, the supporter of contraception. Father Richard McCormick, the supporter of the false moral theology known as proportionalism, the belief that a preponderance of "good" motives and extenuating circumstances can make an otherwise objective moral evil act licit to pursue. The noted dissenter Father Joseph Fuchs. One wonders if Cushing was being advised by the same priests.

Quite a cast of characters, gathered to help the Kennedy clan support baby-killing under cover of the civil law. And there are still priests and presbyters catering to these people who are unrepentant in their support of one moral evil after another. Some of priests and presbyters indemnified John Fitzgerald Kennedy's brother, Edward Moore Kennedy right until the point of his death on August 29, 2009, the Feast of the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, and, sadly, have done so since that time. After all, "Teddy" Kennedy was a champion of "universal health care." This is nothing other than the legacy of Americanism that shaped the Kennedy family and that served as one of the fundamental building blocks of conciliarism itself.

Unfortunately for the Kennedys and for those who have followed them, however, Pope Leo XIII condemned their "personally oppose but can't impose" views in no uncertain terms in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885:

Hence, lest concord be broken by rash charges, let this be understood by all, that the integrity of Catholic faith cannot be reconciled with opinions verging on naturalism or rationalism, the essence of which is utterly to do away with Christian institutions and to install in society the supremacy of man to the exclusion of God. Further, it is unlawful to follow one line of conduct in private life and another in public, respecting privately the authority of the Church, but publicly rejecting it; for this would amount to joining together good and evil, and to putting man in conflict with himself; whereas he ought always to be consistent, and never in the least point nor in any condition of life to swerve from Christian virtue.  (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885.)

The devil hates the Social Reign of Christ the King and Mary our Immaculate Queen. Consider a secular newspaper account, contained in the Workers' Solidarity publication in Barcelona, Spain, of the jubilation that was felt in the murder of so many bishops and priests during the Spanish Revolution (1936-1939):

The Church must disappear forever. . . . The wretched little Catholic holes no loner exist. The torches of the people have pulverized them. In their place rises a free spirit that has nothing in common with the masochism which incubates in the naves of the cathedrals. But it is necessary to tear up the Church by the roots. For this we must take by force all its goods that rightly belong to the people. Religious orders must be dissolved. Bishops and cardinals must be shot.  (Quoted in Warren H. Carroll, The Last Crusade, Christendom Press, 1996, p. 111.)

The Protestant Revolution American Revolution and the French Revolution and the Mexican Revolution and the Italian Risorgimento and the Kulturkampf of Otto von Bismarck and the Bolshevik Revolution and the Cuban Revolution and the Chinese Revolution and the Sandinista Revolution have all had one thing in common: a thorough rejection of Christ the King and His true Church as paramount in the lives of men and their societies. The differences are only in degrees and methods. The American Revolution has coopted Catholics subtly over course of time while the others used violence and/or state coercion to silence Catholics. No matter the differences in degrees and methods, the results are the same: a world where men believe that they can order themselves, both individually and socially, without even praying that Our Lord Himself reign over them and their nations.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy played his own role in furthering this revolution at a time when the age of conciliarism itself was eclipsing the Catholic Church to prepare the way for the coming of out-and-and-out purveyors of rank moral evils and the indemnification by the likes of another American, albeit a South American, Jorge Mario Bergoglio.

Yet it is that L'Osservatore Romano (see Yesterday's Evils, Today's Accepted Norm, Respect Those Who Break the First Commandment? Respect Those Who Break the Fifth Commandment, Urbanely Accepting Evil, Respect Those Who Break the First Commandment? Respect Those Who Break the Fifth Commandment, L'Osservatore Del Naturalista, Big Pharm Trumps the Holy Cross, L'Osservatore Occulto, Vatican does U-turn to praise Oscar Wilde, Vatican paper hails Michael Jackson, L'Osservatore Marxista, L'Osservatore Di Tutte Le Cose Grezze, L'Osservatore Romano Di Infirmita Mentale, Ever L'Osservatore Di Tutte le Cose Grezze, 2010) has run an article describing the "hopes" that been raised by the false "pontificate" of Angelo Roncalli/John XXIII and the presidency of John f. Kennedy:

In a L’Osservatore Romano article marking the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Father Robert Imbelli recalled Catholic life in the United States in the 1960s.

Father Imbelli, a Boston College theology professor and priest of the Archdiocese of New York, recalled that Catholic life seemed to be at its apex in the early 1960s – an era of church and school construction and burgeoning seminaries and convents. “The emblematic portrait depicting John XXIII and President Kennedy next to each other seemed to promise a new era, both for the Church and for the nation: a new Pentecost, ecclesial and civil.”

Following Kennedy’s assassination and funeral, in which “the Dies Irae of the Mass had never resounded more powerfully and fearfully,” “the hopes raised by the conciliar documents” and the Civil Rights Act gave way to the events of 1968: the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, riots in cities, and protests in universities. “In the Church, the promulgation of the encyclical Humanae Vitae “dashed the hopes of many Catholics. Priests and religious abandoned their vocation in rising numbers.”

“The Camelot of the Kennedy era was short lived,” Father Imbelli continued. “In addition, it later proved to be more myth than reality, all too often disfigured by secret infidelity.”

“Without authentic conversion, the well-being and integrity of both the nation and the Church are compromised and corroded,” he added. “The hopes of the believers are not placed in some mythical Camelot, but in the new Jerusalem, which comes down ‘out of heaven, from God’” (Rev. 21: 2). (Vatican newspaper recalls Kennedy assassination.)

 

Only the delusional in the early 1960s thought that Angelo Roncalli was going to bring a "new Pentecost" to the Catholic Church and/or that John F. Kennedy represented promised a "new era." Even those of us who did not recognize Roncalli as a heretic believed we had to "live" with him as "pope" while being bewildered by his strange talk that was but the beginning of cataclysmic events that have driven Catholics away from the the Faith while reaffirming men who followed in the wake of John F. Kennedy and conciliar documents such as Dignitatis Humanae and Gaudium et Spes in their advancement of social evils. Some "new Pentecost. The "new era" of ecclesial and civil "progress was a lie from the devil at its very outset. We are living with the consequences to this very day as part of a massive chastisement for our sins and those of the whole world.

Although reports vary on whether President Kennedy, who apparently arranged for at least one of his paramours to "terminate her pregnancy" with the assistance of Mafia chieftain Sam Giancana, got to Confession before his assassination, we pray that this was indeed the case as Darkened Souls Can Be Made White As Snow, something for which each of us erring sinners must be grateful as the truth about us is that our sins deserve us to be condemned to Hell.

We pray for the repose of the soul of President John F. Kennedy today while keeping in mind that he left behind a legacy that continues to result in the spread of many evils. This should inspire us to pray Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary so that the legacy we leave behind will be one of helping spread Catholic doctrine in life as we have tried, despite our sins and failings, to make reparation for our sins as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Eternal rest grant unto John Fitzgerald Kennedy, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him. May his soul and all of the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace Amen.

Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

 

Appendix A

Photograph of the Presidential Limousine in which President John F. Kennedy was assassinated fifty years ago today

The limousine in which John F. Kennedy was shot and killed. (The roof was added later.) "The Henry Ford," Dearborn, Michigan, Monday, April 16, 2007. The car was rebuilt after the assassination, remaining in service through the administration of President Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr., in 1976.

Appendix B

Richard Cushing's Endorsement of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy's Invalid Marriage to Aristotle Onassis

"This idea of saying she's excommunicated, that she's a public sinner—what a lot of nonsense. Only God knows who is a sinner and who is not. Why can't she marry whomever she wants?"

The speaker defending Jackie Kennedy's marriage to Aristotle Onassis was no gossip columnist or pundit—indeed, few society reporters were so disposed. He was Richard Cardinal Cushing, Archbishop of Boston, Prince of the Holy Roman Church and—as it turned out last week—foremost a friend in need.

The cardinal made his defense of Jackie at a meeting of Boston's Caritas Guild, composed of the city's licensed beverage executives, and he chose that platform to stress caritas—charity. As Cushing knows, it is one of the most elusive of virtues. Two days after his speech, he announced that the volume of hate mail he had received as a consequence, some of it "in the language of the gutter," had persuaded him to resign his see at the end of this year instead of his previous target date, August 1970.

The emotional defense of Jackie by Cushing—who had presided at her first wedding in 1953 and at John Kennedy's funeral ten years later—was not very well received in Rome either. Before Cushing spoke out, the Vatican's chief press officer, Monsignor Fausto Vallainc, had expressed the church's official view that Jackie had "knowingly violated the law of the church" and was ineligible to receive the sacraments. Although reluctant to dispute a cardinal, Vatican theologians simply reiterated their interpretation of the church's law after Cushing's statement

.

Totally Unpredictable. In announcing his decision to resign well ahead of schedule, Cushing complained that 98% of the mail he had received since his statement to the Caritas Guild had condemned his stand. The cardinal sentimentally pointed out that his own sister had married a Jew outside the church and that, while Mrs. Onassis might not be able to receive the sacraments, "she should continue all the private devotions she had as a Catholic."

It was the third time that Cushing had publicly announced his intention to resign. A product of Boston's once-Irish urban ghetto, he was named Archbishop of the city in 1944, and subsequently proved to be one of the great school and church builders of American Catholicism. Affectionately human and totally unpredictable, Cushing was, more importantly, a pioneer ecumenicist in the open style of Pope John, a maverick prelate who found it possible, at various times, to endorse both the John Birch Society and the N.A.A.C.P. In poor health for many years—and, at 73, only two years away from the age limit suggested for episcopal resignations by Pope Paul—Cushing had good reason to ask to be relieved of duty. The Pope is said to have a high regard for Cushing and may well decide to refuse his resignation. On the other hand, if the cardinal mentioned illness or fatigue in his formal request to Paul, that might persuade the Vatican this time to accede to his wishes. (Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article.)

[Thomas A. Droleskey note: Cushing's resignation in 1968 was not accepted by Giovanni Montini/Paul VI at the time. Cushing did not retire until September 8, 1970, after he had turned seventy-five years of age. He died nearly two months later, on November 2, 1970. Oh, by the way, Cushing endorsed the John Birch Society because of its anti-Communism and because its leading founder, the late Robert Welch, believed that Communism had to be fought with Americanism, not, of course, the restoration of the Social Reign of Christ the King as we pray Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary in fulfillment of her Fatima Message to defeat the anti-Incarnational forces at work in the work. Cushing, a thorough Americanist, thought that this was all just peachy keen swell. ]