The (hilarious) thread about Jim Morrison being alive revived an old memory: when I was a kid, there was a bizarre story going around…about 5-6 years after the Kennedy assassination: It goes like this:
Kennedy was shot and gravely wounded (half his brain was blown away). However, he survived…as a vegetable. He was sent to a private nursing home in the midwest, where he lived (in a vegetative state) till the 1990’s. All visits by his family were hidden-Jackie saw and visited him years afterwards-but no records of these were kept.
Kennedy succumbed and was cremated, his ashes were disposed of in the ocean.
I haven’t seen anything on this totally bizarre story-anybody know about it?
Kennedy did survive. They took out part of his brain and dyed him black. He was living in a nursing home in the South, and another resident there was Elvis. Elvis had gotten tired of performing, so he found a guy who was a really good Elvis impersonator and swapped places with him, with the proviso that he could swap back any time. Unfortunately, the impersonator died and the documentation the real Elvis had proving his identity was destroyed in a BBQ accident.
Jim Morrison hosted that barbeque, right? That’s what my dad always told me…
I know that it’s stupid. I’m not sure if that’s helpful, though.
Nonesense. That was Sam Axe working undercover when he was in the FBI.
Nick DiChario made his reputation with a story titled “The Winterberry,” published in Alternate Kennedys, ed. by Mike Resnick in 1992. It’s a moving portrait of Kennedy in exactly this situation.
However, it worked because everybody knew the legend behind it.
Back in the old days, the *National Enquirer *was more like the Weekly World News is today, with lots of blood and fantasy instead of celebrity news. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if they ran sensational and utterly unprovable stories like this regularly.
For that matter, although the WWN almost certainly didn’t start the rumor, they did their share of JFK survived stories. I remember one featuring a reunion of Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe (whose death of course was also faked).
WWN kept the JFK-is-alive story on its front page for years. It was exactly the story in the OP: he was alive, but in a vegetative state. Eventually, they reported his death.
Here’s what seems to be a story about it. Here’s an early article leading up to the actual news story.
Oddly, the original story, from the issue of August 21, 1990, is not in Google’s archive of the WWN. Hmmn.
I hear Kennedy had access to the same Argentine doctors that kept Hitler alive to the ripe old age of a 110.
Confusion with Rosemary Kennedy?
The version I heard had Kennedy living out his vegetative days on a remote island off the coast of Greece. The island was owned by…wait for it…Aristotle Onassis. This was the price he had to pay to get Jacky to marry him.
Other guests at the island included James Dean and, I assume, later, Elvis and Jim Morrison.
The rumors about Amelia Earhart and Judge Crater are absurd, of course.
I remember seeing those stories on the front page of the National Enquirer during the Sixties while waiting in the grocery store checkout line. They had the photos to prove it and everything. This was before PhotoShop so they must have been real pics.
Bobby got shafted. Nobody ever gave him a secret vegetable life.
Thanks for the link! Kennedy must have been reasonably sentient-after all, he was visited by Jimmuh Cahtuh, Hillary Clinton, and many others.
I’m waiting for the employees of this institution to write their memoirs…“I gave spoange baths to JFK…”
sending JFK to the same institution would provide perfect cover for members of the family to visit without suspicion.
Interesting-I once read that poor Rosemary was almost never visited by the family…and she died alone after years of neglect.
Apparently, she had a low-normal/borderland retarded mental capacity, but her father had her lobotomized-which by todays protocols seems horribly cruel.
An actual lobotomy shouldn’t affect intelligence much, unless it’s botched. It has the effect of making people more “docile.” There is speculation that she wasn’t all there before the surgery. This, coupled with neglect in a mental hospital can make anyone’s mind a bit… off.
I have a book that debunks rumors called Rumor! that has this JFK alive as vegetable myth on page 103-104.
The book is copywrited 1984.
Oddly enough this isn’t the first “the government keeps human vegetables in secret facilities” conspiracy theory floating around. I remember reading in a travel book that an American army base in Greenland was long rumored to keep horribly disfigured soldiers away from their families. This post mentions these rumors. I doubt it directly influenced the Kennedy story but at least similar things were being rumored.
And then they teamed up and fought a re-animated Egyptian mummy!
I remember that this (or something like it) was a plot point in the Daredevil comics, starting in issue 129, cover dated January 1976 (so it would have been on the stands, when? October 1975?).
Of course, it turns out they aren’t really alive, it’s all part of an elaborate scheme using what at the time would have been impossible super-science, but now sounds like perfectly plausible CGI.