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Of course I remember 25 years ago yesterday when the news arrived. We eighth-graders at Evans Junior-Senior High School raced outside at lunchtime to enjoy a warm November day. As usual, we gravitated to the Frostop Drive-In, a block away on U.S. 85, where we bought ice-cream cones for a nickel.
We were enjoying our ice cream when somebody heard on a car radio that shots had been fired at the President's motorcade. But we did not gather around the radio, because moments later, a semi and a car smashed into each other about a quarter-mile up the highway.
I was torn. Should I go see the accident? Or stay and try for more news? I decided on the accident, and I remember my reasoning: The assassination of a President is historic, something you read about in history books. It isn't anything that would happen now. Nothing historic would happen in 1963. Things are more organized now, with the Secret Service and all that. This was just a rumor.
We stayed at the accident until the last possible moment, then raced back to school, still chattering about the smashed car and tipped truck, the brief news from Dallas almost forgotten.
As we approached the building, we knew something terrible had happened when we saw Mr. Howard, our social studies teacher.
His house was near our school. He always walked home for lunch and returned a few minutes before the bell. That Friday, he was as close to tardy as we always were. His long face confirmed that during the noon hour, he had been watching TV, and he knew what we suddenly suspected -- President Kennedy had been killed. Something historic had happened, and we kids were all off rubbernecking at an accident.
The rest is a blur, not nearly so clear -- gathering in the gym to watch TV, school getting out early, my parents (both ardent Nixon supporters) as numb and shocked as everyone else. We all remember that, rather than the real JFK who died that afternoon.
A contemporary John Kennedy would have trouble getting into the senate in the first place. The campaign would be complicated by his carpetbag Massachusetts residency that an opponent would pounce on.
Gary Hart's discovered trysts were enough to push him out of the running; Kennedy's philandering was legendary. But treating women like trophies was accepted then.
Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize for Profiles in Courage wouldn't be much of an asset now. If Sen. Joe Biden got jumped on for cribbing a few lines from here and there, how would JFK look when the truth came out? Although the book bore his name, about 98 percent of it was the work of Arthur Schlesinger and other ghost-writers.
JFK liked people to think that he was a man of Sartre
and Mozart when in fact his favorite author was Ian Fleming
and his favorite song was Bill Bailey.
He tried to
establish the patina of a cultivated intellectual because
he thought it would help him politically, just as today,
candidates go the other way, with pork rinds, to establish
a suitable image.
His advisors, the best and the brightest,
allowed
the Bay of Pigs fiasco, never passed a Civil Rights bill,
and pushed us deeper into an unwinnable war in Vietnam.
But during the Kennedy years, people were willing to believe that what they saw was what was really happening: that if a man was listed as author of a book, he really wrote it; that if Jack and Jackie stood close and smiled for the photos, they had a solid marriage; that if a president consorted with Nobel Laureates, he must be a man of impeccable taste and intellect.
We know a little more, and reasonably suspect a lot more, about our leaders now than we did then. In most ways, that's an improvement.
But we still want our leaders to be as wise and charming as JFK was; the grief and shock of the assassination make it almost tasteless to point out that JFK's apparent wit and charm were, by and large, as fabricated as any modern politician's image.
If Kennedy had lived and served a full term or two, he might have been a great president, or perhaps average or even terrible. But the Kennedy legacy would be something real.
As it is, we have this myth. When the real people of today get measured against the Camelot that never existed, of course today's leaders will come up short.
Lloyd Bentsen's well-timed Senator, you're no John
Kennedy
was a highlight of the 1988 campaign. But the
problem is that, in many ways, John Kennedy was no John
Kennedy either. We have trouble seeing that, and that's the
great enduring tragedy of the assassination.
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