My first president had his head exploded by an ideologically confused Southerner who thought he was a Marxist.
The assassination of John F. Kennedy was an epiphanic moment for a 5-year-old; before then any notions of country and government were abstract. I'd heard the air base klaxons sound during the missile crisis but remained untouched by existential dread. Back then "duck and cover" was a game, no more ominous than the sugar cubes they fed us to stave off polio.
The JFK assassination was my first encounter with grief.
It hit my parents hard. My father was particularly affected. I don't remember what he said when he sat me down to explain what had happened in Dallas, but I remember his voice and hands shaking as he fumbled with a cigarette. It unbalanced me to see him agitated and unnerved--it was the first fissure in the marble idol version of my father. It was the first time I understood my world could be overturned by ordinary, grubby men driven by agendas I couldn't understand.
My first president was dead.
Technically, my first president was Eisenhower, but I don't remember Ike. I have no idea how my parents might have voted in 1957, the first year they would have been allowed the privilege. Later my father would admit a grudging respect for Barry Goldwater, for whom he never voted, and a revulsion for Richard Nixon (for whom he did), but politics was never something he talked a lot about.
Kennedy was the only president he identified with to any degree. In the summer of 1963 he took me to see Cliff Robertson play U.S. Navy Lieutenant junior grade John F. Kennedy in PT 109 in Syracuse, N.Y. I remember the birthday when he gave me copies of Robert J. Donovan's book PT 109: John F. Kennedy in World War II and JFK's Profiles in Courage, a surprising Pulitzer Prize winner in 1957.
Both books played important roles in creating JFK; PT 109 chronicled his genuine wartime heroism while Profiles in Courage established his intellectual credentials and helped dispel the notion of him as a promising but callow figure. It's widely credited with supplying him the necessary gravitas to run for president.
Now it's understood that Profiles was largely the work of Kennedy's speechwriter Ted Sorensen, who was credited as a research associate, with help from Georgetown history professor Jules Davids. (Who had Jacqueline Bouvier in his class in 1954 and Bill Clinton a few years later). Sorensen said Kennedy ground out the essays that open and close the book, which for me were the best parts.
Anyway, these days we all know what we know about JFK and have our opinions on what kind of man and president he was. I still have a sentimental attachment, though I understand that Camelot is a manufactured myth and that maybe the best grade you could give Kennedy's truncated administration is an incomplete. He's overrated in the popular imagination because of his martyrdom, his rhetoric, and his style. Eisenhower started the space program, LBJ oversaw most of the heavy lifting, and Richard Nixon was president when we landed on the moon.
We can give JFK credit for standing up to Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban missile standoff, but we also have to allow that he precipitated the crisis with the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 (which cost hundreds of lives, damaged America's reputation around the world, and sent Fidel Castro running into the arms of Soviet protectors). There's no uncomplicated view of Kennedy that feels honest; while both conservatives and progressives seek to claim him, he never had the chance to be the great president most Americans imagine him to have been.
Lee Harvey Oswald is said to have spoken well of him and to have praised Kennedy's stance on civil rights. It seems likely that he'd rather have taken out Gen. Edwin Walker, a Kennedy critic whom Oswald saw as a prospective American Hitler, but when Kennedy became a target of opportunity the former Marine nicknamed "Osvaldovich" couldn't resist striking at capitalism's symbolic leader.
And Oswald, as incompetent as he may have been in other arenas, could shoot. He was angry, ill-educated but haughty, resentful and aggrieved. A reporter who met him in Moscow called him a "hick from the boondocks," and the Soviets recorded his Southern accent so they could study its rhythms.
A year after the assassination my father quit going to mass regularly, in part because he disagreed with the Second Vatican Council's Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy which introduced the "new mass." Now there was music during the processional, now priests were allowed to read scriptural passages "in the vernacular"--in their own language--rather than Latin. My father considered this a vulgarization of the rite, for he had learned Latin at the Catholic academy that took him in as a scholarship kid, a poor local boy who slept at home and didn't board.
He loved the high rites and mystery, the swaying thuribles--he was still a young man in the '60s but they were so much older then. It wasn't long after the assassination that he grew his hair and went to Vietnam in mufti, to an escalating war. And we never knew quite why.
So my ideas of JFK, who would turn 100 years old Monday if he'd lived so improbably long, get jumbled with those of my dad, who outlived him by 20 years. My father was 47 when he died; my first president was 46. My first president was younger than Ronald Reagan, who took office 20 years later.
People will argue with all of that; the truth is never so clear and cold that it can be set in type. People will believe what they want, they will cling to their idols and their holy books, their rituals of comfort and consolation.
I am no different. I still mourn for Camelot.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
www.blooddirtangels.com
Editorial on 05/28/2017