John F. Kennedy's Warning to the Republic | History Today - 0 views
-
The plot of the Hollywood film Seven Days in May (1964) is, of course, fiction. But its journey to the screen is historically significant, because the person who got the ball rolling on the production in 1962 was not a Hollywood mogul but someone with even more power: President John F. Kennedy.
-
The president favoured history (he was a subscriber to History Today) and spy novels. When in 1962, midway through his tenure, he received the galleys of a new thriller about a military takeover of the US government he read it eagerly.
-
Knebel and Bailey were seasoned political reporters. They began writing Seven Days in May after interviewing General Curtis LeMay in the wake of the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, when the US landed anti-communist rebels in Cuba to depose Castro. LeMay blamed JFK for aborting the operation too early, accusing him of ‘cowardice’. The more Knebel and Bailey investigated, the more they realised that the military establishment and the intelligence community despised Kennedy.
- ...6 more annotations...