OLEAN -- A lifetime ago last Saturday, my world and way of thinking changed. So did America's. A lifetime ago, I attended John Fitzgerald Kennedy's funeral.
It was only 40 years, of course, but that has been my adulthood -- my lifetime living as a grown-up. In my mind, I became an adult on Nov. 22, 1963.
And the nation in that terrible time matured into realization that hope and promise did not always come to fruition, that the federal government lies without consequence, that America's goals are not always pure, and that the world will always be a dangerous place no matter how young and handsome our leaders are. Vietnam and Watergate quickly followed in the overall scheme of things.
A senior editing class on the same college campus where I now teach was just coming to an end that normal Friday. We didn't even know the president had gone to Texas.
An old but working wire machine had been placed in the classroom to give it some semblance of a real newsroom. It began clattering as we gathered our books.
Some of us -- news junkies even then -- drifted over to the machine.
Probably a predictive weekend stock report. If only it had been.
We gasped.
There were no TVs, no computers in the classrooms in those days. Because we were journalism majors, and by accident of scheduling, we had received the news first for the entire university. I rushed into the hallway. The first person I bumped into was a revered history professor. President Kennedy has been shot in Dallas and is thought to be dead, I blurted.
I still hear Peter G. Marron's words ringing clearly.
"Hanchette, that is in poor taste and the worst joke you could think of," he replied, glowering at me. "It is beneath a student such as yourself, and you should be ashamed."
But soon we all knew it was no joke. Radios were turned on in almost every room. The few television sets on campus -- in student lounges and administration offices -- confirmed the terrible news. You didn't have to be one of the many Irish Catholics at the Franciscan school to feel numb. Some students and faculty sat on St. Bonaventure University's expansive lawn wherever they first heard the news, as if felled themselves, weeping numbly. President Kennedy had been murdered in Dallas.
We felt so helpless, so lacking in control, that a classmate's daring proposal seemed the right thing to do. Anthony Bannon, good at recognizing life's unrecoverable moments -- and now curator of the George Eastman House in Rochester -- suggested we drive all night to Washington and attend the funeral. This was no mean feat in those days. Few students had cars back then, it was a nine-hour drive at the shortest on southward mountainous roads, and we had no lodging.
In truth, we had no idea of what we were doing, except going to a president's funeral. A classmate from Philadelphia volunteered his old clunker Pontiac. Soon, seven of us set off for Washington.
The car radio sporadically blared news of someone named Lee Harvey Oswald being nabbed as the prime suspect. We were all impressed with the quick work of the Dallas police. That Oswald guy won't last long in Texas, I mouthed off to my car mates.
Somewhere along the line, we stopped so Bannon could make a call to an elderly friend of his family. The woman lived in a big house in Washington's upscale Northwest neighborhood. She proved a spirited, generous lady who was happy to put up poor students in her big, old, charming house. I drew the garret room with a rickety stored bed, but comfortable down mattress, forgotten furniture, and interesting 19th century items strewn about. The small, spooky space had a dusty old window, too.
The moon shone through that window on that clear night. I am a light sleeper and it brought my eyes open. In a life of traveling and reporting, I have frequently come awake in a strange bed in a strange room, and wondered for a couple of seconds where I was and how I got there. This time a different element of uncertainty seemed present. I felt as if I were out of body in an earlier century, somehow, and in a time of national stress. Must have been dreaming some weird dream, I thought.
I glanced upward. Hanging on the wall, staring down at me from an exquisite antique frame, was a famous photo of Abraham Lincoln -- another murdered president. No wonder I had started awake. He is grieving too, I thought. Lincoln's dark, haunting eyes sent a chill racing through me, and stood the hairs up on my neck. I did not get back to sleep.
The memories tend to blend after four decades, but I remember standing in a long, long line on the next misty night to approach Kennedy's catafalque in the Capitol rotunda -- Americans weeping softly before and behind me. No one talked.
After, Bannon and I walked and walked through the District of Columbia streets. We still had no idea why the youngest elected president had been murdered. The two of us talked at length about that, and didn't pay much attention to where we were going. We realized we had wandered into a rough neighborhood. We heard singing -- beautiful, glorious singing. It emanated from a small African-American church. We were drawn to it, and went in.
We were the only whites in the church. We tried to edge back out the door, but were ushered to a pew where still-singing blacks smiled welcomes and pulled us among them. They joined hands with us and the hymn kept going for minutes. We swayed. The minister, now in full throat, spotted us from the pulpit and delivered a rafter-ringing sermon on how grief unites, how death transcends all differences, and how national tragedy had given two white boys the courage to search for fellowship and grace amidst strangers of another color. Bannon and I knew it was not a matter of courage, but we learned a lifetime of respect in that riveting hour. We were hugged and back-patted after the service.
Another memory: Standing in the sunlight on the Capitol steps the next morning and hearing on someone's transistor radio that Oswald -- the reputed assassin -- had himself been murdered by Jack Ruby, a mob-connected nightclub owner, during transfer from one jail to another. It made my earlier prediction in the car on the way down look brilliant, instead of the immature and uninformed blather it really was. My college buddies looked at me like I had a deck of Tarot cards on me.
I still hear the muffled drums in repetitious funeral cadence -- the drummers turning onto Constitution Avenue and heading for Arlington National Cemetery. Dumdumdum. Dumdumdum. Dumdumdumdumptydumdumdum. I still see the beautiful riderless horse, Black Jack, the boots turned backward in his stirrups -- clip-clopping in seeming time to the drums.
When we returned to St. Bona's, I wrote a mawkish, saccharine editorial in the campus weekly about Kennedy's death and probable ascent into heaven.
The public was not privy at the time to his now-famous human traits and weaknesses. We just knew, when we thought of his killing, that we saw a little boy in light blue saluting his father's funeral cortege, and a graceful widow with royal bearing wearing a black veil and showing us all how to act. I think I wrote the editorial because I felt guilty over a previous slash-and-burn job on JFK's Vietnam policy.
Today's college freshmen were born almost a quarter century after that assassination, and many of their parents were only babies when the death in Dallas occurred. To ask them questions about John F. Kennedy is to realize they are almost as aware of Calvin Coolidge. But their interest is now stirred.
The History Channel and others have marked this anniversary of the Kennedy assassination with a blitz of "documentaries" on his life and various conspiracy theories about his death. "Various" in this context means about a zillion. Everybody seems to have one. Some even believe JFK's successor Lyndon Johnson was behind it all, a TV suggestion that has raised a furor from the Johnson family and few LBJ loyalists still alive.
A solid majority of famously gullible Americans don't believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I am among them. The Warren Commission Report that was supposed to soothe Americans is so full of truck-sized holes it makes Swiss cheese resemble cement. When national security documents were removed from protective seal in the late 1990s, they were widely useless because the key information had been blacked out.
One of the things the shadow-meisters don't want you to know is that the fatal shot came from the front, not the back where it could be blamed on the hapless stooge Oswald. Ask any Vietnam or World War II combat veteran, any hunter, any cop, any street punk, any murderer, any rancher, any medical examiner, any mortician, anyone at all familiar with firearms. They will tell you that a bullet goes in small and comes out big.
There are many people still alive who examined Kennedy's head or what was left of it. A man named Aubrey Riker held it in his hands when the corpse was transferred into the casket. The back of the skull was completely missing and blown away. A shot from behind would have blown out the front of the head.
If you don't believe that, believe your own eyes. Turn on your TV. The programmers play over and over again clips from the horrific eyewitness Zapruder Film. They show the back of Kennedy's skull, and pinkish blood and brain matter, exploding back over the trunk of the convertible limousine.
Jacqueline Kennedy, in her bright pink suit, frantically scrambles over the back seat onto the trunk -- in her own words -- to retrieve bits of her husband's skull bone and brains in the desperate thought she might be able to put them back on his head.
It is by now trite to say America lost its innocence when JFK was killed, and besides, there were several previous and subsequent periods in the country's history when innocence vanished. But we did lose our optimism.
When Kennedy told us we could put men on the moon, we believed him, and he was right. When NASA churns out a press release today assuring future astronaut safety, we all smirk in derision.
When Kennedy assured us the FBI would track down crooks and commies, we took it for granted. We didn't know that J. Edgar Hoover was a consummate blackmail artist, his bureau full of incredible bunglers and racists.
As I write this on the evening of Nov. 22, 2003, a neighbor is out on his back porch at dusk, playing "Amazing Grace" on his bagpipes -- apparently in tribute to the murdered president. That's another memory from 40 years ago: the famous Black Watch pipers in the funeral retinue, playing a similar dirge. Life is indeed circular.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | November 25 2003 |