HAMILTON, Ohio — When Debby Rotundo was in grade school in the early 1960s, she remembered seeing President John F. Kennedy stepping out of an airplane at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport.
It is a strong memory for the now-73-year-old Debby Harrison. Her mom wanted to see JFK’s arrival when he visited Cincinnati in October 1962, and brought along Harrison and her little brother. When the former president emerged from the plane, she recalled Kennedy’s hair “blowing in the wind like a copper penny.”
The sight was “mesmerizing,” she said.
About a year later, in November 1963, Harrison wrote a letter following Kennedy’s assassination. She wrote to Nikita Khrushchev, former premier of the Soviet Union, asking for peace, and that letter was included in the recently released former KGB’s 350-page dossier on the Kennedy assassination.
It’s unknown why her letter was included in the dossier kept by the KGB, the Soviet Union’s secret police which also had roles in foreign intelligence and counterintelligence.
“I’ve reviewed this in my head over and over and I thought, ‘What in the world am I doing in there?’” she told the Journal-News. “Then I thought, ‘I wonder if the KGB investigated me when I was a little girl and my family. They might have thought I was some kind of spy or something.”
The letter was part of the fifth-grade assignment at St. Mary’s Catholic school in Hamilton. Students were tasked with writing about the assassination, and Harrison wrote about world peace. She doesn’t recall why she penned her letter to the Soviet leader, other than the fact “I knew he was really, really important.”
“The whole vibe of the country was just so sad. Everyone was in so much shock,” said Harrison. “It feels funny to say I lived through that, but I remember it just as well as can be.”
Harrison also doesn’t recall why she asked Khrushchev to tear down the Berlin Wall in memory of Kennedy, other than the thought that “it would be a good idea.” Former President Ronald Reagan had the same request of then-Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev in June 1987. The wall came down in November 1989.
“It’s just what my mind came up with, I guess,” she said.
The release of the Russian dossier on JFK was announced last month by U.S. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, chair of the House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, and then the document was posted on a JFK Facts Substack.
While the majority of the report is in Russian, some documents are written in English, which begin to emerge around page 300. Harrison’s hand-written letter is on page 316, right after a letter from JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald asking for Soviet citizenship and before a letter to Khrushchev from Jacqueline Kennedy, the late president’s widow.
“Isn’t that crazy,” she said.
