The quiet, tree-lined town of Gilmanton, N.H. enjoyed a fleeting notoriety when Townswoman Grace Metalious renamed it Peyton Place. Behind Gilmanton’s doors, Novelist Metalious found fictional murderers, abortionists and deviates. But somehow she overlooked Richard Pavlick, 73, a slight, white-haired postal clerk and onetime mental patient, whose only aberration seemed to be writing angry letters to newspapers and to public figures. One day last month Richard Pavlick decided to do something worthy of inclusion in Peyton Place: he made up his mind to kill a President-elect.
He took ten sticks of dynamite, some blasting caps and wire, and began to shadow Jack Kennedy. He cased the cottage in Hyannisport, sized up the house in Georgetown, headed south for Palm Beach. “The security,” he said later, “was lousy.” His plans were to rig himself up as a human bomb and explode in Kennedy’s presence. “The Kennedy money bought him the White House,” Richard Pavlick said. “I wanted to teach the United States the presidency is not for sale.”
But security was not all that asleep. The Secret Service got word of a letter Pavlick had written, proclaiming his ambitions. A nationwide alarm went out for his arrest. On Royal Poinciana Way in Palm Beach last week, a policeman spotted Pavlick’s car, arrested him for driving on the wrong side of the center line. In the car, police officers found the dynamite. “In a way, I’m glad it’s turned out the way it has,” said Richard Pavlick as he was held on $100,000 bail for the first assassination attempt on Jack Kennedy. “But I don t like the publicity.”
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