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JFK: Fifty years after
I looked and nobody mentioned it yesterday: it was the 50th anniversary of the assasination of Jonh F. Kennedy. Since FRWL was one of his favorite novels and it did play some role in the popularity of the film franchise, I thought it would be a relevant topic. Not sure it should be in News or General discussions, but here it is.
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http://www.mi6community.com/index.php?p=/discussion/3862/rest-in-peace-show-your-respects-to-those-who-have-passed-away./p16
However, I think this topic is entitled to its own thread. If you can agree with this, I'd like to keep it open.
Knowing how poorly we usually score in terms of clean political debate without - repeat: WITHOUT - trouble, I will commit myself to checking it out regularly. ;-)
Thank you, both Willy and @Ludovico, for these contributions.
Incidentally, I have plugged in JFK yesterday... Amazing movie!
I don't see the harm in it myself. @Ludovico is a fine member, this is not troll activity, and I won't see the 100th or even 75th anniversary (as with some others) and the half century anniversary seems good enough. I'm not for wild conspiracy theories, I have my own simplistic ideas of what occured, but nothing too extravagant. This is a big moment in time, as it was 50 years ago, and I can't see nothing wrong in a little debate on this issue. @Dragonpol beat me to a response (in the above) on this page before I could respond but it's a very significant anniversary and some do have an interest in the subject matter. It's the 50 year anniversary after all, some have been waiting years for this and now the time is upon us, if people want to talk a little, then it seems acceptable..
Well said. I too respect my brother @Ludovico (if I may call you brother, sir) and his idea to create this thread. We're interested in the same sorts of things it seems to me and I'm all for this thread as JFK was no ordinary death or person in life. I think this thread should be in memory of the late President. I mean, this was the man who saved the world from a Nuclear Holocaust during the Cuban Miassile Crisis of October 1962 by not listening to his advisers. I think that he at least deserves some credit and respect and this is the fiftieth anniversary, after all.
I wouldn't have started one today had someone thought to start one yesterday, which I thought someone would.
@Dragonpol-Yes, you can call me brother.
Thank you, brother @Ludovico!
This month marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, perhaps the most famous James Bond fan of all. Let's take some time to look back on the ties between Ian Fleming and Kennedy.
The two met when Kennedy was running for President in 1960. The story is best told in John Pearson’s The Life of Ian Fleming (pages 321-23):
It was CIA dinner guest John Bross who told Dulles about those ideas. Fleming had no inkling that the CIA was devising similar schemes of its own and had begun planning for an invasion of Cuba that very month. Those schemes would lead to the Bay of Pigs disaster. Perhaps taking a direct page from Fleming, the CIA later attempted to put powder in Castro’s shoes to make his beard fall out. Then it tried killing him with shellfish toxin, poisoned cigars, and poisoned wetsuits. It even tried blowing him up with an explosives-filled conch shell delivered via midget submarine. But the fundamental difference between the CIA and Fleming was that the CIA was genuinely serious. Fleming was hardly that committed, and had even made Bond express sympathy for Cuban rebels in “The Quantum of Solace.”
As a matter of fact, Fleming went on to directly criticize American policy toward Cuba. In Chapter 12 of The Man with the Golden Gun, Scaramanga says “As for Mister C, he seems to be going along all right. [Hurricane] Flora was a body-blow but, largely thanks to the Americans leaning on Cuba the way they do, he’s kept the country together. If the Americans once let up on their propaganda and needling and so forth, perhaps even make a friendly gesture or two, all the steam’ll go out of the little man.” This is a pointed rebuke of the schemes of the CIA and American government. As Fleming would later tell Playboy, “many politicians seem to like my books, I think perhaps because politicians like solutions, with everything properly tied up at the end. Politicians always hope for neat solutions, you know, but so rarely can they find them.”
Fleming had no idea how momentous his meeting with Kennedy would become. As his biographer explained:
“From that moment the American boom really began" concludes Pearson. Andrew Lycett adds “after the Life magazine article, Signet [which acquired paperback rights in 1957] weighed in with a major advertising campaign, and by the end of the year Ian had become the biggest-selling thriller writer in the United States.” In a 1962 letter (http://www.hmss.com/articles/lillylib.html) to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, Fleming wrote “I am delighted to take this opportunity to thank Kennedys everywhere for the electric effect their commendation has had on my sales in America.’”
Fleming even thanked Kennedy in the Bond novels. In Chapter 10 of The Spy Who Loved Me, James Bond and Vivienne Michel have the following conversation:
Like many people around the world, Fleming partook of the idealism that surrounded Kennedy’s presidency. He even made Bond a Kennedy fan, albeit a covert one. The Spy Who Loved Me was written in early 1961, around the time that the Life article came out, and one suspects that Fleming wrote this shout-out after reading Kennedy’s endorsement.
The President reappears in You Only Live Twice when the Soviets use an atom bomb test to attempt wrecking the Anglo-American alliance and stripping Britain of its nuclear weapons, since they assume America will not "risk a nuclear war involving her territory for the sake of a more or less valueless ally."
We learn the scheme was foiled because "President Kennedy had come out with the strongest speech of his career, and had committed total reprisals from the United States in the event of single nuclear device being exploded by the Soviet Union in any country in the world outside Soviet territory" (ch.6).
Already famous for his oratory, Kennedy is here enlisted by Fleming to deliver his "strongest" speech--and for the sake of Britain! The President becomes Britain's champion and savior. Furthermore, whereas Kennedy was merely mentioned in TSWLM, here he performs a fictional act of great importance, becoming a genuine part of Bond's world.
Fleming evidently thought the world of Kennedy. In turn, Henry Brandon told Fleming that “the entire Kennedy family is crazy about James Bond” (Lycett, 383). In the White House Kennedy would even sometimes ask Brandon for news of Fleming. “Kennedy,” said Brandon, “was fascinated by the line dividing Ian’s real life from the fantasy life that went into his books. He often asked me how such an intelligent, mature, urbane sort of man could have such an element of odd imagining in his make-up.” [Pearson, 323]
When the film of Dr. No was released shortly before the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy arranged a screening at the White House (it would fascinating to hear what he thought of the movie and Sean Connery). And it is said that From Russia With Love was the last film Kennedy watched before leaving for Dallas. The night before his assassination, both Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald were said to be reading Bond novels. There might be some truth to that: the FBI’s files on Oswald reveal that two Bond novels – Live and Let Die and The Spy Who Loved Me – were among Oswald’s possessions. The page from the FBI’s file can be downloaded at http://www.spyculture.com/the-lee-harvey-oswald-ian-fleming-connection/.
For Fleming the news of Kennedy’s death came three days into the Thunderball court case. It must have been a great blow for him, arriving on top of an already stressful ordeal. In Fleming's posthumously published Playboy interview (http://debrief.commanderbond.net/topic/8164-ian-fleming-interviews/#entry833263) he attempted to describe Bond’s appeal to Kennedy: “I think perhaps that Bond's sort of patriotic derring-do was in keeping with the President's own concept of endurance and courage and grace under pressure.”
Since his first meeting with the Kennedys, Fleming had maintained contact with the family, sending them inscribed copies of his books. In the spring of 1964 Bobby Kennedy poignantly thanked Fleming for a signed copy of You Only Live Twice--on a black-edged card he wrote “I wish someone else could read it also.” [Pearson, page 323.]
Fleming went on to pay tribute to the fallen president in The Man With the Golden Gun, begun less than three months after Kennedy’s death. From chapter 7:
It’s a fittingly hedonistic tribute. And, as Fleming words it, a tribute from one writer to another.
John F. Kennedy was the closest any American President came to being James Bond: a cool, collected, hard-drinking glamorous playboy. Sophisticated, witty, handsome, and dashing, Kennedy was a dream-world President, a Chief Executive Bond. But like all dreams, Kennedy was not real. Far less sophisticated than his image, his womanizing was far more sordid than Bond’s. And though he emulated Bond, the results were fiascos like the Bay of Pigs. His vigor and dynamism (an illusion produced by truckloads of prescription drugs) disguised the fact that his Presidency was a legislative disappointment. Yet Kennedy’s candid wit and glamor persist. And he displayed truly Bondian qualities where they counted most, in the Cuban missile crisis. As the lone voice of sanity among his advisers, he showed the “endurance and courage and grace under pressure” that Fleming praised.
And without Kennedy, what would have happened to Bond? Fleming would not have become a bestseller in the US without Kennedy’s selection of From Russia With Love. That was instrumental in creating a receptive large audience for the first Bond film, Dr. No. Without that, the movie might have tanked and the Bond series would have been stillborn. Without the national interest created by Kennedy, United Artists might not have bankrolled Bond in the first place. It was American interest, backed by American money, that made the Bond films possible. Without Kennedy that interest might not have been enough.
so John F. Kennedy was not only the most famous Bond fan of all time—he may have been the most influential as well.
And yet he wouldn't have been a fan of the Bond books if it hadn't been for the secret heroine of our story, Marion “Oatsie” Leiter. She had been an old friend of the Kennedys since her youth in South Carolina. Five years before Fleming met JFK, she introduced Kennedy to Bond by giving him a copy of Casino Royale to read while he recovered from back pain in Newport, Rhode Island. (Lycett, page 367.)
Oatsie and her husband Thomas Leiter got to know Ian Fleming in Jamaica in the early 50s, after befriended Ivar Bryce in Washington during the war), and he paid tribute to the couple by giving Felix Leiter their surname.
According to an interview (http://blog.oup.com/2006/12/colonel_oates_t/#sthash.EIwpj1Rz.dpuf) with her, “Fleming had promised Oatsie that he would name a character in one of his thrillers after her, but he died in 1964 before he could make it happen.”
That interview was from 2006, when Mrs. Leiter had turned 87. If this remarkable woman is still alive, all of us owe her a debt. Without her, Fleming would not have met JFK, who might not have listed From Russia With Love without having met Bond's creator. So perhaps Oatsie Leiter is the most influential Bond fan of them all. In any case, she was certainly a true friend of Ian Fleming.
I'd be happy to partake of the idealism involved in a Fleming presidency as well, but I don't think he's eligible for the office. ;)
Whatever was said before, this whole Kennedy furore would appear simple enough to most (to piece together). I remember reading some wild and bizarre ideas from, let's call them, "frenzied conspiracy theorists" , on this issue, (and) on these pages
One final time, and keeping things simplistic, RIP to our one time president, lost in such tragic circumstances
Thanks for catching that howler! Error now fixed. A Fleming Presidency would certainly be interesting, but as you noted, it's not a realistic prospect...
Kind of like George Clooney or the young Connery. These guys move real well and look great in suits.