Thurston Gauleiter

In 2007, NPR published an excerpt from Heymann’s American Legacy: The Story of John and Caroline Kennedy. The published excerpt included a testament from a man Heymann identified as Thurston Gauleiter who allegedly had eavesdropped on a conversation between Caroline Kennedy and her Uncle Teddy during an airline flight in November in 2002. On November 20 Ted and Caroline boarded a commercial airliner and flew back to the United States, wrote Heymann. Thurston Gauleiter, an investment banker from Los Angeles, sat behind them in first class. “I couldn’t help but overhear snippets of conversation,” he said (Heymann: Legacy, 4).

However, on the 22nd of September in 2014, seven years after the fact, to their quoted excerpt, NPR appended an editorial note regarding Heymann’s questioned work: the editorial note essentially disavowed American Legacy, questioned its verity and explained that NPR was not aware of the many questions surrounding Heymann’s literary works when they published the excerpt. NPR noted: Heymann wrote that the Kennedys spoke during a flight from Paris to New York City on Nov. 20, 2002. But, it appears Sen. Kennedy could not have been on such a flight. Senator Kennedy, explained NPR, appeared in the Senate chamber on November the 19th; and he was still in Washington on November the 20th where he participated in the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award ceremony. It also isn’t certain, NPR’s editorial note added, that the person who supposedly overheard the Kennedys’ conversation, Thurston Gauleiter, existed. Research by attorney Donna Morel and by NPR turn up no evidence of him.

Neither Donna Morel nor National Public Radio, who is also affiliated with BBC World Service, could verify that Mr. Gauleiter actually existed. Still, if we momentarily accept that Mr. Gauleiter was a real, breathing human being, he simply lied about what he said he overheard during his airplane ride from Paris, France. A sad but also a comical indictment of Clem.1