• NEWS: An old New York Times reporter reveals—for the first time!—that he had a hot tip on the Watergate story before the Washington Post, but then he quit the paper and nobody ever pursued it. Hey guys: 'THE BIGGEST LOSER—OF JOURNALISM.' That's called "giving it a timely hook." Try it. Have the old guy go to Subway or something.
• NEWS: A former White House intern sells a book about her "sexual" affair with JFK 40 years ago, when he was alive and president. Neither of the people involved are youthful and attractive enough (in a "sexual" sense) for the magazine covers any more. Unfortunate.
• NEWS: Some dude has just now started a web site selling a previously unreleased video of JFK Jr.'s 1996 wedding to Carolyn Bessette. When might this have garnered significant public interest? Long, long ago.

Luckily our own Richard Blakeley was on hand to put together a collage. And there they all are, enjoying a sunny December pool party. Clockwise from left we have:

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Ronald Wilson Reagan (with Nancy)

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (at Warm Springs perhaps?)

Gerald Rudolph Ford

William Jefferson Clinton (with some lady)

Barack Hussein Obama

Lyndon Baines Johnson

Kennedy was headed to meet the press at the end of the motorcade, so most of the reporters weren't traveling — they were patiently waiting for the president to arrive.

Victor Hugo King's photograph of the motorcade taking off.

Justice Department spokesman Edwin Guthman was with RFK on the fateful day. He described RFK's state of mind, quoting him as saying, "There's so much bitterness, I thought they would get one of us, but Jack, after all he'd been through, never worried about it."

Mary Moorman's photograph was taken right after the first shot. Kennedy's left fist is raised towards his throat, and Texas Governor John Connelly has also been shot.

AP photographer Ike Altgens took a picture of President Kennedy's limousine as it proceded down Elm Street in Dealey Plaza. You can see Kennedy reaching for his throat if you look closely enough.

We can't forget the Zapruder film, later modified for widescreen viewing:

Here's a look at where the Warren Commission determined the bullets fired by assassin Lee Harvey Oswald came from. The debate over whether or not there was another shooter involved still isn't completely settled.

This is the view from the depository, where Oswald fired from. "I told the FBI what I had heard [two shots from behind the grassy knoll fence]," said Ken O'Donnell, "but they said it couldn't have happened that way and that I must have been imagining things. So I testified the way they wanted me to. I just didn't want to stir up any more pain and trouble for the family."

This is a drawing from the autopsy photo. Here's a more graphic photo of the autopsy. Later, the autopsy process was determined to be riddled with errors. Of course, hindsight is 20/20, and no one could have known how much controversy the event would spawn.

"Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind," Kennedy had told the UN two years earlier.

After he was sworn in, President Johnson addressed the nation: "No words are sad enough to express our sense of loss. No words are strong enough to express our determination to continue the forward thrust of America that he began."

He later accepted the lengthy findings of the Warren Commission.

"I wonder how it is with you, Harold? If I don't have a woman for three days, I get terrible headaches." - JFK to Harold Macmillan in Bermuda, 1961.

Dwindling Club of Witnesses [Dallas Morning News]

Publisher Abrams calls the book "a scrapbook of Vidal’s considerable library of mementos, documents, photos, and records" that will take readers through "six decades of American social history," and has scheduled it for release in November of 2009. Vidal's already published two memoirs on his favorite subject, but with the wealth of photos out there, we don't have to wait that long for the illustrated version.

Vidal was born in 1925 at West Point, where he was christened by the headmaster of St. Albans. After three weeks, he looked pretty much like this.

What a beautiful baby boy! He came from eminent parentage: his mother would marry the man destined to be Jackie Kennedy's stepfather, and often recalled the many times she hooked up with Clark Gable. The great love of his father's life was Amelia Earhart. Dad's on the left.

Vidal was raised in D.C., where he attended St. Alban's. He fell in love with a blond guy named Jimmie Trimble, who would later die at Iwo Jima. He walked the halls of the senate with his blind grandfather, T.P. Gore. After graduating from Exeter, he joined the Army and served in the Aleutian Islands during the Second World War. The Army didn't really suit him, as he found pleasure in other things. In his 20s he published The City and the Pillar, which enticed the NYT to not review his next five books because of the explicit homosexuality therein

In 1959, Vidal made his Hollywood debut by almost nabbing a partial screenwriting credit for Ben-Hur, inserting a gay subtext for Charlton Heston. He also appeared in Fellini's Roma. Though he's gay, Vidal was briefly engaged to Joanne Woodward, and had a relationship with Anais Nin. In 1950, he settled down with his lifelong companion, Howard Austen. "Our relationship was what it was. A sexual relationship was the last thing I wanted. When I was 17 or 18 it was different; I used to become besotted with people. But by then I felt past all that," Vidal said. The two never had sex.

Vidal's feuds were legendary. He'd fight with friends, enemies, partners — whoever earned his ire. When ABC hired both Vidal and conservative luminary William F. Buckley to comment on the 1968 election, a memorable fight ensued. After Buckley died, the ever gracious Vidal said, "I thought hell is bound to be a livelier place, as he joins forever those whom he served in life, applauding their prejudices and fanning their hatred." Nice.

He also had a falling out with Truman Capote, who he once called "a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices." Here's Capote, Tennessee Williams, and Gore together.

Vidal was never shy about squeezing his way into a photograph.

Tennessee and Gore were friends, though, for a time, as this picture of them in Rome in 1948 attests. He called the playwright "The Glorious Bird."

The photo's from a visit Williams and Vidal made to the Kennedys before they became the First Couple, which he later described in the New York Review of Books:

While Jackie flitted about, taking Polaroid shots of us, the Bird banged away at the target. ... At one point, while Jack was shooting, the Bird muttered in my ear, 'Get that ass!' I said, 'Bird, you can't cruise our next president.' The bird chuckled ominously: 'They'll never elect those two. They are much too attractive for the American people.' Later, I told Jack that the Bird had commented favorably on his ass. He beamed. 'Now, that's very exciting,' he said."

After publishing a series of critically acclaimed books, most of them concerned with American history, Vidal turned his attention to politics. He ran against Jerry Brown in the Democratic Party and finished second. Here he is during the campaign.

Despite pondering a second Senate run in the early 80s, as he got older Vidal preferred to fade from public eye, as he recalled in this amazing 1995 Andrew Solomon profile. He did make an appearance on The Simpsons with Michael Chabon, Jonathan Franzen, and Tom Wolfe.

Vidal's now confined to a wheelchair because of a fall he took in an accident. Though he's still respected at the age of 83, he'll end up being more well known for his life than his literary talent. We leave you with this sterling image.

As Vidal himself put it: ''I'm not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don't. Move on and move out.''

There was a sense that John F. Kennedy belonged to all of us, and in his inaugural call for service, he echoed the inclusion of everyone into that political moment. But JFK wasn't just about politics. His election — from its beginnings in the famous televised debate with Richard Nixon — was about creating a cultural image that Americans could comfortably desire.

I recently wrote about the aspirational elements of Mad Men, and that was certainly true of America's love for the Kennedys — their glamourous Hyannisport compound, Jackie O's consummate sense of fashion, the handsome executive from the Irish-Catholic background. As with the Obamas, many voters wanted to be the Kennedys.

That's a difficult place to govern from. Love affairs are fickle, and this very issue was on the Kennedy campaign's mind as he swept into office. Biographer James Burns chronicled JFK's ascendancy into office in The New Republic, in a time in which Kennedy's approval rating was 72 percent:

"The Kennedy buildup goes on. The adjectives tumble over one another. He is not only the handsomest, the best dressed, the most articulate, and graceful as a gazelle. H is omniscient, he swallows and digests whole books in minutes; he confounds experts with his superior knowledge of their field. He is omnipotent...the buildup will not last. The public can be cruel, and so can the press."

Burns thought the press of that time could be cruel. Could he have imagined it today?

As Frank Rich wrote earlier this year, JFK needed the poetry, he needed his image as a substitute for hard policy. Obama's the more substantial thinker, but whatever the distance between our cultural conception of Barack and reality, the key will be managing the political expectations of a popular cultural celebrity.

The cultural and the political are closer together today than they were in Kennedy's time. Whether Barack and Michelle should sail to their inauguration in style the way another White House couple did many years before won't mean much. It's what they do when they get there.

JFK and Jackie O. Were Chic At All Times [Gawker]

Not to bring up Mad Men again, but tonight's finale takes place during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and SNL did have Jon Hamm as JFK. That's all the justification we need to revel in these snapshots:

Every novice history buff has to love glitzy, overfunded president museums. Hopefully time will encourage these institutions to make more of their archives digitally accessible to the general public.

Still Photographs To Throw All Over Your Bed And Jump In [JFK Presidential Library]

For the past two seasons, Jon Hamm's character has been on a journey to find himself, drinking profusely and cheating on his wife to soothe his aching psyche and add to his bone list. With a massive lack of onscreen dialogue in this season's L.A. Story arc, Don Draper has said less and done more than any character on TV, as SNL so aptly reminded us:

While we remain fascinated by every single aspect of Don's life, audiences haven't been as kind to the silent giant of Sterling Cooper. Despite being the best show on television, Mad Men's ratings haven't appreciably improved: it attracts about 1.5 million viewers weekly compared to CSI's 19 million plus audience. Does Matthew Weiner's masterpiece have to be like The Wire where the larger viewing public doesn't really get it until the show is in its last throes?

The preview video for tonight's finale of Mad Men joins a discussion between the junior copywriters of Sterling Cooper about what exactly their sexaholic mastermind boss is doing in Los Angeles. One speculates he's landing a big fish, another says he's done this before. Let's just be sure to wrap it up one way or another, Weiner.

Priscilla Johnson McMillan, who knew both Kennedy and Oswald, spent 13 years working on "Marina and Lee," a book that sought to be the definitive word on the assassin. It was published in 1977. Gerald Posner's years-in-the-making 624-page "Case Closed," which sought to be the last word on the case, was published in 1994. Vincent Bugliosi spent 20 years on "Reclaiming History," his 1,648-page tome that sought to settle everything, once and for all.

That was last year.

And still, here sits Max Holland, working on a book that he says will go a good 600 pages. He has to have a draft to the publisher by October. There is still, after 12 years, no publication date.

Twelve years he's been working. And he's not just some nut. He's a professor! Furthermore, his biggest critic: a guy who agrees with him!

"Transparently and pathetically irresponsible."

Whoa! This last is from Dale Myers, who won an Emmy for his computer animation work on the Zapruder film. He studied the assassination for 35 years and developed a computer-generated, three-dimensional model of the assassination sequence. He thinks Oswald did it, too.

Maybe you people need to be introduced to Super Mario Bros.

[WP]

"They are telling folks that they are trying to adopt these animals out, but that is patently not true," said Patrick Kwan, New York state director of the Humane Society of the United States.

"These animals cannot be adopted out. This is an extermination program that sentences them to death."

Since the cats are feral, you're not allowed to adopt them from the shelter.

But you could try boycotting major JFK customers like, say, JetBlue, for not trying to exert more pressure on the port. It's not like that airline, in particular, is particularly humane to humans at that airport, either.

[am New York]

"The gentleman who bought it said out respect for Marilyn he's not going to make a joke of it and put it on the Internet and try to exploit her," said memorabilia collector Keya Morgan. "That's not his intention and I would never get my name involved if that were to happen."

Monroe is clothed and the man's head remains out of the frame for the entire 15 minutes of the film, said Morgan, who watched it.

The man convinced that the mysterious recipient of Monroe's affection was JFK? None other than sworn Kennedy enemy and vindictive crossdressing fascist, former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover!

"The FBI agent that I interviewed said J. Edgar Hoover was completely obsessed. A team of nine individuals were analyzing the tape inside a lab. J. Edgar Hoover brought in a few prostitutes who allegedly had been with President Kennedy and they tried to ... see if that was really President Kennedy."

As there are no precedents in the Gawker archives for this "put your money where your mouth is" display of upright moral fiber, we have no further comments at this time.

Thankfully our tireless efforts at calling attention to the plight of JFK's feral cat village has landed us on the Neighborhood Cats mailing list, and we learned today that some of the cats have been saved! "Thanks to the heroic efforts of NYC Feral Cat Initiative staff, the cooperation and veterinary care provided by Animal Care and Control of NYC, and caring volunteers, the first ten cats caught in the Port Authority's purge were pulled alive from the shelter." Heroes pull cats from deadly shelter! Exciting!

Cat group infighting prevented the kitty kolony from being controlled via "trap, neuter, release" action upon its discovery in 2004, when the Port Authority was a little more receptive to the idea. But what can you do to help now? Not much! It's the Port Authority, they answer to no man. Call Eliot Spitzer! Or make sure to fly out of LaGuardia when you attend the November 10 National Feral Cat Summit 2007 in Orlando Florida!

Missed Opportunity on Airport Cats in 2004 [NYT City Room]

The ASPCA offered to sterilize the cats and monitor them on site, which would take care of the problem within a generation. But while the "trap-neuter-return" policy worked just fine at controlling the population of Rikers Island's own and significantly larger Meowtropolis, the Port Authority would much rather kill all the precious little kitties and save the precious airplanes from the deadly birds that apparently congregate wherever cat villages are to be found and then suicide themselves in jet engines.

Because the cats are largely feral, most are unadoptable, though you're welcome to call Animal Care and Control and beg for one of the little guys. Or just call up and mew softly into the receiver until they think about what they've done.

JFK Feral Cats Facing Death [AMNY]
Earlier: Adorable Feral Cats Newest Victims In JFK Murder Plot!

Everything bad and evil can be traced directly back to the Port Authority, so it's really no wonder that they're now forbidding cat rescue groups from approaching the "happy cat camp," but still, how wrong is this?

[Port Authority spokesman] Pasquale DiFulco said the cats were creating "an unsafe and unsanitary" environment. "You've got a situation where the cats are being fed, which then attracts rodents and, far more seriously, birds," he said. Gulls attracted to the food could end up colliding with sensitive aircraft parts, he said.

The whole situation is basically just like Fraggle Rock, with the Port Authority as the Gorgs.

Stray Cat Roundup at J.F.K. Worries Rescue Groups [NYT]
[PHOTO: Robert Stolarik for The New York Times]

Today's Headlines [NYT]