Before Dallas: The Forgotten Attempt to Kill JFK
- Daniel Holland
- 7 hours ago
- 6 min read
The name John F Kennedy is so closely bound to the events of November 1963 that it can be difficult to remember how precarious his presidency was even before it began.
Mention the words “Kennedy assassination” and the name Lee Harvey Oswald immediately comes to mind. But the tragedy in Dallas was not the first time that an American citizen had tried to kill John Fitzgerald Kennedy. In fact, three years earlier, while Kennedy was still president elect, another man came disturbingly close. His name was Richard Paul Pavlick, and for a few quiet days in December 1960, the future of the United States balanced on a decision made by a solitary and deeply troubled man sitting in a parked car filled with explosives.
This is the largely forgotten story of the first recorded assassination attempt on John F Kennedy, a plot that unfolded not in Dallas but in Palm Beach, Florida, and one that was quietly sidelined by history itself.
A president elect under threat
In November 1960, John F Kennedy narrowly defeated Richard Nixon to become the 35th President of the United States. The election had been bitter, divisive, and emotionally charged. Kennedy was young, Catholic, charismatic, and the son of immense wealth. To supporters, he represented renewal and optimism. To others, he embodied everything they feared about a changing America.
Just weeks after the election, Kennedy travelled south to Palm Beach. The journey was presented as a brief holiday, a pause before the weight of office descended. He stayed at the Kennedy family compound, attending Mass on Sundays and preparing quietly for his inauguration on on the 20th of January, 1961.
Unbeknown to him, he was being watched.
Richard Pavlick arrives in Florida
Richard Paul Pavlick was 73 years old in December 1960. A retired postal worker from Belmont, New Hampshire, he lived a solitary life marked by long standing mental illness and growing obsession. Pavlick was known locally for writing angry letters and postcards, often rambling and confrontational in tone. But by late 1960, his anger had focused sharply on one man.
According to reporting at the time, including a detailed account published by TIME magazine in the last week of 1960, Pavlick had become fixated on Kennedy. He believed the presidency had been bought, that the Kennedy family’s wealth had corrupted American democracy, and that Kennedy’s Catholicism posed a threat to the country.
“The Kennedy money bought him the White House,” Pavlick later said. “I wanted to teach the United States the presidency is not for sale.”
Pavlick’s motivations were not impulsive. He planned carefully, travelling across states, observing Kennedy’s movements, and evaluating security. TIME reported that he “took ten sticks of dynamite, some blasting caps and wire, and began to shadow Jack Kennedy”. His journey took him to Hyannis Port in Massachusetts, to Georgetown in Washington DC, and finally to Palm Beach.
“The security,” Pavlick later remarked, “was lousy.”
A car packed with explosives
By early December, Pavlick had transformed his vehicle into a weapon. He lined the car with dynamite, described decades later by CNN as “enough to blow up a small mountain”, and installed a detonation switch within reach of the driver’s seat.
His plan was brutally simple. On Sunday morning, as Kennedy left his home to attend Mass, Pavlick would ram his car into the president elect’s limousine and detonate the explosives, killing them both.
On 11th of December, 1960, Pavlick parked near the Kennedy compound in Palm Beach and waited.
“He’s about 20 yards away from Kennedy across the street,” author Brad Meltzer later explained on the HistoryExtra podcast. “Pavlick knows Kennedy’s schedule. He goes to 10am church every Sunday. All Pavlick has to do is hit the gas, flip the switch, and boom goes the dynamite.”
The moment that stopped it all
As Kennedy emerged from the house that morning, Pavlick watched closely. But something unexpected happened.
Kennedy did not leave alone.
Instead, he walked towards his limousine accompanied by his wife Jacqueline and their children, Caroline and the infant John Jr, who was less than a month old. Pavlick, despite his willingness to kill Kennedy, recoiled at the idea of killing the family.
He did nothing.
Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch, in their 2025 book The JFK Conspiracy, describe this moment as one of profound irony. Pavlick’s hatred and bigotry had driven him to the brink of murder, yet a narrow and deeply personal sense of morality stopped him at the final moment.
He decided to try again another day.
He would never get the chance.
The letters that gave him away
Pavlick’s undoing came not through surveillance or informants, but through the habits he could not abandon. He wrote letters. Many letters.
Among the recipients was Thomas Murphy, the postmaster of Belmont, New Hampshire. Murphy noticed something unsettling about the postcards Pavlick sent. Their tone was erratic, aggressive, and increasingly alarming. More importantly, Murphy did what postmasters are trained to do. He examined the postmarks.
A pattern emerged.
Pavlick’s letters traced Kennedy’s movements. Wherever the president elect travelled, Pavlick seemed to follow. Alarmed, Murphy contacted the local police, who in turn notified the Secret Service.
The response was swift.
Arrest in Palm Beach
On 15th of December, 1960, a Palm Beach police officer stopped Pavlick for driving on the wrong side of the road. It was not an unusual traffic violation, but the stop was no accident. The Secret Service had issued an alert.
Inside Pavlick’s car, officers discovered the dynamite, blasting caps, and wiring intended for the assassination.
TIME later noted that although Pavlick never detonated his bomb, his plan was “material enough to be counted as the first recorded assassination attempt against Kennedy”.
Pavlick was arrested without resistance.
A plot lost to the headlines
Despite the severity of the threat, the story barely registered nationally. According to Meltzer, timing played a crucial role. Just one day after Pavlick’s arrest, on the 16th, two passenger planes collided mid air over New York City, killing 134 people. The disaster dominated headlines and public attention.
Then, less than three years later, came Dallas.
The Kennedy assassination in 1963 overshadowed everything that came before it. The Zapruder film, the motorcade, the name Lee Harvey Oswald, all became embedded in the public imagination. Pavlick’s attempt faded into obscurity.
Even Kennedy himself contributed to the story’s disappearance. According to Josh Mensch, the president elect brushed it off. Kennedy had faced death repeatedly, from wartime service to chronic illness, and he did not dwell on the incident.
The Secret Service, however, took it very seriously.
Mental illness and institutionalisation
Following his arrest, Pavlick was committed to a mental institution in 1961, one week after Kennedy’s inauguration. Charges were eventually dropped after medical evaluations concluded that Pavlick was unable to distinguish right from wrong and was legally insane.
Nevertheless, he remained institutionalised until 1966, nearly six years after his arrest and three years after Oswald fired the fatal shots in Dallas.
By the time Pavlick was released, history had moved on.
A nation divided
Meltzer and Mensch place Pavlick’s actions within the broader context of American division in 1960. Anti Catholic sentiment was widespread. Kennedy was only the second Catholic presidential candidate in US history, and the first, Al Smith in 1928, had been defeated largely because of his religion.
Pavlick’s prejudice was well documented. Years earlier, he had attempted to form a Protestant only veterans group that excluded Catholics and Jews. The 1960 campaign intensified his rage.
“Kennedy wasn’t just dealing with political opponents,” Mensch has said. “He was confronting entrenched prejudice.”
The authors draw deliberate parallels with modern political polarisation, noting how fear and hatred can be weaponised, sometimes with deadly consequences.
What might have been
Had Richard Pavlick acted in 1960, Lee Harvey Oswald would never have pulled the trigger in Dallas. The Cuban Missile Crisis, the civil rights legislation, the space race, all would have unfolded differently, or perhaps not at all.
It is one of history’s quieter what ifs, overshadowed by louder tragedies.
And yet, for a few tense moments on a Palm Beach street, the presidency of John F Kennedy almost ended before it began.
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