THE FIRST FOUR DAYS
Though unreliable, patchy, faded
and embossed, some of my memories of that November Friday and the following
weekend remain keen as sunlight glinting off an icy pond, even if they’re not
particularly unique among my age group, race, or class.
I was nine years old, a fourth
grader at George Washington Elementary School, situated about halfway between
the village of Mohegan Lake and our house on Red Mill Road, Westchester County,
New York.
I was returning from lunch at the
school cafeteria through the crowded hallway and sensed some sort of
excitement. Some other kid cried out, maybe a sentence with the word “shot” in
it.
I arrived back in my fourth
grade class. My peers were in an uproar. I asked what was going on. A classmate
named Stephen Grabiner, turned to me, his mouth gaping, his eyes wide:
“President Kennedy was shot
fifteen minutes ago!”
I don’t recall how I reacted to
this news.
The seats in our class of around
twenty students were arranged in a square, with two desks in the middle,
occupied, I think, by a rotating cast of miscreants, the equivalent of sitting
in the corner.
The day’s lessons were stopped
as we sat at our desks (mine was in front of the window, facing into the room.)
A radio broadcast was piped in over the PA system.
I remember two moments: When the
announcer stated that weapon appeared to have been a high-powered rifle, the
girls seated directly across from me shrieked and jumped in their seats.
Then finally, there came a brief
silence and the announcer, his voice collapsing, said simply, “He’s dead.”
After that, there’s a blank
until the three-thirty bell clanged to send us home and we all jumped from our
desks chattering excitedly. Our teacher, Mrs. Kaplan, admonished us to quiet
down, that “a famous man has just been killed today.”
As I sat on the bus home, a kid
in front of me yelled to another: “You know what the newspaper headlines are
gonna say? ‘President Kennedy Shot in the Head!’”
The bus driver yelled at him to
shut up. Maybe I would have been better off walking home. It wasn’t that far.
My father was long gone, my
mother was working late at the Peekskill Public Library, and so I was home
alone with the TV for the rest of the afternoon. Around dusk, my oldest brother
Chris stormed through the kitchen door.
I stood in the doorway to the
den and innocently asked “What do you think?”
“It’s disgusting!” he shouted in
the way only Burchfield men could yell.
The Peekskill Evening Star headline that evening read “President
Kennedy Shot in Dallas,” with no mention of his being dead. When I read it, I
may have felt some childlike hope that he hadn’t died after all, that the
president would be alright and we and the world would go on pretty much as before.
Kids are right to prize stability in the world around them.
I believe I spent most of the
weekend in front of the TV. I was a thoroughly TV kid then. I don’t recall that
I felt particularly unhappy that all the stations—even the three independent
stations from the City—were providing complete coverage of the event.
If I needed to escape, I could
have gone outside, because we lived in a wonderful place. I likely did. The
Fall was always beautiful, the light both sharp and poignant, the air crisp and
cold, the leaves skittering about.
I know I was watching the moment
Ruby leapt in to shoot Oswald. As Monday came my mother, seeing me sitting
there watching the funeral, remarked, “I’m sorry there’s nothing else on for
you to watch.” I don’t think it a callous statement, just perhaps an expression
of concern I was seeing too much of the outside world’s evil too soon and at
once, relentlessly. And though I may have sighed, I think I sensed there were much
more compelling concerns here than some Abbott and Costello movie.
The weeks following actually
seem a little heady as I remember. Everyone at school decided Kennedy was their
favorite president, including me—the greatest. But my mother fairly pointed out
that he hadn’t really been in office long enough to make that kind judgment.
THE
GREAT WHODUNNIT
For some years after, I was
fascinated as many were by the assassination and its aftermath. The last book I
read cover to cover on Kennedy’s murder was Death
of a President by William Manchester.
Looking over the thicket of
conspiracy theories that have covered the landscape like kudzu since then, it
seems many of them involve so many conspirators, that it’s equally unbelievable
that no one blabbed as people
naturally do. John Wilkes Booth and his cohorts weren’t a zillionth of a
percent as lucky as the various elaborate cabals that supposedly murdered JFK.
“Norman Mailer wrote a whole big
long book about Oswald and he doesn’t think the CIA killed Kennedy,” I once pointed
out to one seething conspiracist. “Norman
Mailer,” I calmly repeated.
“Norman Mailer” she declared
sneering at my pathetic ignorance. “Bought and paid for by the CIA!” Mailer's was
the last name on her long list of people bought and paid for by the CIA.
I guess I’m on her list too. (Hey!
Where’s my payoff!? See how incompetent the CIA is!? I keep my mouth shut for
fifty years and they can’t even cut me a check!).
I’ve always resented the
insinuation that because I accept that Kennedy was murdered by a lone gunman, I
am, therefore, complicit in his murder, putting me in the same moral world as
Holocaust deniers. My antipathy for crackpots and true believers grows and deepens
every year.
For a while, though, I did pay
the Mafia-centric scenario some attention—they definitely had strong motives,
especially Carlos Marcello, the name most often mentioned. But in the end, as
high-ranking Mafioso Jimmy Frattiano pointed out in his autobiography, they
would have been “too chickenshit” to pull off such a crime.
And if the U.S. Government did
have enough suspicion that Marcello or any Mafioso did kill the President, the
killers would have been wiped off the face of the earth by hook or by crook—we
call it “extraordinary rendition” now--and no one would have shed a tear for
them.
Whatever holes remain—and there
are holes as this lumpy
article by Ron Rosenbaum clumsily explains, if you’re patient—I am
satisfied that Oswald acted alone and Jack Ruby was of the same stripe as he—two
fools looking for glory in murder. Sometimes the devil is a loser carrying a
mail-order rifle. He doesn’t have to be an evil genius.
So, I’d like to get on with
history. There’s still good in the world and lots to do, big things and small.
NO HEROES IN THE VOTING BOOTH
Fifty years later, politicians
are no longer heroes to me. They’re men and women of varying degrees of outlook,
intelligence, skill—not to mention corruptibility--to whom we give power and
responsibility to make certain things happen—often vital and crucial things—and
keep other things from happening.
Not that I hate and despise them
as a class out of Mencken-like nihilism (though I laugh at them a lot). They
need to be both kept in perspective and held to their responsibilities. I
sometimes think, like Vladimir Nabokov, that the best monument for a politician
would be the size of a postage stamp.
As I grew up and read more
widely and deeply, John F. Kennedy started looking smaller to me, especially
next to other longer-serving, more effective politicians (such as FDR and even
Lyndon Johnson). It appears, as a committed anti-communist Cold Warrior, that Kennedy
hadn’t yet made up his mind what do about Vietnam—pulling out may have been a
politically unpalatable action and we were already very
deeply committed there, no thanks in small part to him.
Kennedy may well have lost the
1964 election for a variety of reasons, including his
very frail health. At that point would we have had Nelson Rockefeller or
Barry Goldwater in the White House? Would Kennedy have been as effective in
getting his civil rights legislation through as Lyndon Johnson was (a
more-respected figure in civil rights circles, from my understanding)?
Kennedy’s presidency may not
have had quite the direct impact people like to think, but his image, his aura
did. He was undeniably charismatic, handsome, and intelligent, if not always
capable. He had the charisma of a movie star on the level of Cary Grant and it’s
hard to think of a U.S. President before that time like him (In that sense,
Ronald Reagan is definitely a successor, as is Barack Obama.)
But charisma can be dangerous
(see, Hitler, Adolf et al) and, even at its best, a leader can ride only so far
on its magic carpet. And John F. Kennedy was quite far from the great liberal hope
who would bring lasting peace and justice to the world.
UPSIDE DOWN, AND BLOODY
Many younger visitors to this
space may feel baffled and impatient at the attention given this weekend to a
fifty-year old event, but believe me, for many of us who were alive then, some
of how the world is now grew from that moment in Dallas, for much better, say in
the way Kennedy’s image (apart from his reality) galvanized some to strive to make
the world a better place. However, it also made the world much worse.
For me, personally, I may have
been getting another taste of how human beings could be very dangerous, with
agendas that often made no sense to me or the world, no matter what sense it
made to them. John Kennedy’s murder was another of those increasing moments
when the illusory bubble surrounding me broke, and the chaos of the human world
rushed at me. I was learning to be wary as I slowly grew up and into the world.
As one poet warned, there are a
lot of bastards out there. Put another way, by an even greater teacher, we are
sent to wander among wolves and so need to be wise like serpents. But also,
somehow, we’re also called to be as gentle as lambs.
This is a balancing act. The
actions of one, even the smallest among us, can turn the world upside down, and
bloody. As 9/11 also proved, we always have to keep an eye over our shoulders
and up around the next bend, for our individual selves and for each other, as
we pray the devils from wherever they hide, high and low, find none of us.
(re-edited 11/23/13 and 12/5/13)
Copyright 2012 by Thomas
Burchfield
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