Adam Carolla talks to Brad Meltzer about his latest book. About a different, little-known, conspiracy against the life of Jack Kennedy.
Which reminds me of when I first arrived in New York, as a young kid, in September 1960, just before the first Kennedy-Nixon debate on the 26th September. Dad was Australian representative at the United Nations. We were in a hotel on East 22nd Street, just before we decamped to suburban New Rochelle.
We watched the debate on a little black and white box, in our hotel room. For us it was the first time we'd even seen television, which at the time hadn't arrived in Australia. So it was kind of magic.
And to see these two men, battle it out on television. Magic.
This was just before Kruschev banged his shoe, at the United Nations, declaring, angrily that "we will bury you". As in communism, the Soviet Union would bury us, the West and US.
Then we went to Germany where we were, Dad in the Australian Embassy in the then capital Bonn, when the Communists started building the Berlin Wall, in August 1961.
Then not long after, I sailed, by ship, to Canberra for my high school years. Which was where I heard about the Kennedy assassination on 22 November 1963. I was at the Canberra Grammar School. Supposed to board, but the boarding section was full, so I was put up by a kind family, whose son, Mick Gee, was in the same year as me.
We'd been out on a school excursion. I returned to find a newspaper on my bed, with the screaming black-faced 100-point headline, in awful alliteration: "Kennedy Killed!".
For most of my life, and even unto now, I believed the official story that it was a lone killer, Lee Harvey Oswald. Everything else, I thought, was Conspiracy Theory. But now, late in life, I'm not so sure. Does not some grander, wider, more sinister plot make more sense? That he was hated for his Catholicism? For his attacks on the "military industrial complex"? For his brother's attacks on the Mafia?
And now we have Brad Meltzer. And his wholly new story of yet another conspiracy.
Meltzer reveals an earlier attempt on Kennedy in his new book. I don't know about it at all. Meltzer says we don't know about it because news was overshadowed by the Cuban Missile Crisis.
What a crazy few years. Kennedy-Nixon, assassinations -- JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcolm X, Oswald, Ruby -- the brink of nuclear war over Cuba, the Berlin wall. Kruschev's shoe.
Watch Adam Carolla’s segment with Brad Meltzer. .
Meltzer's book:. The JFK Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill Kennedy―and Why It Failed
