[/caption]While young adults hearken back to 9/11 as the time when the United States changed abruptly, for the old folks today, November 22, 1963 marks the end of innocence with the Kennedy assassination that ushered in a time of uncertainty and change.
John F. Kennedy was a different kind of President for many people. He came from the American Brahmin class, having been raised by his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, to be a titan following the death of brother Joseph Jr., who had been killed in the war. JFK, as John F. Kennedy came to be affectionately known, was the quintessential aristocrat of sorts, with the addition of his wife, Jacqueline. It was a cemented status he occupied as a youth and eventually as President of the United States. He was also younger than any other President elected before him and the first Catholic President as well.
Many people think of the 1950’s as that Eisenhower period of relative peace and social harmony, and that type of life was true for many of the emerging middle class. The war was over, the fellows marched home as victors from the “war to end all wars.” But Korea’s war never ended, and Vietnam and Cuba were bubbling up when Kennedy was elected in 1960.
The time just before Kennedy became President, the United States was in many ways like it is today, like A Tale of Two Cities in the best and worst of times, one that represented the haves and those getting, and those who never got and likely never would. In that sense things were as they are today, for many people who saw in Kennedy new hope, hope that was changed to despair that November in 1963. The divisions between black and white remained part of Southern tradition, while women still hung out near the bottom of the career ladders in virtually every occupation except social work, teaching and nursing, as the old knew when it was time to go and left the jobs to sons. There were also the poor who worked in the backdoor areas of the economy: the restaurant kitchens, hotel bathrooms, farmers’ fields and highways. They were the unseen, at the deeper levels of what we now call 99%ers. In 1960 they were referred to by Michael Harrington as The Other America.
While the Middle Eastern nations of Syria, Egypt and Libya have been enmeshed in their peoples’ revolutions during the past few years, new African nations were the 1950’s political debutantes, seeking membership in the official world body among the countries of the world. Democracy for many of these new nations may have been the cry for freedom, as the Arabs proclaim these days. Yet many African countries dissolved into military dictatorships and autocracies, with a series of minor wars here and there that rattled a continent other nations had regarded as holding democracy with hope.
Kennedy offered change as the decade turned from the 1950’s to the 60’s. The new President borrowed pages from the scripts of his rivals, putting forth Hubert Humphrey’s poverty program as well as the Peace Corps, which had been the Senator from Minnesota’s original campaign ideas. But Kennedy became the symbol for inclusion while he stood for the working man as well as the Brahmins he knew well. He was caught between them, trying to serve the needs of both groups and in some cases being unable to serve any as they hoped. He talked of integration while making deals with Southern folk he continued to court as well. And he loved his women, literally for sure, and found them just as necessary in those roles of serving well the needs of men just as corporate chieftains who stood guard among the rafters near the glass ceiling to knock off any woman who hope to break right through.
Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. A young reporter lingered on the fringes of the media, at a time when young women were offered the cubicles for typing, the society pages for writing, or the obituaries for helping while hoping to write. There was no anchor desk to look to, no seat at the table for girls without steno pads where men like Chet Huntley and David Brinkley and Walter Cronkite gave the news of Kennedy’s death in sad and somber tones. But the witness to the events on November 22 and the early days afterward came for this reporter like it did for virtually everyone else that day. It was television, black and white pictures of anguished people standing sobbing before the cameras while the government spokespeople from all over the world came forth to present their condolences for the death of a President too young and too soon.
A blogger encapsulates in simple terms the feelings on that day, the feelings that last with those who sat four days in front of television to watch the changing of the country, from the hope presented by a new President to an uncertain future. It was two days before Thanksgiving 1963 when people talked about those “worst of times” described by the blogger as this:
“Four days of watching the flickering black-and-white images of death. It’s as if they extended beyond the screen, into the space at the foot of my parents’ bed. Black-and-white clouds merging into muted gray, a grayness that would return on many days of tragedy to follow. A gray that, right then and there, surrounded my innocence and dimmed it forever. “
