When I was little, my father gave me a list of Lincoln – Kennedy Coincidences. It was printed on crinkly paper meant to look and feel like parchment. The Historical Documents Company makes a lot of these, from The Wanted Poster For Billy The Kid to The Raven By Edgar Allen Poe in his own handwriting. I always liked the feel of them and the way they smelled.
The Lincoln – Kennedy Coincidence? was my first. It ran down the similarities: Both men were succeeded by a Southern vice president named “Johnson,” Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy. Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln. It starts to lose steam towards the end “Both Johnsons were opposed for reelection by men whose name starts with ‘G,'” for instance. But the one that always stuck with me was that Kennedy’s assassin shot him from a warehouse and was captured in a theater, and Lincoln’s assassin shot him in a theatre and was captured in a warehouse (ok, it was a barn, but c’mon).
Searching through the reprint of the Nov. 23, 1963 edition of the Dallas Morning News, I found a somewhat weird coincidence that I am surprised the coincidence/conspiracy guys never jumped on.
In the obituaries, right above Officer J.D. Tippit, the patrolman who was murdered by Oswald in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas as Oswald was fleeing, there is an obit for the name Surratt (Lillian Lorraine). Surratt was also the last name of the woman who owned the boarding house where the Lincoln assassination was plotted. Mary Surratt was convicted for complicity in the president’s murder, and was hanged–the first woman to be hanged by the US government. Considering that some conspiracy theorists, fueled by Thomas G. Buchanan’s 1964 book Who Killed Kennedy? (1964), believe that Tippit was part of the JFK conspiracy in the same way Surratt was part of the Lincoln conspiracy, it’s more noteworthy than counting letters.
As a boy, I found and read everything I could about the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations. It replaced my search for clues in the “Paul is Dead” mystery. There were plenty of out-there theories–all of which were chasing shadows. In the end, there was a conspiracy to kill Lincoln, and there wasn’t a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. But I never saw this one.
