Nemesis: Facing Our National Demons

The older you get, the more precious are your childhood memories. They may be growing faint, but they are the last vestige of the innocence and trust born in your heart which have not yet been violated, a safe place in your personal hard drive where you still nurture those all-American hopes and ideals.

And heroes.

Peter Evan's 2004 revelation called Nemesis took my long-protected bubble of innocence and hammered it into an urn of ashes. I accept that it happened, but I am always mad at myself when I am the last to know...

But maybe there are some others who like me missed this story... some incredible way, probably THE BIGGEST STORY OF THE CENTURY. Peter Evans seems to have quietly answered all of our suspicions and fears, and many of the lifelong mysteries around the Kennedys... and nobody bothered to acknowledge his accomplishment. Some tried to call it rubbish and even an outrage, but it seems to have survived the test of time.

Evans wrote an authorized biography about Aristotle Onassis and then was told by several people very close to the famous husband of the former First Lady, that he had completely missed the real story. It was the story that Onassis took to his grave. It was the story that others closest to him must never admit. And in the telling of it, Evans takes down many of our lifelong American icons.

I found the book by accident after watching Bill O'Reilly's killing book made into a movie, made with tunnel vision, Killing Kennedy, where one scene grabbed my reclining intellect as I enjoyed memory lane. Jack and Jackie are cuddling and consoling one another after losing their third born, and President Kennedy says sweetly and trustingly, for her to go ahead on that Mediterranean cruise with that Onassis guy... to get some rest and enjoy herself... and come back to him so they can go to DALLAS... it was all so wholesome. And right then I knew that O'Reilly had done another slick spin on history as he wants to sell it. But I was unsure why I felt that way...

Perhaps it was because, no matter how much skeptics have dismissed the lingering suspicions about an assassination conspiracy, even as a nine year- old I knew that it was too much of a coincidence that Lee Harvey Oswald JUST HAPPENED TO BE EMPLOYED in a building right on the parade route which would give him maximum visibility to shoot the president. Too much of a coincidence that Oswald was found quickly hiding in a theater, where he gave himself up as if he expected an escort out of the country... Too much of a coincidence that a Dallas strip club owner was able to walk right up to him and shoot him LIVE on national television in the police station... Too much of a coincidence that Texas Governor John Connolly, once the trusted hatchet man for Lyndon Johnson, discreetly changed over to the Republican Party... knowing he had no friends left in the other one...

What did Connolly know? Perhaps he learned as I did from Peter Evans that Jackie, fed up with the Kennedy brother's sex-capades, wanted out of her Kennedy farce, had found a new champion in Onassis, a longtime nemesis of the Kennedys. And Onassis was a man that had no moral compass and was admittedly the most ruthless man on the high seas. Perhaps he found out that one of Jackie's trusted confidants was also a trusted confidant of...

Lee Harvey Oswald.

I just knew from Killing Kennedy that IF Jacqueline Kennedy was floating around with Ari, before the assassination, that fact opened up a lot of possibilities for the causes of future events. For more “coincidences.” And as it turned out, Peter Evans had been trying to tell me and you for a decade. Yes I am a conspiracy nut. Every mother's son from my generation is to some degree. We all knew growing up that the Warren Commission had been a whitewash to cover up the truth about the Kennedys, the assassinations, the ugly part of our national soul, and we would probably never know what happened. It was too big, too dangerous, too earth-shaking. And then Peter Evans dumps it out like moldy old gym shorts from a forgotten locker room. And damn it stinks.

And there are answers, and reasonable explanations, and yes, even confessions. In the end, none of the players is left standing, least of all Jackie O, our uncrowned queen.... our forever national widow, fallen from grace, and with Peter Evans's investigative skullduggery, she morphs into OMG, the wicked witch of the west.

Evans's account is scrupulously footnoted and backed by numerous first- person accounts and testimonies, and yes, tons of hearsay. But the bottom line is that it has the ring of truth. Onassis had volcanic hates, and irrational obsessions, and multi-layered sin scum at the bottom of the sea, and Peter Evans manages to dredge up just enough to make us beg him to drop it, for God's sake, back to where he found it.

But not before he has convinced me and others that he has uncovered the ugly truth about the Kennedys and “Camelot,” and the political forces behind their destruction. In the end, it all makes sense. The unexplained coincidences of the premature deaths of Marilyn Monroe, the Kennedys, Oswald, and others. Anyone who could hurt Jackie. And arranged by the ones who would avenge her. And then they tried to destroy each other. In the end she walked away with her reputation intact... and with much of the money.

But new questions emerge. How could the Media and our whole country for that matter, ignore this book and its implications? That question, and the possible conspiracy behind it is far more daunting now. How could O'Reilly make such a flacid regurgitation of old news, and perpetuate Jackie's spin of “Camelot”? To do that, his co-writer had to step over a lot of dead bodies. One wonders why, after all this time, and Evans's revelations, we are still nursing those childhood fantasies...

But I'm sure O'Reilly sleeps better at night, than those of us who have faced our national demons. We all have to choose between Peter Evans's noxious humus, the staggering corruption and decadence which was the cornerstone of the Liberal wing of our society, fifty years ago, or continued ignorance and bliss. It is obvious, America has already made its choice.