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On Friday, November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated and a unique era of American history came to a bloodstained end. The news stunned the entire world: no one hearing the jumbled incoherent words of radio and television commentators, or reading the first newsflashes could believe it. Stripping the glitter from the Kennedy legend Reg Gadney reveals the cracks beneath the glamour. Jacqueline, the most beautiful and independent of First Ladies, was admired as the perfect White House hostess and so feted on trips to Europe with her husband that in France Kennedy commented, ‘I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.’ But she was also unhappy about the obsessive public scrutiny, increasingly bored with politics and her excessive spending on clothes and redecoration in the White House was becoming notorious. Joseph Kennedy, the President’s much-loved father was a political liability, incapacitated by a stroke. Robert Kennedy, whose appointment as Attorney General had been widely criticised, was battling with the consequences of trying to put civil rights legislation into effect. At the centre of the stage was John Kennedy, the war hero who could not leave women of power alone. He was a President who came to believe in his own larger-than-life image; who took responsibility for the humiliating Bay of Pigs fiasco, and faced down the Russians over the missiles in Cuba; who sent Americans to Vietnam as ‘advisors’, and initiated the costly race to the moon. Kennedy’s charisma remained undimmed. Even after the unsuccessful invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles supported by the CIA, opinion polls showed him to be more popular than ever. He was a man who stirred the hearts and minds of all the peoples of the free world, who called on his fellow Americans to ‘ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.’