Religious bigot who nearly killed JFK with a suicide car bomb

The assassination of President John F Kennedy on November 22, 1963 remains one of the most defining events in American history.

- BY CHRISTOPHER BUCKTIN

Captured in grainy video footage and seared into the memory, his death at the hands of Lee Harvey Oswald has prompted decades of debate, speculation and what-ifs.

But three years before that fateful day in Dallas, Kennedy narrowly escaped an entirely different assassination attempt - one that, if successful, would have meant he had no presidency at all.

On December 11, 1960, just weeks after winning the election, the President-elect was targeted by a would-be suicide-killer hiding in plain sight.

In their book The JFK Conspiracy, bestselling authors Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch shed light on this little-known episode. The pair reveal how a retired postal worker named Richard Pavlick came within seconds of blowing up the 43-year-old senator with a car full of dynamite.

Describing the scene, Meltzer explains: “He's about 20 yards away from Kennedy across the street.

“Pavlick knows Kennedy's schedule - he goes to 10am church every Sunday. All Pavlick has to do is hit the gas, flip the switch and boom goes the dynamite. And that would have been the death of Kennedy.”

Pavlick was not just a lone drifter with a grudge - he was a First World War veteran from New Hampshire driven by anti-Catholic bigotry.

“Kennedy wasn't just dealing with political opponents,” Mensch says.

“He was confronting entrenched prejudice. Catholicism in America at that time was linked to the waves of immigration in the early 20th century that had transformed the nation.

“People like Pavlick feared what they saw as an erosion of traditional Protestant values and there was a lot of anger, a lot of rage on this issue.”

That rage only intensified during the bitterly contested 1960 election.

Kennedy faced deep suspicion and open hostility from powerful corners of American Protestant society.

“Kennedy was only the second Catholic presidential candidate in US history,” Mensch says.