Nov. 23, 1963, was three days after my 5th birthday, a tungsten sky with hardness in it.
We were living on an air base in upstate New York. There may have been snow. A black & white TV, a patch of silver, sizzled in the corner. I was home from school with mumps or chicken pox, dressed in fuzzy flannel jammies. The house we were living in was a government-issue split-level, one of hundreds of identical houses. It must have been tiny, though I remember it as large, with a big basement. Things were bigger then; ask anyone who remembers.
That's a joke. Defense attorneys know how unreliable a witness memory can be. We are prone to confabulation and self-service. We guess, and believe, but we know less than we think.
For years I thought I had actually seen the assassination live on television. This is impossible. There was no television coverage. It was before men with cameras shadowed the president on every mundane mission, recording every exposure to the public on the ghoulish chance something bad might happen.
It wasn't until years later I saw Abraham Zapruder's home movie, its blown-up frames grainy and garish. I'm not even sure that I was in front of a television set when at 12:56 p.m. Eastern Standard Time the first bulletins came in.
I could have been watching. I try to remember and see a movie poster; a child viewed from behind, sitting before a scratchy gray maw, bathed in electronic gray murder. It's not true but it is what I remember.
I was at home, smelling of Campbell's chicken noodle soup, when John F. Kennedy was shot. I know a man who was walking across Harvard Square when some girl ran past him crying; he went to see what was wrong and she told him. I know a woman who was in her high school civics class. Another friend who's passed on now had been in the newsroom of the Dallas Morning News. Two days later he was in the basement of the Dallas City Hall when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald dead.
(His memory wasn't perfect either; he once told me he thought he might have been one of the last people to speak to Ruby before he killed Oswald. In his version, Ruby had been at the newspaper dropping off an ad for his nightclub half an hour before the murder. That seems unlikely since Oswald died on a Sunday--would there have been anyone at the Morning News to accept his ad? Besides, it's well known that Ruby was at the Western Union office across the street from the Dallas City Hall immediately before the shooting. But my friend remembered it as he did.)
I am always astounded to meet full-grown men and women who have no answer to that question, who have no trickster memory of the event because they were born too late. To them, JFK seems as remote as Napoleon.
Maybe they have Sept. 11, 2001, to serve as the day when the adults were stricken; we have the zombie days of '63. I remember riding in the car with my parents through a shut-down town, half-mast flags snapping dully above colorless vacant-looking businesses. Whatever pain there was was blunt and heavy and communal, diffused through millions yet still tangible, a nut of grief in the back of every throat.
I've heard stories that in some parts of the country children cheered when they heard the news, and I used to not believe them. But after I ran a version of this column a few years ago, I got phone calls, letters and emails from dozens of people who remembered just that. I guess it happened, here and there.
We were all bewildered.
There is a way of looking at John Kennedy that will lead you to the conclusion that he was a centrist Democrat of unremarkable credentials whose political success was largely due to a surfeit of personal charisma and great gobs of Daddy's money. There is another way of thinking about Kennedy that might cause you to believe the man was a hypocrite and a hustler, a playboy who lacked the intellectual rigor to fulfill his considerable potential. There are those who will tell you that Kennedy was a fraud and a weakling and that he was far from a great man.
Though his bones have been picked by opportunists as varied as Mark Lane and Seymour Hersh, JFK remains a part of a national mythology. While his function may be more cultural than political, he is all the more potent for having died young and pretty, the first rock star president, James Dean in the White House, trim and well married with a shock of Hollywood unruly hair.
He had the good fortune to be born wealthy, and in that narrow window that made it possible for him to be both adored by television and immune to journalistic enterprise. He benefited from both the coziness of the elite reporters who followed him and from the cameras that caressed his upper-middle-class bone structure. The bullets that ripped through him killed him, yes, but they also provided the strobe flash that burned his handsome, boyish, vigorous image into America's scrapbook of iconic images.
JFK, no matter who or what he was, is the fallen king, and his story is an American legend. He was not the first president to be murdered, but the first to be murdered on TV, and America not only survived but even seemed to congeal around the wound. Lesser countries would have splintered, the army would have mobilized, and the woods would have filled with desperate, dangerous men.
Poor Oswald thought he killed the king, that his murder would have consequences beyond the personal. It didn't work out that way. The revolution didn't come. Oswald was deserted on the beach, and only the impetuous act of another lonely actor saved him from the indignity of jurisprudence.
We have made up fantastic stories about the JFK assassination because we need to believe that it means something when people die, especially when those people are famous or pretty or young. We cannot quite accept the idea that any little man with a gun can squeeze off an unlucky shot and cause a nation to buckle.
But it wasn't hard. All Oswald had to do was make use of the opportunity that was presented him. He simply took his time with the third shot and blew the world apart. He found the seam and waited for his chance.
Sometimes the truth is as simple and as unbelievable as that. Pop. Pop. Pop.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 11/22/2016