My Own Private JFK

Fifty years! Hardly seems possible. Some part of you always remains 16.

JFK was the first President Mad Dog can really remember in great detail, personally. Eisenhower was a gray old man. Now that Mad Dog has learned more about Eisenhower's critical approach to the reactionary forces within the US military, Ike looks a lot better. But then Eisenhower was just another irrelevant old man.

And now JFK looks...well, a lot different.

What swept Mad Dog away as a teenager was the marketing, the glamor machine--JFK had that great regional accent which made him sound smarter and more exotic. The only regional accents Mad Dog heard growing up were from the South, and Mad Dog associated those accents with stupidity, brutality and backwardness. 

And there were those press conferences, full of wit and joy and class. And those gatherings at the White House of luminaries, Nobel prize winners, scientists, artists, athletes. One night, JFK stood in front of a glittering dining room, looked around at all the famous, accomplished people and said, "This is perhaps the greatest concentration of talent, creativity and accomplishment to be present in this room in  the White House,  since Thomas Jefferson dined here, alone."

Mad Dog pleaded with his parents to allow him to go downtown to the Kennedy Inauguration, and finally they gave consent, but it snowed 8 inches and that much snow paralyzed Washington, DC. So Mad Dog had to watch it on TV at home, the same way kids in New Hampshire did. Robert Frost tried to read a poem he had written for the occasion, but the sun reflecting off the snow blinded him and JFK stood up to shade the lectern so Frost could read, but Frost gave up trying to read and said he would recite a poem he didn't need to read, one he knew from memory, a poem called, "The Gift Outright." There he was, an old man, standing next to the youngest President, reciting from memory. A lovely moment in American history.  Mad Dog never saw JFK in the flesh. He did meet Jackie Kennedy, much later, when Mad Dog was a resident in medicine at New York Hospital, but never JFK himself.

Mad Dog's father thought Kennedy something of a light weight, and he could not abide Jackie Kennedy. Every time Jackie's name came up, Mad Dog's father would tell the story about when she was a cub reporter and he had to take a telephone call from her,  to answer some questions about some government program and what really struck him was "that awful, brassy voice."  She had no class whatsoever. Just a pushy career woman, trying to make it in Washington.  When she gave her famous televised tour of the White House with that phony whispery voice, Mad Dog's father just howled. "You want a breathy whisper, go for Marilyn Monroe. She, at least, is just being funny and she is a class act."

Apparently, JFK may have agreed.

We know more now. JFK took his pleasures where he found them. His sexual mores were aligned with those of his father. You married a woman, who you put on a pedestal, and you bedded other women, for pleasure. Once Upon A Secret is but one memoir of a woman who JFK had procured, brought to the White House and had sex.  All those sexual adventures mean to Mad Dog now, is JFK lived in an era which demanded he lie about his sex life, an era which has not yet ended.

The Friday Kennedy was shot, there was supposed to be a Judy Collins concert at the  high school, which Mad Dog was in charge of publicizing and there was considerable criticism Mad Dog had done a pretty poor job. Judy Collins was then an  unknown folk singer and she had agreed to appear at the  high school because it had the biggest gym in the county--a field house with a geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller, and the ticket sales had been anemic and that field house was going to be empty. Of course, the concert was cancelled with the news from Dallas.

A few kids at school had transitor radios, but  it was not like today, where everyone is  linked in--radios were not usually turned on until the bus ride home from school. But students  looked out their windows and all those yellow buses were pulling up in front of the school and it was only 2 o'clock in the afternoon. There was that long line of buses and everyone knew something was up. And kids who had radios, turned them on.

They interrupted classes with a Public Address system announcement. 

They were smart enough to select Mr. Good to deliver the news. He really did live up to his name: Everyone really liked him. He was the vice principal.  He said the President had been shot in Dallas but there was no word as yet about his condition. On the way to the buses, kids clustered around anyone who had a radio to his ear, and they knew before they got on the buses: the President was dead.

That school, Walt Whitman High School,  was just miles from the District line, and most of the kids were children of  federal employees, civil servants, Congressmen,  Cabinet officers. Like adolescents everywhere, the students  were more concerned day to day with who was cool and who was dating whom, and it did not matter much what their parents did for work, or who was a Senator's daughter. It mattered if she was cute or bright or stupid, but nobody cared much if your father was a Congressman. But at that school most kids did feel some direct connection to the federal government, and even if their parents were Republicans, nobody was anything but distraught that day. Didn't matter if Kennedy was a Democrat, the idea that somebody could shoot dead the President of the United States made everyone pretty grim.

Personally, Mad Dog was furious. Mad Dog was mad at himself for thinking about how at least he would not have to look out at all those empty seats in the field house and feel like a failure, but he was really furious about the idea somebody could shoot the President, his  President, a President to whom he felt somehow personally connected. 

We heard a lot about Texas over the next few days, how they were all a bunch of haters down there.  But we could see the television images from Dallas and it was pretty clear not everyone in Texas was happy Kennedy had been shot.

As fate would have it, Mad Dog's college girlfriend was from Houston and one of his best friends from Dallas.  Mad Dog sort of made them exceptions, like people in the South made exceptions for Negroes they knew personally. "Oh, he may be a Negro, but he's okay."  That's the way Mad Dog felt about Texans in college. In the end, though, there was a cultural gap between Mad Dog and the girl from Texas.  Broke up with her in medical school. It would never have worked. You can take the girl out of Texas, but you cannot take Texas out of the girl.

But back to Kennedy.

As for his presidency, Command and Control (Eric Schlosser) tells the story Mad Dog had not appreciated, about just how close we came to nuclear war and the most harrowing part of it was not the craziness of Khrushchev, but it was the craziness of our own military leaders, who seriously urged JFK to launch a first strike against the Soviet Union. How did these maniacs rise to the top of the American military?

JFK was rendered impotent to pass legislation to reverse Jim Crow in the South. There were drinking fountains, bathrooms, restaurants, motels for whites only throughout the South and others marked "Colored."  JFK himself was clearly appalled by this. But the Democratic party in those days was a Southern party. Only the Confederate states voted reliably Democratic, against the Republican party of Lincoln, while New Hampshire had William Loeb of the Manchester Union Leader, and the Granite State was reliably Republican, as was much of the Midwest.

LBJ, who may have murdered JFK, changed that alignment of the parties. He pushed for the passage of the Voting Rights Act, and legislation which made segregation illegal and the South jumped ship and turned Republican on a dime.

So, in retrospect, JFK was a transition figure, who managed to keep America from going over the Armageddon cliff, but could not do much to change the nature of life in America for the underclasses. He really could not accomplish much. And he did inject advisers into Vietnam. We'll never know whether or not he would have extricated us from Vietnam. 

We do know he did not push the button during the Cuban missile crisis.

And avoiding Armageddon is no small accomplishment.