"I KNOW WHAT YOU MUST BE THINKING, Goldberg," Kennedy said as we sat down for dinner. "Oh?" I replied with just a tinge of condescension in case he was about to spring the news of his Presidential masquerade on me. "Yes," he went on, "while I might have fooled the best and brightest members of my entourage with this 'dress rehearsal' proposition, a man of your Machiavellian mentality can't be deceived that easily by such a preposterous idea, so I'll tell you the truth." At this point I fully expected Ballbraker to burst into the room as the "Kennedys" removed their wigs and latex masks—whereupon the 3 "partners in crime" would gleefully enjoy themselves at my expense. But this was one of those rare cases when my analysis of a situation couldn't have been more erroneous!

     "Long before we left Washington on this European junket," the President resumed with an impressive solemnity, "our principal destination wasn't the wall separating East and West Berlin but the American embassy in Moronville."

     "Yes!" Mrs. Kennedy enthused, excitedly clapping her hands together, "Jack and I made our minds up months ago we had to fabricate some credible excuse for arranging this cloak&daggerstyle meeting with you."

     "Not that our reasons for doing so were identical," the President quickly added. "Although to some degree I might share Jackie's enthusiasm for your trailblazing work in the field of Superprotracted Foreplay, it's those revolutionary political ideas you expressed so brilliantly in that Diatribe Against The Evils Of Egalitarianism which captured my attention. And, while I was sorely tempted to order your immediate return home for a private oval office discussion of those antidemocratic theories there were some obvious drawbacks to such a direct approach—"

     "Not the least of which," the First Lady interrupted, "was your reputation for those legendary lovemaking skills that most fascinated me—"

     "And," countered the President, "of much more importance to me, was your persona non grata status within the State Department. The slightest hint I might be even remotely associating myself with your neofascist ideas could compromise my neoautocratic ambitions."

     Had I heard him correctly? Was the President of the United States of America actually telling me he was a closet monarchist? While I wouldn't go quite so far as to describe my own political philosophy as neofascist it was true I'd never made a secret of my serious reservations about the future of an American democracy that could waste (which is putting it charitably) a human resource as rare and precious as mine. Could it be possible this most shining example of the American Success Story—this Prince among politicians—this living legend of God's gift to His most recently Chosen People—was no less bitter than I over the squandering of his potential for greatness?  As Kennedy continued expounding on the reasons for his pilgrimage to Moronia it became clear the answer to all of these unthinkable questions was a resounding "YES!" Based on the "blueprint" I had drawn in my Diatribe Against The Evils Of Egalitarianism¹² Kennedy had formulated a plan for turning America into a "SemiConstitutional Monarchy"—which he now wanted to run past me for my "expert opinion on its tactical feasibility, its strategic objectives and, more crucially, its moral certitude."¹³  This was the "flag" he intended to raise; the "trial balloon" he would send aloft; the "dress rehearsal" for whose staging he had made his circuitous way to Moronville!

     Having finished our meal (for which the Kennedys complimented me in the most effusive terms)—and while the First Lady¹⁴ took herself on an "unguided" tour of my "legendary bedchamber to inspect its amatory accouterments"—the President and I withdrew to my study where, when the room had filled with cigar smoke and we were sipping the second of our (most appropriately named) Napoleon brandies, he revealed the details of his "historymaking" plan; a plan I have summarized as follows:

(1) Since, in all modesty, it was fair to say the "Camelot Aura" surrounding his persona, marriage and Presidency could be construed as no less providential than the circumstances from which arose such divinelyrighted rulers as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Ivan the Terrible, Henry VIII, and Louis XIV; if ever there was to be an American king no better candidate for playing that role could be found than from among the Kennedy clan.¹⁵  One had only to read between the lines of all those adulatory stories being written about the mystique, charisma, and aristocratic elegance of the "royal" couple occupying the White House to appreciate the fact a basis already existed for winning the hearts and minds of the American masses to the idea their democratic form of government needed to be rerevolutionized.

(2) The failure to capitalize on his unprecedented popularity merely because of some "stupid constitutional prohibition" against a President serving more than 2 terms would be to miss an opportunity of the most crucial proportions—and one that had been clearly ordained by the same divinity who had so obviously made him (Kennedy) in His (God's) own autocratic image. Having not yet reached his 50th birthday there was no reason why he couldn't go on winning elections for another 20—or even 30—years. No reason, that is, except for that "sacrosanct" scrap of paper¹⁶  known as "the Constitution of the United States!"

(3) But this constitutional prohibition against serving more than 2 terms could in fact turn out to be a blessing in disguise. Using his charismatic popularity to argue for the repeal of the 22nd Amendment wouldn't be all that difficult. But why stop there? Couldn't the argument also be made that: While preparing to put a man on the moon our government was still traveling along the road of its manifest destiny in an 18thcentury horse and buggy? No! Whatever justification it might once have had, the Constitution had outlived its usefulness and, like the Communist Manifesto or Doctrine of Papal Infallability, should now be relegated to the scrapheap of history! Having taken the first bold step of deleting 1 of its previously enshrined Amendments would it not be logical—nay, irresistible!—for America to march bravely on toward the 21stcentury by trampling every chapter and verse in that obsolete document?¹⁷

(4) Not—he would hasten to add while telling the American people why their precious Constitution had to be trashed— that embarking on such a radical course would be riskfree! Even though, unlike Napoleon, Lenin, Mussolini or Hitler, he—King John I—would remain uncorrupted by the (relatively) absolute power they were being asked to confer upon him, his heirs might not resist the temptation to abuse their royal authority. History is, after all, filled with examples of dynastic decline. But the same history also teaches us that if declining societies aren't wise—or bold—enough to read the handwriting on the walls of their crumbling institutions they are doomed to collapse with them. In the final analysis, while the outcome of such an enterprise would, like a marriage—or a work of art—be somewhat speculative; isn't it better (or at least more exciting) to have crossed a new frontier no matter how disastrous that act turns out to be than never to have expanded one's horizons? And, if this experiment in what some might call "another delusionary attempt at national salvation through enlightened despotism" should in fact fail, would it not be preferable to perish in a Wagnerianstyle Gotterdämmerung than continue boxing against the shadows of America's former greatness—or drown in that deluge of mediocrity Louis XVI so rightly predicted would follow in the wake of his involuntary abdication?

(5) Having read the handwriting on the crumbling bastions of America's outdated political fortress, he would not—indeed could not—shrink from his "patriotic duty" to wear the crown fate itself had place upon his head. The only question remaining for him was not whether he should enthrone himself as the first American king, but how and when such a thoroughly unAmerican deed might in fact be done!

JFK HAD, OF COURSE, PUT HIS Presidential finger on the problem I wrestled with at such great length in my Diatribe Against The Evils Of Egalitarianism. Staging an oldfashioned coup d'etat in a 20thcentury democracy is by no means a piece of political cake. Especially when one is dealing with a system of checks and balances like that of the United States, where the federal levers of power have been so widely dispersed throughout a tangled web of agencies, bureaus, branches and departments—not to mention the maze of state, county and municipal entities whose ancient aspirations for local autonomy have never been entirely extinguished by the wet blanket of Washington's claim to centralized government fame. Ironically, the only function this checks and balances system performs efficiently is to perpetuate the bureaucratic stagnation suffocating America in a spiritual, cultural and intellectual vacuum.  After agonizing for several years over the question of whether America's moribund democracy could be rerevolutionized, I reluctantly came to the conclusion in my Diatribe Against The Evils Of Egalitarianism that "such a radical solution to our political paralysis is probably impossible."¹⁸ The only "solution" I could offer to the "insoluble" problem of finding a loophole in the fine print of America's putschproof^G Constitution was: "To sit by and wait until the entire establishmentarian juggernaut comes to a grinding halt from the friction generated by its sheer size and complexity; at which juncture it might be a relatively simple matter to build a sleeker system of government from scratch—with a single, autocratic, ruler at its streamlined head."

     "In my humble opinion, Goldberg," said the President, "when you ended your Diatribe by concluding a coup d'etat was out of the question constitutionallywise, you overlooked one very significant loophole."

     "Oh?" I responded with more surprise than curiosity.

     "Yes," Kennedy resumed eagerly, "Despite its elaborate safeguards against the kind of conventional coup d'etat scenarios you spent so much time speculating on, there is at least one potentially fatal flaw in the supposedly "putschproof" framework of our Constitution."

     "Which is?" I asked him somewhat petulantly—unable to conceal my skepticism that he might somehow have discovered the loophole I had failed to find in the course of my painstaking analysis of that document.

     "The 20th Amendment!" he exclaimed, as if he were a backward student who had at long last caught his teacher with his pedagogicald pants down. "Surely you must be familiar with that footnote to our constitutional history?" he added, rubbing a little salt into the wound when I didn't respond immediately.

     "The 20th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States," I answered emphatically, "merely changed the date of the Presidential inauguration from March 4th to January 20th. Which is a technicality whose 'loophole' significance I have yet to fully appreciate."

     "Don't you see, Goldberg? The date doesn't mean a damned thing. It's the occasion itself that matters!"

     Of course I saw what he was driving at! I was only playing dumb in the hope I might think of some way to make it appear to him as if I had discovered the SwearingIn Ceremony Loophole. But he was too quick for me.

     "The only occasion," he went on, "except for the State of the Union Address, when, for all practical purposes, the entire federal government is assembled in one place!"

     "I still don't under—" I tried to interject, but there was no stopping him. He was on one of his famous oval office realpolitik rolls and he knew it.

     "But, unlike the State of the Union Address, there is a moment during the SwearingIn ceremony when America's fate hangs suspended in a delicate balance between its egalitarian past and what could be its autocratic future—when, for a split second, just as the torch of executive power is about to pass from the old to the new President an infinitesimal gap appears in that chain of civic continuity stretching all the way back to George Washington—there is a pause of such exquisite pregnancy— a brief but cosmically consequential hiatus—an evanescence in whose—"

     "Yes, yes, yes!" I protested in my exasperation over what seemed his intent to impress me with an endless litany of similes and metaphors. "You've made your point, Mr. President. But it's one I find to be of such Jesuitical—if not Talmudic—elegance that, almost by definition, it doesn't apply to this real world in which we are actually living! Ontologicallyspeaking this 'brief but exquisitely pregnant pause' of yours could indeed be a 'loophole' through which a truckload of putschist possibilities might be driven. For practical purposes, however, more than a single microsecond is needed to mobilize all those forces need for changing the course of American history."

     While I myself wasn't entirely sure of what I was saying, I had at least temporarily reestablished what had been the more or less mutuallyrespected terms of our dialogue. "Now," I resumed with a calmness more consonant with my tutorial role,¹⁹ "what I want to hear from you, Mr. President, is exactly how this SwearingIn Ceremony Loophole hypothesis of yours can be translated into an accomplished fact?"

     "For starters, my fat Jewish friend,²⁰ we are talking about a phenomenon that can only be fully appreciated by those who have been through it, namely: A President of the United States of America! There is simply no way of conveying to you, or anyone else, what goes through a man's mind just before he puts his hand on that Bible and repeats the oath of office administered by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Suffice it to say one is overcome not only by the sense of such a supremely solemn occasion—whereby all one's hopes, dreams and aspirations have at long last been fulfilled—an event signifying that in a matter of only a few minutes one's name will be immortalized—a moment whose magic can't be over—"

     Noticing the stern expression that fretted my professorial brow he suddenly halted in midhyperbole and veered more directly toward the target of his oratorical barrage by saying: "And yet, while all those stupendous thoughts are racing through your mind you can't escape the idea that: By taking said oath you are making a pact with the devil—or worse still; lobotomizing yourself in an act of intellectual submissiveness to a doctrine about which you have the most serious reservations."

     "Which, as I recall, is almost exactly how I described the paradoxical nature of Presidential 'power' in A Diatribe Against The Evils Of Egalitarianism."

     "Yes," Kennedy conceded graciously, "everything you wrote about the oath of office couldn't have been stated more accurately. It's nothing less than a legal straightjacket into which the President is obliged to put himself before he can 'claim' to be the world's most powerful chief executive."

     "A garment that also puts the nation he is supposed to rule in a state of political paralysis!" I reminded him.

     "A nation," he quickly reminded me, "whose dreams of cultural glory were strangled in its crib by a document the only purpose of which was to enshrine America's postrevolutionary status quo in a mausoleum of antiAutocratic paranoia."

     "With the result," I couldn't resist adding, "that while America's antiquated political system has remained more or less mired in the reactionary mindset of its founding fathers, time has been marching relentlessly toward the twentyfirst century—"

     "A century in which only the boldest and most innovative societies will survive and prosper!" stated the President— punctuating what I had just said with a direct quote from my Diatribe.²¹ "And that, of course, is why I keep harping on my 'New Frontier' theme."

     "Which, by the way," I told him, "I must compliment you on for its artfulness in sounding a Reverelike wakeup call to a population of couch potatoes who couldn't care less about emulating those Minutemen who stood their revolutionary ground so fearlessly at Concord and Lexington."

     "Thanks," said Kennedy with another of his wry smiles, "Coming from the man who wrote the textbook on how to coat the bitterest metaphysical pills with semantic sugar that's a compliment I will always cherish!²²   But, if we can return to the discussion of my SwearingIn Ceremony Loophole hypothesis?"

     "Of course! By all means!" I responded, having roused myself from the ruminations detailed in the foregoing footnote.

     "Well, there you are—poised to put your hand on that most venerable of books—with your mouth parched, your palms sweating, your heart pounding and your knees trembling; and you ask yourself: What would happen if you did the unthinkable and refused to take that oath?"

     "Ah!" I gasped at the ringing of this revolutionary alarmbell I myself had set off in speculative terms when writing my Diatribe.

     "And, instead of playing your part according to the same old script, you astounded your audience by simply snatching the reigns of Presidential power in a selfdefining act of autocratic panache that would clearly establish your claim to nothing less than the Kingly fame you were born and bred to attain?"

     "With all due respect, Mr. President," I answered, "despite your popularity—after giving such an 'astounding' performance, in my opinion you would not so ceremoniously be put into a real straightjacket and hauled off to the nearest mental institution!"

     "Of course I would!" laughed the President. "Unless certain precautionary 'measures' had been taken to prevent that from happening."

     "What sort of 'precautionary measures' did you have in mind?"

     "The sort one takes when one is truly serious about staging a coup d'etat! The kind you yourself discussed with such assiduity in A Diatribe Against The Evils Of Egalitarianism! Or could it be, Goldberg," he said sternly, "now that we're dealing in what it really takes to make history you are having second thoughts about your revolutionary convictions?"

     Was Kennedy right? Now that one of my most radical chickens had come home to roost was I proving to be merely another armchair iconoclast? Not that I was being asked to risk my life and/or limbs for the sake of a cause I advocated so ardently. No. If this impetuous Irishman actually decided to take the coup d'etat plunge it would literally be no skin off my Semitic nose. Nevertheless I felt a certain moral obligation to be as honest with him as I could under the circumstances. "As with most good ideas, Mr. President," I explained, "when translating a political theory into action, the devil is always in the details. Perhaps when you've given this matter more thought we can—" I never finished that sentence²³ because Kennedy had taken a thick envelope from his inside coat, opened it and handed me the contents—which consisted of a single handwritten²⁴ document of some 10 or 12 pages entitled, "CASE REX: PRESIDENTIAL EYES ONLY"

     "Go ahead, Goldberg," said the President, "read it."

AND READ IT I MOST CERTAINLY DID! To my astonishment "Case Rex" turned out to be a detailed plan for overthrowing the government of the United States and replacing it with a "semiconstitutional" monarchy. As Kennedy had indicated throughout our conversation this powerplay would unfold during the January '65 second term SwearingIn ceremony —his re‘lection in '64 being assumed but, like every other aspect of Case Rex, by no means taken for granted.  As for my "naive" concerns about a hostile audience reaction to his "astounding performance" Kennedy outlined an array of elaborate measures against such a contingency. They included a brigade of elite security forces²⁵ which would not only surround the crowd of dignitaries and ordinary citizens attending the inauguration with "an impenetrable ring of cold steel" but neutralize the nonparticipating (conspiracywise) elements of Washington's vast security apparatus in a Preemptive Blitzkrieg operation based on Stauffenburg's 27 July 1944 Hitler assassination plot.²⁶ But of all the details spelled out in the Case Rex coup d'etat scenario the most startling was that I—the lowly American ambassador to Moronia—had been cast by JFK to play a major role in its execution!

     Not that I would be one of the players on the Capitol steps during the actual performance. No. My part in Kennedy's '65 inauguration day coup was to be that of a "stagemanager" who remained behind the scenes. Pursuant to Case Rex I would use my annual 30 day leave to return home during the '63 Thanksgiving/Christmas season, when Congress and the Supreme Court were in recess and the remainder of Washington's bureaucracy had been skeletonized by the annual holiday exodus.²⁷ Under a cover story of my "sudden and premature death from natural causes"²⁸ I would surreptitiously move myself into a secret portion of the White House basement Kennedy (and several of his predecessors) had reserved for the most private of his Presidential "affairs." And there I would remain for the entire year leading up to the "inauguration day surprise," helping to mastermind the Kennedy/Johnson reelection and finalize the operational plans for what would turn out to be his "coronation" as King John I on 20 January 1965. Before my return to Washington Kennedy was counting on me to monitor Case Rex as it continued to evolve in order to detect any flaws he might overlook in the heat of the daily battles he was required to fight while running the nation from his oval office. The "ivory tower" isolation I enjoyed in Moronia would provide me with the perfect milieu for focusing my laserlike attention on the business of converting our horseandbuggy government into a streamlined spaceage enlightenedautocracy. To accomplish this we would remain in constant touch via a "Presidential Eyes Only" diplomatic pouch and, for emergency purposes, a special telephonic hot line between Kennedy's oval office desk and mine in the study where we were now sitting above the Moronic embassy.

     "Well?" asked the President expectantly after I finished reading the last page of his coup d'etat prospectus, "What do you think of Case Rex?"

     "Not much I'm afraid," I responded.

     "How can you say that when it's based on the very blueprint you drew in that damned Diatribe of yours?"

     "It isn't the plan I object to, Mr. President; it's the name you've given it which causes my concern!"

     "For Christ's sake, Goldberg—at a time like this I don't appreciate your Semitic sense of humor!" Kennedy shouted, slamming his fist emphatically on the table.

     "That little joke of mine was more than a mere exercise in Jewish oneupsmanship, Mr. President. It was meant to illustrate just how thorny this seditious undertaking of ours will be. You are asking me to go over your plans with the finetoothed comb of my Talmudic faculties, are you not?"

     "Yes!"

     "Well, having just read through this document in the most cursory fashion I've already discovered what, in my considered judgment, could be the first of its fatal flaws. Associating the word "Rex" with a plan intended to make you America's first king is not what I would call the happiest choice of code names. Anyone with even the most elementary knowledge of Latin who got wind of Case Rex would have little difficulty deciphering its monarchistic intentions."

     "Based on my experience in Washington there are less than a handful of people who could make that connection. But assuming someone did have both the education and the brains to link 'rex' with 'king' and discover our little secret—isn't it just as logical to assume such a person would be favorably disposed to our elitist cause?"

     "Perhaps, but—"

     "Besides which, while it might sound anachronistic to you, for me the code name Case Rex adds an element of boldness to a project whose swashbuckling style is no less important than the flawlessness of its details. Call me a romantic fool, Goldberg, but I believe there is an aesthetic imperative involved with the labeling of schemes which are truly historic in character—like the entitling of a great novel or play. Contrary to what Shakespeare says about roses, an undertaking as grandiose as this one is wouldn't smell as sweetly by any other code name. Or, to put it in words of one syllable: A man who would be king must have the balls to put at least one of his sleeve cards on the table!"

     "While in principle I agree with what you say about the artistic considerations involved with an enterprise like that we are contemplating, I must respectfully dissent when it comes to proving our aesthetic 'manhood' by risking its loss over what I regard as a minor technicality."

     "All right," Kennedy said soberly while extending his hand toward me, "you've made your point!" But when I offered to return the Case Rex plan I assumed he was reaching for to signify my intransigence had put an early end to our partnership, he laughed, plucked the document from my grip and gave my empty hand a masculine—but extremely affectionate—shaking that lasted for what seemed like several minutes!

     "Where's your Semitic sense of humor now, Goldberg!" he chided me playfully. "Don't you see? I was only putting your 'I'm not another of your goddam Presidential YesMan' mettle to the test—one which you passed admirably! While when push comes to shove RubiconCrossingwise, of course, there can be no doubt about who has the final word in running this cabalistic show of ours, the last thing I need is another asskissing sycophant whose burglar's guts come suddenly unglued at the first sign of a Presidential temper tantrum! No, you stainlesssteelstomached sonofabitch! Case Rex has got to be a team effort! And what more dynamic duo could there possibly be than combining my Irish charm with your Jewish brains?"

     Having mutually reached this threshold agreement regarding our conspiratorial²⁹ modus operandi, the President and I spent another hour enjoying our cigars and brandies while we speculated on the spectacular nature of the enterprise we were embarking upon. Needless to say, few men are privileged (or sufficiently astute) to appreciate the history they make as they are in the process of making it. And I found it particularly gratifying that President Kennedy—the man with whom my future had just been so fatally linked—was very nearly my equal in that respect!

AS FOR WHAT TRANSPIRED between the 3 of us during what remained of that magical evening I have, dear reader, chosen to remain silent. Although leaving what must seem like such a pregnantly prurient state of affairs to your imagination is a (somewhat) dubious proposition it is also, I think, the lesser of 2 evils—the more perilous one being to stretch your credulity to its breaking point by telling you the "truth" about (what sounds like is leading to) our "manage a trois." And there is, of course, another factor involved with my decision not to reveal the details of how the Kennedys and I spent the wee hours of our night together. As God Himself stated so firmly at the end of Book One—this story isn't supposed to be about me! My function is to humbly shed what light I can on the Klutz Affair in order to chronicle the Redemptive Gospel signified by the Martyrdom of that Massianic Everyman, Jack F. Klutz. It is he—not Mordecai J. Goldberg—who is the real hero of this nonfictionnovelcumevangelicalmanifesto! And so it is that we now resume our tale on the following day when, among other things, I first laid my eyes on that Moronic babe who would one day lead the whole of humanity

Book Two Chapter 3 Part 1   Return to Index

Footnotes

12 As he expatiated on the theories I had propounded in my Diatribe I began to recollect them with a renewed appreciation for just how brilliant they really were when I first conceived them. For some reason (modesty?) my photographic memory occasionally failed me when it came to recalling some of my own scholarly accomplishments. It is also quite remarkable, now that I think about it, how prophetic the antiEgalitarian ideas I expressed in that essay have proven themselves to be in the unfolding of the Klutz Affair and my writing of Morons Awake!.

13 Before burning all his "impeachment" bridges JFK was concerned that, in the event of a "fiasco," he could defend his "treasonous" acts on the "high ground" of a patriotism which, no matter how misguided—like John Brown's abolitionist raid on the arsenal at Harper's Ferry—was fundamentally well intentioned.

14 She insisted I call her "Jackie"—-which I did only after she agreed to call me ,"Mordecai."

15 Which, in 1963, was already being widely described in "dynastic" terms.

16 Actually a scrap of parchment.

17 Like me, and despite his own (IrishAmerican) experience of having been victimized by AngloSaxon Protestant persecution, JFK was an unreconstructed Anglophile who wistfully regretted the separation of the American colonies from their British parents. With all of his warts George III was nowhere near the "tyrannical despot" we have been brainwashed into believing he was by the rewriting of our colonial history to justify a "revolution" that was in fact (as the British correctly describe it) an "insurrectionary temper tantrum." One has only to ponder what the world would be like today if America had remained in the British Empire—an empire we would most certainly have come to rule at least jointly with Westminster; and one upon which the sun would never have been allowed to set, as it so sadly did in 1941. Having orphaned ourselves in 1776 we gained the Faustian prize of unfettered freedom—but at the considerable cost of losing our cultural souls. By severing our Old World ties we not only rid ourselves of George III but of Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Milton (not to mention Homer, Aristotle, Plato, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Da Vinci, Monteverdi, Goethe, Moliere, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, etc.) in a bargain that made Jack's beanstalk deal look like Seward's purchase of Alaska for 2¢ an acre! History teaches us that when the masses revolt they always throw the baby out with the bathwater. Hence the sacking of Rome by the Vandals, the Reign of French Terror and the pillaging of St. Petersburg by the Bolsheviks. In our case, however, this postcolonial hostility toward all things remotely British, European or "aristocratic" has lingered on to this day as an antiIntellectualism pervading our American psyche—with cultural consequences no less masochistic that those the Morons inflict upon themselves.

18 Which, to reflect my frustration, is why I entitled it as a "Diatribe" rather than a "Manifesto" or "Revolutionary Declaration."

19 I should point out here that JFK and I were, give or take a few months, the same age. Nevertheless, because of his bornboyishness and my congenital mental superiority the chemistry between us was, for the most part, that of an elder statesman to a practicing politician—or a fountain of wisdom to a thirsty acolyte.

20 This remark was delivered with a typically Kennedyesque wink and smile—and wasn't construed by me as either a personal or ethnic slur. Quite the contrary: The rapport between us continued to wax as our conversation and the evening wore on, as you will soon discover.

21 As published in The International Digest of Advanced Political Thinking, June 1958, p.112.

22 No doubt he was referring to my Dictionary of Deceit—which isn't really a book but a somewhat satirical essay I wrote on the propaganda theories of the late Dr. Josef Goebbels. The thrust of which was, whether we like it or not, the Nazi Propaganda Minister did break new ground in the field of human psychology, to wit: The larger the lie the more believable it is to the average man or woman. The applicability of this discovery is, like many other aspects of Nazism, not limited simply to the political sphere. The postWWII transformation of America's once mildly disingenuous advertising business into a worldbeating powerhouse, megamendacitywise, was one that would make Goebbels himself blush? But Madison Avenue is by no means alone in its exploitation of the Big Lie technique. While the deceits perpetrated by a novelist are seldom of such consequence they can be described as "an author's deliberate attempt to totalitarianize his readers"—this is due more to the lack of respect for literature in general than to a writer's lack of totalitarian animus. The real question, of course, is whether the kind of "white lies" I've been telling throughout this book have any serious moral consequences; or are only the "relatively harmless" means by which an "artistic" end is achieved? The easy answer to this question is: Since novels are by definition fictitious they are exempted from the otherwise unbreakable rule that an end can never justify the means by which it is achieved. But if, as some— including myself and Shakespeare—believe, we are all actors on a stage (or characters in a novel) doesn't life itself acquire a fictitious nature? And if that is the case, before Morons Awake! is dismissed as being just another "harmless literary fraud" the reader should ask herself whether my efforts to raise her cultural IQ haven't been at least partially successful?

23 Which was probably fortuitous because, frankly, I had no idea how I was going to end it.

24 So supersensitive was the text JFK had written out with his own hand he didn't even trust his personal secretary to transcribe it—a woman whose knowledge of his Presidential (and/or personal) secrets (and/or peccadilloes) was previously unlimited.

25 A "Palace Guard" comprised of the most blindly obedient people JFK would personally select from the Secret Service, CIA, FBI, Cuban Exiles and regular armed forces of the United States.

26 Although the most essential element of this plot failed—Hitler's assassination—it remains as a brilliant example of Prussian efficiency in stagemanaging what could have been a putsch of unprecedented proportions. JFK's appreciation of this esoteric fact was—as the Morons say—"no small feather in his cap."

27 Once again Kennedy was using the lessons he learned from his reading of history. In this case it was Japan's decision to bomb Pearl Harbor on Sunday morning; and George Washington's to ambush the Hessians at Trenton while they were celebrating Christmas.

28 A ruse Kennedy thought would be easily credibilized because of the reputation I had for  overindulging my love for "wine, women and song."

29 In addition to JFK's rather reckless choice of "Rex" as a code name he insisted all our future supersecret correspondence be signed M and K—the M standing for Merlin/Machiavelli while the K represented King/Kennedy—both of which were hardly the stuff from which conspiratorial ciphers are usually made. [Of course the same criticism can be (and was by Vicky Truelove) made concerning my choice of Art Long as an alias.]

Glossary
putsch noun A sudden attempt by a group to overthrow a government. [German, from German dialectal, from Middle High German, thrust, of imitative origin.] - putschist noun