Sometimes I am not sure what my monthly letter will be about. In September, a topic did not emerge. I ended up doing a potpourri and titled it September 2013: Musing and Meandering Along.
That does not happen often.
Certainly, it is not the case this month.
This month marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of
President John F. Kennedy which happened on November 22, 1963.
I was ten years old at the time and in the fifth grade. I was old enough to really begin to realize
the importance of the President of the country. During the election, I was
seven years old and old enough to say I was for Nixon at school because that is
who my parents were voting for. I was old
enough to appreciate the fascination the country was experiencing with this
charismatic president, his charming wife, and their two cuter than cute
children. They were all photogenic and
it seems their photos were everywhere.
He had a great accent that was lovable.
He had a boyish charm and enviable level of education. He was a role model for a ten year old kid
for sure. People talked about him been
Catholic but that seemed normal to me as many of the students in my elementary
school were Catholic.
It was a horrible shock when he was killed. It was an aftershock when his accused
assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was gunned down on live TV by Jack Ruby. I remember actually seeing that. There has been a non-stop debate about
various conspiracy theories ever since.
For people who lived through it, the assassination is one of those
moments that everyone remembers exactly where they were and what they were
doing when they found out. These kind of
shocking history changing events are like that Pearl Harbor, 9/11, the death of
Princess Diana are all like that.
So, where was I on that fateful day? Like this year, November 22, 1963 fell on a
Friday. It was the Friday before
Thanksgiving. I was at Burns Elementary
School in the City of Detroit. The
President was shot at 1:30 pm EST and declared dead at 2 pm. I heard the news shortly thereafter. I remember being in gym class. A girl in the class asked if we had heard the
news. What news? “Someone shot Kennedy with an elephant
gun!” I was stunned. I immediately
wondered how and why someone would shoot Douglas Kennedy? My classmate, Douglas Kennedy, was not in
school that day and I assumed this shocking news was about him. Douglas Kennedy was a good guy and kind of a
friend. He was a slight fellow and I
just could not believe that anyone would shoot him let alone shoot him with an
elephant gun of all things.
What can I say? I was ten
and I was thinking locally and not on a broader scale. There was a temporary sense of relief when I
realized that it was the President who had been shot and killed and not my
friend. That sense of relief was very
short lived as I saw how everyone around me, in my family, and the media were
reacting to the tragic event. At the
time, I felt pretty stupid for making that error. It was not well into my adulthood that I
realized it was an innocent error.
As the weekend unfolded, the nation was in total shock. It was the news on all of the channels. In Detroit, we had a whopping four channels
ABC, NBC, CBS, and a station, CKLW, from Windsor, Ontario. It must be noted that the television stations
were not 24/7 in those days. In 2003, I
was watching a special on the 40th anniversary of the assassination of
President Kennedy. The show I was watching showed footage of Walter Cronkite
reflecting on the events of that sad and shocking day. Cronkite was pointed out
that it was 11:40 pm and they had stayed on the air 10 minutes past their
normal broadcast day because of the gravity of the events. He said that they would pick-up the coverage
in the morning and wished everyone a good night.
I saw another documentary the on the eve of the anniversary: Four
Days in November. This film was
released on November 21, 1964, one year after the assassination. Per IMDb :
From more than eight million feet of newsreels,
amateur footage, tape-recordings and more, David L. Wolper presents a priceless
detailed account of the time and events surrounding the assassination of
President John F. Kennedy.
The documentary was beautifully and richly narrated by Richard
Basshart.
It was very well done. It was a straightforward presentation of
the facts that most people held true at the time. Oswald killed Kennedy. Two days later Jack Ruby killed Oswald. There was extensive coverage of the funeral.
There was no conspiracy theories floated, no Zapruder film, no CIA, no Cubans, no Mafia, no Russian, no Marilyn
Monroe, and Oliver Stone.
John F. Kennedy was the first President of the United States that
seemed to understand and take advantage of the relatively new media of
television. There is a general consensus
that Kennedy was elected primarily because of the televised debates he had with
then Vice-President Richard Nixon. As
much as the camera loved Kennedy, Nixon came off stiff, shifty, and not nearly
as likable. This might not have had an
impact in previous elections but it did in that 1960 election and every
election since then.
From my youth, I did not know about the much of the politics of
President Kennedy. Other than the
assassination, I remember three events that stood out in my mind back
then. First, I recall that in August
1963, Jackie gave birth to their youngest child, a son, Patrick Bouvier
Kennedy. Patrick died after two
days. It made me a little sad as I was
young and believed things like that were not supposed to happen and they
certainly weren't supposed to happen to such famous and special people. It was something a nine year old could relate
to.
Second was the Cuban Missile Crisis. I understood the basics of this crisis and
the threat of having Soviet missiles ninety miles of our cost. This was the first international crisis/issue
I remember. I was old enough to know it
was important but also old enough to be curious about it. The Cold War and Vietnam were just words to
me before this crisis. Cuba, Castro,
Russia, and Khrushchev were just names to me.
With the Missile Crisis, they became threats. It was a scary time of air raid drills in
school and bomb shelters in the news.
The threat of war, and attack, coming to the American homeland was real
enough to concern everyone. The crisis
dominated the airwaves and preempted, seemingly, all television as we only
really had the three network channel compared to the hundreds of choices we
have today.
I was concerned, scared, and fascinated by the Cuban Missile
Crisis. I tried to follow it the best I
could. I tried to listen to President
Kennedy's press conferences and speeches but to no avail. They were simply too long and the vocabulary
beyond my grasp. I did understand that
we have missiles in Europe at the time that could strike Moscow and was
admittedly a bit perplexed by the double standard. I am still perplexed by the double standards
such as this.
Because of the Cuban Missile Crisis, I wanted to know more about
communism. I knew it was bad and we were
good but no one could really explain the differences in our capitalistic system
versus communism. So, I got an age appropriate
book and learned about it. Also, if we
were going to be victims of atomic bombs, as we called them back then, I wanted
to know about them. I wanted to know who
invented them, how they worked, and what made them so powerful. This curiosity led to more books and a
passion for physics which turned into a passion for mathematics that I have had
ever since.
Thirdly, I get the impression that he was my President. I felt I could write him and ask him things
and that I would get an answer due to the helpful and engaging nature of my
President and the Federal Government.
This memory is due to a Christmas gift in 1962. It was a book of letters children had sent to
President Kennedy. Some were funny. Some asked silly questions or made requests
of the President that he could never consider fulfilling. Then there were letters from young people, my
age at the time looking for information about various federal programs. I found these letters inspiring to the point
that I sent President Kennedy two letters of my own. I expressed my desire to learn more about the
space program. A few weeks later, a
large manila envelope arrived from NASA.
This package had a huge influence in my life. I was mildly interested in the space program
before getting the various books and booklets.
After getting this package from President Kennedy, I felt that it was my
duty to read them and learn about the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo Missions the
made up the race to the moon. I was
hooked and could not get enough of it.
Thank you Mr. President. I was
completely dedicated to him. A few years
later, I realized that President never saw my letter and therefore did not
personally direct the folks at NASA to prepare that envelope for me. It did matter; to this day I still think it
was pretty special. It does not seem
like much when fifth graders today can simply go online and get any government
publication available to the public.
These last two points make no difference to me. I will always think it was something pretty
special.
Oddly, I knew very little about the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam when
Kennedy was President. I did not quite
understand what the Bay of Pigs or Vietnam were all about back then. Compared to the above items, the Bay of Pigs
and Vietnam were grayer than the black and white, good and bad, in my ten year
old world.
The Presidency of John F. Kennedy was and is referred to as
Camelot. This magical reference to King
Arthur’s castle and court gave the Kennedy White House a nostalgic, mythic, and
idealistic image. I did not realize
until fifty years later that this reference was coined by Jackie Kennedy
herself… after the assassination. Per The
Guardian:
The name "Camelot" is such an
accepted sobriquet for the Kennedy Administration that many don't recognize it
as a creation of Jackie Kennedy's during a Life magazine interview following
JFK's assassination.
The power of his charisma and this image of Camelot made us all
long for that ideal almost immediately after the assassination. That longing has lasted for many of my
generation until this day. Consider the
photo of the President chosen for this blog.
It is a photo taken by the famed Tony Spina a photographer for the
Detroit Free Press. Sonia Harlan, a
family friend, posted this photo on Facebook earlier this week. I knew immediately because of the nostalgia
and longing for that return to Camelot that this is the photo I would use for
this blog.
The photo shows John F. Kennedy in Detroit. At the time of the photo, Detroit was a
vibrant industrial powerhouse of a city, the fourth or fifth largest city in
the country. In the fifty years since,
the country has changed in size, demographics, economics, and technology. The City of Detroit has changed even more and
for the worse.
It seems the days just before the assassination we were at the
pinnacle of the post war bliss. With the
assassination, we all felt things changed and they in fact did. In the years to come, the country would be in
a war that made no sense and embroiled in the civil rights movement. We experienced the generation gap, the hippie
movement, the SDS, Black Panthers, race riots, and antiwar social unrest. The assassination of John F. Kennedy was a
prelude to the assassinations of Martin Luther King and his brother Bobby both
in 1968. It was almost like the
assassination of John F. Kennedy was an inflection point in the history of this
country. Whether that is really true, it
was certainly an inflection and reflection point in how I look at the history
of this country.
If John F. Kennedy had not been assassinated that fateful day
fifty years ago, it would have been interesting to see what he might have
accomplished as President, what he might have done after his term was over, and
how we might be looking back on his life and career. It is pure speculation which is how I view
the various conspiracy theories as well.
If he were still alive today, he would be 96 years old. When I think of John F. Kennedy, I think of
the William Butler Yeats poem, In Memory of Major Robert Gregory where the
Irish poet asked:
“What made us dream that he could comb grey hair?”
