Longboat Key Kiwanis Club meets political thriller author

Everyone in author Jon Dietz’s generation remembers the moment they heard President John F. Kennedy was killed in Dallas.

Dietz was a high school freshman in his first class of the day. From that moment, his life took turns including long stints as a newspaper reporter at the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and as an investigator for the 12th Judicial Circuit Court’s Office of the Public Defender, but he stayed interested in Kennedy’s life and death. It took him 58 years, but he came up with a broad story and answers for the way the investigation went. 

“Everybody in my generation remembers where they were when that happened, and you know, I just never lost interest in the Kennedys,” Dietz said.

On April 21, Dietz visited the Kiwanis Club of Longboat Key to discuss his second book, “Fallen Prince.” It’s a political thriller that combines historical and fictional characters to tell the story of Kennedy’s death and the minds behind the Warren Commission that investigated the events. 

“I always wanted to write this book, but I couldn't until I figured out why the Warren Commission behaved the way it did,” Dietz said. “Now I know, but I won’t tell you. You're going to have to read it. I have fictional characters, intermingling with historical characters because I didn't want to write a dry recitation of facts.”

Dietz opened his presentation to the club with a contrast of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination investigation versus that of Kennedy. The former investigation took 90 days from the day the president was killed to the day the conspirators were punished. The latter spawned nine separate investigations that were all disbanded when newly installed President Lyndon B. Johnson established the Warren Commission. Within the story, Dietz cites the Katzenbach memo, the track of the bullet through Kennedy’s head and his missing brain. 

“For decades, I read every article on the Kennedy family that I could, and the beauty of this is that when I decided to (write the book) the internet saved me,” Dietz said. “A lot of this material I read, and I didn't keep, because I didn't think I'd ever solve the problem. But with the internet, I wrote this book sitting on my couch. If I had a question in my head, I’d Google it. My first book that I wrote, before the internet, was called ‘The Jerusalem Train,’ and I had to go to the libraries, I had to go to Washington to research and I'd have to drive to the libraries to find out the material I wanted. Thank God for the internet.”

“Fallen Prince” was Dietz’s longtime passion project. He’s a self-described passionate historian who’s always had a penchant for putting pen to paper.

As a reporter, he worked the Metro beat, the crime beat, the airport beat — you name it. He even covered the Ted Bundy investigation for a global magazine. His favorite tasks were the feature stories he wrote, often about local veterans.

Even as an investigator, he followed faint threads to piece a story together. He’s been a part of Sarasota for 50 years; he helped his parents move down in the 1970s and figured he’d stay for three weeks. And yet, he’s still here writing his way through life. 

“I always said, I can’t change a lightbulb, but I can write,” Dietz said.