- WASHINGTON (AP) -- Two and a half years before his assassination, John F.
Kennedy seemed to have had a premonition of his own death. He questioned
whether God had a place for him and jotted "I am ready" on a
slip of paper his secretary found during a trans-Atlantic flight.
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- The paper that Kennedy's longtime personal
secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, tucked into her diary was included in 60,000
pages of documents that were made public Wednesday by the National Archives
and the Assassination Records Review Board, which is charged with accumulating
any documents that could shed light on the Nov. 22, 1963 assassination.
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- Lincoln wrote that shortly before midnight
on June 5, 1961, Kennedy summoned her to his cabin on the presidential
plane and asked her to clear away some papers so he could go to sleep.
-
- "As I started to clear the table,
a little slip of paper fell to the floor," she wrote. "I picked
it up and in his own handwriting were these words: 'I know that there is
a god and I see a storm coming. If he has a place for me, I am ready."'
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- Lincoln found the note on the trip home
from Europe after Kennedy's summit meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev
in Vienna -- an unsuccessful meeting that resolved none of the outstanding
Cold War problems between the two superpowers.
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- Lincoln, who died in 1995 in Washington,
served Kennedy from the earliest days of his Senate career until his assassination.
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- Another diary entry in her handwriting
showed that Kennedy was concerned about televising the space flight of
astronaut Alan Shepard, whose death Tuesday came a day before the opening
of the Kennedy papers.
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- "He is afraid of the reaction of
the public in case there is a mishap in the firing (of the rocket),"
she noted, four days before Shepard became the first American to fly in
space.
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- Lincoln's papers include her stenographic
notes of a presidential conversation -- later disclosed in her 1968 book,
Kennedy and Johnson -- in which Kennedy made clear his intent to dump Lyndon
Johnson as his running mate in the 1964 election.
-
- The conversation occurred three days
before Kennedy was killed in Dallas.
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