John Fitzgerald Kennedy spoke to me as an adult long before anyone else in my family did, and I understood him.  You don’t forget that. 

 

Of all the things I remember about that awful day, I remember thinking I’d lost someone I knew and liked and who had been nice to me, expected much of me.

 

It was after lunch, and Malcolm Gourlie was standing looking at the ground when we came into Spanish class.  Malcolm always seemed to wear a vest, and he was standing nodding his head to an unknown beat.  He had his thumbs locked in either of his blazer pockets.  He looked up.  “You hear?” he asked me.   Hear what?  “They shot the President.”  I never asked him who ‘they’ were; I don’t know why it didn’t seem strange nobody asked who ‘they’ were.  We just continued past it.

 

I, of course, didn’t believe it and was in full ‘gimme a break’ mode when others wandered in and said they’d heard the same thing from various teachers (at prep school in the 1960’s, we called them Masters) and from others who were allowed to have radios or televisions, or in any case had them.  They were mostly Seniors, but I noted a fair number of my sophomore class remained better informed than I in the coming days.

 

The discussions got loud and emotional.  It percolated into the mentality that we would soon recognize as mob and all sorts of hysterical theories and explanations were in the wind.  We were a closed community, two hundred fifty boys and faculty in the oldest boarding school in the nation, and we were the last of those who were raised by television and the shell shocked veterans of Korea and the Big One who’d benefited from their hysterical insistence on conformity and safety and family and Here, and definitely not over There if it could be helped.  All that shattered around us as we gossiped about that of which we knew less than nothing at the time.  The attacks were at home, now.  Nobody was safe.

 

The Spanish master with the big ears came in white as a sheet and dismissed class and sent everyone back to their dorms.  Mine was on the far side of campus, past the gym, and it was a rather thrilling walk back with our lives, as we saw it, utterly changed forever.

 

Jack Kennedy was little more than a youthful icon to us.  We’d been raised by two grey haired and bald men, Truman and Eisenhower, and Kennedy was so much younger it was like our own father or an older brother had taken the reins.  I’d been twelve when I’d sat and watched the inauguration while my mother was cleaning house and my father fumed in his office.  I listened to Robert Frost, heaving gulps of air into the microphone, hatless, obviously cold and determined, blind as a bat, and speaking from memory.  “The land was ours…..”  Then Kennedy, also hatless but with such thick hair it was hard to imagine him feeling the temperature at all, took the podium.  Behind him Johnson.  Eisenhower to the side.

 

“…ask not what your country can do for you…….” 

 

When you’re twelve, you’re right at the Etonian ideal of melodramatic romantic.  You tear up at movie bravery and nobility in death.  You tear up when certain music plays and you read awful poetry that moves you.  In 1963, I still had a translation of Leonidas’ monument at Thermopylae written in my notebook.  “Pass by, weary traveler, and to Sparta tell.  That here, obedient to her laws, we fell.”  On the other side was a lyric I was busily stealing from the Kingston Trio and applying in the same way.  “One hundred and eighty were challenged by Travis, to be killed and forgotten there…..”  I couldn’t think of a second line that moved me as much as the chroniclers of Leonidas, so under all the crossed out applicants there was nothing…….the Alamo didn’t lend itself to me as easily as I had hoped.  But that didn’t matter, anymore.

 

I teared up listening to that inauguration address.  I’ll bet I wasn’t alone.

 

Years later, of course, I discovered that the translation of the Thermopylae monument wasn’t all that accurate and that the Alamo was a fight for slave states and that while the Spartans did total three hundred only, their hoplite slaves numbered far more, and in any case it didn’t really slow Persia down too much, because Xerxes made it to Athens and watched as the navies fought and his lost.  Since he couldn’t make it back to Persia except by land, they had to start retreating soon.  In any case, Persia considered it mostly a victory because the rebellions ceased for a while and the payoffs continued.  And anyway, the Greeks were Greeks and at each others’ throats within weeks.  It fit in very well with how wars of that sort normally went and there was nothing out of the ordinary.

 

We didn’t know how often things repeated themselves, similar only in hindsight, as men followed their cerebral cortex to most conclusions.

 

In the years since Kennedy was killed, the ‘truth’ has swung back and forth a lot through the four decades.  There is still a lot of momentum for finding a conspiracy, but common sense indicates not, bolstered by the evidence we have, what we know about other assassinations, the ability of people to keep any secret, the type of men supposedly involved.  In any large crowd there to hear or see someone famous, there are probably several individuals or groups of individuals there to do harm.  If one of them summons up the nerve and competence to actually do it, the investigations will undoubtedly uncover the presence and existence of others and, logically, try to find commonality and conspiracy that doesn’t exist.  And of course, we now know lots more about Kennedy.

 

His brother Robert, who’d be killed five years later, said that he didn’t think John had a day without great pain in his adult life.  When he said that, it seemed a strained bid for sympathy beyond and above what the Kennedys already had.  It turned out, with the release of all the files and testimony from doctors in recent years, that this was true.  Kennedy had Addison’s Disease, he had a back dissolving, he couldn’t eat much food, he couldn’t drink alcohol at all, he had war injuries, he’d been given the Last Rites three times previous to becoming President, and he was only forty-six when he died.  What people saw as a healthy tan was his medication and his disease.  John Fitzgerald Kennedy was a physical wreck, a medical basket case at the mercy of quacks and doctors chosen because they could keep a secret they should not have kept.   

 

That the few pleasures allowed him included sex and a lot of it not only should come as no surprise but ought to be looked upon with some kindness and compassion.  He was in such pain the woman nearly always had to be on top.  The man thought he’d die young, maybe tomorrow, and when he was able to get illegal forms of Speed and feel-good medications he grasped at them.  He lied to the public about them, just as the previous administration had lied about Eisenhower’s heart, but it also must be said that there was never any indication that his medication affected his judgment, or that he allowed it to.  There are several instances where he ceased taking things he though were affecting him.

 

He should not have been allowed to be President, maybe, but his election and thousand days in office ought to be looked upon as a personal vindication over and above his father’s role in buying off certain entities that swung the election his way.  His father was a crook, a Nazi apologist, and an awful man who thought nothing of coming on to his sons’ dates if so moved.  But his children recalled him as the warm one in the family, and their mother as sort of a bring-down presence and religious fanatic.   Got it?  Stir in crippling physical pain and ladies and gents, here’s your President!

 

My father hated the Kennedys with a passion that bordered on psychotic for what one would suppose had been personal slights he never revealed, which was because they never were issued.  His brother in law had married a beautiful woman, a Catholic, who had once socialized with Joe Kennedy, Jr., the President’s late older brother.  If there was any actual issue with this, or just a sort of being above celebrity act, it was never revealed to me, but he really hated the Kennedys.  His reaction to JFK, RFK, and Ted Kennedy was very strange, like the loser in an eternal triangle, a guy who ever hated the one who married his sweetheart or his best friend’s sweetheart or maybe the pathetic reaction of the drudge to the charming playboy who always got whatever he wanted, none of which applied here, but my father really, really hated them.  It never left his heart and never sank below hatred. 

 

He loudly screamed at the television whenever they were on, and ever considered Nixon the quality candidate, and proudly displayed his Christmas card from the Nixons for years.  It was all repeated decades later by the same social elements over Bill Clinton, a better President and far sharper than his opponents than Kennedy was. 

 

I think it has to do with sex.  I don’t see how to explain the spitting, sputtering hatred if it isn’t.

 

But, oddly, I never saw it again until Bill Clinton.  The people who just hated the man, and really enjoyed all the sexual scandal that surrounded him, gossiping about it as if their own rather restricted experiences, easily viewed as boring and certainly unrewarding through life, became justified by the embarrassment that Clinton endured.  It was palpably a sexual and lustful hate, as though they themselves were elevated in the pack by Clinton’s fall. 

 

And when he didn’t fall, and they were suddenly all dressed for a party that hadn’t started, they heaved a sigh and locked it all tensely away, awaiting someone, anyone, who they could laugh at and hate, as others had laughed at and ignored them.  Men and women both, although the women were never trusted by their men on such matters, as if they felt in any contest, Clinton could sweep their wives out of their lives.  Certainly, they thought that about JFK.  A fumbling playboy, totally unqualified and riding his father’s money, who could seduce any woman unless stopped, somehow.   Fear.  Hate.  Sex.  It was there with Clinton and it was exactly there with his idol: Kennedy.

 

The nineteen fifties are often erroneously viewed as safe, family value oriented years of innocence and joy and only the appearance of racial strife and drugs and hippies siphoned it all off.  At least in the estimation of those who, like George Will, loved those years.  I suspect that after two horrible wars - even by the standards of war - that the returning millions of vets were pretty well damaged themselves.  They wanted no ‘loud noises’ in their social construct.  They wanted peace and quiet and respect for hard work and no discussions about unpleasant things.  They didn’t want to tell their young wives on their return what they’d done during the war, or on leave, or run the risk of blurting stuff out, so their energy went into a social system that prevented all of that.  It was stifling, it was boring, it was reassuring….but only to those who’d been in combat, and there were a lot of them.  There was no such thing as post traumatic stress syndrome to the public; only variations of the ‘shell shock’ of the First World War, and while it was more advanced than the charges of cowardice or lack on manhood, it didn’t really address the fears and horrors of the returning vets, much less their needs or that of society. 

 

Men who through sloth or wealth didn’t adhere to that image were suspect.  Nixon, who had been in war zones, sensed that and built his career on the fears of such men, because he himself had no charisma whatever, no spark, and even his greatest admirers were not blown away by his speeches or great unifying theories.  His career was built on playing the fears of his peers against the tears of the years, a sing-song oversimplification that television and radio had allowed to be welcomed into the American mindset even beyond small churches, and turned Middle America against civil rights and those with whom they actually had more in common than the political elites.

 

Kennedy, Nixon’s opponent in 1960, was actually none of that.  He’d been born rich, privileged, and above the crowd, but also Irish and Catholic and while he’d actually experienced war, death probably scared him a great deal less than others, given that he’d been expected to die at least three times previously, and had been in pain and some physical misery all his life.   He’d been his father’s second choice as favorite, and only the death of his elder brother Joe - who was trying to get as much press as PT 109 had received by a daring volunteer air operation - put him under his father’s beneficent eye.  Papa Joe charmingly played his children off against each other all his life.

 

Kennedy photographed well, but he was so appallingly thin that many people were shocked on first seeing him in person.  He had a large head and a rugged frame but he was so crippled he could barely bend over.  He wore a heavy back brace to keep him upright, and it was so stiff that his body reacted weirdly when the first bullet slipped through his throat and another blew his head apart on November 22, 1963 in Dealey Plaza.  His athletic reputation is rather puzzling when you watch the movies now: he runs, walks, moves as a man in pain.

 

My cousin was getting married in Washington D.C. that Thanksgiving, eight days after the assassination, and when my father picked me up the day before the holiday and we sped down to New Bedford, we talked about the trip and the President.  I never really recovered from that car ride of less than one hundred miles but in the days of the two lane turnpike it took about two and a half hours, all told, I think. 

 

My father wasted no time talking about the assassination, and while I remember little specifics of what he said, I know he laughed when he talked about it, and took joy in the theory, rampant among the Right of the time, that ‘maybe Kennedy’d got what was coming to him.’  I was fifteen, and my father passed away from me during that car ride, and I never took him seriously again.  I offered up some questions and I do remember him saying “Oh, it’s an awful thing, son, don’t get me wrong…” but in the voice and tone that said he didn’t think it awful at all, and some great Cosmic Karmic imbalance had righted itself.

 

We worshipped our Presidents, and kids back then actually believed that Presidents did what was best; we’d been taught that by school and church and parents, and here was one, my father – there were many others – who clearly hadn’t meant much of what they had said at all.  I’ve always suspected that the great shock of Kennedy’s murder to people my age was that it revealed how many adults were clearly pleased by it, and were revealed as liars and hypocrites.  It did that to me, and it did to some few others I know of, and I suspect many more but because of what is actual Ancestor Worship plus the Fifth Commandment can’t bring themselves to say it, just like the South had trouble saying slavery was wrong, because it would cast their parents into hell, and them after for betraying them.    

 

The years that followed greatly reduced Kennedy’s reputation, but it was an absurd reputation to start with.  He was treated as a Saint by the loonier elements of the Catholic Right; he was Good simply because he and his wife were Beautiful and Young and Catholic.  I married a girl who’d lived in Costa Rica most of her life and who’d been surrounded by friends who had photographs of John Kennedy next to the Saints on the wall, and who was sometimes prayed to as if he himself would become a Saint surely enough.  Like Clinton, Kennedy was revered far more overseas than among those with whom he had to share power.

 

His policies simply could not have been dunderheaded or ill thought out because ….. they just couldn’t, is all.  And the only people who thought differently were people like, well, in their minds, my father, because they were jealous of Kennedy, is all.  A man his own age was President (and suspected of screwing all the broads worth screwing in the entire nation, I mean come on!  Jackie AND Marilyn?) and God!  How they hated him! 

 

But with the years and the ludicrous assassination theories and Jackie having the temerity to marry well again and leave the country for money (could it be anything else?), the intricacies of the Cuban missile crisis and the pressure upon Kennedy by the Right came to the fore, and of course Lyndon Johnson was far more the successful President and far more Left than Kennedy was, and suddenly Jack didn’t look all that bad to those now called the Silent Majority.  He had formed the Green Berets, he had faced down Khrushchev, and he had signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.  Not great, but not bad for only a little over three years.  He had, of course, also got us into Vietnam but it turned out that was the continuing payment for France allowing Germany to rearm, and Kennedy felt he could not lose Vietnam like Truman ‘lost’ China.  We never had them to lose, of course, but the Right wouldn’t see it that way or allow anyone else to see it that way.  We literally didn’t know Jack, in those days.  We just knew our elected leader had been murdered.

 

We celebrated Thanksgiving at home and flew down the day after, and stayed in a hotel for the large wedding.  At the reception, the groom gave a long speech about himself, apparently under the impression he was so interesting to the bride’s family.  It would have seemed out of place at any time, but it was very out of place given we were in a city in mourning in a nation at mourning.  Further, the priests who just married the couple had officiated at the funeral or some part of the Kennedy process and wanted to talk about it, who they’d met, who they’d talked to.  My father didn’t exactly smirk all through the week, but it was close.  His brother, the father of the bride, a Vice President of labor relations for a major manufacturer, had already had run ins with Attorney General Bobby Kennedy and deeply hated him, so no doubt the two had much to cheer them up that weekend.  The Kennedys were gone.

 

But we waved off the happy couple and then met with a friend of mine from Maine, who lived there, and he took us all over the place as a good guide and we had a great time, which was somewhat embarrassing to me because we were surrounded by crepe and flags at half masts and dreary, dreary weather.  We shouldn’t be enjoying ourselves.  This, as I recall it.  I’m surprised at the photographs of us in deep sunshine at the Washington Monument. 

 

And like most kids my age, I missed Jack Kennedy.  I missed the guy who gave a speech when I was twelve that spoke to my emotional values nearly four years before.  An adult, a stranger that seemed to be talking to me as a fellow adult.  “Ask not what your country can do for you….”  I understood him, I vibrated with his emotional renderings, I knew that the torch had been passed and I felt my hand on it, on the winning side, on the side of Good.  A fellow preppy.   A friend, even.  John Fitzgerald Kennedy spoke to me as an adult long before anyone in my family did, and I understood him.  You don’t forget that. 

 

When I visited Dealey Plaza in 1976, I was immediately impressed by how small it was, what a simple shot to hit a slow moving man in an open car with a back brace would have been from that window.  Almost a pistol shot.  All the talk about it requiring a sharpshooter of great ability was revealed as stupid, an attempt to confuse.

 

 For years, I actually wanted there to have been a conspiracy, because I would have enjoyed inflicting vengeance upon his killers or, rather, witnessing it..

 

But it fades away under time and a world of Hinkleys and Chapmans.