Assassination!: The Brick Chronicle of Attempts on the Lives of Twelve US Presidents (20 page)
Read Assassination!: The Brick Chronicle of Attempts on the Lives of Twelve US Presidents Online
Authors: Brendan Powell Smith
JOHN F. KENNEDY
December 11, 1960
In 1960, Richard Pavlick was a seventy-three-year-old retired postal worker from Belmont, New Hampshire, with two missing fingers on his right hand. He lived alone and was considered a local eccentric who wrote frequent “rambling and dumb” letters to newspapers and was vocal at town meetings.
Virulently anti-Catholic, Pavlick hated John F. Kennedy. When Richard Nixon lost to Kennedy by the narrowest of margins in the 1960 election, Pavlick told people that life had lost all meaning to him. He talked of destroying himself and taking others with him. “He was always rambling about something,” noted a neighbor.
During the last week of November, Pavlick sold his house, donating the money to a local youth center. He then set off in his 1950 Buick and began stalking the president-elect at the Kennedy family mansion in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts.
Pavlick returned to Belmont and mentioned to Postmaster Thomas Murphy that he had been to Hyannis Port and that secret service agents are stupid. Murphy was busy at the time and didn’t think much of it, but later wondered why a man who hated Kennedy would travel to Hyannis Port to see him.
In early December, Pavlick continued to stalk Kennedy, driving to Washington, DC, and then on to Palm Beach, Florida, where the Kennedys had a winter home. At some point along the way, he stopped and purchased ten sticks of dynamite, four large canisters of gasoline, detonators, and wiring.
On the morning of Sunday, December 11, Pavlick sat in his dynamite-laden car with a trigger in hand and waited for the president-elect to emerge from his vacation home to head to church.
His plan was to drive directly at Kennedy’s car and then detonate his car bomb at the last moment, killing his target and himself. But when Pavlick saw that Kennedy’s wife and two young children had come outside to see him off, he chose to wait for a more opportune time to act.
Following him to church, Pavlick concealed a stick of dynamite under his coat and attempted to approach Kennedy during the mass, but Secret Service Agent Gerald Blaine noticed him getting too close to the president-elect and quietly guided him out of the church.
Meanwhile, back in New Hampshire, Postmaster Murphy had become suspicious when cryptic postcards he received from Pavlick mentioned that he would soon hear from him “in a big way.” Noticing the postmarks were from cities Kennedy frequented, he contacted the Secret Service.
Kennedy left town the next day but was due to return to Palm Beach on December 16. On the 15th, however, Pavlick was pulled over for a minor traffic violation. Seven sticks of dynamite were found in his car, and Pavlick was arrested.
