Hi readers. Thanks for coming by for a read. Not all of this is humor.
Must have been November, 1962, election day in Massachusetts though we didn’t know it. Three young GIs in uniform, Tony Bozza, Julio Ditata and I were off work. We lived in a brownstone house converted to apartments on Beacon Street, so we wandered over to an ice-cream joint on Boylston Street across from Boston Plaza.
As we finished off our ice cream we saw police cordoning off Boylston Street, people drifting in behind them. Something was happening so we rushed out for a front-line position. Asked one of the cops what was going on.
King/President Kennedy was in town. Came to vote for his brother for the Senate. Maybe State Senate. I can’t recall for certain. JFK was going to stay at the Plaza Hotel across the street. “Salute when he drives by!” He scowled at our uniforms. [In those days the military was appropriately recognized as shit. Nobody saying, “OOOOO thank you for your service”.]
Eventually along came the limo, JFK sitting up on the back the way you’ve seen his picture in Dallas a year later. He was patting his cheeks red with the cold. Barbie, Jackie, whatever, was sitting down closest us gazing vacantly at the admirers lining the street, bored. No further than from here to the door from us.
After the motorcade passed and circled over to the Plaza Hotel across the Plaza the cluster of admirers thinned and another incident happened I’ll tell you about another time. But we GIs all looked at one another shaking our heads.
Julio: Man I’d like to screw her!
Tony: Fat chance of that! She wouldn’t screw anyone with less than a million dollars.
Me: Felt good looking at her, though. Pretty woman.
A year later I was in Korea when Kennedy went to Dallas and LBJ arranged to have him offed. The Stars and Stripes newspaper was full of pictures of LBJ, Barbie-Jackie, Kennedy in the back of that limo. I thought a lot about that day in Boston.
LBJ stayed out of the backs of open limousines, but more importantly, nobody would have wanted to screw Lady Byrd Johnson.
Fact is, the historical precedent has worked fairly well. If a King dies, his Queen takes over things until other kinfolk can fight it out and settle things. And if Barbie-Jackie Kennedy had been vice president and taken over the White House things would have been a lot more better for the US.
LBJ would never have been VP never been prez because nobody would have wanted to risk having Lady Byrd for prez. The Gulf of Tonkin Incident and the Vietnam War would have never happened.
Hell, when Ma Ferguson took over as Governor of Texas after her husband died she pardoned half the people serving time in Texas penal institutions. Hell of a lot better Guv than her hubby.
And one of the US Prezes, maybe Taft, became incapacitated in office, his wife took over his duties for the remainder of his term. Didn’t feel obliged to get us into a single damned war.
I’m sitting here trying to think of some Vice President we wouldn’t have been better off replacing with the wife of the croaked prez. Elleanor Roosevelt surely wouldn’t have been a bad’un compared to Harry Truman. And hell, Mary Todd Lincoln was conducting seances in the White House. That would certainly have been better than Johnston, who got himself impeached.
I haven’t looked at the others, but I’m betting the same would be true, their wives better than their legal VP replacements.
But nowadays they’d need to be good looking, as well as rich girlygirls graduated from Vassar. Barbie’s good compared to Ken, but if Barbie and Ken go to the White House again we’ll need to know how she looks in a bikini.
Old Jules
So Far From Heaven 