John F. Kennedy Archives - Page 2 of 3

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]

ARA: The way my mind works

The hardest Presidents to remember were Taylor, Fillmore and Pierce, which sounds like a law firm

CHRIS: Ooo, what does the infinity symbol symbolize?

Gee, I thought it was a sidewards eight.

Good on you with the presidents’ thing. The three presidents in one year has happened twice and three in two years but more than one year happened once (by my count using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States), none of which I knew before the discussion came up.

Three in one year was 1841 and 1881, that’s correct. Hadn’t thought about three in two years, but that would be 1849-1850, with Polk, Taylor and Fillmore.

Which brings me to my next question: how do you learn so many random things? Did you, for example, set out to memorize all the presidents and the years? Or does your brain do that “naturally”?

After minutes of self-psychoanalysis, this is what I’ve concluded

1) As a child, I had the foolish notion that should know all the knowable things in the universe.

2) To that end, I used to read encyclopedias – the Americana as a child – dictionaries, and especially the World Almanac, which I have received for Christmas almost every year since I was nine or ten.

3) Realizing at some point that “all the knowable things in the universe” a) was impossible to know and b) was not interesting to me, I tended to concentrate on things like sports (Willie Mays hit .211 in his last season, with the New York Mets), and American history and politics.

4) My specific interest in Presidents, and the Constitution, now that I think about it, probably came from the trauma of the assassination of JFK. “Oh, no, what happens now?” Oh, they have a contingency plan for that! (I’m not sure I could have told you we HAD a Vice-President on November 21, 1963, when I was 10 and a half, let alone that Lyndon Johnson was that guy.)

5) Even more specifically, when JFK was killed, there were all these coincidences with Lincoln that showed up in the newspaper – oh, I used to read the newspaper even then:
a) Lincoln was elected in 1860, JFK in 1960
b) both had Vice-Presidents named Johnson
c) Lincoln reportedly had a secretary named Kennedy, and Kennedy a secretary named Lincoln (I never confirmed that, BTW)

6) This got me thinking about all those previous “accidental Presidents,” starting with Tyler, then Fillmore, A. Johnson, Arthur, T. Roosevelt, Coolidge, and Truman. So it was a small step to get all their dates in order. The hardest ones to remember were Taylor, Fillmore and Pierce, which sounds like a law firm. My daughter tests me regularly with weird stuff like “Who’s the 27th President?” I don’t know, but I remember Cleveland was the 22nd AND the 24th, so I get to Taft soon enough.

7) It seemed a natural progression to start reading the Constitution. (Sidebar: I got to talk to another Chinese delegation at work on the 5th of July. I just happened to come across a box of booklets with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, that I found while sorting things in the attic, so I gave them copies. I also gave a copy to a guy on the bus I know in the context of what the Supreme Court’s June decision on the Defense of Marriage Act did, and did not do.)

8) Of course, the interpretation of the Constitution came from the Supreme Court, and in the 1960s, the Court was dealing with a lot of significant issues involving freedom of the press, the rights of defendants in criminal trials, and civil rights. I could not have cited, e.g. New York Times v. Sullivan (1964) or Gideon v. Wainwright (1962) or Loving v. Virginia (1967), but I believe I was more aware of their implication than most of my classmates at the time. (Hey, speaking of Taft, which I did a couple of paragraphs back, did you know he became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court? Or that he’s the guy pictured?)

9) Conversely, there are plenty of things I DON’T know, starting with the makes and models of automobiles. I recognized a ’66 Ford Mustang recently, but in general, cars have two doors or four and are cars or those larger things (SUVs, minivans). All midsize silver-gray cars look the same to me.

Presidents Day 2013: books, 1912, and longevity out of office

Which four presidents were assassinated?

JEOPARDY! Show #6451 – Monday, October 8, 2012

THE 1912 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

With his opponents dividing the vote, this Democratic challenger was elected
This incumbent president accepted the Republican nomination & did no campaigning; electoral votes: 8
Theodore Roosevelt used this metaphor when announcing his run, hence the button seen here
Eugene V. Debs garnered almost 1 million votes representing this left-leaning party
*Everyone wanted change even back then; the opposing campaign slogans were The ____ Freedom & The ____ Nationalism (same word)

2012 was a big year for Abraham Lincoln. He was featured in two movies, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and that other one. But he did NOT invent Facebook. And secede from the Union? Lincoln has something to say about THAT.

The other guy who got a lot of play was Thomas Jefferson. There was Master of the Mountain: “The real truth about Thomas Jefferson. Forget Sally Hemings — a historian discovers the ugliest side of a founding father in his ledgers.” Jon Meacham, author of Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, and previously, American Lion [Andrew Jackson] and Franklin and Winston, insists he’s not letting Jefferson off the hook.

The Meacham book was one of the Good Reads’ best history & biography, along with Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard: “A riveting historical narrative of the shocking events surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the follow-up to mega-bestselling author Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Lincoln.” Also selected: The Passage of Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson #4) by Robert A. Caro.

In 2013, HBO will air a documentary about Bill Clinton, who is giving his full cooperation. It will be directed by Martin Scorsese.

As of early September 2012, Jimmy Carter became the U.S. president who lived the longest after leaving the office, overtaking Herbert Hoover. Navigate the length of retirement field on this Wikipedia page, and you’ll see that they are followed by Ford, J. Adams, Van Buren, Fillmore, GHW Bush, who just passed Truman, then after him, Nixon, and Madison, the first person this list who served two full terms (though Truman practically did). If I Google for the answer, John Adams often comes up as the answer. That was accurate until Hoover overtook him in 1958.

Carter, incidentally, is severing his ties with the Southern Baptist Convention, after six decades, because of the church’s choice “to interpret holy teachings… to… subjugate women.”

America’s Greenest Presidents. The tease said the top two were Republicans, which made it very easy to pick. Carter was third.

The “Checkers” speech was the making of Richard Nixon. Speaking of the 37th President, Throughout Richard Nixon’s presidency, three of his top White House aides obsessively documented their experiences with Super 8 home movie cameras.” A Kickstarter campaign will help the documentarians “launch OUR NIXON out into the world.”

JFK campaign stamps and Vintage anti-JFK GOP Coloring Book from Early 60s. You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to conclude, as RFK, Jr. did, that the Warren Commission Report was “a shoddy piece of craftsmanship”.

There was a What’s Your White House IQ quiz in Parade magazine. The print version was better. It would ask “Which four presidents were assassinated?”, whereas the online version would make it multiple choice. I DO know the answer, BTW, without the prompts.

Girl discovers all US Presidents except one are related to a former king.

President Obama, again. Plus Obama and his predecessors.

This is a comedy bit: 26 Ways President Obama Has Completely Ruined The Country.

Hard Times – George H.W. Bush Campaign Song. During the 1992 election, Fresh Bush and the Invisible Man released this single.

National Review outraged that Obama called Holocaust ‘senseless violence’; he was essentially quoting Ronald Reagan.

The 2012 Chester A. Arthur Presidential Dollar was finally released after a lengthy delay. It was the first Presidential coin not minted for circulation and struck only in very limited quantities for collectors only. Still hate that; the next three are out now, Cleveland 1, B. Harrison, and Cleveland 2. More on Chester A. Arthur.

JEOPARDY! answers

Woodrow Wilson
William Howard Taft
Throwing his hat into the ring
The Socialists
New

JFK and Thanksgiving Day

Some people say, “We should be thankful EVERY day,” and that’s true. But, for most of us, we just aren’t.

I went out with this woman in the late 1970s who was old enough to have voted for John Kennedy the first time she had the opportunity to vote for President. I can only imagine how devastated she was, along with the rest of the country, when he was killed. Every Thanksgiving I spent with her when she or someone else said grace, she always added, “And bless the memory of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.”

That thought ran through my mind when I realized that Thanksgiving and the assassination of JFK coincided this year. November 22 in 1963 was a Friday – I’ll undoubtedly write more about THAT event next year, on the 50th anniversary.

Thanksgiving is probably my favorite holiday. Yet I know from personal experience how a holiday can engender sad feelings as well. My Chinese restaurant Thanksgiving, when I was uninvited, out of the blue, by an ex. Or the Christmas Eve in 1990 when our church’s tenor soloist died, and yet we had a service to sing; I’m sure we were not very good.

Still, I think a day set aside for thanks is a good thing. Some people say, “We should be thankful EVERY day,” and that’s true. But, for most of us, we just aren’t.

For those of you celebrating it, may this Thanksgiving be a good one.
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Yes, I think the pardoning of the turkey is a silly tradition. It doesn’t bother me, though, like it does some indignant folks. Silliness in DC beats incivility.

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