The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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“That man was crouching over the corpse, no longer chuckling but breathing hard and moving his body rhythmically. At first I thought he must be performing some mysterious symbolic rite he’d learned from Mexicans or Indians as a boy. And then I realized —there is only one way to say this — he was literally fucking my husband in the throat. In the bullet wound in the front of his throat He reached a climax and dismounted. I froze. The next thing I remember, he was being sworn in as the new President.” --fictional Jackie Kennedy anecdote |
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The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book (1967) is a satirical article by Paul Krassner published in The Realist following the censorship of William Manchester's book on the Kennedy assassination, The Death of a President. At the climax of the short story, Lyndon B. Johnson is on Air Force One sexually penetrating the bullet-hole wound in the throat of JFK's corpse. Krassner acknowledged Marvin Garson, editor of the San Francisco Express Times and husband of Barbara Garson (author of the notorious anti-Johnson play MacBird! ), for coming up with that surreal image. According to Elliot Feldman, "Some members of the mainstream press and other Washington political wonks, including Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame, actually believed this incident to be true." In a 1995 interview for the magazine Adbusters, Krassner commented: "People across the country believed – if only for a moment – that an act of presidential necrophilia had taken place. It worked because Jackie Kennedy had created so much curiosity by censoring the book she authorized – William Manchester's The Death Of A President – because what I wrote was a metaphorical truth about LBJ's personality presented in a literary context, and because the imagery was so shocking, it broke through the notion that the war in Vietnam was being conducted by sane men.".
In 1967, the Canadian campus newspaper The McGill Daily published an excerpt from Krassner's story. The Montreal police confiscated the issue and Rocke Robertson, principal of McGill University, charged student John Fekete, the supplement editor responsible for the publication, before the Senate Discipline Committee.
Incipit:
- "An executive in the publishing industry, who obviously must remain anonymous, has made available to the Realist a photostatic copy of the original manuscript of William Manchester's book, The Death of a President. Those passages which are printed here were marked for deletion months before Harper & Row sold the serialization rights to Look magazine; hence they do not appear even in the so-called "complete" version published by the German magazine, Stern.
