Page 71 - Alex Ferguson: My Autobiography

to Stanley Matthews rather than me?’
But during the dinner, Brian asked me, ‘What are your hobbies?’
‘I don’t have time for hobbies,’ I said. I was obsessed with United. ‘I have a snooker table in the
house, I like a round of golf and I like watching movies at home.’

He pulled out a card. ‘My son has a firm in London, he gets all the early releases. Any time you
want a film, give him a call.’
The previous night I had been to the pictures in Wilmslow to see JFK. ‘Are you interested in that?’
asked Brian. By then I had assembled several books on the shooting. ‘I was in the fifteenth car in the
motorcade,’ Brian said. There we were in The Potteries and this guy was telling me he had been in
the JFK motorcade.
‘How?’

‘I was a Daily Express journalist. I emigrated to San Francisco and worked for Time magazine,’ he
said. ‘I applied to the Kennedy administration in 1958 to work on the election.’ Brian had been on the
plane when Johnson was sworn in as president.
That personal connection drew me deeper in. I started going to auctions. A lad from America who
had read about my interest in the subject sent me the autopsy report. I kept a couple of photographs at
the training ground – one I bought in an auction, and another that was given to me. I also bought the

Warren Commission report signed by Gerald Ford at auction. That cost me $3,000.
When Cathy and I went back to the States in 1991 for our wedding anniversary we travelled to
Chicago, San Francisco, Hawaii, Las Vegas and on to friends in Texas, with New York at the finish.
We went most years after that. My book collecting gathered pace. The definitive biography of John
Kennedy is probably Robert Dallek’s An Unfinished Life, John F. Kennedy 1917–1963 . That’s an
exceptional book. Dallek had access to Kennedy’s medical files and showed that he was a walking
miracle, with Addison’s disease and liver problems.

In the three years of his presidency, plenty of battles came his way, with the failed Bay of Pigs
invasion, for which he took the blame, as well as segregation, the Cold War, Vietnam and the Cuban
missile crisis. Medicare was another rumbling issue, as it is today. It was some workload. Here’s an
aside that casts light on the importance of the world’s favourite game. Later, in 1969, do you know
how the CIA realised the Soviets were at work in Cuba? Football pitches. Aerial shots of football
pitches laid out by Soviet workers. The Cubans didn’t play football. Henry Kissinger was European

in temperament and understood that.
My reading on the Kennedys brought me into contact with some wonderful literature: David
Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest stands out. It concentrates on the reasons for going into
Vietnam, and the lies the Kennedy brothers were told. Even Robert McNamara, US Secretary of
Defense and a friend of the family, was misleading them. He apologised, in retirement, to the Kennedy
family
On our summer tour of America in 2010, I visited Gettysburg and went to lunch at Princeton

University with James M. McPherson, the great Civil War historian who wrote Battle Cry of
Freedom. I was also shown round the White House. My fascination with the Civil War started when
somebody gave me a book about the generals in that conflict. Both sides had dozens. Teachers were
made generals. Gordon Brown asked me one day what I was reading about. ‘The Civil War,’ I said.
Gordon said he would send me some tapes. Soon I was taking delivery of 35 recordings of lectures
by Gary Gallagher, who went on to work with James McPherson on the role of the navy in the war, a

largely untold story.
Then along came horse racing, another great passion, another outlet. Martin Edwards, the former