JiFKa: the 50th anniversary of the death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy

I watched Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald, in real time.

A few years back, I asked What was the first public trauma – as opposed to a personal trauma, such as a death or divorce in the family – that you recall? And while not my first event, the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, when I was ten years old and didn’t understand what happened next – I was not yet seeped in Presidential succession law – was terrifying. The death itself was already scary enough.

It certainly didn’t help that Miss Oberlik, our fifth-grade teacher, told us the news, LEFT THE ROOM, for some reason, which got us talking among ourselves about the meaning of it all, and then she comes back and SCREAMS at us for not being quiet, like everyone else in the school (who, I suspect, hadn’t been ABANDONED by their teacher). I wondered later if she had gone off to compose herself after dropping that bombshell on us.

Like much of the nation, I was glued to the television that weekend. I saw Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald, in real time. Of course, I viewed the funeral, and John-John’s salute of his daddy.

Such a strange time, now that I look back on it. A lot of households I visited, especially after the shootings, had pictures on the walls, and the only ones that weren’t family members were of JFK and Jesus Christ. It was not my grief that I remember; it was the tears, seemingly out of nowhere, of many of the adults around me. And if not tears, then an overwhelming sadness that came like unexpected tidal waves.

The 50 cent piece, starting in 1964, bore Kennedy’s image, which I find, in retrospect, to be an amazing feat, changing coinage so quickly. Idlewild Airport in New York City – famous from the Car 54 Where Are You TV theme – was renamed for the slain leader, as was Cape Canaveral, though the latter was eventually switched back.

In 1964, the Report of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, generally referred to as the Warren Commission Report was released. It claimed that Oswald was the lone gunman, not involved in a conspiracy; and that the bullet that killed the President also wounded Governor John Connolly of Texas. One of the local newspapers had excerpts of the Warren Commission report, and I not only read them, I clipped them out of the newspaper, and put it in a three-ring binder, something I believe I STILL have somewhere in the attic.

Over the years, there are those who dismissed the report as a coverup, or at least as a lazy effort of accepting the FBI’s analysis as fact, rather than doing an independent investigation. The Oliver Stone movie JFK (1991), which my girlfriend at the time and I referred to as JiFKa, was about New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s belief that there was “more to the Kennedy assassination than the official story.” Conversely, at the end of his novel 11/22/63, Stephen King says he’s over 95% sure Oswald was the lone shooter, though his wife Tabitha believes otherwise.

The one time I got to meet Earl Warren, along with a number of my classmates in the early 1970s, I really wanted to ask the by-then retired Chief Justice of the Supreme Court about this topic; instead, I asked him some arcane question about corporations as people, which was an issue back in the 1870s as well as the 21st century.

I still wonder, if only a little, what the whole truth of the matter was.
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CBSNews.com to stream 1963 broadcast coverage of JFK assassination, and/or one can buy the coverage on Amazon. I think not for me, thank you.

Five quotes from JFK’s 1963 Civil Rights address that still resonate today

How JFK’s Assassination Changed Media and the SIXTIES Generation.

Lee Harvey Was a Friend of Mine by Laura Cantrell [LISTEN]

Book Review: 11/22/63, a novel by Stephen King

My great frustration with reading this book is that I had a great deal of difficulty putting it down!

I had never read a Stephen King novel, but due to boredom, I ended up taking out from the library 11/22/63, an 800+ page tome. OK, it wasn’t JUST boredom, but also a near-obsession I have long had with the tragic events of that day, crystallized in my mind; my own long-running curiosity about the various conspiracy theories surrounding John F. Kennedy’s assassination; and what would happen if, somehow, the President had survived the attack. (I’m sure I’ll write more about that next year.)

When I checked out the book – allowed for only 14 days, instead of the usual 28, because it’s a recent purchase – the library clerk, who had read it, assured me that it wasn’t one of those King horror books.

Well, no,  and yes. This is a pretty straightforward narrative about a man and a portal to a very specific time and place in 1958. What I always disliked somewhat in some going-back-in-time stories is how very precisely timed the trips were. If one were trying to stop JFK from being killed (or make sure that he was, so that the “time-space continuum”, or whatever, wasn’t wrecked), one would show up in Dallas, Texas on November 19 or so.

What would happen, though, if you had to live in the past for five years before intersecting with history? Would that be a good thing? What would you do with your time? How would you survive financially? (Your 2011 credit card, or for that matter, your 21st-century cash, would not be useful.) Might you involve yourself in other wrongs that should be righted? And would you find the past more enticing than the present? The protagonist says, more than once, that the past is obdurate.

There were monsters, though, in this book, including assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, and a couple of other folks. But the protagonist finds some redeeming characters as well.

My great frustration with reading this book is that I had a great deal of difficulty putting it down! Sleep? Work? Housework? These were getting in my way of finishing this fine, incredibly well-researched book. King addresses his sense of the conspiracy theories, both in the story proper, and the Afterword. Even though this is a fictional account, you will learn much about the forces that led to JFK’s death.

I hope it’s obviously HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
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Jaquandor’s take on the book.

New York Times review by Errol Morris.

Steve’s Stephen King memories

I is for Ides

Only the ides of March, May, July, and October are on the 15th; the rest are on the 13th.


Vincenzo Camuccini-The Ides of March. 1800.

When one hears of ides, it is almost always the Ides of March, which is March 15. And when one thinks of the Ides of March, one inevitably contemplates the assassination of Julius Caesar by his foes and so-called friends in 44 B.C.

Of course, the telling of the tale by William Shakespeare is the most well-known portrayal of the leader’s murder. There are at least 27 different movies and TV shows named Julius Caesar in the IMDB.

An iteration of Caesar’s death I hadn’t been familiar with is The Ides of March: A Novel by Thornton Wilder. From the Amazon description: “The Ides of March, first published in 1948, is a brilliant epistolary novel set in Julius Caesar’s Rome. Thornton Wilder called it ‘a fantasia on certain events and persons of the last days of the Roman republic.’ Through vividly imagined letters and documents, Wilder brings to life a dramatic period of world history and one of history’s most magnetic, elusive personalities.” Moreover, Jerome Kilty turned the book into a 1971 play.

I never saw it, but Episode No. 89 of the TV show Xena was called IDES OF MARCH.

Here’s a look at March 15 in history. Incidentally, the ides of a month is not necessarily on the 15th. In fact, only the ides of March, May, July, and October are on the 15th; the rest are on the 13th.

George Clooney began filming the movie Ides of March, about a Democratic governor campaigning in presidential primaries, in Cincinnati, Ohio in February 2011, continuing into March. Perhaps even on the 15th? Or would that be tempting fate?

There are a few songs called Ides of March, including one by Iron Maiden, but I thought I’d end with a song by a group called Ides of March, doing a live version of their #2 1970 hit Vehicle.
ABC Wednesday – Round 8

Ramblin' with Roger
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