Doroty Kilgallen and JFK - II
by DCDave

...continued from...

Dorothy's last published item about the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy ran in her column on September 3, 1965:

"Those close to the scene realize that if the widow of Lee Harvey Oswald (now married to another chap) ever gave out the "whole story" of her life with President Kennedy's alleged assassin, it would split open the front pages of newspapers all over the world. Even if Marina explained why her late husband looked so different in an official police photo and the widely-printed full-length picture featured on the cover of Life magazine, it would cause a sensation. This story isn't going to die as long as there's a real reporter alive--and there are a lot of them."

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Sometime in October, while Carmen Gebbia prepared her for the television show (What's My Line), Dorothy blurted out to the makeup man that she was "all excited."

"Is it Kennedy?" he asked.

"Yes," she said, " and it's very cloak and daggerish."

She told Gebbia that she was going to New Orleans, where she was going to meet someone who was going to give her "information on the case," Gebbia remains vague about the details: "It was a designated area. She said she didn't know the man , but she'd recognize him because of something--a walking stick, a straw hat. I don't remember. I do know that she said to me several times, 'If it's the last thing I do, I'm going to break this case.'"

Lee Israel, KILGALLEN, A BIOGRAPHY OF DOROTHY KILGALLEN (New York: Delacorte Press, 1979) pp. 404-404, 405

Alas for poor Dorothy, she was only a Broadway gossip columnist and greatly over-estimated her colleagues in the news business. She had no idea how corrupt they were, and are. Imagine. She believed that there were still a lot of real reporters out there who would be able to get the truth printed in the organs for which they worked.

Okay, I'm being a bit hard on her. Not too long ago I thought like she did. Then I began to look into the death of Vincent Foster. That cover-up has been completely exposed, but it hasn't "split open" one newspaper. I attended the news conference when the harassed witness, Patrick Knowlton, unveiled his lawsuit against members of the FBI working for Kenneth Starr and a bevy of reporters and cameras were there. All that appeared the next day was a buried away distorted report in The Washington Times, and they subsequently abandoned the story. Then when Knowlton's lawyer got his 20-page expose of the cover-up officially appended to the Starr Report on Foster by the 3-judge panel, that news got a complete black-out. The Washington Post even represented what they put up on their web site as the entire report, but they left off his intergral portion. Not one news organ in the United States reported on the existence of the devastating addendum to the Starr Report (Chris Ruddy in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review mentioned it sometime later).

David Martin
August 26, 1999

...RIP

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