Posted on 11/18/2003 6:31:29 PM PST by Pokey78
Could it really be 40 years? Has the best part of half a century gone by since the assassination of President Kennedy? I scarcely know a single American of my generation who does not regard that event as a seminal point in his own life: a moment after which everything changed.
Norman Mailer once said that he thought that America had had a collective nervous breakdown after Kennedy's death: that much of the insanity of the hippy counter-culture, with its obsessions with hallucinatory drugs and anarchic personal rebellion, were symptoms of that pathology. I was 19 - an undergraduate at Berkeley where my political inclinations had moved well to the Left of Kennedy's administration.
He was not a personal idol for us in the fledgling Left-wing student movement, as he appears to have been for Bill Clinton. But on November 22, 1963, we felt the Earth move.
My whole recollection of the day - vivid as it is - remains dreamlike. We walked shell-shocked out of lecture halls and classrooms to drift around the campus exchanging bits of information that were coming through in garbled snippets. (On the way to an early class, before I learnt of the news, I heard a boy saying in a stricken voice: "You mean they've shot our president?" I was struck, in retrospect, by the depth of feeling in his use of the possessive pronoun: he was "our" president now, whatever your politics.)
Rumours and misinformation were thick in the air. The question of whether Kennedy was dead was answered quite quickly, but I can remember hearing that the vice-president, Lyndon Johnson, had also been shot and was thought to be critically wounded.
It was the week of "the big game" - the annual American football match between local rivals Berkeley and Stanford - and normally the bells of the university campanile would have played our team cheerleading songs at noon. But mercifully somebody had got to the controls and it was the national anthem that reverberated around the campus, played very slowly like a dirge.
It is impossible to overestimate the sense of mass shock and grief. People wept in the streets. Students rang home, wanting to talk to their families, to touch some kind of reassuring emotional base.
Late into the night, everyone remained, milling around the student union and the central campus piazza. No one wanted to go home, at least not by himself. Friends asked each other if they had anywhere to go where they would be with other people. This was not a night to be alone.
Then there was the funeral: the extraordinary dignity of the widow, her hand held by the devoted, stricken brother; the unbearable poignancy of tiny John Jnr's salute to the passing coffin. In spite of all that we have learnt since about JFK's private predilections and the sordid facts of his personal life, I still find it almost impossible to watch footage of that funeral procession without being reduced to tears.
It was, I suppose, the beginning of the 1960s: of shared emotional outpouring and bonding, and all those expressions of communal feeling that overtook the national psyche during the coming decade.
The day of Kennedy's death was truly a day that shook the world, but not because he had made any great mark on history in his two years in office - the extent of his impact on world events and the Cold War remains controversial.
It has become difficult now to separate out the impact of the JFK presidency from the impact of the assassination. His is still often described as a "great presidency" although - apart from the Cuban missile crisis, which might well have been the beginning of the end of the Soviet threat - its lasting monument was more rhetorical than actual.
Not that rhetoric - when it is truly great - is not a significant contribution to history. The most important Kennedy speeches were his inaugural address ("Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country", which sounds positively Edwardian by today's demotic standards) and the Berlin Wall speech (with its grammatically incorrect rallying cry, "Ich bin ein Berliner").
Perhaps their real historical significance was that they made a new generation believe that politics was worth thinking about and participating in. So the "silent generation" of the 1950s gave way to the idealistic and ultimately self-destructive youth movements that would end by tearing the nation to pieces.
But it was the event itself, even more than the man who was lost, that was the great trauma. The murder of a president on a city street in broad daylight was a species of anarchic disorder that the profoundly secure American public had not believed could happen to them. This was the stuff of Third World despotism, of illegitimate regimes in criminal societies.
It was simply inconceivable that the greatest democracy in the world, which had delivered stability and safety to millions of the dispossessed and persecuted, could watch its elected president gunned down before its eyes during a public procession. For this to be followed by the killing of his apparent assassin on live television took the event from political catastrophe into civil nightmare.
It was not simply the individual tragedy: the loss of a man who was attractive on a heroic scale, who had seemed to embody the sense of a new generation having arrived to awaken the nation from its 1950s torpor.
It was the sheer terror of it. The American suburban dream of social respectability, financial security and political solidity was dissolving into chaos.
I suppose that the effect of it was not equalled until September 11, 2001 when Americans realised in a quite different way that their security could never be taken for granted.
Must we forever suffer this orgy of "remembrance" every year about Kennedy and his assassination? Yes- everyone alive then knows where they were when the heard about his assassination. Yes it was a big deal. Does it even approach an event like 9/11 or Pearl Harbor? No. I actually find the comparison highly inapropriate.
It looks like we're stuck with it. I don't know why, I got over it by 1964.
Today's democrats might do well to follow Kennedy's lead with regard to not following polls and moron advisors, but, being morons themselves, they won't.
The Dems never got over it. In fact, to them, his legacy permeates the present.
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Excerpt from Charles P. Pierce's article in Esquire magazine, Oct 2003:
JFK at 86
He's still with us. Not in the way Elvis still lives, but in the way his personality, his looks, his scandals, his words, his celebrity, his failures, his assassination, and the suspicion it engendered still set the agenda for America.
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Naturally, I looked for the requisite word "Camelot" before I even read the article. I didn't have to look far. I found it in column 2 on the second page. These Kennedy worshippers are so predictable.
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