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By James [Jerome] Knudsen
For the past week this nation has been remembering, reliving, and rehashing the assassination of John F. Kennedy. We’ve heard from the usual suspects; people who were there in Dallas, or at the inauguration, or in the situation room during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The cable television world has been awash in docu-dramas and biography pieces, the latest conspiracy theories along with the old ones. I’m not interested in critiquing them, I don’t want to discuss the “what ifs” or shine a light on the dark, musty corners of castle Camelot. And with good reason, I wasn’t around back then. On that fateful day in Dallas that saw the end of the JFK era, the JJK era was still 474 days away. My perspective is that of one who has no memories of his own, only the memories of other people’s memories.
It was in fourth grade that I became aware of November 22, 1963. There was probably something in the history textbook. And then I found our family’s paperback copy of the Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy. I never attempted to read it. And by then, the mid-seventies, the world was awash in every possible conspiracy theory. My childhood was filled with stories of “what if,” “if only,” “it would have been different if....” For the adults living through that it must have been a time of unimaginable despair and disillusionment. Maybe that’s what I was feeling all those years.
I was prompted to write about our 35th President by a documentary, Letters to Jackie, which shared the feelings ordinary Americans conveyed to the widowed First Lady following the assassination of her husband. They shared their sense of grief, anger, and loss. It includes clips of JFK delivering some of his best and lesser-known speeches. And in watching the young President speak I noted a combination of qualities that haven’t been found in a Chief Executive since. It’s a combination we need again; bold, brash, passionate, and fearless. Bold enough to present a vision of going to the moon, providing healthcare for the elderly and civil rights for all. Through small, incremental steps or giant leaps, the direction was forward, the destination was the future. Brashness that only a rich kid with not a care in the world could pull off. Seasoned pols will tell you he broke every rule of politics and still got elected. He understood we were ready to be moved to action by an impassioned call to service in the cause of a greater good, and the Peace Corps was born. And Jack Kennedy knew fear. But instead of cowering in the face of it, he used his knowledge to show a nation how to be fearless, to move past its fear, to look ahead, to seek new challenges and to master them.
I look around now and wonder, fifty years on, How good a job have we done in honoring his memory? Here in California I look at what was once the finest public education system in the world now in ruins, its columns toppled, its facades crumbling. The industrial heart of this nation is a post-apocalyptic canvas of shuttered factories and empty cities. And with each 24-hour news cycle people become more polarized, more isolated and less united. In the Theatre Appreciation course I teach we spend a chapter on the Middle Ages—roughly from the fall of the Roman Empire to the dawn of the Renaissance. As far as theatre is concerned there isn’t much to talk about. The people of the Middle Ages were mostly watching Bible stories in church performed by the clergy. If that isn’t a recipe for bad theatre I don’t know what is. But I found something else to talk about a couple of semesters ago: post-apocalyptic culture. For the people trying to eke out a living in Europe a thousand years ago it must have seemed like the world had gone through an apocalypse. Great ruins of a culture that no one remembered littered the landscape. Roman marble re-purposed as a crude bench or table reminded the survivors of something that had been and could be again if only they were smarter or prayed harder or had a great leader. I point out to my students that a post-apocalyptic world was something kids of my generation wondered about. We read stories about it, we saw movies and listened to songs that dealt with the possibility of two global super-powers finally having one last war. And the survivors, assuming there were any, would be left to stumble around in a desolate world trying to build a new civilization.
It has been 50 years since the fall of Camelot. I think that’s enough time stumbling around in the Dark Ages. Despite the best efforts of Walmart, we are not an illiterate mass of serfs. This is a nation of human and natural resources that, once engaged, can lead again with a vision that will benefit all. We just need someone to ask us to be bold, brash, passionate, and fearless, again.
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Copyright © 2013 by James Knudsen
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"Where have all the flowers gone?"
ReplyDeleteFifty years later the legacy of JFK remains as disputed as it on November 23, 1963. Some wish to remember “Camelot”, others shake their heads at the human flaws the succeeding decades have revealed, a few still burn with the resentments of that era. Presidents who have an impact on their times and their fellows, Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR, remain subjects of contention and reexamination for later generations. Kennedy perhaps still stirs our imagination as much for the manner of his death as for any action of his Presidency.
ReplyDeleteWhile the other Presidential Assassinations, Lincoln, Garfield ,McKinley, continue to be subject to scholarly inquiry, only Kennedy’s remains popularly disputed. A political “hot potato” that demolishes the reputation of anyone who speaks of “conspiracy”. Lyndon Johnson foresaw this, that there was a “Paranoid Style in American Politics”, (as Richard J. Hofstadter, termed it in 1964) and tried to de-politicize the events in Dallas, but instead stoked the fire.
He, as many other Presidents have done when faced with controversy, appointed a commission of inquiry. Robert Caro’s The Passage of Power, the fourth volume of his biography of Lyndon Johnson, outlines the problem with The President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, usually referred to as the Warren Commission, quite clearly. 1964 was a Presidential election year, and the last thing Johnson wanted was to leave questions about what had happened in Dallas open to debate with his expected opponent Barry Goldwater, who personified that paranoid style.
In the days after JFK's funeral he approached the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Earl Warren to head the inquiry. Warren, realizing that this was a “hot potato” declined, until pressed by Sam Rayburn, the Speaker of the House of Representatives and Lyndon's political mentor. The goal of the commission was two fold- come to a clear explanation of what had happened, and to do so far enough ahead of the election that it was set aside as a political issue. Which was the prudent, as well as politically smart, thing to do.
The difficulty in this approach is that it requires haste, allowing for procedural questions to be raised. Creating a sense of a “Rush to Judgement”, as the first serious book on the commission by Mark Lane termed it. Also, the agencies that the commissioners turned to, the FBI and the CIA, had their own agendas and secrets to protect. The result being that the document released in September 1964 had enough ambiguities to fuel an industry. So here we are five decades later, not considering the issues James raises, instead arguing “who dunnit”. What a waste.
As I said about Moto's column: to compare Kennedy to today's political trash is to see a giant among midgets.
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