JKF Assassination Weekend
American Life In The Kennedy Era
I am Alice L. George, a historian and author who worked as a newspaper editor for 20 years. I am researching and writing a book about American life in the Kennedy era. In that process, I hope to use interviews, books, documents, oral histories, TV shows, movies, sports, and music to capture the essence of those days. In this blog, I will be posting the results of my research as well as my memories. At the same time, I’d like to hear responses and recollections from the blog’s readers.
Somewhat strangely, I have concluded that the best place to start this journey is at its end. Where were you when Kennedy was shot? Most Americans over the age of 70 can answer this question with a surprising number of details. Furthermore, popular culture has created interest in this Crime of the Century among members of later generations as well. On Friday, November 22, 1963, America’s heart stopped. What happened that day in Dallas was equally as unthinkable as the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Today’s entry is primarily based on what I recall about the assassination and my reactions to it as a child, but I must be honest: A few years ago, I wrote a book about Kennedy’s death and its effects on American life, The Assassination of John F. Kennedy: Public Trauma and American Memory, published by Routledge. Consequently, my memory has been contextualized. To produce that book, I read a broad array of assassination-related writing, ranging from official reports to the wildest conspiracy theories.
JFK Assassination Weekend
Nevertheless, what holds the strongest grip on my memory is my own experience as an 11-year-old sixth-grader in my North Carolina hometown. We were sitting in the school auditorium when the building-wide intercom system sounded unexpectedly. Usually, when this happened, we would hear a voice from the principal’s office making an announcement, but this time, the noise we heard was a staticky voice speaking breathlessly. After a moment, I realized that someone had pushed a radio up to the microphone, something that had never happened before. The first thing I remember hearing was a reporter saying that Jacqueline Kennedy appeared to be uninjured and that Vice President Lyndon Johnson was holding his arm when he entered the hospital. The report probably provided more details for about 45 seconds before the reporter returned to the real news—President John F. Kennedy had been shot and seriously wounded. Blood, blood everywhere.
To me, this shocking and unbelievable report seemed like a TV or movie plot. I cannot imagine how first-graders handled this news, especially since they did not hear it from a responsible adult whom they knew, but from an anonymous voice pouring through a faceless loudspeaker. It’s easy to second-guess the school administrators’ somewhat cowardly decision not to break the news to a building full of children; however, nothing like this had occurred in their lifetimes, and they probably had retired by the next time a presidential assassination attempt occurred. (I was a 29-year-old news editor when Ronald Reagan was shot. It was the only time in my newspaper career when I got to call the pressroom and say, “Stop the presses.”)
After the announcement that Kennedy had been shot, we returned to our classroom, and before we had time to conjure up an image of an injured JFK, I saw something I thought I’d never see—adult schoolteachers crying as they conveyed the news that the president of the United States had died in a Dallas emergency room.
That whole weekend was like walking through a blurry nightmare. Kennedy had been so young, and I loved to watch him spar with reporters during his live press conferences. I knew that he was smart, wealthy, and witty. Moreover, almost everyone I knew saw him as “a Yankee.” I am not sure whether I understood that he had the highest approval ratings of any president since voter polls began during Franklin Roosevelt’s administration. (I was only a kid, after all.) I believed that he was a good crisis manager, but I could not have recited details of all of his achievements beyond efforts to protect civil rights activists and the peaceful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which had terrified me. (Maybe I’ll tell you how my school handled that event in a later post.)
As Friday turned into Saturday and the TV networks stayed on the air devoting all of their time to one news story and showing no commercials, I remember being awed by how brave Jacqueline Kennedy was and how strong the entire Kennedy family appeared to be. During those unsettling days, the president’s widow and his family set an example for a nation in mourning. At our house, the TV was on all day. We turned it off each night at bedtime, although uninterrupted coverage on NBC extended from 6:59 a.m. Sunday until 1:18 a.m. Tuesday. (The network showed the slow passage through the Capitol Rotunda of hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans who wanted to pay their respects to a slain leader.) The still relatively new medium of television enabled Americans to share the disturbing end of John F. Kennedy’s story.
On that Sunday, the second most shocking day in four very grim 24-hour periods, Jack Ruby edged through a gathering of law enforcement officers and journalists to shoot Lee Harvey Oswald with surprising ease. I did not see Ruby fire the shots in live coverage on NBC, but I did see it within minutes on another network. It was the first time I had seen this kind of violence in reality. Shortly afterward, I was taking a break, briefly immersed in a child’s life outside with my cats, Mama Kitty and Gingerbread, when my parents returned home from an afternoon event. I remember telling my mother and father in a matter-of-fact way, “Someone shot Oswald,” as if the assassination of an alleged assassin was something that happened every day. I don’t know whether the presence of violence on TV had hardened me to this kind of scene, as some media critics would have argued, or whether it was all so bizarre that it simply didn’t compute in my 11-year-old brain.
aftermath of JFK’s death
Monday was the official day of mourning and the day of Kennedy’s funeral. I recall the riderless horse and the fatherless Kennedy children. Young John Jr.’s salute of his father’s flag-draped coffin seemed almost eerie. Although I had never attended a funeral, the mass seemed familiar to me as a Catholic. I know now that for many American Protestants, this represented their first exposure to something that seemed alien—a Roman Catholic Latin mass. I remember the funeral procession to Arlington and the lighting of the eternal flame by Jacqueline Kennedy, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and Senator Edward Kennedy. I know from subsequent reports that Robert Kennedy may have been as shaken by the assassination as his brother’s widow. His behavior at the time veiled his huge sense of loss, but it was revealed poignantly when he spoke tearfully at the 1964 Democratic Convention and in April 1968 when he delivered an brilliant and moving extemporaneous speech telling a mostly African American crowd that Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. Robert Kennedy himself died from gunshot wounds just two months later, and his funeral brought together many of the same people who had played prominent roles in the aftermath of his brother’s November 1963 slaying. In a way, the two funerals, both ending at Arlington, seemed like two halves of a whole.
In the aftermath of JFK’s death, I realized how little I knew about Lyndon Johnson. Unlike the handsome Kennedy, his looks were average, and instead of a clipped New England accent, he had a lazy Texas drawl. Beyond that he was a virtual unknown to me at that age. When he became leader of Senate Democrats, I was only 2, so that selection was not exactly on my radar. Given that network newscasts were only 15 minutes per night until CBS and NBC expanded to 30 minutes less than three months before Kennedy’s assassination, it is understandable that a vice president would not be well known to an 11-year-old. As a consequence, I was largely indifferent to Johnson when he took office, but I later felt great sympathy for him, succeeding a popular leader who was virtually canonized after his death. He tried to carry out and expand Kennedy’s agenda, but despite a landslide re-election in 1964, he seemed doomed.
John F. Kennedy is still the president with the highest approval ratings ever. Not only did he rate higher than his immediate predecessors, but he outscored the eleven men who followed him. In the years since his death, trust in government has plummeted, and perhaps that has made it impossible for another president to receive such high ratings. Trust that the federal government would tell the truth in almost any case rose during Kennedy’s term and into the beginning of the Johnson years, reaching a level of more than 75 percent, but it began to slide during the later years of Johnson’s administration. Today that figure stands at just 29 percent. The government’s account of Kennedy’s assassination, the Warren Report, contributed to that decline. Many Americans could not believe that a puny loner could kill an American president so easily without help. A rush to release the report without a thorough autopsy or an exhaustive investigation reinforced those feelings.