Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye, A Personal Reminiscence

For those of us who are aging boomers, today brings back bittersweet memories. It’s the 50^th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a day that I will always remember very clearly.

I heard the news in my college dorm room (I was reading Gulliver’s Travels for a class) and was completely bereft. Kennedy was the first politician I admired, the first I actually helped campaign for. Once, shortly after I left for college and my parents were visiting, my mother and I raced out to see his limo rush by the restaurant where we were eating. Tan, handsome, young, cultured, intelligent – everything most politicians at the time weren’t. My mother was in love with him and I guess many of us were.

During the few days after his murder I sat nearly catatonic in front of a television the college brought in so we could watch the funeral. Believe it or not in those days most dorms didn’t have televisions. I was numb with grief and disbelief. It couldn’t have happened and yet it did. The funeral was choreographed theater: the black horse without a rider, and with boots reversed in the stirrups, young John-John saluting as the cortege moved by, and his beautiful widow Jackie wearing a black veil.

Years later I happened to be in Dallas and when the cab I was in drove through Dealey Plaza (where the shooting took place) I recognized it immediately. The images had been burned into my memory by films, photos, and from seeing the 8mm home movie shot by Abraham Zapruder over and over and over again. I went to the Texas Book Depository, the building where Oswald had hidden and from which he fired the fatal shots. Seeing the site, seeing the boxes behind which he hid (they’ve been kept intact), brought it all back to me.

Many of the events surrounding the assassination made no sense. I’m not one who accepts conspiracy theories easily but there were and still are so many unanswered questions. Why was Jack Ruby who was directly connected to the mob allowed to come into police headquarters and shoot the accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald? Why did Oswald shout, “I’m a patsy?” What was the connection between Oswald and Cuba?

What effect did JFK’s affair with mob boss Sam Giancana’s girlfriend (Judith Exner) have on the killing? What influence did attorney general Bobby Kennedy’s aggressive prosecution of Mafioso have? Why has the government still kept much of information about the assassination secret? Why did the first review of what happened completely whitewash the event? There are many farfetched theories out there and a lot of it is baloney but I have never accepted the lone assassin concept. It just doesn’t add up.

As I grew older I began to realize that JFK wasn’t all I thought he was. He initiated a war in Viet Nam – secretly for the most part — that would change my life, the lives of thousands of my peers and their families, and the lives of millions of innocent Vietnamese. People now say he wouldn’t have continued to prosecute that insane, ill-conceived, and murderous war as Lyndon Johnson did but I’m not so sure.

Kennedy and his brother Bobby were obsessed by Cuba to the point that they tried, maybe several times, to have Fidel Castro assassinated, again involving mob figures. He later launched an invasion that culminated in the ignominious Bay of Pigs fiasco, the reverberations of which we’re still feeling, even here in the Keys. Later he and Nikita Khrushchev brought the world to the brink of nuclear war over the issue of nuclear warheads in Cuba. JFK was also clearly behind the 1963 assassination of Ngô Đình Diệm, the president of South Vietnam, a killing that marked the culmination of a successful CIA-backed coup d’état.

Kennedy’s many affairs including with Marilyn Monroe are well documented. While his sexual proclivities were kept private at the time, some of them could have jeopardized the security of the United States and one such affair may have led to his assassination.

Now we are inundated with books, television shows, and memorials on news programs on this the 50^th anniversary of his death. Much of what has been said, will be said, is hagiography. John F. Kennedy was inspiring to those of us who hadn’t yet lost our political innocence. His wit, his intellectual brilliance, his cosmopolitan character were all real and that can’t be changed. He achieved some enduring successes during his brief presidency including in civil rights and peaceful service in the Peace Corps.

However, he was also a cold warrior who was willing to kill international leaders. His actions eventually cost this country thousands of lives and other countries millions.

Our tendency – including my own – to create and worship heroes in public life is ill-advised. They always disappoint us. And, I’m afraid, they always will.