Unlike my colleagues here at HA, I have clear, full memories of the events of 50 years ago. Darryl was just three years old at the time. It was years before Lee was born, many years before Carl was a twinkling in anyone’s eye, and possibly even before Roya’s father arrived.
In November 1963 I was 13 years old, an 8th-grader at Heritage Junior High School in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Just after we’d gotten back indoors from band practice (we were scheduled to play at halftime of the high school’s football game the next day … a game that was never played), the unimaginable announcement came over the loudspeaker as we were putting away our instruments.
Everything between that moment and arrival at the front door of my house has vanished from my memory. No recollection of gathering up my belongings, of boarding the school bus, of the half-hour ride with dozens of other dazed 12- and 13-year-old kids.
Once I got home, however, along with my entire family I was glued to the TV for days. We were a Huntley-Brinkley family, so we watched Frank McGee on NBC rather than Cronkite’s CBS. We saw President Johnson’s brief speech at Andrews AFB. We saw Lee Harvey Oswald murdered by Jack Ruby. We saw Kennedy lying in state in the Capitol rotunda. We saw the funeral procession, with muffled drums, the caisson, the riderless horse, the international leaders from far and wide, John-John’s salute, the burial in Arlington National Cemetery.
Like everyone else, we were in shock. And we were still in shock on Thanksgiving, six days after the assassination. We celebrated (if that’s the appropriate word) the holiday with relatives who lived in the DC suburbs. Over that weekend, we went to Arlington to pay our respects to the President. On that cold, blustery, sunny morning, we filed slowly and silently past the raw, freshly-turned soil of the grave. We had to be careful not to trip over the gas pipe (not yet buried) feeding the eternal flame … not an easy task with tear-filled eyes.
Since I started blogging almost 11 years ago, I’ve written a number of essays about what the assassination of President Kennedy means to me. On my own Peace Tree Farm blog, there’s Forty years (2003), The end of the innocence (2004), and 43 … and 46 (2006). My DailyKos diary on the subject is JFK and the “Where were you when…?” moment (2008). And I wrote The tricks that memory plays two years ago here on HA.
November 22, 1963 remains a central, seminal event in my life. For me, that is the day the Sixties began. The sudden, wrenching events in Dallas led directly to the immense discontinuity between the staid, black-and-white Fifties and the counter-cultural, many-colored Sixties.
How might American and world history have been different if JFK hadn’t been shot? Would there have been a Nixon, a Reagan, a Dubya presidency? Would the Vietnam War have been shorter or less lethal, or even been short-circuited completely? On the other hand, could John Kennedy have strong-armed Congress into passing the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare? We’ll never know, unless we can somehow jump into the alternative universe in which Oswald worked somewhere other than the Texas School Book Depository, or the one in which he stayed in the Soviet Union, or just the one in which he missed his target in Dealey Plaza.
I wish we lived in one of those other universes.
I was in seventh grade at Sharples Junior High in Rainier Valley on Graham Street. Someone from the admin office came in into our class and handed the teacher a note on a small piece of paper, which he then read to himself. I could see that he was immediately shaken at what he had read and he had to take a moment to compose himself before he could speak to the class. He didn’t read the note, instead informing us in a few words of his own that our president had been shot and killed in Dallas.
It seemed to me that the entire class was stunned, that all breathing had stopped and there was this stillness in a classroom that I’d never experienced. It was in this utter silence that a kid in the row next to me, one desk behind mine, whispered to himself, “Good.”
I’ll never forget.
The day Kennedy was killed was apparently the day that my mom was trying to explain to her parents about why she needed her birth certificate. The day after she realized she was knocked up with me. It’s my understanding that grampa was laughing and gramma was horrified.
I was in 6th grade at the time, sitting in class. An announcement came over the school PA system. JFK had been shot. The rest of that day was very strange and unreal.
Enough already! JFK was neither a saint or a monster, but an ordinary guy. Let’s stop this hero worship.
I was in high school and remember it like yesterday. The feeling among my contemporaries has been that it’s been downhill for America ever since.
JFK defeated Nixon in a very close election that some Republicans still claim was stolen (this is easily debunked; even if the Daley machine stole Illinois, Nixon still needed two or three more states), and partisan rancor back then wasn’t too different from today.
Although the usual partisan contentiousness swirled around JFK’s policies, the Kennedy family were popular with the public and there was a widespread cheery sense that we were living in “Camelot.” Then, bang, bang, bang it abruptly ended and after a period mourning we all woke up to the realization that LBJ was president, and Jackie went off and eventually married a Greek shipping billionaire and everybody thought she did it for the money and what little was left of Camelot died in the tabloids.
LBJ rammed through his legislative agenda against a backdrop of Cold War tensions and escalating conflict in Vietnam. I have to say that Vietnam kind of crept up on us. I was a college freshman when the Gulf of Tonkin incident made headlines and LBJ went on teevee to tell the nation he was sending combat troops to Vietnam; but not to worry, it’ll be over before I graduate. From there, it gradually and steadily turned into pig shit, a few scattered protests began to appear, it dragged on, protesters battled cops in the streets and the country split down the middle with young pitted against old and college kids pitted against hardhats, with the middle class increasingly confused and growing more wary of what politicians were telling them.
Then came the spring of 1968. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were gunned down, blacks rioted in the cities and were shot down by National Guardsmen, campuses erupted, and the Chicago police viciously attacked protesters outside the Democratic Convention hall, all of which worked together to put Richard Nixon in the White House to everyone’s surprise.
The downhill slide accelerated into free-fall. Nixon escalated the war, tried to suppress the protests, and then his administration disintegrated in a swirl of scandal, first with Agnew being forced out on corruption charges, and then Watergate, against a backdrop of a collapsing military effort in Vietnam and erupting economic problems at home. I remember riding on a Seattle city bus and listening to another passenger tell me we had to keep the war going in Vietnam because it created jobs at home.
Nixon was followed by Ford, a rather benign figure who made himself unelectable by pardoning Nixon, followed by Carter whose presidency was dominated by oil shocks, the hostage crisis, and stagflation.
And then we got Reagan, whose administration secretly traded guns for the hostages, secretly supported Central American death squads and South American dictators who kidnapped and tortured political opponents and threw naked prisoners out of airplanes over the Atlantic Ocean, ran up gargantuan deficits, and ushered in 30 years of disastrous wingnut economics.
Like I said, it was all downhill after Kennedy was shot. Would things have been different if Kennedy had lived? Sure. It’s hard to know exactly how, but LBJ likely would not have become president, Nixon probably would have but wouldn’t have had a war to escalate or protesters to bully, civil rights would have taken longer but eventually would have happened simply because racial equality was an unstoppable force and even Nixon and Reagan couldn’t have contained it, there would have been no Watergate or impeachment or resignation or Ford presidency or pardon or Carter presidency, Reagan eventually would have floated to the top of the GOP candidate seniority list and drifted into the White House but with less of a mandate and a lessened ability to do the damage he did, there would have been a Bush presidency but maybe only one, there would have been a Clinton presidency although the timing might have been four years earlier or later, and there eventually would have been a black president and a woman president but the Chimp presidency probably accelerated that process of history by at least 20 years and maybe 30 years.
That’s my guess.
I was under the impression that LBJ was able to get much of the Civil Rights legislation enacted in Kennedy’s name. If he had not died, it would have been harder.
@4. Alternate histories are fun. How about we imagine an alternate history where the election was not stolen when the shrub was NOT installed by the supreme court and the rightful president Gore was elected?
Speaking of alternate histories, I just read one where FDR was impeached for treason for trying to institute socialist programs to stop the depression and this lead to Hitler winning the war and also inventing the nuclear bomb at the same time as the US. Germany controlled all of Europe and Russia. Corporations took over the US. The German Socialist governments collapsed several generations later under the corrosion pressure of capitalism and the complete inability for the socialist goverment to function, and this lead to a global free trader, no regulation, corporate run Utopia.
As one who was born near when JFK died, I never got the direct impact of the man and the times, just the echos. Baby boomers seemed to worship him. I never understood why everyone thought he was such a game changer, considering that every president after him has been a blend of good and bad, of mix of greatness, mediocre and incompetent. Some more than others. Kennedy seemed no better or worse
@7 That one’s easy. No 9/11. No Iraq war. No deregulation of banks. No housing bust, no financial crisis, no Great Recession. No Patriot Act, no NSA domestic spying, no TSA lines in airports. The national debt would be half what it is, we’d have 4% unemployment, and the rich would pay taxes. George W. Bush would be watching baseball games and eating peanuts.
@4 JFK was a run-of-the-mill politician who charmed his way into the White House, but had enough sense to not let Curtis LeMay blow up the world, which is more than I can say for the Republicans who were in the room at the time.
@10, 9/11 would most likely still have happened.
“When consumers purchase more goods, plants use more of their capacity, men are hired instead of laid off, investment increases, and profits are high. Corporate tax rates must also be cut to increase incentives and the availability of investment capital. The government has already taken major steps this year to reduce business tax liability and to stimulate the modernization, replacement, and expansion of our productive plant and equipment.”
“Our true choice is not between tax reduction on the one hand and the avoidance of large federal deficits on the other. It is increasingly clear that no matter what party is in power, so long as our national security needs keep rising, an economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenues to balance our budget, just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits. Surely the lesson of the last decade is that budget deficits are not caused by wild-eyed spenders, but by slow economic growth and periodic recessions, and any new recession would break all deficit records. In short, it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low. And the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now.”
@14.
Dude,
You are repeating yourself
http://horsesass.org/?p=52189&.....nt-1250242
@14:
Yes, by all means let’s follow Kennedy’s tax policy.
Here’s what that entails, according to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum (emphasis added):
I can support your enthusiasm for a 65% top end to individual taxes and a corporate rate of 47%.
Forget about Nixon, Reagan and Dubya – had JFK NOT been killed, there would have been no Lyndon Johnson presidency.
And that would have been a very, very good thing!
@13 Bullshit. Letting it happen required the kind of gross neglect that only Chimp and his Republican crowd were capable of:
“During the transition between administrations, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger arranged several extensive briefings on [terrorism] for Bush’s incoming national security adviser, Condoleeza Rice, and others on the Bush team, including Vice President Cheney. One briefing lasted half a day. Berger told them that Osama bin Laden was an ‘existential threat’ and told them that he wanted ‘to underscore how important this issue is.’ In another briefing, Richard Clarke, head of counterrorism in the NSC, the single most knowledgeable expert in the government, gave them a complete tutorial on the subject. In yet another briefing, CIA officials were brought in to go over all the intelligence available on terrorism.
“Don Kerrick, a three-star general and outgoing deputy national security adviser, overlapped for four months with the new Bush people. He submitted a memo for the new National Security Council warning of the danger of terrorism. ‘We are going to be struck again,’ he wrote. But as Kerrick explained to me, he received no answer to his memo. ‘They didn’t respond,’ he said. ‘They never responded. It was not high on their priority list. I was never invited to one meeting. They never asked me to do anything. They were not focusing. They didn’t see terrorism as the big megaissue that the Clinton administration saw it as. They were concentrated on what they thought were higher priorities than terrorism.’ The Principals meeting of national security officials took up terrorism only once, after constant pressure from Clarke, on September 4, 2001, and at that meeting they discussed using unmanned Predator drone spy aircraft, but no decision was made. ‘Unfortunately,’ said Kerrick, ‘September 11 gave them something to focus on.’”
— Sidney Blumenthal, The Clinton Wars (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2003), pp. 797-798.
Of course, we know what Republicans were obsessed with while Osama bin Laden plotted his attack: Cutting taxes for millionaires and billionaires. That was far more important than protecting the American people.
Clinton had 8 years to prevent 9/11, Bush had 8 months. Everyone screwed up, but to say that the election of Al Qatari Gore would have prevented 9/11 is asinine.
@ 18 RR
You forget, the project that had priority was starting a war with Iraq. They were saying it outright, the propaganda about both Iraq and Afghanistan was all over the news as soon as the election was over. The tapes of women being shot in Afghanistan, the interviews with “Iraqi defectors” talking about Saddam’s weapons projects and minor incursions into Saudi Arabia, hints of terrorism in Israel with the apparent source being Iraq, Israel making a point of instigating little skirmishes with the Hezbolla in southern Lebanon.
They had already stated their intention to get rid of Saddam Hussein even before Bush had taken his oath of office. It was a minor thread during the last weeks of the Bush/Cheney campaign.
9/11 just gave them the perfect excuse. It was the best possible thing to happen to George Dubya fuckin Bush.
@ 19
You really think we’re stupid enough to fall for that bullshit? All the background players were the same. They don’t fire everyone in the CIA and DIA when a new administration comes in, they’re all the same people, often with careers spanning 40 years. Supposed experts.
There WAS chatter. There WERE multiple warnings from the German, Italian, Russian and French intelligence organizations about something really “big” that about to happen. The Bush administration dismissed all of that with a flick of a pinky. The reality is, at the very least, they LET IT HAPPEN.
The best way to get out of these overseas conflicts is to simply withdraw from the fights.