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.
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.
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