Yesterday was the 56 anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Not a story about it in the major media…New York Times, Wall Street Journal,
CNN.com, etc.
Also forgotten was President Trump’s
broken promise to release all the confidential files of John F. Kennedy’s
assassination by 26 April 2018.
Here is
the inside story told to me by then-Texas Gov. John Connally, who was seriously
wounded when he took a bullet in the back sitting in front of Kennedy.
Everyone old enough to remember that day
recalls where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news. I
search the news every Nov. 22 to see how the Kennedy assassination is
commemorated. For the most part, it is only dutifully mentioned or barely
reported on. This year, though, with the expectation that the sealed files of
the assassination will be released, the upcoming anniversary will be more
extensively covered in the news.
As a
young boy in grade school, I saw Kennedy campaign in front of the Yonkers train
station at Larkin Plaza. A few of my Catholic school classmates and I took a
bus to see him. As Kennedy’s motorcade left the campaign stop, I ran up behind
his car, reached over the back of the trunk and touched his outstretched hand.
As
life would have it, we would connect again.
FAST FORWARD
The
year was 1992. The place was Dallas, Texas. It took me 46 years to get from
2940 Hone Ave. in the Bronx, where seven of us lived in a five-room walk-up, to
Dallas.
It was there that the former
Democratic governor of Texas and former Treasury secretary appointed by
Republican President Richard Nixon, John Connally, who almost was assassinated
along with Kennedy, wanted to meet me on a Sunday.
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I’d
planned to get away that fall weekend with my wife to an Adirondack lake resort
where I was to give the keynote address to a healthcare association the
following Monday.
But I
knew in my gut that going to Dallas was more important than going to Lake
George.
Weeks
before the 1992 presidential election, there I was having lunch with Connally
and a few others in the restaurant at the Anatole Hotel. I was asked to meet
with him because he wanted to know how, three years earlier, I’d forecast the
rise of a third political party when only 13 percent of the public thought such
a movement possible.
What’s more, in my book Trend Tracking (1989), I had singled out Ross
Perot as just the kind of political maverick who could pull it off. Perot, a third-party
candidate, was making a serious run for the White House.
I’d
come all this way to have lunch with Connally, but frankly, I wasn’t an
admirer.
I
thought of him as a cowboy con artist, a smooth-talking wheeler-dealer only
interested in feathering his own nest. But as he talked over lunch, I realized
my dislike was based on his media image. The more he talked, the more ashamed I
felt for prejudging him. Secondhand dislike swiftly turned to deep admiration.
I
found myself getting annoyed with others at the table. I’d never heard anyone
speak as articulately and with such economy of words as Connally. Each word
seemed like a sentence, each sentence a paragraph. I remember wishing I had a
tape recorder to capture every word.
I
wanted to hear what he had to say and what was on his mind. “Please shut up!”
I’d say to myself, hoping the power of suggestion would work when others at the
table cut him off and talked about what they thought and believed. It didn’t.
Quietly and courteously, he would yield to them.
But I
would not. Whenever there was a pause, or I was able to create an opening, I’d
prompt Connally with a question to lead him back to his previous stream of
thought.
I had
flown from New York to Nashville the previous day to meet with John Jay Hooker,
the Tennessee gadfly who’d arranged the meeting. As we were finishing lunch,
Hooker boomed, “What do you say John, ready to go now? The limousine is
waiting.
In
his rumpled seersucker suit, sporting a white Stetson hat, the tall Hooker was
right out of Central Casting. It was he who’d brought us together and,
unbeknownst to me, had arranged with Connally and his wife Nellie to go with us
to the Texas School Book Depository.
Hooker had lost a close race
for governor of Tennessee several years earlier, but never left the political
scene. His finely appointed Nashville apartment walls were covered with
pictures of him and the late-greats. It was a who’s who of American politics:
all the Kennedy clan with him at Kennebunkport, Hubert
Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson and a cast of congressional movers and shakers. He was now a vociferous opponent
of America’s electoral process that promotes the buying and selling of
politicians through campaign financing.
“They won’t let go of the tit, Celente my
boy,” Hooker said, looking and sounding almost like W.C. Fields. “Once they’re
in power, they’re all the same. They think that tit’s only for them to suck on
and that no one else is entitled to the mother’s milk of our great country,”
Hooker told me, referring to Democrats’ and Republicans’ permanent grip on the
political system.
John
Jay Hooker, the man who prompted Ross Perot to throw his hat into the race for
president in 1992, had now convinced John Connally and his wife Nellie to
return to the scene of JFK’s assassination. This would be the first time they’d
gone back since the day it happened, almost 30 years earlier.
And
there I was, this kid from the Bronx, parked outside the book depository
listening to John and Nellie Connally tell, firsthand, what had happened on 22
November 1963.
WHAT CONNALLY SAW
Connally
set the scene, pointing out the direction the presidential motorcade had taken
around Dealey Plaza. He had been sitting in the jump seat in front of President
Kennedy. A tall and rangy man, Connally imitated his uncomfortable scrunched-up
position in the small seat and how he was holding his Stetson hat on his knee.
To his side sat Nellie, directly in front of Jackie Kennedy.
“I
heard a gunshot. I knew it was a gunshot because I’d been hunting since I was a
little boy,” Connally said. “I looked to the right and didn’t see anything. I
was wearing a dark blue suit that day,” he recalled. “When I looked to my left,
I saw brains on my shoulder. I knew they were brains because my daddy was a
butcher.
“Then
I felt as though there was a pounding on my back,” he said, making two parallel
fists as if to mimic someone hitting him on the back. He grimaced as he
explained what he felt when the bullet meant for Kennedy tore through his back,
hand and his knee.
And
so, he and Nellie went on, recounting the minute details of that gruesome
event: The three gunshots and the ensuing chaos… The screams of fear… Nellie
throwing her body over her husband to shield him… The mad dash drive to
Parkland Hospital.
Connally
had incredible luck in those worst of times. A thoracic surgeon, seeing the motorcade
screaming into Parkland while on break, rushed to the emergency room. As luck,
or life, would have it amid the mayhem, he would be the doctor that would
immediately operate on Connally’s lung and save his life.
It was hard for me to process
what I was hearing and how fortunate I was to be there.
For
me, it was a day of epiphany.
On the
way back to the hotel, hardly a word was spoken. On my left sat Hooker. Pat
Caddell, the pollster, sat on my right. Connally was across from me. To
his right was Rama Fox, Larry King’s girlfriend at the time, and Nellie to his
left.
It was then that I figured out why I
was so taken with the way Connally was speaking, with his calmness,
extraordinary clarity, his gestures and assuredness. I knew with absolute
certainty that he was a man with a lot to say… and not much time to say it.
Connally was dying.
I
could see the signs – a stiffness and weakness like those I noticed some 10
years earlier when my father, may his soul rest in peace, was dying. Like Dad,
Connally was suffering from a pulmonary condition. His was from the gunshot
that had ripped through his lungs. My dad’s lungs were rotted from asbestos
poisoning when he worked in shipyards during World War II.
When
I looked at Connally’s hands, I saw my father’s hands before he died. They were
stiff, with big, purplish splotches – a reaction to massive doses of
prednisone, a cortisone used to temper his lung inflammation.
Connally,
remembered as a “straight shooter” by those who knew him, would die of
pulmonary fibrosis eight months later. I don’t believe he consciously knew he
was dying when we met on that sunny Sunday. But I was convinced that it was his
subconscious that dominated his conversation.
When
the limo pulled up to the hotel, Connally and I, the middle passengers, were
the last to get out. The others were a dozen steps ahead of us, heading for the
elevators. Connally stopped and
turned to me.
“Gerald, I read your book and it’s a
fine piece of work,” he said. “And I know that your heart is in the right
place, but you don’t have a clue of what’s going on in the government, and
neither do the American people.
“Because if they did, there’d be a
revolution in this country.”
MY EPIPHANY
Without
another word, he headed for the elevators and caught up with the others. For an
instant, I stood alone. I didn’t know what was behind that remark, but with
Connally as the source, it came less as a shock than as a confirmation. Even
without knowing the details, I understood what Connally was telling me.
Over
the years, the unique Globalnomic trend-forecasting system that I had
developed, and which was proving remarkably successful, had given me an
advantage in viewing the world and machinations of government with a critical
eye. I was able to stand outside the political box and beyond the scope of
print- and broadcast-media reporting. With no agenda to sell and
beholden to no one, I had become a political atheist, uncommitted to either
party and interested only in accurately interpreting the facts.
But what I had not quite realized before my
lunch with Connally was the extent of corruption and slim odds of anyone
bucking the system and winning.
This was coming from the horse’s mouth.
Here was a man who had been at the top of government and deep inside the
corridors of power. This was not Sunday morning Beltway babble coming from Face the
Nation or Meet the Press. This was a one-on-one straight scoop coming from a
man in a position to know, talking outside of a public forum.
I
recognized it as a singular and privileged moment. I was given insight into the
real gravity of just how bad things were. It was the culmination of a long
process.
Straight
out of graduate school, I had begun my career as the No. 2 man running the
Republican/Conservative mayoral candidate in Yonkers, New York. From there, I
went to Albany as assistant to the secretary of the New York State Senate.
Recognizing
that I was seeing politics in action from a different vantage point than those
caught up in party dogma, I designed and taught “American Politics and Campaign
Technology” at St. John’s University. I spent the next several years as a
government affairs specialist working between Chicago and Washington, D.C.,
representing a major segment of the chemical industry.
Beginning as a believer in the American
democratic system, I held that belief into my early 30s. But, by the time I met
Connally, I had lost my naiveté and harbored deep doubts about government. And
my disdain for most politicians was growing. It was not just what Connally said
that moved me, but the authority and gravity of the way he said it.
He was my epiphany.
We
all went up to his suite and had a couple of drinks, a few snacks and some
small talk. Hooker was trying to sign Connally onto the Board of Directors for
a chain of steak houses he wanted to develop. Caddell, a Washington pollster,
and Connally traded tales of political days gone by. Fox cooed about her
engagement to Larry King.
I
half listened and said nothing. My brain was back in the hotel lobby replaying
Connally’s statement: “If the American people
knew what was going on in this government, there’d be a revolution.”
That line reinforced my political
atheism. I refused to believe in political dogma, genuflect before any
political preacher or vow obedience to any political god.
I would not be a member of any party or follow any leader.
That
day in Dallas strengthened my resolve to base forecasts on verifiable data and
to select those facts that illuminated the actual situation rather than those
supporting a particular political/economic/philosophical agenda.
“If
the American people knew what was going on…” I wondered if revolution would
happen and when.
A
quarter-century later, most people fight among themselves, defending the
political party they believe in and the cast of cowards, liars, freaks and
fools… the politicians for life they pledge allegiance to who run and ruin
their lives.
As I
look back now, not only is the political divide worse than ever, so too is the
State of the Union.
Can
it change?
Yes.
It is
up to We the People, not the dictates of the current failed political system.
“It does not take a majority to
prevail… but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of
freedom in the minds of men.” — Samuel Adams
Gerald
Celente is founder and director of The Trends Research Institute, author
of Trends 2000and Trend Tracking (Warner Books), and
publisher of The Trends Journal. He has been forecasting
trends since 1980, and recently called “The Collapse of ’09.”
Copyright © 2019 The Trends Research Institute
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