I have a friend who has become in his late years a real conspiracy theory believer. He doubts that people were ever on the Moon and subscribes to many theories about politics and culture. He gets a lot of his information from what I consider spurious sources - and he laughs at me because I believe in the big, established media news sources.
He doesn't believe most of the popular theories about the JFK assassination a,nd the Warren Commission Report is total fiction. He does believe he was assassinated. A recent podcast on who killed JFK has made me more of a believer in the JFK assassination conspiracy.
John F. Kennedy was quite a reader. Part of that came from his many long hospital stays in his youth because of colitis, and Addison’s disease and with his back issue during his Presidency. Doctors doubted that he would make it into his 30s. One of his favorites was Ian Fleming's James Bond novels. Do a search on JFK + James Bond and you'll find many articles connecting the two.
Did Kennedy use Bond to fight the Cold War? You can imagine why something like From Russia, With Love would appeal to him.
Kennedy proclaimed his love for James Bond in a 1961 LIFE magazine feature at the height of his political popularity. At that time Bond was not popular in America but JFK's endorsement led to Fleming’s first significant sales in the U.S. Then United Artists secured the film adaptation rights. They rushed Dr. No. United Artists’ movie adaptations did not follow the order of the novels. It went from Dr. No to From Russia with Love perhaps based on JFK's reading list.
Fleming even had Bond say “We need more Kennedys’ in the next book, The Spy Who Loved Me in 1962.
There were three books that Lee Harvey Oswald had at the time of his arrest: 2 Bond novels, The Spy Who Loved Me and Live and Let Die and a non-fiction book about the USSR and Communism. Legend has it that Lee Harvey Oswald and Kennedy were both reading Ian Fleming the night before the assassination.
Trivia: The film The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) was the last movie watched by Elvis Presley.
President Kennedy watched 81 films at the White House cinema. The first was The Misfits, starring Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable. They watched 13 foreign-language films (probably Jackie;s choices). JFK liked Fellini’s La Dolce Vita but walked out after 20 minutes on Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, which I totally understand. They keep track of these things at the White House. President Dwight Eisenhower's favorite movie was High Noon.
Before becoming a senator, papa Joseph Kennedy had been a successful Hollywood producer who was said to have had an affair with Gloria Swanson. She is best remembered for Sunset Boulevard, which is one of Trump’s favorite films and was the most repeatedly screened film during his time in the White House. The first film he watched? The animated Finding Dory.
Before JFK knew Marilyn, he had a poster of her upside down (so her legs were akimbo) on the rear of his hospital door as he recovered from back surgery in 1954. Jackie complained about the poster. The poster image was from Niagara. That was the film that really made her a star. Warhol stole the image for his Marilyn silkscreens from that film. In From Russia, with Love, there is a chapter called “The Mouth of Marilyn Monroe.” While in the hospital, Jackie gave him a copy of Fleming’s first book, Casino Royale.
Tom Jones may have been the last film JFK saw, though on November 20 he was briefly back in DC for brother Robert’s birthday party and they had a copy of From Russia with Love then. The film differed from the book with SMERSH, the Red Army’s real-life counter-intelligence unit, replaced with a Russian crime syndicate. We didn't want to stir up the Russians. Kennedy had already seen it, getting an advance copy back in October. He watched it with his brother and Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post who reported later that “Kennedy seemed to enjoy the cool and the sex and the brutality. He seldom sat through an entire film, but he watched this one to the end.”
United Artists released the film on a double-bill with War is Hell. That was the film that Lee Harvey Oswald saw part of as he hid at Dallas’ Texas Theatre, where he was apprehended shortly after the shooting of the President.
According to The Washington Post, Kennedy’s admiration of Bond was also political. “Kennedy deliberately used Bond to project an image as a heroic leader who could meet any challenge in the most perilous years of the Cold War.”
JFK didn't get to read all 14 Bond novels which were published through 1966.
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