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President invites suspected assassins to Rose Garden press conference.

Excerpt

I suspected right away that I had stumbled upon an assassination plot.

Not sure I can explain how I came to suspect this. I don’t think I’m psychic, unless you would count the occasional ability when I was younger to start humming a tune an instant before it was played unannounced on the radio. It could have been because the disc jockey had been playing the same sequence of songs so often that I unconsciously memorized the order. Then again…

I wonder now if a related phenomenon was at work to prime me for my immediate recognition that the strange message I’d stumbled onto while snooping through White House email might well be a communication between conspirators in a plot to assassinate my boss, the President.

The President being the President of course was hated by multitudes. In her case the haters constituted right-wingers – both greedy economic giants and bitter proletarian ignoramuses – along with assorted misogynists, misoneists and misologists of all races, ages, income levels, genders and sexual proclivities. Many of them who might otherwise have tolerated her or even offered her grudging respect, were utterly turned off by her refusal to confirm or deny that she occasionally enjoyed a pharmaceutical compound proven clinically to induce female orgasm, which is sold to billions of women world-wide under the trade name Primrose Lane.

Assassination plots ranked a close third behind fund-raising activities and poll results in the President’s morning staff meetings. That is, until the President one morning waved an impatient hand at Warren Hendrian, her domestic affairs adviser, to halt his usual litany of plots against her life that were newly discovered, under investigation or recently thwarted by various law enforcement agencies, the primary one being the United States Secret Service, to which, among his many duties, Hendrian served as the President’s liaison.

“Warren, enough. Enough already,” she said in a tone hovering dangerously close to scold. “If they’re going to kill me, they’re going to kill me. I dearly hope our guys are smart enough and good enough to keep that from happening. But if it happens, it happens and I’m sick of hearing about all the sick and evil people out there who want to do me in. So…,” she smiled abruptly, showing a set of even teeth so white they looked like Jimmy Carter’s caps, “enough with the lists of all the plots and counter-plots and so forth at these little morning get-togethers. OK, darling? We have more important things to talk about, I hope. Adele, what’s happening in the jungle? Whose asses do I need to kiss today?”

This effectively ended the routine discussion of assassination plots in the morning meetings, although I as Chief of Staff had Hendrian deliver those reports to me so that if nothing else I could adjust the President’s schedule to avoid situations that could prove opportune to any of the plotters who had been identified and, I hoped, really were under investigation.

I decided at first not to tell Hendrian what I had discovered. I had several reasons for keeping this card face down. Perhaps most important among them was that he was a pompous ass who would have loved nothing more than to push my face into a pile of my own feces were I dumb enough to show him the pile and then bend over it and wait for him to strike. Which is what I would have been doing had I told him that something I’d stumbled upon while snooping in the purgatory file of the White House email network might be a note from one would-be assassin to another.

My first inclination was to bring in Tonga Cooke, who was chief of the White House technical support team, and a friend. And or possibly Joan Stonebraker, agent-in-charge of the White House Secret Service detail.

For the time being, I worried solo. I did keep a journal during this time, though, partly because I felt frustrated and outraged – not to say terribly vulnerable – that there are still and may ever be serious doubts about the government’s integrity in the JFK murder and its investigation. One journal kept by a player in that sad, sorry episode might have contained the key to obviate all of the myriad heavily and meticulously documented theories both proving and disproving the various intricate conspiracies credited for the crime that will haunt Americans for as long as there is an America.

Let us proceed to my journal.

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Copyright 2010 Mathew Paust. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.