Episode 58: JFK - "Winter Kills"

Winter Kills is supposed to be a political satire / dark comedy in the vein of Dr. Strangelove. However, it's nowhere near as good and really seems to be a further bizarre smear campaign against JFK and his memory. After reading The Manchurian Candidate, which was great and was a book JFK himself liked, this seems particularly like a slap in the face.

Links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_Kills_(novel)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_Kills_(film)

https://tubitv.com/movies/680181/winter-kills

https://consaracytheories.com/blog/f/jfk---in-2024-will-anything-change?blogcategory=JFK

Need more? You can visit the website at: https://consaracytheories.com/ or my own site at: https://saracausey.com/. Don't forget to check out the blog at: https://consaracytheories.com/blog. 

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Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Winter Kills, Richard Condon, political satire, dark comedy, JFK assassination, conspiracy theories, Jeff Bridges, Lee Harvey Oswald, satire.

Welcome to con-sara-cy theories. Are you ready to ask questions you shouldn't and find information you're not supposed to know? Well, you're in the right place. Here is your host, Sara Causey. 

Hello, hello. Thanks for tuning in. In tonight's episode, I will be talking about winter kills, both the novel written by Richard Condon in 1974 and its analogous film adaptation from 1979 if Richard Condon's name sounds familiar to you, he was also the author of The Manchurian Candidate, which was a fantastic book. When I first heard about this, I was like, Oh, I don't know, because I was told it was a political satire, slash dark, dark comedy about the death of JFK. And I was like, I don't even think I want to go there. Like, why? I mean, why would you even want that? And I've admitted my own hypocrisy on this issue before, because I watch a film like Dr Strangelove, which is a political satire slash dark comedy about nuclear annihilation. You have Slim Pickens riding the bomb on the way down, and that hilarious exchange between Lionel Mandrake and bat guano about shooting the Coca Cola machine to get spare change. And it's like, well, if we survive this, you're going to have to answer to the Coca Cola company. Well, things haven't changed very much, because the corporations are still in charge around here. I laugh at that, but then in watching Kubrick's adaptation of Lolita, I was completely repulsed. He tries to put in some moments of dark comedy, and for me, it just doesn't work. It's a terrible film. Not that Kubrick's filmmaking itself is bad, but it's a terrible subject matter about a grown adult man who's trying to groom his 14 year old step daughter to be his lover. It's not funny. I find it disgusting. So I had a similar ugh vibe from winter kills, where I'm like, why would you even want to make a film even on the fringe of a joke about the murder of JFK? I don't get it. Spoilers abound. If you choose to read this novel or you choose to watch the film as of this recording, it's available free of charge on to be but you know my disclaimer there. Films come and go. It could be here today, gone tomorrow. If you are planning to read the book or to watch the film, I don't want to spoil anything for you. I'd rather that you check things out and make up your own mind. So if you continue on with me, I will assume that you're fine with spoilers. So Let's saddle up and take this weird ride. I'm going to talk mostly about the film, and then I will interject here and there where I can remember that the film diverges from the novel, as is so often the case, the book goes into much greater detail, and there's more plot development, there's more character development that you get in the novel, as opposed to what you're going to get in a film. The film is more in your face, I think, and it tries to push the comedic element more so some people have labeled it as a Gonzo film, which I think is pretty good, because when we think about gonzo journalism, representing in your face, journalism where there's no pretext, there's no supposition of objectivity, it's somebody pushing a clear agenda. I think that's a fair assessment. I do. So the movie opens with Nick, and he's played by Jeff Bridges. In the film, it opens with Nick calling a woman named Yvette, but getting her answering machine he is urgently summoned to a helipad, so he's been working on like an oil rig, and he gets urgently summoned to a helipad, and a man who was in an industrial accident on the oil rig claims that he was the second pop Popper, because Nick's brother Tim was the former US President Timothy Keegan, who was murdered in circumstances very similar to JFK, and in the novel, he might as well have just called President Keegan con F genety and and the character pa could have been co Gen Edie senior. That's how obvious it all was. I mean, at one point, Keegan is described as being nothing but red hair and teeth. I was like, Oh God, here we go. The second murder of JFK. We have to also murder his character and anything that could have been said positive about him. I thought a lot about primary colors, and, more specifically, the skit that was done on S. And L to lampoon primary colors, where they're talking about teve torbs, dobb bowl, Lamar Alexander, number two. I mean, it's very clear who's being talked about here. There's, there's no mystery involved. Now, one difference is that, in the novel, Keegan is a widower. He gets married at like 2223 his wife dies sadly, and then he just decides to not ever get remarried, because he wants to get a bunch of sympathy sex from women who feel bad that he's a widower. And then he just has the brother, Nick, who's actually is half a brother. So it's not like the entire Kennedy family, where you have multiple brothers and sisters, and you know, a large, large family there. You also, in the novel, get this back story that the keegans are not even Irish. They're actually German, but there was a name change. So it's like even the presumption of Keegan being this Irish American is a fraud. So there's that. So this man named Arthur Fletcher makes a confession in front of Nick that he killed Nick's brother. He relays his position and that of the first pop Popper, and he says that he was hired by a man named Casper Jr, and he got $25,000 for one morning's work. He admits where he left the Boomstick in the building, and his fingerprints are on it and his name is taped to it. Nick leaves to see if the man's story is true. What better way to verify it than to go and look for the Boomstick. We learn that several people have died under mysterious circumstances, even if they weren't involved in the murder. Nick calls an associate named Miles who calls Captain Heller from the Philadelphia Police Department. So in both the novel and the film, instead of the Pop Pop taking place in Dallas. It happens in Philadelphia. And sure enough, they go to investigate, and Nick finds the Boomstick. Miles says, I'm sorry, you'll have to live it all over again. Heller suggests that they take it to the to the Foxtrot Bravo, India. And Nick says, why not? They probably built it. And then miles laughs maniacally, and as Nick is distracted, we hear shots ring out, and everyone in the car is murdered, except for Nick. Now that's a difference from the novel. Things don't actually happen that way. In the book, there's a bit more intrigue about Captain Heller And what actually happens to the boom stick. If you read the novel, Nick tries to call his father for help, but gets connected to some kind of fixer named John Saray. Nick goes to the desert to find his father, who has been playing golf and cavorting with women in winter. Kills the Warren Commission report is stylized as the Pickering report. Nick's mom shows up and seems to be crazy and a bit dingy, and this is also quite a bit different from the book. So in the novel, Tim and Nick have different mothers, and like Nick's mother, actually takes him away from this evil character, Paul. And Nick and Paul don't get along for a very, very long time. They're estranged from one another, but then his mother dies, I think, in a car accident, and that's how Nick and Paul wind up reconnecting. But the idea in the novel that she was like disheveled and crazy and dingy, no, she wasn't. Nick calls Yvette again, but still only gets the answering machine. Paul claims he's been up all night talking to people and getting a plan together. They'll have to solve the mystery themselves before going going to the current president. Otherwise, he'll just resurrect the Pickering commission, who Paul refers to as fucking corpses. I laughed out loud there, I have to admit, because I was like, well, that's not so far off, really, from the Warren Commission. Pa tells him that he's been duped by phony policemen, and Nick is confused. Pa promises to make Nick a legend for solving his brother's murder. Pa wants Nick to get in politics and brags on the number of times that Tim had sex while in the White House. He says he'll set up a meeting with the oil bear and z k Dawson so Nick can question him. Dawson has a huge ranch with armed guards. And I thought actually at this moment of John Hamm and Fargo. If you have watched the Fargo series, the most recent one that was on FX, John ham plays this like root and tootin, corrupt sheriff in like, the middle of nowhere in North Dakota, I think, and he's like, super corrupt and crazy, and thinks that he's gonna raise a militia. I thought of that immediately while driving someone in an armor tank tries to run Nick down, and it suddenly looks like Nick is in a battlefield. Dawson is played by Sterling Hayden, who was Jack D Ripper, by the way, Dr Strangelove. Nick tells him that he's trying to find Casper Jr. Dawson says he knows why Nick is really there, because Nick believes that he had something to do with Tim's death, just like all the other conspiracy lovers and conspiracy loving America, Dawson tells Nick that he would have no reason. And to kill Tim, because actually, Tim was very good for all of his businesses and all of his investments, so it just wouldn't make sense for him to go after Tim. Dawson says he's been so upset about all of the rumors, and especially that the rumors that upset his own daughter that he decided to do some investigating on his own, and he has uncovered that it was the Philadelphia Police Department that killed Tim and that Captain Heller was in charge of the operation. So Dawson suggests that Nick go back to Philadelphia and have a talk with them. Nick tells Dawson he can't do that because Heller is dead. Dawson says, well, then go talk to his sidekick, a man named Ray Doty. A cavalcade of Dawson's tanks fire at Nick to speed him down the road and get him the hell out of dodge. Now this is completely different from what happens in the novel. In the novel, Pa sets up this meeting with z k Dawson, and he tells Nick to go to like a suburb of Tulsa, which cracks me up, because now we're starting to get into some of my stomping grounds, go to a suburb of Tulsa, and he'll find Dawson in like an old ramshackle farmhouse, and he takes all of his meetings from a dentist chair. So automatically, you're thinking, what kind of oil baron is going to be in a ramshackle farmhouse, meeting people leaned back in a dental chair. That's how it is in the novel. I mean, this is supposed to be weird satire, after all. So Paul calls Nick to tell him that his right man from Brunei is dead. This man named Kee Fitz, who had been Nick's right hand man, and key fits is also kind of a conspiracy theory nerd in this, in the novel and in the film, keep its is dead, and then also the orderly who took the statement from this man named Arthur, that said that he killed Tim. So it's like the witnesses to this meeting are dead. That's also somewhat accurate from the book. There was like a stenographer and some other people, an attorney, I think that helped Arthur give his statement. But all these people that were there when the statement was made. Die Turk. Turk Arthur, aka Turk, is also dead as well. So like anybody that was involved in this confession, they're all dead. Pa says that he will coordinate a meeting between Nick and Doty in Philadelphia. The plane that Nick is on trying to get back to Philadelphia, nearly crashes and gives Nick another scare. He meets Dodie in a chicken house to find out what he knows. Dodie relays a story to Nick that Casper Jr started to lean on a man named Joe diamond. And Joe diamond is a nightclub owning mobster who's very, very clearly based on Jack Ruby. Joe meets his mobster buddy, Game Boy in Arizona, and Joe is offered a big contract to help pay back his debts from cheating other mobsters over the years, he has also been in Cuba, and Game Boy claims that there's a fox trot Bravo India file on him as being involved with communism. Joe protests and says that he was out of Cuba 10 years before Castro ever got into power, Joe is told he'll kill Willie Arnold, and Willie Arnold is the stand in here for Lee Harvey Oswald, while another man will actually kill President Keegan. Joe doesn't want to do this, but he's forced into it. Willie Arnold is, as I say very clearly, the stand in for Lee Harvey Oswald, and he will be installed in a TV warehouse as the motorcade goes by, a boom stick will be planted, along with some spent shells on the floor, and Willie Arnold will be the Patsy, even though he won't know it until it's too late after the hit, Willie will go home, and the police will send a patrol car for him. Nick asks why the mafia would want to kill Tim, and Doty replies that it was for business reasons. He says that Tim took $2 million in cash from the Syndicate, and they expected him to look out for them, but instead, he doesn't do anything to help them, so they feel double crossed. Nick doesn't believe it, because Tim didn't need the money. And Dodie says, who knows, but whoever it is, they still have tremendous amounts of clout, even after all these years, Nick finally connects with Yvette in New York, and they have wild sex. To me, it actually just seems like a gratuitous way to put some TNA into the film. I mean, they are sexually involved in the novel, but I mean, you know, it's almost like in order to make sure that the men continue to watch this film, we have to have some boobs and butts. Nick proposes during this trip, but Yvette doesn't actually want to marry him. She tells him that she's the assistant editor at a national magazine. Now, this is different from the book, because Yvette is not involved with the magazine. In the book, there's actually a completely separate character who Nick sleeps with that's involved with being the Associate Editor, and he has this big crisis of conscious conscience of like, How can I propose to one lady and then go sleep with another one? I guess I'm becoming too much like Tim, and I'm like, Oh God, here we go. Here we go. It's implied that Yvette is bisexual and has a woman lover coming over and Nick Lee. In a fit of anger, he goes to the family's penthouse apartment to fume at the house. A maid tries to murder Nick by throwing him off the ledge, but she doesn't succeed. This is also different from the novel, because in the novel, it's like an actual professional pop Popper, and not a maid. Yvette meets nick the next day for lunch. He still wants to marry her, but he doesn't pressure her. He says that he needs the magazine's help so he can contact somebody high up in the mafia. He also wants to look through any information The magazine has about the mobster Joe diamond. She's excited and agrees to help him. Pa is mad because he told Nick not to tell anything to the press. Nick also learns that pa has the restaurant bugged because he says that lots of people more important than Nick make deals there, and he needs to know everything that goes on the penthouse is also bugged. Pa is a consummate spy. Yvette sets Nick up with a man named Irving mentor, who she claims is the magazine's direct line to the mafia. Pa gives Nick an assortment of weapons to take with him, and then says he's going to into the hospital for blood transfusions from young people, I thought like of battering at that moment, Nick goes into a store, obviously and overtly operated by the mob. Irving says Game Boy ordered the hit and tries to leave. Nick is angry and demands more information. Joe owes money to mobsters, so he leaves for Cuba and gets involved with every man in high places he can find. And it's more than implied that when we say he gets involved with every man, he gets involved with them. Irving claims that Casper Jr was an actor hired by Harry small, the head of federal studios. Harry hated Tim when he stopped having sex with Ella May, a top actress who killed herself over Tim Irving's cat dies from poisoning, and the building blows up shortly after Nick walks out the door. Now, again, these things happen in the novel. It's just a different set of events. Some there are certain things in the movie where things that happen in the novel get sort of mashed together, I guess, for just speed and expediency. Nick goes back to PA, who has the world's most posh hospital suite. He tells Nick that he's chasing after nonsense because federal studios would have no interest in murdering Nick, especially not over LMA, because her movies were already losing money. It wouldn't have made any sense to go after Tim for that. He also tells Nick that he has interlocking companies that control federal studios, and there's no way they would have murdered Tim POM wants Nick to meet Frank mayo, a big time mobster who will know more than this hustler that he already met with. Paul has porn star nurses who help him, and he offers for Nick to participate, but he declines to. And there is a clear implication here of like, Well, Tim would have done it. So again, I'm like rolling my eyes, going, here we go. Here we go. Mayo says he feels sorry about what happened to Tim. And Nick asks who actually made the contract to kill Tim, and mayo claims that he doesn't know. He says that Joe diamond had no connections in Cuba and that he's never heard of anyone named Irving mentor, who's in the mob. Nick is angry because he realizes that everybody is jerking his chain. He goes to national magazine to call on Yvette in person at work, and the receptionist tells him that the HR department has no record of anybody named Yvette Malone ever having worked there. He goes back to the apartment building where they've been doing the mattress Mambo, and the doorman says that nobody named Yvette has ever lived there. The woman in the apartment he's describing is 62 years old. When Nick returns to the family penthouse, he finds key fits in his bedroom, even though he had been told earlier that key fits was dead, Nick faints key fits. Key fits faked his own death because so many people have been murdered thus far, key fits thought he would be better off dead. He tells Nick that it's all an exercise in futility. Go down one rabbit trail over and over and over and over until you just give up. You'll never get a straight answer. You'll slowly go insane. Kefit suggests that Nick go to see Sarayu, one of His Father's right hand men. Saruti shows Nick their archives of various blackmail operations. He discovers that Paul basically has his own November Sierra alpha to spy on everyone. Nick tells saruty that he has shown up at the compound without an invitation because he wants to find Yvette. Saray tells him that's not possible, because Yvette has been abducted. Nick asks who would have abducted Yvette, and Saray blames it on Casper Jr. Saray tells Nick that Yvette is involved in the conspiracy and that it wasn't the tubesters, which is an obvious play on the teamsters that got to Joe diamond. He gives yet another insane story about Frank Mayo the mob. That Nick just met, went to the tubesters for help in murdering Tim, and he fingers a woman named Lola as being the one who contacted Frank mayo. So in Sara D's story, Lola is ultimately the person that everyone is looking for. And I've written in my notes. So here we go again. Lol Lola camante, who is played in a very brief cameo by Elizabeth Taylor, was a washed up movie actress who went from being Tim's paramour to being a procurer of women for Tim, and in exchange for her providing women for him to sleep with on a continual basis, he provides her with fame and fortune. Saruti tells Nick that pa knew all about this, and he also indulged in some of the women that Lola was procuring, and that pa even had his own business connections with Lola. We learned that Lola was responsible for the $2 million campaign contribution from the mafia because Frank Mayo wanted Castro out of Cuba so that the casinos and the brothels could be restored. Tim was unaware of the campaign contribution and all the strings attached to it, so he refuses to go along with Lola's plan, and she becomes very angry. It was not Tim that was involved in the campaign contribution anyway, it was PA. Tim gets very angry with PA and storms out. And Tim never speaks to PA or to Lola again, saruti admits that the real ZK Dawson hasn't left Venezuela in years. The goofball in the tank on the ranch wasn't him. He now switches the blame to Dawson's daughter, who's actually Yvette. He tells Nick that Yvette was one of Tim's mistresses. Nick demands to know if Pa was really the mastermind of Tim's murder. Saray tells him that pa groomed Tim for the job for years because he knew the White House was a place to generate a lot of cash for the Keegan business interests. Everything went to Keegan's head, and he wanted to be a real president. Pa feels betrayed and screwed out of money, so Tim's got to go. Yvette is dead, not merely abducted, but killed. Now we get to the showdown between pA and Nick. Nick asked pa if he really killed Tim just for money. Pa is angry that Nick would even ask such a question of him. Pa refers to himself as the King of Thieves, but not a killer. Pa blames Tim's death on Saray. Pa says he's not really in control. He's merely a front for saruti. Saruti is really the proverbial man behind the curtain. Pa tries to get kefits to murder Nick when that doesn't work. Pa goes out on a ledge. He goes over the ledge in a suicide but tells Nick business advice on his way down. And thus concludes the film. So a lot to digest there. One part of the satire that I would say I agree with is this aspect of everybody blaming everybody else. It reminds me of that meme where all of the spider men are standing in a circle, pointing at one another. It was the mafia. No, it was the Charlie India Alpha. No, it was the Foxtrot Bravo India. It was Hoover, it was Johnson. It was a jealous husband. It was the man's own family. It was Castro, it was Khrushchev. I mean, on and on and on it goes. And I think people in the pop, pop research community often get lambasted by others saying, well, you're going to waste your life. It's going to be a waste of your time. It's going to be a waste of energy. You're not going to bring him back. It's not like if you solve this mystery in a way that would make Sherlock Holmes look like the amateur hour, that Jack Kennedy is going to come back, and we're going to all have him back again. It's it's over with. He's dead and gone long dead at this point. So go on and do something else with your life. Quit worrying about it. Let him rest in peace, like you're doing him a favor. Let him rest in peace, and you go on and live your life. And typically, what they mean by that is worry about who Taylor Swift is dating. Worry about who's going to be in the next Super Bowl, worry about who's going to win the World Series. Get into bread and circus and leave this issue alone, because you're never going to know anyway, so you might as well drop it. Is that kind of confusion, obfuscation and disinformation done on purpose? Yeah, I'm sure it is, and that's one reason why you just go down one rabbit hole after another, after another, after another, and there's such a lack of certainty that's like at the beginning of last year, I asked the question of, would anything really change? Would we get any information that would be a game changer. In fact, I titled it JFK. In 2024 Will anything change, and in big type I put spoiler alert, I highly doubt it. And we've been told documents will be disclassified this president or that candidate or whoever will actually. To allow some new documents and some new information to see the light of day, and then, more often than not, it never happens, and we're just left waiting. But oh, for national security purposes, we still can't do it. Still can't release it. I'm with the people in the research community who say there's not ever going to be the proverbial smoking gun. No pun intended. There's not going to be this moment where, aha, there's one document, there's one thing that's finally so revealing that even the harshest critic of the research community has to say, Well, you've done it. You've solved the mystery. Now it will probably just be a slow dribble of information over the course of years, decades, probably, and it will take dedicated researchers putting together all of the puzzle pieces. But I don't and I could be wrong on this. There's always room to be wrong. I could be wrong, but I highly doubt that there will be one document, one thing where everybody universally goes, aha. Now we've been caught. You've been caught. We know who you, who you are and what you did. I just don't think so. Now, at some point in the future, could there be something along the lines of Daphne Park, like when I was reading the golden thread, and the author talks about the London book review where Baron Leah says that allegedly, Daphne Park told him, yeah, that was us. We did it, referring allegedly to MI six and the murder of Patrice Lumumba. Yeah, that was us. We did it. We're claiming credit for that now, even though plenty of people feel that the Charlie India Alpha was also involved, could something like that happen? Could you have some group or some agency eventually down the road that says, Yeah, we did it. You could. It's just going to take a lot more time to continue poisoning that well. And I think that's one of the reasons why a movie slash novel like winter kills I find so distasteful. Because even though it's satire, you're still drawing water from that same poisoned well. He was a womanizer. He was vapid and unintelligent. He was just nothing but red hair and teeth. Talk about reductionist. Whoa. Holy smokes. He was nothing but red hair and teeth. Wow. But the story hits on a lot of these rumors and a lot of these aspersions. Kennedy was stupid. He didn't have any deep ideology. His father railroaded him into the presidency. He didn't actually have any desire to be in public service. He was 24/7 365, penis. He had procures. He had Madams. He was screwing around with actresses. He took money from the mob, and then double crossed them. He had tried to be friendly with the mob, but then double crossed them. His father was a piece of crap. The family is a piece of crap, etc. I mean, it touches on all of these things that have, in my opinion, been deliberately manipulated and deliberately used to exactly to poison that well, because if you give it another 100 years, you let more people die off, and you let the message continue to fester that he was a garbage sack, then you have some agency or some group claim credit and say, Yeah, that was us. We did it. And by the way, we did you a favor. You might have people that agree with that. Oh, he was a no good he was a womanizer. He was a drug head, because that's part of it now too. It was too blase to smoke pot. He was a coke sniffer and an acid head. And you're like, what with all of his health problems? Really? Okay, wow, that's a lot to digest. It's like they're just throwing every shrimp they've got on this Barbie. I wrote a series of blog posts over on the conserracy theories about this exact topic. It starts to get like Jon Lovitz, his character, the pathological liar. Would you believe he was a drug head? Would you believe he was a womanizer? Would you believe the whole family sucked? Would you believe Bobby Kennedy was involved? Would you believe this? Would you believe that? And it's like, what, what? What? What is the need to throw this much gasoline on a fire that, in and of itself, makes me suspicious. If you go to the film's Wikipedia page, you will read Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film one star out of four, and wrote winter kills rapes the memory of President John F Kennedy while giving his late father a few dozen kicks in the head too. It revels in its every degrading scene, one feels a little less clean just having seen this picture. End quote, I don't think that that's necessarily a bad way of putting it, I just sort of sat back and thought, why would anybody want to write this novel, and then why would anybody want to make it into a film? It was definitely a things that make you go, Hmm, kind of moment. As I said, the character in the novel really should have just been called con F. Identity. It was so obvious that it was about JFK and is Richard Condon's point to to throw his lot in with the well, he had it coming. He was a garbage can. He wasn't good, he wasn't intelligent. At some point, he decided he really wanted to be a president, but he had too many people pulling his puppet strings, and so he got killed for trying to actually run the office. Is Richard Condon seriously saying that? I mean, is he trying to do it through the lens of humor, or is the whole thing just sarcastic, strange analysis? I'm not even sure how to put it. It is such a weird novel, and it is such a weird movie, very over the top, very campy. The film is, I don't know, decide for yourself. The closest thing that I can say is, I would say that Gene Siskel gets it right. It seems to really rake JFK memory over the coals, along with Joe senior for good measure, trying to just poison the well for the both of them. Now, is this a Charlie India alpha type thing, where they want to really, really make sure that you believe JFK was a scumbag and we're all better off that he was dead. Judge for yourself. Stay a little bit crazy, and I will see you in the next episode. Thanks for listening. 

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