I always love hearing a book’s origin story.
The moment that lightning struck in a writer’s imagination and the seed for a great story - fiction or nonfiction - was planted. So often, it’s a moment you would never expect.
For me and The Lincoln-Kennedy Coincidences, it happened in a museum gift shop…three decades ago.
Best guess, I was probably about eleven and remember the feeling quite clearly. Like a lightning bolt sizzling through my body.
Right there, hanging on the wall—or perhaps in one of those hinged frame-turner deals with which you can leaf through different posters—was an eleven-by-fourteen introduction to a genuine mystery of American history.
To its credit, its bold headline ended with a question mark, framing its thesis as merely a possibility, not a declaration. Still, printed on a thick parchment deliberately made to look wrinkled, aged, and important, it looked just like the other replicas hanging beside it: namely, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Gettysburg Address. Add to that the historically accurate reproductions of Civil War currencies and maps that looked like they were taken straight off Ulysses Grant’s whiskey-stained living room wall, and this poster with the question mark headline bore a bit more weight. Call it legitimacy by association.
“Lincoln-Kennedy Coincidence?” it ruminated in thick black ink across the top, bookended by images of, no surprise, presidential order number sixteen and number thirty-five: Abraham Lincoln and John Kennedy. Beneath the headline, the poster ticked off eighteen overlapping or similar details that connected both the assassinations of the two presidents and the presidents themselves.
At first glance, my eleven-or-possibly-twelve-year-old self stood there slack-jawed, taking in the list and burrowing its details deep down into my long-term memory. It was genuinely one of the most fascinating things I’d ever seen.
Yet for as entertaining as the content of the poster was, that wasn’t what sealed the deal for me. Even at that young age, I knew a little something about odds and the likelihood of coincidence. A very little something, but I knew that for there to be this many coincidences suggested the possibility that none of it was actually coincidence.
In retrospect, that was probably the moment I became mesmerized by both of these events in one fell swoop. In the years that followed, with all the historically slanted term papers and book reports I wrote, books and articles I read, and movies and documentaries I watched, my fascination with the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations began in that moment—when I became convinced they were somehow cosmically connected.
And though it took roughly a half of a lifetime for that seed to ultimately bloom into a full grown flower, that encounter is the moment that started it all.