The satire column was written by-37-year-old New Yorker Paul Krassner (1932-2019) and originally appeared in his satire publication The Realist.
The article starts as a purportedly serious recap of William Manchester's book on Kennedy The Death of a President until the bottom when it offers a fictional section describing Jackie Kennedy's witnessing the obscene act.
The McGill Daily was a real daily with a significant 25,000 circulation at the time. Hours after the story ran, the Montreal Star's Tim Burke reported on it "Article Shocks Students."
The column was the idea of writer John Fekete, who gave up his usual space for the text. Daily editor-in-chief Peter Allnut (1948-1999) defended the article, while news editor Danny Levinson said he was unaware of it and would have opposed it.
McGill suspended Fekete, a scholarship student, in early February 1968. He graduated three months later, winning the Shakespeare Gold Medal, McGill's top award in English. But he was denied a J.W. McConnell Memorial Fellowship later that year due to his ideology. One source reported that police raided Fekete's home on Decarie searching for bombs but only found marijauna. Five years later his home in Longueuil burned down. He went on to teach at Trent University in Peterborough.
The Daily was the first and only publication to reprint the column.
The Sir George Williams University student paper, The Georgian, sonsored Krassner to speak at the university on Monday 13 November 1967. "It was the most outrageous thing I could think of. The article was a lie in order ot make people see the truth." Krassner made similar comments at a talk at McGill later the same day.
