President Kennedy, Four Decades Removed
It doesn’t seem forty years on since the
day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Time passes more quickly
with each decade of life, and the distance of years brings with it a certain
residue and altered light which affect one’s perception of those events,
and under no circumstances is it easy to feel the same awful feelings in the
gut and and head and heart after hearing the news and watching the sequence of
events through that weekend, the funeral and the aftermath of it
all.
That late autumn day, I was
teaching at a school in northwestern Ohio, and it was during sixth period that
“the news” began to race around the building. The reactions were
those of numbness, tears, a few people laughing – almost hysterically (we
hoped) for reasons we never understood .
surfaced.
The head of school called
for a special assembly. I don’t remember what he said, and I don’t
remember the rest of that day. Like everyone else, I was in shock, but we knew
it was our job to keep things on an even keel for the students. We did, but
only barely.
I had only seen John
Kennedy once. He came to a meeting at Harvard shortly after his election. He
had been on holiday in Florida and arrived in a black Cadillac limousine with a
few Secret Service people. He announced that he was there to get our grades
raised, laughed with us, and disappeared into University Hall. He was young,
tanned, the picture of good health, and he was our hope for the future. The
campaign had been long, grueling, and was not decided until the middle of the
next day.
As one of the few admitted
liberals in my family, I had supported Kennedy and could not imagine anyone
voting for Richard Nixon. My mother reminded me that she cast her first vote
for the Socialist Norman Thomas, and my father, wisely, said nothing it all. I
considered both responses some sort of
forgiveness.
But now Kennedy’s
short tenure had come to a tragic end, and Lyndon Johnson was – almost
unimaginably – our President….from Texas, rough and ready, with a
complex, if not devious, political history of his
own.
Most of us in America spent
the weekend stuck to our television sets watching events unfold in Dallas,
Washington, and Virginia. It was horrific, depressing, and yet there was
something noble in act, fact, and restrained grace in the transition from one
administration to another under such difficult circumstances, thanks in large
measure to the quiet leadership of Jacqueline
Kennedy.
One memory haunts me from
that weekend. I am convinced it is true, but it is so unbelievable that I
wonder about it still. Richard Nixon, by then back in the legal profession in
New York, was interviewed at an airport on his way to Washington for the
funeral. Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin, had just been shot by a then
unidentified person, and the reporter gave Mr Nixon this shocking news and
sought his reaction.
Nixon looked
into the camera with a serious expression and said, “Two rights do not
make a wrong….I mean, two wrongs don’t make a right.” I
turned to the neighbor watching with me in my apartment and asked him whether we
had both heard the same thing. He agreed that we had, and we fell into a long
silence.
Something broke in
America with the death of President Kennedy, and it has never been fixed. In
truth, I doubt it can never be fixed, and after all these years, I cannot say
for certain what that something was. Perhaps a sense of hope that with hard
work and by working together, we could construct a just and fair society for all
Americans.
One should be grateful
for the clarity of youth; it is far different from the clarity one finds decades
and decades later.
Posted: Mon - November 24, 2003 at 04:51 PM