Kennedy Assassination – Do You Remember the 22nd of November?

If you answer yes to that question, you’re in your 60s or older.  It’s simple arithmetic.

I don’t know what the generational line of demarcation is between those who will never forget that awful Friday afternoon–who remember, after 56 years, exactly where they were and what they were doing When They Heard About It–and those to whom November 22 doesn’t mean anything special.  Sometime back in the 90s, I don’t remember the year, I tried the experiment of asking my introductory class on “Judaic Civilization” at the University of North Carolina if they knew what had happened on that day.  Of those young people, ranging in age from 19 to 21, not a single one did.

Our age cadre, though thinning a bit too rapidly for my taste, is not yet extinct.  This past Friday night, which was November 22, my wife Rose and I were at Sabbath evening services at our local Reform synagogue.  There came the time in the service when the rabbi asked the people in the congregation to call out the names of individuals for whom we might together say the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.  A white-haired gentleman in the back row called out “John F. Kennedy!”

This year, as in 1963, November 22 fell on a Friday, which I suspect made the memories all the sharper.

Here’s where I was and what I was doing When I Heard About It:

It was mid-afternoon, between seventh and eighth periods at Delhaas High School in Bristol, Pennsylvania, where I was in eleventh grade.  Eighth period Friday was study hall, which meant I could kind of relax, read things I might want to read.  Maybe even do some UFOlogy.  A girl I had a crush on was in that study hall, and I thought maybe we might happen to walk through the door at the same time, exchange smiles, maybe a joke or two.  Maybe some sign she liked me also.

In the corridor, amid the crowds of kids going from one class to what would be (relief!  TGIF!) the last class before the weekend: “Kennedy was shot in Texas.”

It was a boy who said that, maybe to me in particular but maybe to anyone who happened to be listening.  The news was exciting, not particularly threatening.  Like one man I heard a few weeks later over the radio, I assumed he’d been shot in the arm or the leg or something.  He’d appear next week in a press conference, his arm in a sling, laughing, joking with the reporters about what had happened.

The PA system was broadcasting in the study hall.  We took our seats, our faces now as somber as the teacher’s had been the moment we came in.  No.  It wasn’t Kennedy’s arm or his leg or something.

I don’t know how long it was before the announcement came, saying what couldn’t possibly be true:  The President is dead.

It couldn’t be true because things like that didn’t happen in 1963.  Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated a hundred years ago.  In between there’d been a couple of others–McKinley, and, oh yeah, Garfield (whoever they were).  But this was now and we were the Baby Boomers, and things were safe.  A little over a year ago we’d been on the brink of nuclear war, but it hadn’t happened.  This couldn’t have happened either.

Therefore: he was still alive.  The body, declared lifeless, would stir.  There would come a knocking from the inside of the casket.

The afternoon was gray and cold.  He was dead.  I got off the school bus, after riding the five miles or so from Delhaas to the Levittown street where my parents and I lived, and walked the few steps to our house.  My friend Curt R., who lived some distance away but already had his driver’s license, stopped by.  He was there when my father came home from work.

They exchanged a few conventional remarks about the weather.  It had been pretty warm for November, Curt said.  But now it had turned cold.

My father:  “It’s colder in Dallas.”

Then he said:  “This is a date we’ll remember.  November 22, 1963.”

My family loved John F. Kennedy.  My father, who was about Kennedy’s age, awoke one morning the previous summer and announced:  “I dreamed I went fishing with Jack Kennedy!”  He added, “And we had a great time.”  His face shone with the fond wistfulness of it.

And now he was dead.

It became very difficult, in the weeks that followed the assassination, to remember how much Kennedy had been hated by a fairly broad section of the population.  I don’t know if the hatred was as intense as the partisan loathing and spite we’ve become used to, as a staple of today’s political discourse.  I suspect it was worse than we can now bring ourselves to remember.  Which has the bright side of suggesting that our current situation, repellent as it is, is not a total aberration.

A joke:  “Jack and Bobby and Teddy Kennedy are on a boat in the middle of the ocean, and it sinks.  Who will be saved?” 

Answer:  “The nation.”

After November 22, 1963, that joke ceased to be funny.  I wrote an accusatory, self-righteous editorial for our high school literary magazine blaming Kennedy’s death on the joke and the sort of people who’d stoop to telling it.  More often, we blamed ourselves collectively for having created the atmosphere in which such an atrocity could take place: JFK had died for all our sins.  Something like this became the new national consensus once the man was safely dead.  I recall a piece of Republican campaign literature in the 1964 election speaking of him as having been “martyred.”

Cape Canaveral, much in the news through Kennedy’s beloved space program, became “Cape Kennedy.”  New York City’s Idlewild Airport became “John F. Kennedy International Airport.”  Late in the 1990s, when I described these name changes to a group of UNC grad students who hadn’t been born when they happened, a fellow faculty member who was sitting in on our conversation burst out laughing.  She hadn’t been brought up in this country, hadn’t been here for the assassination.  To her, the gestures seemed just silly.  She hadn’t felt the trauma of the thing-that-couldn’t-have-happened-yet-did, had no sense of how we craved reassurance, however symbolic or illusory, that somehow HE wasn’t really gone.

(Since then, Cape Canaveral has gone back to being Cape Canaveral.  But the airport’s name has stuck.)

Some things remained the same, even with him dead.  The UFOs, for example, were still flying around the sky; and the November 1963 issue of The N.J.A.A.P Bulletin, of which I was editor and pretty much sole author, was due out.  (NJAAP = New Jersey Association on Aerial Phenomena, of which I’d recently assumed the directorship.)  It rolled off the mimeograph machine the next Wednesday, on the eve of the saddest Thanksgiving in my youthful memory (which was also my sixteenth birthday).  While typing the stencils, I found space at the bottom of page 8 for the notice:

“NJAAP joins the nation in mourning the tragic and untimely death of President John F. Kennedy.”

Two years later, taking notes in a lecture course as a Cornell freshman, I wrote the date November 22, 1965.  And on impulse, wrote beneath it:

“Thy beauty, O Israel, upon thy high places is slain!
How are the mighty fallen!”

–from 2 Samuel 1:19; and when the girl next to me asked why I’d written that and I told her, she made a face and looked away.  Blind adoration of John Fitzgerald Kennedy was not exactly an approved stance in radical circles at Cornell University.  But it stuck with me for some years, even when I (falsely) believed myself a radical; and when reports of the sleazier sides of the glamorous Kennedy clan began to leak out–not to mention that JFK hadn’t been blameless for getting us into the swamp of Vietnam–for a long time I refused to believe them.

Was it a better time, before he was struck down?  Was his death that fabled turning point at which we “lost our innocence”?  It’s not easy to look back over it and remember the multitudinous ways in which we weren’t so “innocent” even before that, even though this specific trauma may not have been one we’d have anticipated.  Historian Barbara Tuchman writes in the foreword to her splendid book The Proud Tower, about America and Europe in the last decades before the First World War:

“The period was not a Golden Age or Belle Epoque except for a thin crust of the privileged class.  It was not a time exclusively of confidence, innocence, comfort, stability, security and peace.  All these qualities were certainly present.  People were more confident of values and standards, more innocent in the sense of retaining more hope of mankind, than they are today, although they were not more peaceful nor, except for the upper few, more comfortable.  Our misconception lies in assuming that doubt and fear, ferment, protest, violence and hate were not equally present.

“We have been misled by the people of the time themselves who, in looking back across the gulf of the War, see that earlier half of their lives misted over by a lovely sunset haze of peace and security.  It did not seem so golden when they were in the midst of it.  Their memories and their nostalgia have conditioned our view of the pre-war era but I can offer the reader a rule based on adequate research: all statements of how lovely it was in that era made by people contemporary with it will be found to have been made after 1914.”

Nostalgia–a combination of the Greek words for pain and homecoming–a painful yearning to “come home” to a former time.  To a time when we were younger than we are now.  Which wasn’t such a Golden Age either, if we remember it properly; but when options that are now closed seemed still to be open and welcoming.

All these things do I ponder as I remember November 22, 1963.  And prepare to give thanks for the good, often unnoticed, that surrounds us this very day.

by David Halperin
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