The Peculiar Truth about the Failed Plot to Kill JFK

• December 1960: President-elect John F. Kennedy was just weeks away from being sworn in as the 35th President of the United States.

• At that time, three full years before his assassination, an unrelated murder attempt was underway. If the would-be killer had achieved his goal, which he nearly did, JFK would never have reached the White House.

• Belmont, New Hampshire is a sleepy town twenty miles north of Concord and near the middle of the state. The population in the year 1960 was fewer than 2,000 residents.

• Among them was Richard Pavlick. Nearly everyone in town knew the retired postal worker. The man was nuts.

• Local police were all too familiar with him. They had detained him a few times. Once he even drew a weapon.

• Pavlick hated politicians. He openly hated all Roman Catholics. Kennedy was both. And although JFK was a son of New England like him, Pavlick couldn’t stand it that the man had been voted into office.

• Not long Election Day, Pavlick mysteriously disappeared. He gave away his house to charity, climbed into his 1950 Buick, and left town. No one knew where he went or why. Yet for some reason Pavlick sent recurring letters to the Belmont Post Office while he was away.

• A postal worker named Thomas Murphy read the letters. What he found deeply disturbed him. Pavlick wrote that something big was about to occur, although he never specified what that might be. Murphy showed the letters to his bosses.

• They then discovered a pattern. Every postmark on each envelope came from a location where President-elect Kennedy had been, including from Hyannis Port, Massachusetts where the Kennedy family lived. Was Richard Pavlick, a belligerent old man from the tiny town of Belmont, New Hampshire stalking the next President of the United States?

• Authorities were contacted, and word was passed on to the Secret Service.

• They in turn made a shocking discovery. Pavlick had bought ten sticks of dynamite from a New Hampshire hardware store.

• To make matters worse, the Secret Service didn’t know where Richard Pavlick was. A manhunt commenced.

• By the time the information about the explosives had been unearthed, however, it was already too late.

• The Kennedy family had a winter residence in West Palm Beach, Florida. On Sunday morning December 11, 1960, the President-elect, his wife, and his children were inside. Richard Pavlick was already lying in wait outside the house with a carful of dynamite.

• The plan was simple. When Kennedy drove off to Catholic mass, Pavlick would hit the accelerator and smash his Buick into JFK’s vehicle. The resulting crash would detonate the explosives, which the Secret Service later described as an amount that could “level a small mountain.” Pavlick would die but so would Kennedy.

• Then something unexpected happened that changed Pavlick’s mind. It wasn’t the sudden appearance of law enforcement officers arriving in the nick of time. It was something the old man hadn’t planned on.

• Jackie Kennedy and their kids got into the car and went to mass, too. Pavlick could see himself murdering a politician but not an innocent woman and her babies. So he aborted the plan.

• But he stuck around for three more days in case he might catch Kennedy driving alone. Nobody suspected a thing. Until Kennedy went to church again.

• On that occasion, Pavlick entered the church and stared at Kennedy. Secret Service Agent Gerald Blaine saw the strange old man and escorted him out. When Pavlick got into his Buick, Blaine gave the license number to local police and told them to keep an eye on him.

• Police then did a random traffic stop and found the dynamite in Pavlick’s car. He was taken into custody, explained every detail of his plan, and showed no remorse.

• Little was written about the murder attempt. The Secret Service kept it quiet.

• Pavlick was deemed too mentally unsound to stand trial. Instead, he was sent to a state mental hospital where he remained until after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.

• Richard Pavlick lived to age 88 and died in 1975.

• If not for a sudden pang of morality, a deranged old man would have fulfilled his bomb plot and the world might never have come to know John F. Kennedy.