EXCERPT FROM THURSTON CLARK'S BOOK : JFK LAST HUNDRED DAYS

Commentary : This is fabulous writing, bringing the reader to the scene in the nation, in the world, with broad strokes and then the small details, painting a heart rendering picture of the JFK assassination and immediate aftermath!

CHAPTER "AFTER DALLAS"  (Last Chapter)
Pages 347 - 362

Jackie wept first, and from her and from Dallas a tidal wave of tears rolled across the nation and around the world.  In New York, there was a murmur and then a rising wail as the news jumped between tables at a midtown restaurant.  Advertising men in tailored suits hurried into St. Patrick's Cathedral and fell onto their knees.  Outside, drivers hunched over steering wheels, sobbing as dashboard radios broadcast the news.  A crowd gathered at the Magnavox showroom on Fifth Avenue, watching on television sets piled two stories high as Walter Cronkite chocked back tears before announcing that the President was dead.  Chorus girls rehearsing for an evening television show at the Ed Sullivan Theater on Broadway kicked in unison, arms linked around waists and tears streamed down their cheeks.

In Washington, a rookie police officer wept as he lowered the flag on the Capitol dome to half mast and looked down to see that drivers had abandoned their cars and stood in the street, staring up at the flag and crying... At Harvard, a girl wept on the steps of the Widener Library and a boy hit a tree in time to a tolling church bell... President Truman cried so much when he called on Jackie before the funeral that he had to be put to bed in the White House.  A poem by the columnist Art Buchwald began each line, "We weep for, " and conclude, "We weep because there is nothing else we can do."  The cartoonist Bill Mauldin drew the statue of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial, sitting with his head in his hands... November 22 would be the first time many children saw an adult cry, and after hearing the news from sobbing teachers they went home to find their mothers in tears.  A girl remembered her mother doing the ironing as she watched television, her tears sizzling a they hit the hot iron...

Soviet interest in maintaining the atmosphere of détente created by the nuclear test ban treaty was demonstrated by the appointment of First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikolya, the most powerful Soviet official after Khrushchev, to represent the USSR at President Kennedy's funeral.  Khrushchev instructed his wife to write Jackie a personal note, an unprecedented gesture for a Soviet leader that his son believed was meant to stress "the sincerity and personal nature of his sympathy." ... (Yevgeny) Yevtushenko would tell the actor Kirk Douglas, "People cried in the street... They sensed that, in him (Kennedy). there might be a chance for our two countries to get together."

... Big Ben tolled every minute for an hour, lights dimmed in Piccadilly Circus, and Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home reported that distraught British teenagers were "openly crying in the street." ...

Danes carried bouquet to the U.s Embassy and left behind a six foot high wall of flowers.  ...

Sixty thousand  West Berliners held an impromptu torchlight procession and gathered in the square where Kennedy had said "Ich bein ein Berliner." ...

President Charles de Gaulle told a friend, "I am stunned.  They are crying all over France.  It is as if he were a Frenchman, a member of their own family."

EXCERPTS FROM : JFK'S LAST HUNDRED DAYS by THURSTON CLARKE C 2013
The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President.
Penguin Press New York 2013 Publisher

JFK and JACKIE VORACIOUS READERS : FROM JFK'S LAST HUNDRED DAYS

Page 72

He and Jackie were voracious readers.  For her, books had been an escape from her parent's troubled marriage; for him, an escape during his many illnesses and hospitalizations.  His reading had a determined and remorseless quality, and he read at meals, in the bathtub, and even propped a book up on his bureau as he dressed.  He told his friend Larry Newman, "I feel better when there are books around.  That's really where my education comes from."  Exchanging books had become a form of communication for them - a way of expressing feelings they had difficulty voicing.....

Page 73

Kennedy was a fast reader and could have finished the biography that weekend (of Marshall of France: The life and Times of Maurice de Saxe.

******

CT editor : Jackie may have given this book to her husband because Maurice de Saxe, the man it profiled, was much like him.  Witty, elegant, a philanderer. Even the Count's mother may have reminded her of Rose Kennedy, growing increasingly eccentric as she aged.  Also, the Count's father may have reminded her of JFK's father, Joe Kennedy, who was a "notorious satyr."  There were other similarities.  Jackie's first child Arabella, had been miscarried.  Maurice de Saxe's wife's first born lived only a few days, as had their son Patrick.  I wonder if Jackie believed in reincarnation.  I know from reading around her that she was a bit of a fatalist.



JFK'S LAST HUNDRED DAYS by THURSTON CLARKE C 2013
The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President.
Penguin Press New York 2013 Publisher

JFK'S LAST HUNDRED DAYS by THURSTON CLARKE : CHRISTINE TRZYNA BOOK REVIEW

JFK'S LAST HUNDRED DAYS by THURSTON CLARKE

CHRISTINE TRZYNA BOOK REVIEW

Any writing on a well known subject (The Sinking of the Titanic, Elvis Presley, the Presidency and Assassination of President John F. Kennedy) is challenged by all those who have tackled it before.  This year a number of JKF books are out to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of his death.  Are publishers just trying to Capitalize on this or is it more?  Could the American Reader be harkening back to a time when the typical citizen believed in his President?

Thurston Clarke was brilliant on focusing on JFK's last hundred days of life, as a President of the United States, because the reader senses in this a countdown to the inevitable.  Indeed, that focus makes us anxious because we already know what is going to happen, the death of a President by assassination, an event that is still controversial to this day.  Thurston managed to build suspense despite our already knowing what is going to happen. 

For a writer the challenge is how to tell the same old story it a different way, perhaps through his own writing style that simmers up from their own personality and character, and in this Thurston Clarke has exceeded all expectations. The focus here is on the humanity of the man and how he had changed as person within the historical context of the Presidency and his marriage to Jackie.   Readers around the subject as I am, will take in stride some of the reportage and note the difference in how certain issues are opened without defensiveness.

Haunting are the many times that JFK acknowledged, considered, and spoke about possibly being assassinated, as if he knew, and you know, sometimes people do know that they are going to die.  

The last chapter brought all that momentum to the sad climax of the immediate aftermath of the announcement that our American President was slain.  The event was impactful, the writing even more so in the delivery of a succession of scenes from around the country and around the world.  I cried, and I knew I wasn't just crying for JFK, or what once was, but for our United States of America, which seems to be in so very much trouble now.

Was it innocence that the American public had?  How could that be in this era of developing Civil Rights?  What made a Harvard educated man who never carried cash or credit cards with him because all bills got paid one way or another, who was shielded from poverty for much of his life, acknowledge the poor and understand that poverty is an issue tied to Civil Rights? 

Sometimes I think it was, first and foremost, because of his personal experience of bodily pain, disability, something that he (and his family) sought to dismiss.  Many people in as much pain, without advantage, suffer their whole lives in poverty, unable to find an employer who will have them.  He knew he would not be elected or considered a viable President if people knew what ailed him, and what ailed him was a lot.

As I continued to read this book, my promise to myself that I really would get up and do the dishes went unkept, as did my promise that I would take my dog for a really long walk.  I admit to be a slug of a woman who laid around in an unmade bed until I finished the book.  My dog sat with her head down on a pillow watching me, waiting with patience. But not a lot of you have that much luxury, so for you my excerpts.

Christine Trzyna

JFK'S LAST HUNDRED DAYS by THURSTON CLARKE C 2013
The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President.
Penguin Press New York 2013 Publisher


 

WHAT WOULD JACKIE DO? by SHELLY BRANCH and SUE CALLAWAY

An Inspired Guide to Distinctive Living.

This book was interesting to me because of Jackie's life as a literary editor, but also First Lady, and icon. Like Andy Warhol, I suspect Jackie was, from an early age, extremely aware of herself as a product and of marketing.

Page 18 Scoring Big with Courtly Correspondence.


"A woman with an erudite aura writes a main. She knows that words that flicker on a screen may land her a job interview, even a few good dates. But she also gets that words flowing directly from a pen are apt to deliver more - if less immediately tangible - riches.

"Jackie was a model correspondent. She used her trademark stationary (light blue sheets with embossed white lettering) and loopy script to curry favors, charm lovers, maneuver out of tight spots, and evoke her famous wrath - unusually in effusive fashion.

"Most people reserve a good handwriting job for more formal affairs these days. That is a mistake. An ambidextrous Jackie would dash off an eight-page letter of sympathy ... then shift to more intellectual prose with lofty-minded dear hearts such as former Deputy of Defense Secretary Roswell Gilpatric."

Page 19

"To mix it up and save money in the process Jackie used postcards from museums, as well as letterhead from high end hotels (Japan's Half Moon Hotel was once a favorite source of sheets). These helped to project a "you-are-there" in-the-moment tone - the perfect vibe for earnest scribes."