The history that might have been: John F. Kennedy assassinated 59 years ago today in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963

In The Man in the High Castle, an alternate history novel by American writer Philip K. Dick, published and set in 1962, events takes place 15 years after a different end to the Second World War, and depict intrigues between the victorious Axis Powers – primarily, Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany – as they rule over the former United States, as well as daily life under totalitarian rule. A television series was loosely adapted from the book and ran for four seasons from January 2015 until November 2019.

In a similar vein, The Plot Against America is a novel by Philip Roth published in 2004. It is an alternate history in which Franklin D. Roosevelt is defeated in the presidential election of 1940 by Charles Lindbergh. Adapted for television as a six-part miniseries that aired in March and April 2020, The Plot Against America imagined an alternate American history told through the eyes of a working-class Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey, as they watch the political rise of Lindbergh, an aviator-hero and xenophobic populist.

The fascination with alternate timelines is not limited to science fiction writers. Historians have been known to wonder if the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, in ending Camelot, changed the course of history for the worse? It’s a popular, if not almost universal view, that it did. But historian David Hackett Fischer, in his 1970 book, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought, warns of the dangers of counterfactual historiography, which extrapolates a timeline in which a key historical event did not happen or had an outcome which was different from that which did in fact occur. Had Kennedy lived would the United States have exited Vietnam closer to 1964 than 1975? Would Lyndon Johnson’s landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 have passed so soon under JFK? We can only wonder.

As Kennedy’s presidential limousine, a modified 1961 Lincoln Continental four-door convertible, turned off Main Street at Dealey Plaza around 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time on Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, three shots rang out as the motorcade passed the Texas School Book Depository. If you were born in 1957 or earlier, you have a highly detailed and exceptionally vivid flashbulb memory snapshot of that moment and where you were and what you were doing. I was in my Grade 1 class in Oshawa, Ontario here in Canada at St. Christopher Separate Elementary School on Annapolis Avenue that day.

Secret Service Agent William Greer, 54, the limousine driver, sped to Parkland Hospital where Father Oscar Huber, a 70-year-old Vincentian priest from Holy Trinity Catholic Church, who had been watching the presidential motorcade, having walked the three blocks, arrived to administer the sacrament of last rites (extreme unction) to the mortally wounded 46-year-old president.

Just two hours and eight minutes after Kennedy was shot, Vice-President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), who was also in Dallas, riding in a car behind the president with his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, and Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough, was sworn in as president of the United States aboard Air Force One at Love Field, as the presidential plane’s four jet engines were being powered up, by Judge Sarah Tilghman Hughes, a federal judge for the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, the only woman in U.S. history to have sworn in a United States president, a task usually executed by the chief justice of the United States, using a Roman Catholic missal taken from a side table in Kennedy’s airplane cabin, which Larry O’Brien, a member of JFK’s inner circle as  special assistant to the president for congressional relations and personnel, is said to have mistakenly taken to be a Bible, as it was bound in calfskin and embossed with a crucifix. Would O’Brien, a practicing Irish Roman Catholic, mix up a missal with a Bible in the chaos of the moment? Perhaps. Or maybe he thought it was a perfectly natural thing, given his own religious background, to have Johnson, a Stone-Campbell  Movement Disciple of Christ adherent, sworn in with a missal.

Also, while the oath should have been, according to Article II, Section 1, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution, “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” Hughes said in 1968 she also mistakenly added, “So help me God” to the end of the oath she read on the plane: “Every oath of office that I had ever given ended up with ‘So help me God!’ so it was just automatic that I said [it].”

While conspiracy theories about Charles Harrelson, actor Woody Harrelson’s father, being one of the “three tramps” on the grassy knoll – a second shooter in Dallas – along with two other shadowy figures, Charles Rogers and Chauncey Holt, continue to have some currency, it appears the boxcar tramps actually were Gus Abrams, Harold Doyle and John Gedney, and that Lee Harvey Oswald, as the Warren Commission concluded, acted alone. Harrelson, however, was later convicted of the assassination of U.S. federal district court Judge “Maximum John” H. Wood, Jr., shot dead in the parking lot outside his San Antonio, Texas townhouse on May 29, 1979. Harrelson, 69, died March 15, 2007, incarcerated at Supermax, the United States’ most secure federal penitentiary in Florence, Colorado.

It was also on Nov. 22, 1963 that C.S. Lewis, the former atheist-turned-Anglican apologist died, as did Aldous Huxley, author of the dystopian novel Brave New World, which anticipated developments in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and operant conditioning, leading Modern Library in 1999 to rank it fifth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Kennedy, Lewis and Huxley all died within hours of each other, In January 1982, Reformed Protestant Calvinist-turned Catholic apologist Peter Kreeft, a professor at Boston College since 1965, published Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C.S. Lewis & Aldous Huxley, where he imagines the three discussing life after death and the claims of Christ.

The deaths of Kennedy, Lewis and Huxley came one day after CBS aired what is believed to be the first major U.S. news report to feature The Beatles on Thursday, Nov. 21, 1963, which you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-sI-e-eJwQ

Steve Gillon, host of the new History Channel podcast 24 Hours After: The JFK Assassination, says the assassination of JFK is the only time when the nuclear codes were temporarily lost.

“The president always has a military aide who carries an attache with all the nuclear codes,” he says. “He was in a backup car, and in all the chaos of rushing to the airport, the aide got lost. The codes were soon reunited with the president, but I think that’s the only time I know of in the nuclear age where, if the president had wanted to launch a nuclear strike, he would not have been able to because he wouldn’t have access to the codes.”

The president is always followed by the briefcase, the so-called “nuclear football,” and a military aide wherever he goes. It has joined every president when they are away from the White House since the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. The football is carried to allow the president to be able to launch a nuclear strike at short notice if needed.

It originally got its name from an Eisenhower-era nuclear war plan, code-named ‘Dropkick’, and was created to make sure a nuclear war option was always near the president. There are three of the bags in total, one is with the president, one with the vice president and the other kept safe in the White House.

“The ‘ball carriers’ who look after the cases also carry Beretta pistols and are authorized use deadly force against anyone who tries to take it.

Little is made public about what is inside the cases and it regularly changes. A small antenna that pokes out the top of the case means it likely contains a satellite phone.

There is also a 75-page book that informs the president of his options for a nuclear strike, with another highlighting places he could hide during a nuclear war.

A ten-page folder on contact details for military leaders and broadcasters sits next to a sealed laminated card known as the Biscuit.

This looks like a large credit card and shows letters and numbers, with the president having to memorize where on it sits the Gold Code.

In the event of a nuclear strike, the commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces will say the code down the phone to the National Military Command Centre in Washington D.C.

Despite the bags being kept at the White House when the president is in residence, it is widely thought he carries a card with the launch code on him all the time.”

Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) sail somewhere off Norfolk, Virginia and San Diego, with North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) personnel at the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, near Colorado Springs, Colorado, and the U.S. Strategic Command, (USSTRATCOM), the global warfighting command at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska.

In the event of a national emergency, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) says, a series of seven different alert conditions (LERTCONs) can be called. The seven LERTCONs are broken down into five defence conditions (DEFCONs) and two emergency conditions (EMERGCONs). Defence readiness conditions (DEFCONs) describe progressive alert postures primarily for use between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the commanders of unified commands. DEFCONs are graduated to match situations of varying military severity, and are numbered 5,4,3,2, and 1 as appropriate. DEFCONs are phased increases in combat readiness. In general terms, these are descriptions of DEFCONs:

EMERGCONs are national level reactions in response to ICBM (missiles in the air) attack. By definition, other forces go to DEFCON 1 during an EMERGCON.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the U.S. Strategic Air Command was placed on DEFCON 2 for the first time in history, while the rest of U.S. military commands (with the exception of the U.S. Air Forces in Europe) went on DEFCON 3. On Oct. 22, 1962 SAC responded by establishing Defense Condition Three (DEFCON III), and ordered Boeing B-52 Stratofortress long-range, subsonic, jet-powered strategic bombers on airborne alert. Tension grew and the next day SAC declared DEFCON II, a heightened state of alert, ready to strike targets within the Soviet Union.

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The Truth is in Here? U.S. National Archives set to release final JFK assassination records Oct. 26

The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, Maryland is set to release on Oct. 26 the final 3,000 never-before-seen documents the federal government says it holds related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  The records at issue are documents previously identified as assassination records but withheld in part or in full.

An additional 34,000 previously redacted files are also scheduled for release with the redacted text restored for the new releases. Under the terms of The John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, the United States government was given 25 years to make public all Kennedy assassination-related files. That deadline expires Thursday. President Donald Trump tweeted Oct. 21 that “subject to the receipt of further information, I will be allowing, as president, the long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened.” The records are to be released this week “unless the president certifies, as required by The John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, that continued postponement is made necessary” by specific identifiable harm, including harm to intelligence, law enforcement, military operations or foreign relations. A statement from the White House on Saturday said: “The president believes that these documents should be made available in the interests of full transparency unless agencies provide a compelling and clear national security or law enforcement justification otherwise.”

The John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 resulted from filmmaker Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie JFK, which added more fuel to 28 years of inflamed public fascination with the idea of conspiracy and cover-up connected to the Kennedy assassination, despite the official finding of the 1964 Warren Commission that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

Earlier this year, the National Archives and Records Administration released at 8 a.m. on July 24 a set of 3,810 documents, along with 17 audio files, previously withheld in accordance with The John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. The materials released July 24 were available online only initially, with access to the original paper records promised “at a future date.” The National Archives and Records Administration established the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection in November 1992, and it consists of approximately five million pages of records. The vast majority of the collection, about 88 percent, has been open in full and released to the public since the late 1990s, the National Archives says.

Highlights of the July 24 release included FBI and CIA records and 17 audio files of interviews of Yuri Nosenko, a KGB officer who defected to the United States in January 1964. Nosenko claimed to have been the officer in charge of the KGB file on Lee Harvey Oswald during Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union. The interviews were conducted in January, February, and July of 1964. The set of documents released in July included 441 documents previously withheld in full and 3,369 documents previously released with portions redacted. The redacted text is restored for the new releases.

Josh Sanburn, a writer for TIME, suggested last December “the files – many of which trace back to the House Select Committee on Assassinations from the 1970s – promise to be less about second shooters and grassy knolls and more about what the government, particularly the CIA, might have known about assassin Lee Harvey Oswald before Kennedy’s death.”

According to the National Archives, the final records release includes information on the CIA’s station in Mexico City, where Oswald showed up weeks before JFK’s death; 400 pages on E. Howard Hunt, the Watergate burglary conspirator who said on his deathbed that he had prior knowledge of the assassination; and testimony from the CIA’s James Angleton, who oversaw intelligence on Oswald. “The documents could also provide information on a CIA officer named George Joannides, who directed financial dealings with an anti-Castro group whose members had a public fight with Oswald on the streets of New Orleans in the summer of 1963,” says Sanburn.

As President Kennedy’s presidential limousine, a modified 1961 Lincoln Continental four-door convertible, turned off Main Street at Dealey Plaza around 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time on Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, three shots rang out as the motorcade passed the Texas School Book Depository. If you were born in 1957 or earlier, you have a highly detailed and exceptionally vivid flashbulb memory snapshot of that moment and where you were and what you were doing. I was in my Grade 1 class in Oshawa, Ontario here in Canada at St. Christopher Separate Elementary School on Annapolis Avenue that day. Kennedy, who was born 100 years ago, was the fourth United States president to be assassinated, after Abraham Lincoln in 1865, James Garfield in 1881 and William McKinley in 1901.

Secret Service Agent William Greer, 54, the limousine driver, sped to Parkland Hospital where Father Oscar Huber, a 70-year-old Vincentian priest from Holy Trinity Catholic Church, who had been watching the presidential motorcade, having walked the three blocks, arrived to administer the sacrament of last rites (extreme unction) to the mortally wounded 46-year-old president.

Just  two hours and eight minutes after Kennedy was shot, Vice-President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), who was also in Dallas, riding in a car behind the president with his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, and Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough, was sworn in as president of the United States aboard Air Force One at Love Field, as the presidential plane’s four jet engines were being powered up, by Judge Sarah Tilghman Hughes,  a federal judge for the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, the only woman in U.S. history to have sworn in a United States president, a task usually executed by the chief justice of the United States, using a Roman Catholic missal taken from a side table in Kennedy’s airplane cabin, which Larry O’Brien, a member of JFK’s inner circle as  special assistant to the president for congressional relations and personnel, is said to have mistakenly taken to be a Bible, as it was bound in calfskin and embossed with a crucifix. Would O’Brien, a practicing Irish Roman Catholic, mix up a missal with a Bible in the chaos of the moment? Perhaps. Or maybe he thought it was a perfectly natural thing, given his own religious background, to have Johnson, a Stone-Campbell  Movement Disciple of Christ adherent, sworn in with a missal.

Also, while the oath should have been, according to Article II, Section 1, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution, “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” Hughes said in 1968 she also mistakenly added, “So help me God” to the end of the oath she read on the plane: “Every oath of office that I had ever given ended up with ‘So help me God!’ so it was just automatic that I said [it].”

While conspiracy theories about Charles Harrelson, actor Woody Harrelson’s father, being one of the “three tramps” on the grassy knoll – a second shooter in Dallas – along with two other shadowy figures, Charles Rogers and Chauncey Holt, continue to have some currency, it appears the boxcar tramps actually were Gus Abrams, Harold Doyle and John Gedney, and that Lee Harvey Oswald, as the Warren Commission concluded, acted alone. Harrelson, however, was later convicted of the assassination of U.S. federal district court Judge “Maximum John” H. Wood, Jr., shot dead in the parking lot outside his San Antonio, Texas townhouse on May 29, 1979. Harrelson, 69, died March 15, 2007, incarcerated at Supermax, the United States’ most secure federal penitentiary in Florence, Colorado.

Some conspiracies, however, are … well, conspiracies. Others remain unproven matters of conjecture. And still others exist on the fringes of tinfoil hat conspiracy theory speculation.  In April 2016, then Republican presidential primaries candidate Donald Trump accused Canadian-born Republican Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s father, Rafael B. Cruz, a Cuban-American Christian preacher, of being alongside Lee Harvey Oswald several months before he shot the president, “channeling a National Enquirer story that the Cruz campaign has denounced as false,” wrote McClatchy Newspapers correspondent Maria Recio for the Miami Herald at the time. Responding in Indiana, Ted Cruz, challenging Trump for the Republican presidential nomination at the time, quipped: “I guess I should go ahead and admit that yes, my dad killed JFK, he is secretly Elvis and Jimmy Hoffa is buried in his backyard.”

The assassination of Lincoln, however, was part of a larger conspiracy, a fact that’s largely forgotten today. What is remembered is that actor John Wilkes Booth entered Lincoln’s State Box at the Ford Theater in Washington, D.C. on April 14, 1865 undetected and shot him in the back of the head. Lincoln, mortally wounded, was taken to the Petersen House across the street and died at 7:22 a.m. April 15. On April 26, Booth was found hiding in a barn near Port Royal, Virginia and was shot and killed by a Union solider after he refused to surrender and the barn in which he was hiding was set ablaze.

Co-conspirator Lewis Powell attempted to assassinate Secretary of State William Seward, but only managed to injure him. At the same time, another co-conspirator, George Atzerodt was supposed to have killed Vice-President Andrew Johnson, but backed out.

Eight Lincoln co-conspirators were caught over the next few days and tried by a military court. They were found guilty on June 30 and given various sentences depending upon their involvement. Powell, Atzerodt, David Herold, and Mary Elizabeth Jenkins Surratt were charged with conspiring with Booth, along with various other crimes, and all were hanged in Washington on July 7, 1865 – with Surratt becoming the first woman executed by the United States federal government.

It was also on Nov. 22, 1963 that C.S. Lewis, the former atheist-turned-Anglican apologist died, as did Aldous Huxley, author of the dystopian novel Brave New World, which anticipated developments in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and operant conditioning, leading Modern Library in 1999 to rank it fifth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Kennedy, Lewis and Huxley all died within hours of each other, In January 1982, Reformed Protestant Calvinist-turned Catholic apologist Peter Kreeft, a professor at Boston College since 1965, published Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C.S. Lewis & Aldous Huxley, where he imagines the three discussing life after death and the claims of Christ.

The deaths of Kennedy, Lewis and Huxley came one day after CBS aired what is believed to be the first major U.S. news report to feature The Beatles on Thursday, Nov. 21, 1963. Correspondent Alexander Kendrick interviewed The Beatles in England, including in his 5:09 clip footage recorded at the Winter Gardens Theatre in Bournemouth, England five days earlier, which you can watch here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeolhjIWPYs

Did the assassination of President Kennedy, in ending Camelot, change the course of history for the worse? It’s a popular, if not almost universal view. But historian David Hackett Fischer, in his 1970 book, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought, warns of the dangers of counterfactual historiography, which extrapolates a timeline in which a key historical event did not happen or had an outcome which was different from that which did in fact occur. Had Kennedy lived would the United States have exited Vietnam closer to 1964 than 1975? Would LBJ’s landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 have passed so soon under JFK? We can only wonder.

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Billy Graham, Jack Van Impe, G.K. Chesterton and Saint Paul the Apostle and the human enigma

It has taken me months, but yesterday I was able to finally finish watching the last 18 minutes of a slightly more than 26-minute TED conference talk titled “On technology and faith” that a then 79-year-old Billy Graham gave in California in February 1998. If you are interested, you can watch it here at: http://www.ted.com/talks/billy_graham_on_technology_faith_and_suffering#t-399663

The talk, like many Graham has given over his long life, is remarkable for any number of reasons, and delivered with his usual homespun, folksy North Carolina wisdom. If it’s not too much of a stretch, I’ve long considered the Southern Baptist preacher with a worldwide appeal transcending Christian denominationalism, and even extending to non-Christian religions, as somewhat analogous to a living saint (Catholics don’t have living saints, much less Protestant ones, but grant me a moment of literary licence.)

Graham, of course, would never think of himself that way either because he well recognizes the sinful and depraved nature of man, something we Catholics also recognize, although not as total depravity in the Calvinist sense. Interestingly, Graham in that talk more than 17 years ago, was talking about end of life issues and getting ready to go home and meet his maker. Apparently God still isn’t quite ready for Billy since he’s now 96. While he’s not well enough these days to be giving a TED or any other public talk in all likelihood, methinks God leaves people like Billy Graham and Mother Angelica, a similar age to Billy, and founder of the worldwide Catholic Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) among us longer than we might expect as a reminder of what a shining witness is, even long after they can make public appearances. The very fact of their lives is their Christian witness.

Saint Paul the Apostle, describing the human enigma in his Letter to the Romans, wrote:  “My own actions bewilder me; what I do is not what I wish to do, but something which I hate. Why then, if what I do is something I have no wish to do, I thereby admit that the Law [of God] is worthy of all honor; meanwhile, my action does not come from me, but from the sinful principle that dwells in me.

“Of this I am certain, that no principle of good dwells in me, that is, in my natural self; praiseworthy intentions are always ready at hand, but I cannot find my way to perform them; it is not the good my will prefers, but the evil my will disapproves that I find myself doing.

“And if what I do is something I have not the will to do, it cannot be I that bring it about; it must be the sinful principle that dwells in me. This, then, is what I find about the Law [of God], that evil is close at my side, when my will is to do what is praiseworthy. Inwardly, I applaud God’s disposition, but I observe another disposition in my lower self, which raises war against the disposition of my [heart], and so I am handed over as a captive to that disposition towards sin which my lower self contains.”

G.K. Chesterton, one of the four greats, at least to my mind, of Edwardian letters (the others on my Dead White European Males – or DWEM – literary canon shortlist being Hilaire Belloc, H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw) was asked in 1907 by The Times of London to write an article on the theme, “What’s Wrong with the World?” Chesterton’s pithy reply was: “Dear Sirs, I am. Sincerely yours, G. K. Chesterton.”

Influenced by his wife Frances, he first became an  Anglican and later converted to Roman Catholicism in 1922. Chesterton lived from 1874 to 1936. This is the convert to Catholicism after all who wrote: “[W]e should thank God for beer and Burgundy by not drinking too much of them.” Privately, he joked, “One pint is enough, two pints is one too many, three pints isn’t half enough.” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/03/24/catholicism-is-a-big-tent-with-an-eclectic-communion-of-saints-will-there-be-room-for-g-k-chesterton-some-day/)

In September 2013, Bishop Peter Doyle, bishop of the Diocese of Northampton, appointed Canon John Udris, a priest of the diocese and currently spiritual director at St Mary’s College, Oscott, to undertake a fact-finding exercise on his behalf into whether a cause for Chesterton’s canonization should be opened. Udris in due course will submit a dossier to the bishop on whether to open the cause for Chesterton’s canonization.

As Udris told the Catholic Herald in an interview in March 2014, Chesterton, one of the most important Catholic writers and apologists for the faith of the 20th century, is “potentially a huge model” for the Church who “breaks the mould of conventional holiness.”

Udris noted Chesterton, a married layman, was not conventionally devout and could show Catholics “you don’t have to say your rosary every five minutes to be holy.” The first stages of a canonization cause include collecting evidence of heroic virtue.

Instead, Udris suggested, “Chesterton’s holiness could be found in his humour, his charity and his humility.” His defence of the faith in particular, Udris said, “was a model for Catholics.”

Dale Ahlquist, president of the American Chesterton Society, and a former Baptist who converted to Catholicism, said in 2013 the idea that someone like Chesterton could be a saint attracted him to the Catholic Church: “The fact that a 300-pound, cigar-smoking journalist might be a saint of the Catholic Church made me understand what the communion of saints is all about. They’re not just one particular type of person.”

Exactly so. Did Chesterton lead a perfect life? Hardly.  His excessive enjoyment of food and drink exhibited a distinct lack of temperance, the cardinal moral virtue “that moderates the attraction of pleasures and provides balance in the use of created goods,” as the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it. As well, some of his utterances, contemporaneous with his times, clearly sound anti-Semitic to the modern ear. There should be no whitewashing of Chesterton’s life.

Saints, we are reminded time and again, lead holy, but not always conventionally holy, and never perfect lives. They were human beings before they were saints.

Another who has lived a life of Christian witness, in my opinion, although many Catholics may not share it, is Jack Van Impe, who at 84 is a bit of a youngster compared to Billy Graham, where Van Impe got his start at the age of 17 playing the accordion before he started preaching.

Van Impe, an American televangelist best known for his long-running half-hour weekly television show Jack Van Impe Presents, an eschatological commentary on the news of the week, is a premillennial dispensationalist in his interpretation of Bible prophecy, positing a pretribulation secret Rapture – the belief that Christians will be taken up from earth in a sudden, silent removal of true believers by God prior to a time of tribulation and the Second Coming. For this Pre-Tribbers rely heavily on Saint Paul and 1 Thessalonians: “For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord.”

That, to be clear, is not a Catholic reading of 1 Thessalonians or Catholic theology, as the passage describes a very loud and public event, not a secret Rapture. We do, however, believe in a future Antichrist, and a coming trial and time of apostasy before the Second Coming. While some of the Apostolic Fathers of the early church, including Papias, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Methodius, Commodianus and Lactanitus – were premillennialists who believed that Christ’s Second Coming would lead to a visible, earthly reign – the pretribulational Rapture espoused by Van Impe, which is premised on the notion that Christ sought to establish a material and earthly kingdom, but the Jews rejected him, so the Church by necessity is a parenthetical insert into history, created as a result of Jews rejecting Christ, resulting in the existence of two people of God: the Jews, the “earthly” people, and the Christians, the “heavenly” people, is all alien to both Catholic theology and even the premillennialist views of some of the early Apostolic Fathers.

The premillennial dispensationalism that Van Impe adheres to is of much more recent vintage and is for the most part the creation of John Nelson Darby, an Anglo-Irish curate with of the Anglican  Church of Ireland, who would eventually leave that church and in the early 1830s with a small group of men form what would come to be known as the Plymouth Brethren. It was Darby who postulated the secret Rapture and much of what premillennial dispensationalism today teaches about 190 years ago.

Van Impe, who co-hosts Jack Van Impe Presents with his wife, Rexella Van Impe, has been hospitalized since May and missed several recent broadcasts of his show. The couple have been married since 1954.

Van Impe is widely known as “The Walking Bible.” He says he has spent about 35,000 hours in memorizing 14,000 verses through two hours of daily memorization, including virtually the entire New Testament. Divine gift? Photographic memory? Neither, Van Impe says, chalking it up to simple hard work and study.

David Allen was his role model. His ability to quote the scriptures in his work as a successful pastor and teacher convinced Van Impe of the value of memorization in giving authority to one’s ministry.

The actual method using index cards, he picked up fortuitously from his father, Oscar, who on a return trip home to Belgium left his “Bible memory cards” behind inadvertently in Michigan, and Jack found them.

Van Impe graduated from Detroit Bible College, as it was then known (later William Tyndale College) in 1952 as an undergraduate, but he calls himself “Dr. Van Impe” in that annoying habit some have of  using honorary, or even worse, somewhat sketchy doctorates, to self-justify the honorific before their name. Call me elitist, but if it isn’t an earned PhD from a properly accredited graduate university program, you shouldn’t be using the title doctor before your name in an academic sense.

Van Impe was known in his early years of ministry as being anti-Catholic, but to his credit, that changed by the early 1980s, so much so that he’s taken much heat over the issue from some of his fellow Protestant evangelical brethren.  While he doesn’t like Pope Francis, perceiving him as too liberal, and rants about him on air from time to time, Van Impe has only good things to say about his two immediate conservative predecessors, Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI and Saint Pope John Paul II. He just doesn’t trust Pope Francis and occasionally alludes to the possibility Pope Francis may be the last pope by a somewhat specious use of the Prophecy of St. Malachy or Prophecy of the Popes from 1139, which is a sequence of 112 cryptic Latin oracles or mottoes ending with the 112th and final Pope, Petrus Romanus, who in Malachy’s vision, is said to be on the Throne of the Apostle as history’s 112th and last pope (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/the-prophecy-of-malachy/)

Jack Van Impe Presents works as good television not because of Jack’s bombastic jeremiads, but because of the chemistry between him and his wife, Rexella, 82, who calls herself “Dr. Rexella Van Impe,” although she didn’t complete her undergraduate music and Bible history studies at Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina before Jack swept her off her feet.

There’s something transcendent about how they look at each other several times each show and speak to each other. Rexella in some ways is still the blushing bride she must have been on their wedding day in 1954. And Jack clearly has eyes only for her. Here’s this crusty old televangelist, who actually is well named as Impe as he acts like an impish boy around her at times. He simply unabashedly melts in her presence after six decades of marriage. For that kind of authenticity, I can put up with some sketchy, in my view anyway, theology, and questionable academic credentials. Besides, at the end of the day, how can you not like a couple who do a VHS video and DVD called Animals in Heaven? and, along with Billy Graham, believe we will see our pets in heaven one day? Sadly for those of us of Catholic persuasion, early sensational media reports of Pope Francis reportedly saying animals go to heaven during his weekly Wednesday general audience at St. Peter’s Square last Nov. 26, which would have contradicted centuries of common Catholic theological opinion that the souls of animals do not survive death, turned out to be premature, the result mainly of some garbled translation of an interpretation of Pope Francis’ remarks by the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.

Jack Van Impe Ministries in Troy, Michigan reported in the November-December 1998 issue of their Perhaps Today magazine that people from the largest denomination ordering their materials were Baptists, followed by Roman Catholics, then the so-called “unchurched” in third spot, and then Presbyterians, Lutherans and Methodists – in that order.

Most recently, Carl Baugh stood in as guest co-host of Jack Van Impe Presents with Rexella. Baugh is 78 and a young earth creationist. To be fair to Baugh, he had an impossible task. The show may ostensibly be about Bible prophecy, but in reality it works because of the chemistry between Jack and Rexella.

While I think he’s wrong or misguided about some things (who isn’t?), I can’t help admiring his steadfastness and thinking when Jack arrives at the Pearly Gates he’ll hear, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant … enter thou into the joy of thy lord.”

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On Nov. 22, 1963 LBJ was sworn in by Judge Sarah Tilghman Hughes, a federal judge and the only woman in U.S. history to have sworn in a United States president, while mistakenly using a Roman Catholic missal instead of a Bible

Fifty-one years ago tomorrow, United States President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

As Kennedy’s presidential limousine, a modified 1961 Lincoln Continental four-door convertible, turned off Main Street at Dealey Plaza around 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time, three shots rang out as the motorcade passed the Texas School Book Depository. If you were born in 1957 or earlier, you have a highly detailed and exceptionally vivid flashbulb memory snapshot of that moment and where you were and what you were doing. I was in my Grade 1 class in Oshawa, Ontario here in Canada at St. Christopher Separate Elementary School on Annapolis Avenue that day.

Secret Service Agent William Greer, 54, the limousine driver, sped to Parkland Hospital where Father Oscar Huber, a 70-year-old Vincentian priest from Holy Trinity Catholic Church, who had been watching the presidential motorcade, having walked the three blocks, arrived to administer the sacrament of last rites (extreme unction) to the mortally wounded 46-year-old president.

Just  two hours and eight minutes after Kennedy was shot, Vice-President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), who was also in Dallas, riding in a car behind the president with his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, and Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough, was sworn in as president of the United States aboard Air Force One at Love Field, as the presidential plane’s four jet engines were being powered up, by Judge Sarah Tilghman Hughes,  a federal judge for the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, the only woman in U.S. history to have sworn in a United States president, a task usually executed by the chief justice of the United States, using a Roman Catholic missal taken from a side table in Kennedy’s airplane cabin, which Larry O’Brien, a member of JFK’s inner circle as  special assistant to the president for congressional relations and personnel, is said to have mistakenly taken to be a Bible, as it was bound in calfskin and embossed with a crucifix. Would O’Brien, a practicing Irish Roman Catholic, mix up a missal with a Bible in the chaos of the moment? Perhaps. Or maybe he thought it was a perfectly natural thing, given his own religious background, to have Johnson, a  Stone-Campbell  Movement Disciple of Christ adherent, sworn in with a missal.

Also, while the oath should have been, according to Article II, Section 1, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution, “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” Hughes said in 1968 she also mistakenly added, “So help me God” to the end of the oath she read on the plane: “Every oath of office that I had ever given ended up with ‘So help me God!’ so it was just automatic that I said [it].”

While conspiracy theories about Charles Harrelson, actor Woody Harrelson’s father, being one of the “three tramps” on the grassy knoll – a second shooter in Dallas – along with two other shadowy figures, Charles Rogers and Chauncey Holt, continue to have some currency, it appears the boxcar tramps actually were Gus Abrams, Harold Doyle and John Gedney, and that Lee Harvey Oswald, as the Warren Commission concluded, acted alone. Harrelson, however, was later convicted of the assassination of U.S. federal district court Judge “Maximum John” H. Wood, Jr., shot dead in the parking lot outside his San Antonio, Texas townhouse on May 29, 1979. Harrelson, 69, died March 15, 2007, incarcerated at Supermax, the United States’ most secure federal penitentiary in Florence, Colorado.

It was also on Nov. 22, 1963 that C.S. Lewis, the former atheist-turned-Anglican apologist died, as did Aldous Huxley, author of the dystopian novel Brave New World, which anticipated developments in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and operant conditioning, leading Modern Library in 1999 to rank it fifth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Kennedy, Lewis and Huxley all died within hours of each other, In January 1982, Reformed Protestant Calvinist-turned Catholic apologist Peter Kreeft, a professor at Boston College since 1965, published Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C.S. Lewis & Aldous Huxley, where he imagines the three discussing life after death and the claims of Christ.

The deaths of Kennedy, Lewis and Huxley came one day after CBS aired what is believed to be the first major U.S. news report to feature The Beatles on Thursday, Nov. 21, 1963. Correspondent Alexander Kendrick interviewed The Beatles in England, including in his 5:09 clip footage recorded at the Winter Gardens Theatre in Bournemouth, England five days earlier, which you can watch here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeolhjIWPYs

Did the assassination of President Kennedy, in ending Camelot, change the course of history for the worse? It’s a popular, if not almost universal view. But historian David Hackett Fischer, in his 1970 book, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought, warns of the dangers of counterfactual historiography, which extrapolates a timeline in which a key historical event did not happen or had an outcome which was different from that which did in fact occur. Had Kennedy lived would the United States have exited Vietnam closer to 1964 than 1975? Would LBJ’s landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 have passed so soon under JFK? We can only wonder.

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