Leonard Gross

Leonard Gross is the author, co-author or ghostwriter of 22 books, including his latest novel The Memoirs of JFK. Prior to writing books and later films and plays, he wrote for numbers of magazines, principally LOOK, on whose staff he served for twelve years as a senior editor, Latin American correspondent, European editor and West Coast editor. His latest novel The Memoirs of JFK imagines that John F. Kennedy survived Dallas, that he served two terms and then wrote a memoir in which he fails to confront many of the questions that had arisen in the JFK presidency and in the aftermath of assassination attempt. A worried publisher sends a seasoned ghostwriter to try to persuade President Kennedy to deal with these omissions. Their combat is the engine of this novel. With the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy and in the shadow of the U.S. government shutdown one has to wonder. What would our country and the world look like today if JFK had not died in Dallas? Although Gross's novel The Memoirs of JFK is an invention, both its factual aspects and post-assassination conjectures are informed by his interviews with some 50 sources--many of them members of President Kennedy's administration, some of them journalists Kennedy favored, a few of them close friends. No one, of course, can know for certain what decisions John Fitzgerald Kennedy would have taken, but given the nature of the man and his expressed intent, the world described in the novel is one we might well have lived in had he survived Dallas.