Friday, November 21, 2008

November 22, 1963

I was in the fifth grade. We’d just had art class, and the kid sitting next to me must have eaten his crayons rather than drawn with them, because he vomited all over the floor.

We’d just gotten him squared away – the janitor had to come in and clean, and disinfect the area – with me still sitting right next to it – and we tried to get on with what was left of the afternoon.

It was somewhere around 2 o’clock – maybe even earlier -- when another knock came on the door … the same janitor … Pop Geary, we called him … probably to come back with Round 2 of disinfectant, since, truth be told, the area still smelled pretty bad.

Instead, he whispered something to Sister Waltrude, the fifth-grade nun at Sacred Heart School in Lynn. She let out a shriek, and came back into the classroom holding her head in her hands, with an awfully stricken look on her face.

My GOD, she cried (blasphemous, really, for a nun teaching fifth grade. The President has been shot in Dallas.

I was slow on the uptake. I thought she said “battle,” and asked the kid on the other side of me why a president fights in a battle and dies. He didn’t know. I don’t think he even heard the question. He was just stunned. We were all stunned.

In 1963, every class at Sacred Heart School was equipped with its own TV set … mostly so we could watch PBS broadcasts of Mme. Slack’s French lessons, or some other current events programming on Channel 2. All I remember about any of THAT is that the Channel 2 test pattern song was the Radezky March, by Johan Strauss (well, I didn’t know that at the TIME, but I heard it properly introduced much later and put it together).

Sister Waltrude immediately turned on the TV to Channel 5, which was the CBS affiliate at the time, so we could listen to Walter Cronkite broadcast.

News – even now – can be frustrating to follow, and we have 24/7 cable outlets that can give us instantaneous information from the far corners of the world. Things in 1963 weren’t anywhere near as sophisticated, and the news came at its own pace … and was reported that way as well.

I don’t remember the exact time Walter gave his now-legendary “from Dallas Texas, the flash apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time, 2 p.m. Eastern Standard time … some 38 minutes ago.”

Now, I was 10 years old. I knew nothing of the geopolitical ramifications of the president’s assassination. I did not know, for example, of the fears that we’d be invaded by the evil Communists, or that Lee Harvey Oswald was a Marxist sympathizer … it took me years to delve into it and read up on all the conspiracy theories. All I knew is that the president was dead. That was scary enough.

Boys don’t cry … although Lord knows I wanted to. And I didn’t even know why. I didn’t know JFK. I didn’t cry a year earlier when my grandmother died, so why should I want to cry NOW?

But girls cry … at least, that’s what kids my age were always told. Boys don’t … girls do. And they did. I went into the cloakroom to get my jacket (it was unseasonably warm that day in New England) and Jan Jenerlavitch was sitting on the floor, crying her eyes out.

I lived far enough from the school so that I had to take the bus home. That bus came from downtown Lynn, MA, and included Lynn Classical High school, Cobbet Junior High School, and St. Mary’s catholic high school students on it. These were all people older than me, and some of them scared the HELL out of me on most days. Not today. The bus was somber, and there were a LOT of people crying. Especially black high school kids.

Again, at age 10, I had only a dim, and very superficial, understanding of the civil rights movement. I knew what I saw on TV, and it made sense to me that all people should have access to the same things, regardless of color. In the mind of a 10-year-old, that makes perfect sense, and you wondered why anyone in the world would think differently. But apparently, people did.

Studying history does fill in the cracks. And since the assassination has haunted me for 45 years, just about everything I ever learned about the history in and around that era has been seen, though my eyes, in the context of JFK’s death. A couple of years later, when I began to understand the struggles in the south (and the north too; let’s be fair), I understood why these kids were crying. It may have come a little later in the game than people would have liked, but John F. Kennedy (and his brother) took a stand at the University of Alabama and other places. And, after all, it was only the previous August – just three months earlier – that Martin Luther King Jr. led the march on Washington.

The after-school hours were a blur. Naturally, the entire family (mother, father, my sister Jayne and I) sat and watched all evening and well into the night. I learned for the first time that JFK was one of nine children, that his brother Joe had been killed during World War II and that his sister Kathleen had died in a plane crash. I learned that his father couldn’t talk because he’d had a stroke; and even found out that his grandmother was still alive at the age of 98.

I knew there was a Ted Kennedy because his senatorial campaign was only a year earlier (that’s when his opponent, Ed McCormack, said “if your name was Edward Moore instead of Edward Moore Kennedy, your candidacy would be a joke). But I never knew there had been a Robert F. Kennedy, or that he was the attorney general.

I grew up in a heavily Irish Catholic neighborhood, in an Irish Catholic parish, and couldn’t understand the significance of JFK being the nation’s first CATHOLIC president. I thought everybody was Catholic. It just never occurred to me that anyone would admit to being anything else, since the nuns always taught us that the Catholic Church was the one true church.

I know there was a real fear that this was some kind of a larger plot to take over the country, and I suppose that scared me a little. But mainly, I just sat, motionless, taking it all in. I watched the plane land in Washington, I saw Lyndon Johnson make his short speech on the tarmac, saw Jackie Kennedy’s blood-stained dress, saw grown men crying (something I’d never seen before), and, well, it was all just too much to take.

I couldn’t sleep that night. I kept going over and over it. I had this image of JFK riding in that car, top down, looking like the world was his … and BANG! Dead. It didn’t help that our evening newspaper – the one I work for now – printed a special edition with a big, bold, oversized headline that simply said “Kennedy dead.” It didn’t just add to the drama; it added to the overall sense of fright, doom and grief that was just pervasive.

I suppose the next morning I was on sensory overload, because I don’t recall much about the morning broadcasts. I was still 10 years old, it was still Saturday, and that meant “go out and play.” So I’d imagine that’s what I did. I know that we played endless games of touch football in the next door neighbor’s yard (not because of the Kennedys, but because that’s just what we did), and perhaps spent a good deal of Saturday doing that.

All I know is that the next time I got in front of the TV; everybody was talking about Oswald, and the death of Officer J.D. Tippett, and was re-running footage of his arrest and booking the previous day.

I’m not sure when, exactly, this took place, but at some point, Kennedy’s body was taken from the White House to the U.S. Capitol so it could lie in state under the rotunda. That’s the first time I heard those muffled drums … boom, boom, boom, tadadada, boom boom boom, tadadada, boom, boom, boom, tadadada, boom boom-boo-boom.

I don’t know what possessed me to do it, but I started marching around the den in cadence to the drums, and my mother just SNAPPED at me, “Stop that!”

Sunday proved to be almost equally as momentous as Friday was, because that’s the day this country – in its unfathomable grief and fear – witnessed a vigilante killing on national television. I mean, what was next??

Today, with all of the paranoia that comes with security, security and more security, Lee Harvey Oswald would have never seen the light of day … or the light of anything. The Dallas Police Station would have whisked him away under the cover of darkness, at an unannounced time. He’d have been held in some isolation unit somewhere out in the boondocks of El Paso, or someplace like that … far, far, FAR away from the madness in Dallas.

But not in 1963. Somebody thought it would be a good idea to parade Oswald in front of the TV cameras as they escorted him from the police station to the county jail. I guess they thought they had it covered. It was just a short walk, after all, from the station to the car that was to take him to the jail, but not short enough.

Out of the crowd came Jack Ruby with a snub-nosed revolver. He shot Oswald in the abdomen, and the most notorious murder suspect since John Wilkes Booth in 1865 met the same end as did Mr. Booth … shot dead in his tracks. Odd that these two assassinations were almost 100 years apart.

I wasn’t watching when all this happened. We were playing touch football in Bobby Kaminski’s back yard – blowing off the pent-up steam that all kids my age were probably blowing off. Mrs. Kaminski – Eleanor – opened up the back door and shouted, “they just shot Oswald!”

We all ran inside to watch, me wondering why everybody was so stunned.

“Well, he shot the president,” I kept saying. I COULDN’T understand why Jack Ruby was being led away, COULDN’T understand why everybody thought this was so horrible.

But Oswald SHOT THE PRESIDENT,” I’d say. “Isn’t he a hero?”

My father had to sit me down when I got home – still tremendously upset that Jack Ruby was being treated as a criminal for killing the man who killed the president – and explain due process, and the American judicial system to me. It was just one of many lessons, civics and otherwise, I learned that weekend.

From the moment JFK’s death was confirmed, rumors started circulating that Charles DeGaulle would fly over to attend the funeral. Big Deal, I thought. Who’s Charles DeGaulle?

Again, my fifth grade brain couldn’t wrap itself around the notion that there was anyone in the world close to being as important as the president of the United States, or that Charles DeGaulle was one of the heroes of the French resistance in World War II … OR that he was extremely important, maybe even more so than JFK; OR that he was one of the most prickly men ALIVE.

It was a very big deal that Charles DeGaulle came to the U.S. to attend John F. Kennedy’s funeral. Earlier that year, JFK had gone to France – at a time when relations between the two men weren’t exactly tremendous – and Jackie Kennedy went with him. And she charmed the socks right OFF Mr. DeGaulle.

You see, to me, the world was the globe that sat in the corner of our living room. Spin it around, and point to a country, and say “here, this is France.” I had no concept of what that meant … that there were French people who swore by their country, and their leaders, the same way we did. It was all just one big ball with a bunch of colors on it. I knew about the evil Communists (who didn’t?) but that’s how the world was presented to me in 1963: The Russians … and us … and faceless people who occupied other lands, and who weren’t nearly as important as either us or the Soviets. Or the Cubans (I remembered just enough of the Cuban Missile Crisis to know who they were).

Sunday, November 24, was just a lot of day. Period. I don’t know if I, or anyone, really, had any energy or emotion left to endure the funeral Monday. But it was heart-wrenching … and this time not so much because of what it put the country through, but for what it put the Kennedy FAMILY through. The rider less horse … the incessant muffled drums … the dirges … and Jackie Kennedy, her two children, and Robert and Teddy.

I remember Cardinal Cushing, of Boston, a good friend of the family’s, delivering an impassioned sermon. I remember Jackie Kennedy lifting the flag off the coffin as it sat in the capitol rotunda, so she could kiss the casket. But most of all, I remember JFK junior saluting his father one last time. He was only three. In fact, his birthday was on the day of the funeral. Sure, the moment was choreographed somewhat. Jackie Kennedy heavily choreographed that entire funeral to mirror the great state funerals of Europe.

But staged or not, how could you not cry for this kid? Even at the age of 10, I knew that while the country would have other presidents, he’d never have his father back. I thought of what would ever happen if my father just up and died when I was 10. The thought chilled me. My dad only died last year, when I was 53, and there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t miss him at some point and grieve for him. Imagine going through all of that when you’re three?

I think we were all relieved when taps were played at Arlington National Cemetery. Somehow, the bugler hitting a wrong note lent not only authenticity to the occasion, but –in a perverse way – a very fitting end to it. The entire four days had been a bad nightmare, and that just put the period on the end of the sentence.

Today, I’ve come full circle on whether there was a conspiracy. When I was in college, which was right around the time the Abraham Zapruder film was made public, I was convinced there was one. Life was just an endless series of grassy knolls, magic bullets, intricate plots … I read books upon books, all of them advocating for some mammoth plot, and just ate up all of it.

The Zapruder film itself was unsettling. I’d never known the extend of JFK’s head wounds and as time went on, completely shut that aspect of the assassination out of my head, preferring to contemplate the socio- and geo-political ramifications instead. By the time I got into college, it was 1971, and the entire decade of the sixties had passed. Malcolm X was killed. So was Martin Luther King. And Bobby Kennedy. The fissures caused by these cataclysmic social events, along with the Vietnam War, and the growing rift between young and old – the so-called “generation gap” -- all of that could be traced back to the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

And it wasn’t just social and political either. You could make a very strong case that John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr never would have made it out of England had the American psyche not been so damaged by JFK’s death. The Beatles came along in early 1964, and they were certainly a sweeping breath of fresh air, youthful exuberance, and optimism for a country that had just been overwrought with grief and gloom.

And since we all have the benefit of knowing what the Beatles brought forth, both musically and culturally, it could be further argued that JFK’s death opened the Pandora’s box for the rampant use of recreational drugs, as well as the deepening cynicism, that just about ensured the demise of what had once become such a promising, optimistic decade.

Through the 70s and 80s, I was all for ripping the masks off the FBI, CIA, the Warren Commission, and anyone who had been a party to pulling the wool over our eyes by claiming that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

Then, I saw JFK, the Oliver Stone movie … and I just thought it was the biggest crock of bull ever. I know … I know … it wasn’t supposed to be historical. But come on! This is a guy who saw a bogeyman jumping out of every corner. And it just made me think that fertile imaginations were at play here … and that maybe, after all, that was just a random act of violence by a social misfit who was tired of being marginalized for his Marxist sympathies.

Because when you come right down to it, history rarely turns on conspiracies. It turns on random events that RESULT in people banding together. The Boston Massacre wasn’t planned. But it was certainly a tipping point toward arousing anger among the Boston colonists … without which there would have been no American Revolution.

There’s also this: It’s been 45 years since JFK was shot. Most, if not all, of the principal players on that day has long since died. There is no reason anymore for anyone who may have been inclined to keep a secret or two regarding a conspiracy to do so. Yet nobody’s said a word. Maybe there aren’t any words to say.

I used to be a bonafide Kennedy-phile. Worshiped the ground they walked on. I knew everything about all of them … the family histories, the unspeakable tragedies, the words of wisdom … but that died when Willie Smith was accused of rape and it came out that Ted Kennedy had rousted his son and his nephew out of BED so they could all go drinking. I’m no prude, but dammit all if I’d ever want to go out and get drunk with my son. I don’t care how old he is. A kid should always be able to look up to his dad without reservations. I looked up to mine every day he was alive … and I still do. One of the enduring American tragedies, if you ask me, is that there are so many kids who either don’t have dads in their lives to whom they CAN look up; or that their dads consistently fall short. And while nobody’s perfect, I just don’t see how a father can be so sloppy and undisciplined that he needs to go out and get hammered with his son.

For the longest time, I even tried to wish away the most damaging aspects of Chappaquiddick in my mind. I tried to justify the whole thing, believing that Teddy was just too stressed, too overwrought, too burdened by tragedies and responsibility, to have a clear head about much of anything.

And while I’ll always have tremendous sympathy for what the family has gone through, it’s just as true that at some point, your pass expires. At some point, you have to take accountability for the mistakes you’ve made. And I just don’t believe that Teddy ever has … at least not with regards to Chappaquiddick. He never admitted what most of the world seems to accept as universal fact: that he was drunk, horny and too consumed with alcohol and hormones to pay attention to where he was going … and too much of a coward to stick around after the accident to make sure every effort was made to remove Mary Jo Kopechne from that car.

And there were just so many eyebrow-raising details. This is a man who, only five years earlier, had severely broken his back in a plane crash. He had to walk around with a back brace, the pain permanently etched on his face. Yet he can crawl out the window of a car submerged in a lagoon and swim to safety? He can swim across the channel that separates Martha’s Vineyard from Chappaquiddick Island?

To me, the Kennedy dream began its slow, painful demise with Bobby’s death. In many ways, I think he was Jack times 10. Maybe not in the beginning, but by the time he died. John Kennedy was a cold warrior when he took office in 1960. In fact, if you go back and study that campaign, JFK was even scarier than Richard Nixon.

But he grew in the short time he was in office … grew past the bellicosity that marked his formative years in politics. He died before he could ever complete this transformation, but Bobby took it and ran with it. I think that if Bobby had lived, he’d have been one of the best presidents this country ever had. He seemed to have the right amount of ruthlessness mixed with genuine compassion for the downtrodden that either things would have improved or he’d go down in flames trying to improve them.

Alas, none of this ever came to pass. Instead of the Kennedy family dynastic that Old Joe pined for so deeply, we got the Bush dynasty.

Today, 45 years later, JFK’s death haunts me more than any single historical event in my lifetime. You look at all the potential that he brought to the White House … and you look at all the wreckage from strewn throughout history.

And that’s when you see the things that are … and ask why.