JFK Post-Assassination BBQ


Quoting from pages 277-278 of The Astronaut Wives Club:

Later that day, many of the Mercury and Gemini families gathered at the boat slip in Timber Cove, rolling their barbecue grills from their backyards down the streets to the landing. Somehow it just didn’t seem right staying at home. The Glenns would soon be off to Washington; they were the only astronaut couple that had been invited to the funeral.


So much for the idiotic assertion by one poster that this event was fabricated for the series.

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It wasn't "fabricated for the series." It was fabricated, period. Astronaut's Wives Club is a novel. It is fiction. It is based on events that really happened, but the details, conversations, descriptions of what a character thought, comes from Lily's imagination. Yes, she interviewed many wives and did tons of research, but that does not mean the scenes in a book of fiction are real. I love the show. I started reading the book about three weeks ago. I was absolutely amazed and delighted how true to the book the TV show is! That scene of the men wheeling their BBQ grills down the sidewalk is straight from the book. The TV script writers had easy jobs because Lily did so well in telling a story. Someone posted that they would believe Lily over the Carpenters, which is absolutely ridiculous. Someone who actually lived the story is a lot more reliable than the storyteller. Of course you will have different viewpoints. Rene's daughter says the BBQ after JFK died is made up. She said everyone was home watching TV. She was there. So I choose to believe someone who actually lived through the event rather than the writer born in 1981.

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You moron. The Astronaut Wives Club was a New York Times non-fiction bestseller! The book is filled with quotes from the actual astronauts wives themselves. There's even a quote from Rene Carpenter directly to Lily Koppel, the author, on why the wives' stories were never told until now. Whatever Rene is saying now, she clearly had no problem talking at length with Koppel. So did Betty Grissom, Jo Schirra and a bunch of the other wives. It's their story of the times, in their words.

As to the Carpenter kids, they weren't quoted in that Washington Post article, were they? You made that up. You fabricated a lie, although for what bizarre reason I can't imagine. In fact, the full description of the day of JFK's assassination Koppel notes that the families watched on TV at home and then got together for a memorial barbecue. So, no falsehood in the book after all.

Someone who actually lived the story is a lot more reliable than the storyteller.


False. When Stephen Ambrose was compiling oral histories for his various books on WWII, he found that the recollections of war veterans were highly inaccurate. He made a specific point of fact-checking their stories against official records, and found that often their recollections contradicted those of other men in their own unit, let alone the Army's carefully compiled war logs. If you bomb Bastogne on a certain day there's generally going to be thousands of eyewitnesses that it happened that day, no matter if Uncle Ed says it was a different day and he was on that mission, goddamnit!

What makes accurate history is a neutral historical author using multiple sources to compile a truthful account of events...which is what Lily Koppel has done.

Now, go stick your head in a wood-chipper and stop posting BS here.

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Oh, so I see you are the same person who didn't like my confusion about the book post! If you are interested, I found a really neat clip of Rene campaigning for John Glenn. Scroll down a little ways to see it. They don't even identify her as Rene in the clip, but you can tell it is her. You can see it's Annie in back of her on the right. If you search that e-footage page with "Annie Glenn," another very short video will come up. That one actually does have Annie talking to a school girl; she asks her if she should be in school. This historical stuff is just fantastic!

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