Like DougJ, I can’t say that I really understand what it would feel like to have the level of hope that my parents’ generation had about JFK, since I was 7 months old at the time. Oddly enough, what I remember in their telling of their JFK assassination story was what they did the weekend after it happened. First, they borrowed a TV, which for my parents was a big deal because they hated TV and wouldn’t buy one for us until 1970 (after which we proceeded to watch it obsessively to make up for lost time). Second, they watched TV all weekend, which to me was unimaginable since my dad worked 60-80 hours a week and my mom was always bustling around the house taking care of her ungrateful brats.
Having grown up hearing about MLK and RFK getting assassinated, if I didn’t know what my parents did that weekend, I would have thought that JFK was like the other two. But, it was clear that, for them, time stopped for a couple of days while they were glued to the TV, so I knew that something extraordinary had happened.
SiubhanDuinne
Yes. Not only was that four-day period an extraordinary time in modern politics and American history, it was also a defining moment in media, and a huge factor in our relationship with mass media.
c u n d gulag
THAT, was the moment when hope, changed.
I would be 6 in March of ’64, and I remember vividly where I was when JFK was shot. I’ll spare you the story.
I was, at that time, too young to become a cynic.
Cynicism came later. In April and June of ’68, when I was a very politically knowledgeable boy, and watched my two hero’s get gunned down – MLK Jr, and RFK.
JFK’s was ‘the shot heard ’round the world.’
Sadly, it wasn’t even close to the last one.
I’m very much a cynic now – except I tell people that I’m a realist.
I really wish that I followed up on what I had thought about after Reagan got elected and John Lennon got killed – and that was to say “Auf wiedersehen!” to America, and look for a job and a life in West Germany
Betty Cracker
I read somewhere yesterday that only about 26% of Americans today are old enough to have personal recollections of the JFK assassination. I guess that makes sense from an actuarial point of view since it was 50 years ago, but as someone who grew up hearing all the adults discussing it on every 11/22, I found it a little jarring to realize that I’m the boring, middle-aged mombie now.
Josie
I was at the University of Texas and had a Latin III class that met TTS at 9:00 (good times). My professor refused to cancel class that weekend, and he was one of those that took roll and counted off your grade if you missed without a doctor’s excuse. I hated him with the heat of a thousand suns, and fifty years later, I still hate him.
NotMax
@Betty Cracker
There was a decent SF novel speculating on someone cloning JFK and bringing the child up in order to pick up the mantle (probably long out of print).
Going from memory, but pretty sure it was called Joshua, Son of None.
Amir Khalid
@Josie:
TTS?
WereBear
@NotMax: Out of print, perhaps, but not unavailable.
Joshua, Son of None
Josie
@Amir Khalid: Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday
Elizabelle
@Josie:
In Texas, yet.
And since dinner in Austin was planned for the evening of JFK’s Dallas trip.
What a bad rabbit.
How do you say that in Latin?
greennotGreen
I don’t think it was actually the loss of JFK that ended an era of growth and optimism, but it became a symbol of that end. Since my father was a rabid Republican, my thought at the time was (I was just a kid,) since JFK was so horrible, isn’t this good for the country? I was never under the illusion that JFK was a great President, but after I began to make my own judgments about political figures, I never thought he was the devil, either.
Come to think of it, I didn’t lose my naive hope about the country till Kent State. We had marched and campaigned against the war in Vietnam for years, and now they were just going to shoot us? Our country was going to shoot its own children? We were right about the war all along, and yet I’ve still never heard any major political figure stand up and say, “The hippies were right about the war.”
Elizabelle
@Amir Khalid:
Thinking that’s Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday.
Hello, sir.
Amir Khalid
@Josie:
Ah. I’d thought it might mean Thursday through Saturday.
Josie
@Elizabelle: Ha! I have no idea. That was a long time ago and I’m old. I probably have other excuses, but I can’t remember them now. I mainly took Latin because, at that time, it could substitute for math. Weird, right?
Baud
@greennotGreen:
I agree. The biggest historical effect of JFK’s assassination is that it made LBJ president and, with that, brought to fore civil rights and the war on poverty, and Vietnam. (Query whether another personality in that spot would have handled those long simmering issues more effectively.)
Josie
@Amir Khalid: Our classes were either Monday, Wednesday, Friday or Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. The classes that were less popular got the less fun schedule – also the ones most taken by freshmen. I notice now that kids are luckier. There are very few Saturday classes scheduled.
WereBear
I’ve never heard anyone considered “of consequence” in our society admit the hippies were right about anything, and yet, most of the time, they were.
NotMax
@greennotGreen
In different words, JFK’s Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, essentially stated that, albeit not publicly until much, much later.
Josie
@WereBear: So true.
MomSense
@greennotGreen:
Kent State was the event for our family–my mom went to Kent State and worked in the Dean of Students office and my dad was a part of starting the anti war movement there. My grandmother loved the Kennedy family and would talk about RFK probably more than JFK.
A weird thing happened to me though and that was when I spent time in France, people of the JFK generation thought I looked like Jackie–so I kept hearing their feelings about JFK and Jackie. There was a restaurant owner who wouldn’t let me pay for my meal. I think I could have eaten free there every day the whole summer.
Betty Cracker
Taking a gaggle of teens to see “Catching Fire” shortly. It’s 2.5 hours long. There better be many good-looking, shirtless lads onscreen to entertain me!
Baud
@WereBear:
Although hippie is often used to described anyone to the left of Joe Scarborough, I thought a true “hippie” was someone who kind of dropped out of society and joined communes or something like that. In other words, I don’t think actual hippies were all that politically involved in the issues of the day.
Just curious if that’s correct.
Linda Featheringill
I remember the assassination of Kennedy very well. I wasn’t a fan of his but still it felt like I’d been kicked in the belly. Devastating.
And how we cheered when What’s-his-name shot Oswald.
Ex Regis
The 1968 assassinations were awful, the first shocking (What? That can’t be.) and the second so scary (Not again. What’s happening to us?).
Neither of them compared in impact to the 1963 assassination. People were so hopeful then for the future. I was a college student, looking forward to my first vote being for JFK in 1964. (The voting age was 21 then.) Everything seemed to crumble.
And then there was the novelty of all-day coverage of the assassination’s aftermath, including the unbelievable and numbing murder of Oswald on live TV.
All sorts of pictures come to mind, intrude, of Boston where I was living at the time: police crying while directing traffic, retail workers having to be physically touched to remind them to take our items, crowds silent at trolley stations and streets and other places where we normally would hear conversation.
CarolDuhart2
Mistermix, I was seven, but that was a time when even grocery stores closed at six. For something like this, just about everything closed that weekend.
An example: I remember when only one convenience store was open on Christmas Eve. My dad would drive us past all of the glittering lights (gas was a quarter a gallon then) and we would pass all of the closed gas stations and closed stores that night). Same thing on Thanksgiving. So a stunned nation simply sat watching tv that weekend. One memory of that Saturday was seeing all of the people pile past the casket-all ages, all races, paying respects in the rotunda.
Somehow I remember sitting on the porch steps that weekend and noticing how silent the streets were, how devoid of even other kids to play with, how there was no traffic at all (or very little). I vaugely remember Oswald being shot as well. Then there was Monday and the funeral, and having to go back to school.
NotMax
@Baud
Hippies, Beats, Diggers (does anyone remember that term?), Yuppies, etc., etc, long ago became ensconced under the umbrella term ‘hippie,’ referring to anything remotely counter-cultural, especially, at the time, males with long hair
Amir Khalid
@Betty Cracker:
Have you read the books? They’re well worth it. I plan to skim through Catching Fire, just for a quick recap of the story, before seeing the movie.
geg6
@Baud:
Not in my experience. I knew many hippies but only a very few joined communes. And every single one was anti-war and politically active. My oldest brother was a DFH college student with a whole John Lennon look going on, but he cut his hair and shaved to go “clean for Gene.”
Baud
@NotMax:
Wait, I thought yuppies were 1980s Alex Keaton type conservatives.
ETA: Thanks for the correction.
@Amir Khalid:
It was a good series, although I think the ending lost some coherence.
aimai
I was only three, and my parents, though staunch democrats, didn’t romanticize Kennedy at all–we never had any “this was the day he was shot” discussions at.all. And Kennedy was local for us–since we are from MA.
But I don’t understand why people who were too young to remember the death of this president don’t get how shocking it was that the most protected man on th eplanet, as people thought, someone lawfully elected who had campaigned all over the country just: dissapeared. Just was murdered off the public stage. As I (and others) have constantly reminded people we then had even more political assasinations and the connection between the bone deep hatred of the neo confederates/john birchers for white “race traitors” as well as specifically black leaders became obvious. I’m not falling for the romantic notion of Kennedy as anything special on civil rights but I am arguing that retrospectively his murder ushered in (another) era in which political and policy differences–specifically the Civil Rights movement–permitted the white on black violence of the Jim Crow era to be experienced as moving upwards into white on white violence and the violence of the local states against the federal government and its workers.
I’d like to point out that Reagan was nearly killed and that was as big a shock for the country–left or right. I’d have been happy for him to die in office but I was still very upset at his shooting.
NotMax
@NotMax
My very, very bad in #25.
Yippies, not Yuppies.
MikeJ
@Amir Khalid: Didn’t care for the second as much as the first. I liked that the first was stand alone and hated that the second book just sort of stopped in the middle so they could make it three books.
Betty Cracker
@Amir Khalid: Yes. I read all three a couple of years ago. I enjoyed the first movie — I absolutely love Jennifer Lawrence. She’s a wonderful actor, which I’ve known since I first saw her in Winter’s Bone.
NotMax
@Baud
Yup. Product of it being 5 a.m. here, I suppose.
See #30 for correction.
Baud
@geg6:
Thanks. And, yes, the hippies were often right.
gogol's wife
@Ex Regis:
This is true to my recollections. What I’m struck by on these comment threads is how callous and inured to political violence our society has become, when people who weren’t born yet in 1963 can’t imagine why it was such a big deal.
c u n d gulag
@Baud:
I doubt anyone could have handled the Civil Rights legislation better than LBJ did.
He was, after all, a Texan, and had run a virtual Dixiecrat campaign, in ’48.
After JFK’s funeral, when talking with his advisors about what he wanted to do next, was told maybe he should wait until AFTER he was reelected. Johnson said something to the effect of, ‘What good is the Presidency, if I can’t do anything about Civil Rights?’
And while I praise him for sticking up for Civil Rights, where he was the exactly right man at exactly the right moment. unlike JFK, who was more focused on international affairs, LBJ was exactly the wrong man at the wrong moment, for Vietnam.
Charles de Gaulle had warned JFK and RFK about getting ground troops in Vietnam.
If LBJ knew about that, he ignored the warnings.
And, if anyone knew anything about the negative results of putting ground troops in Vietnam, it was the French, and Charles de Gaulle.
And Vietnam ate his Presidency.
In the end, he felt like his legacies on Civil Rights and poverty were far overshadowed by Vietnam.
The testimony to how wrong he was, is how active and focused America’s Conservatives still are, to dismantle his “Great Society” on their way to destroy FDR’s “New Deal.”
Ultimately, and ironically, it was LBJ getting sidetracked into the horrors that became The Vietnam War, that prevented us from becoming a ‘Greater Society.’
ellie
I asked my mom that question, and my parents, too, were glued to the television all that weekend.
aimai
@gogol’s wife: What strikes me as odd is the desire of people to find a villain–and to find the real villain is “the boomers” and “people who think Kennedy was a big deal” or “people who are sentimental about stuff that happened in their youth” or whatever. I’ve seen tons of complaints about the TV coverage like it is the populace that demanded it rather than the insatiable 24/7 media circus looking for content. Or questions from posters about why this is such a big deal as though it wasn’t, obviously, a huge deal since the abrupt transmission of power in a democracy between elections is always a big deal.
Mostly I’ve been struck by the hostility displayed towards people who want to think about or remember what seemed a pivotal event for them and their families and the country. Maybe I’ll feel the same way about 9/11 given the way its been used politically as a cause of war. But I certainly won’t be surprised if people still want to talk about it and think about it in fifty years or remember where they were when they heard. It was more of a slow moving disaster but I think people will still talk about it that way.
MikeJ
@c u n d gulag:
It took ten times as many deaths to end slavery in the 1860s. If the Vietnam war was the price to pay to end Jim Crow it was cheap.
Baud
@c u n d gulag:
I don’t think anyone could have been better at being aggressive about civil rights and getting it through. But I wonder whether anyone else could have managed it in a way that mitigated the ensuing societal upheavals that followed.
In the end, probably not. Privilege is privilege, and it doesn’t die quietly.
NotMax
@c u n d gulag
LBJ’s Great Society was an outgrowth of JFK’s New Frontier.
He certainly was mindful of the well of political capital the assassination had bestowed upon him and spent it copiously, some wisely, too much foolishly or grandiosely.
MikeJ
@aimai:
Anyone with the temerity to express interest or concern about anything on the internet will almost always immediately be informed that the things they care about are at best meaningless, or more often actively evil.
You can see this on threads about the trivial (Doctor Who in the previous thread ) to the literally world changing (like political assassinations).
Baud
@ellie:
As we would all be if, God forbid, some loon got to Obama.
The only difference is that we’d be live-blogging about it while watching it unfold on TV.
geg6
@Baud:
There was no way and no person who could have possibly mitigated the rage of white males who were seeing their privilege seeping away and who felt powerless to stop it. They still haven’t dealt with it and that’s why we still cannot have nice things.
Elizabelle
JFK honored in Fort Worth, site of ‘the last good memory’
Read more here: http://www.thestate.com/2013/11/22/3114909/kennedy-remembered-at-fort-worth.html#storylink=cpy
NotMax
@c u n d gulag
Also too, people tend to forget the 15 members of the Electoral College (14 of them Dems) who voted for a Dixiecrat ticket (Byrd/Thurmond) who had not even been on any ballot rather than for Kennedy, and made no secret that it was because of JFK’s support for civil rights.
Elizabelle
@Baud:
I never even like to think about that.
GW Bush might have a Grandpa Moses period at age 94; he’s safe as can be, and back in his cocoon of privilege.
Obama’s life will never be the same.
Baud
@Elizabelle:
I feel the same way. I just think it’s odd that people think it’s odd that the nation would be glued to the TV after a horrific event like that.
Elizabelle
@c u n d gulag:
LBJ pretty much drank himself to death, didn’t he, over despair of Vietnam. He couldn’t see the great things he accomplished, and those opposed to the War refused to see them too.
One thinks of Jimmy Carter after his presidency; he did not retire but accomplished even more.
And tries not to think of W and — worst of all — Cheney roaming America a free man, from whatever undisclosed location he picks any given day.
CarolDuhart2
@Baud: Which is why, ironically, Obama won’t be. The Secret Service was very underfunded in those days, with fewer agents than a city police department. Even today, some say there isn’t enough agents, but at least they have better equipped and trained and more agents. The open convertibles are gone:, many buildings along a route are sealed, and snipers are posted at strategic spots. And nobody publishes a Presidential travel route days in advance anymore.
A day like this is a “look back over the bridge we crossed” moment-a moment to realize that we’ve come a long way since those terrible days in Dallas.
shelly
Remember that weekend very well. At the time we lived on a very busy main street. My parents would always insist on walking me across if I wanted to visit my friends. No need that Saturday or Sunday. The street was as quiet and deserted as if it was 3am on Christmas morning.
Villago Delenda Est
It’s been often said that the 60’s began on 22 November 1963, and ended on 9 August 1974. This period just happens to coincide with the bulk of my time in 1-12 education. I was in first grade when Kennedy was assassinated, and I was anticipating my senior year of high school when Nixon resigned under fire. It shaped my life in countless ways, growing up during that period…Civil Rights, Vietnam, Men walking on the FUCKING Moon, Watergate. Not to mention the Beatles, Motown, and the incredible fusion of music you’d hear pour out of the radio…nothing at all like the highly stratified “one format only” approach to what’s left of radio today.
Kennedy’s assassination set the tone for the 60’s…that even though Oswald was a leftist, the conspiracy theories all center around the right wing taking out this guy who was set to change things, and it was time to make sure that his murder did not disrupt the New Frontier, which morphed into the Great Society, which for the most part, was wildly successful and because of this the entire “government is the problem, not the solution” meme was created in order to counter the good that was in fact accomplished which was contrary to “conservative” conventional thinking. I was going to use “wisdom” but that’s so over the top and out of place…”thinking” is borderline out of place, too.
If Vietnam hadn’t fucked it all up, LBJ would be remembered as a great president, on the order of FDR and Lincoln. His need to protect his right flank on foreign policy worked against his legacy. Would Kennedy have handled it differently? We’ll never know.
CarolDuhart2
@Elizabelle: Another thing that came out of the assassination that helps Obama: the lifetime protection of former Presidents. Beforehand,
Secret Service protection stopped when the President stopped being President. Truman’s memoirs relate that when he was no longer President, he and Bess went on a cross-country trip exploring America. No security at all, just he and Bess traveling around. And while Jackie had Secret Service protection for a while, one reason she married Onassis was that he could provide her private security.
MikeJ
@CarolDuhart2: The Republican congress dropped that in the 90s as a way to say “fuck you” to Clinton. Clinton however still gets lifetime protection since they couldn’t change the deal for a sitting president. Bush is the first to give up Secret Service protection, and Obama will have to give it up too.
CarolDuhart2
@MikeJ: It was restored recently:
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/01/lifetime-secret-service-protection-restored-for-presidents-bush-and-obama/
NotMax
@Villago Delenda Est
Johnson’s M.O. often involved bullying people politically into acceding to his will or demands.
In domestic policy, that can be an asset.
In foreign policy, it is much more often a detriment.
I do believe he came to recognize the distinction during his short time post-presidency.
c u n d gulag
I agree with those who responded to my earlier observations on JFK and LBJ.
And yes, LBJ’s actions on civil rights stemmed from JFK’s “New Frontier.”
But one thing LBJ understood that JFK didn’t have any experience in, was poverty.
By the early 70’s, LBJ’s “War on Poverty” helped to lower the rate of those in poverty by a lot.
Not nearly enough – but a lot!
But since that time, Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, and W – and yes, Bill Clinton, too – did a lot to raise the level of poverty back up.
And now, Republican members of Congress would do any and every thing that they could, if we decided to do a “War on Poverty II.”
And boast about their efforts.
Dave
Is that an Art Brut reference? I’d never expect that…
Villago Delenda Est
@Baud:
Hermione: “Dumbledore says that people find it far easier to forgive people for being wrong than for being right. I heard him telling your mum, Ron.”
Ron: “Sounds like the sort of mental thing Dumbledore would say.”
GregB
Us conservatives had such hopes and dreams for JFK. What, after he vanquished that left wing liberal Richard Nixon in 1960 and told all Americans that government was the enemy.
Then Oswald ruined everything.
CarolDuhart2
@c u n d gulag: However imperfectly done, the Great Society programs put a floor under the poor. There were just about no homeless for decades: even the poorest could get public housing and some food and some medical care. Also, and I believe this is one reason some of the whites of the day hated this: the educational programs of the Great Society expanded the opportunity for education to the growing black and brown population. College education was rare among black and brown people back in 1963: Thanks to Pell Grants, loans, and other programs, college became more integrated and more diverse, and subsquently the professions as well.
Villago Delenda Est
OT: Noisemax reports:
Ted Cruz to Meet With Trump
The stupid is strong with these two.
Baud
@GregB:
“Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what a tax cut can do for your country.”
dmsilev
@Villago Delenda Est: One hopes that a Stupid Event Horizon will form from which neither will be able to escape.
NotMax
@c u n d gulag
When running a guns and butter administration, one doesn’t dread the butter being turned on him or her. The guns are always – always – another matter entirely.
debbie
@greennotGreen:
I think the shock of the loss was that it was “unthinkable” that it could happen. Like Kent State (Gov. Rhodes sent an actual tank down High Street to frighten OSU students) or 9/11 (It didn’t occur to me that the buildings would actually fall down).
Nothing’s unthinkable anymore. The unthinkable is now not only possible, but likely. It’s just one more blow to absorb.
handsmile
@Baud: , et al
For more extensive answers to the questions you raise, I recommend with the greatest enthusiasm the book, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage by Todd Gitlin. Gitlin was among the most prominent political activists of that era, e.g., president of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and an organizer of early anti-war marches in Washington and NYC. Now a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia, he remains a respected leader of progressive opinion and action.
At the moment, The Sixties is regarded as the most authoritative, non-specialist volume on this tumultuous decade of American history. A wonderful, illuminating, and enjoyable book.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Sixties-Years-Hope-Days/dp/0553372122/ref=cm_lmf_tit_14
More generally, there is active debate among American cultural and political historians as to the degree/extent of political activism of young people (college-age, early/mid 20s) in the ’60s. The Civil Rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War were the defining and binding struggles for those so engaged. “Hippies” was little more than a generic pejorative used to discredit those espousing non-mainstream views and to foment class resentment.
Baud
@handsmile:
Thanks. I’ve added it to my read list.
NotMax
@NotMax
Left out the final line.
LBJ’s seeming lack of that dread was a key flaw.
Dolly Llama
@Baud: I was just thinking the same thing. And within 24 hours of it happening, some House wingnut would say he planned it to divert attention from the Obamacare rollout.
GregB
@Villago Delenda Est:
CarolDuhart2
Can we hope they would run together, and insure us a Democratic Congress?
Suzanne
I was born in 1980, and so I have dim memories of Challenger, and of course remember 9/11. The thing about the JFK assassination that always surprised me, though, is that no one seemed to have imagined that that could happen. Like, riding in an open-top car? No one imagined that bad shot could happen? Are you fucking kidding me? McKinley had been shot. Lincoln had been shot. Come ON.
the Conster
As a third grader from the Boston suburbs, yes, that weekend is etched into my mind as the saddest time I’d ever witnessed, shared collectively. We had a black and white TV and that makes all my memories so much starker, and somber. I remember laying on the gray rug in front of that TV that wasn’t turned off, and in those days there was no compulsion for the studio people to talk over everything – the whole drama played out in real time, with no punditry or voice overs except to convey information and the grief of that beautiful family was a real thing that I can still muster, being about Caroline’s age. The shock this 8 year old felt that there were such evil people in the world who could do this, turned into certainty that every politician who espoused and acted on my beliefs – sharing, justice for all, the commonwealth, etc. would be killed like RFK. I pray in my manner every day for this president.
dmbeaster
@c u n d gulag: Getting sidetracked by rather pointless wars tends to sum up US history over the last five decades. It has been a powerful force in US politics that has truly effed us up. 911 re-ignited the influence of these people to our regret. And all that you have to do is look at the trajectory from Eisenhower (warning us about the influence of the military industrial complex) to Reagan, who was both bellicose and loved to overspend on the military, to see who has been winning the debate about sending us into pointless wars.
nancy
@greennotGreen: I was 10 and I, too, recalled my parents being critical so I was confused by the grief around me. Kids are literal. I only later realized that my father criticized every president and member of congress, actually rather knowledgeable of him when I think of it now. I grew up expecting that heroes, like Medgar Evers and Dr. King, would be killed. When Kent State happened, I was planning to go to college. I think I less-than-consciously expected that the killing would continue, and I assumed that I wouldn’t have a long life. It made planning for the future seem like a joke. And the killing has continued, just not necessarily acknowledged by the remnants of our national media. The point of comments is to be short and to the point, so I’ll stop here. It is good to read intelligent thoughts at this site.
WereBear
@Baud: As for what “hippies” advocated, I’m thinking in particular of:
*diplomatic means to ends, ending war, seeking peaceful means first
*reverence for the Earth, conservation and ecological issues, renewable resources
*diversity regarding sexes, skin color, orientation, nationality, embracing the spectrum of human rights
*celebrating all forms of art, even those not usually regarded as “art” and respecting all forms of expression
*widening of our concept of spirituality, ecumenicalism, democracy in word and deed in both politics and religion
*the egalitarian concept writ large
And this is just off the top of my head. Naturally, the media of the time was determined to discredit, distort, and outright slander those dirty, drug-ridden sluts (female) with the long hair (male.)
And still… we rise.
Tripod
@Betty Cracker:
We’re getting far away from the JFK assassination as that event was from McKinley.
Memory is a funny thing. I suspect what we get now in terms of “I was there” is some kernels of truth interspersed with forty years of mass media hagiography.
The lost hope of Camelot is a made for TV storyline. For all of the usual “The Sixties” tropes, I believe the most salient event of the era was domestic peak oil production. Until then it was easy for the Democrats to spread the wealth around to some very disparate interest groups. After that economic growth engine became constrained, it became politically expedient for the GOP to punch down.
Mandalay
Photoshop becomes art.
Nobody could have predicted how devastating this innocuous image would become….
A great image that says everything about a vile fucker who richly deserves all the hatred he has earned.
handsmile
@Suzanne:
Proximity of target and assassin had something to do with it, I’d imagine. Lincoln, McKinley, and James Garfield (hey, let’s not forget our 20th President!) were all shot and killed at close range. That was the threat that the Secret Service and Dallas police were detailed to prevent.
Now, of course, we have Pope-mobiles.
(also too, i didn’t realize you were so young. from your commentary on this blog, i’d have thought I was reading the wisdom of someone at least in their 40s. :) )
Ol'Froth
I was only a year old when JFK was murdered, so I have no recollection of the event. However, I was seven years old when Eisenhower died, and I asked my father why I didn’t have to go to school that day. When he told me it was because a great man had died, I asked, “Who shot him?” I think that says quite a bit about the turbulence of that decade.
geg6
@handsmile:
I second that recommendation. Great book.
NotMax
@Suzanne
Accessibility of the polity to power was a long-standing (and since eroded) part of the American system.
1963 wasn’t all that far removed from the time when anyone could walk up to, and into, the White House from the street. Access to the Capitol wasn’t fully limited and controlled until after 2001.
Riding in an open car (and before that, a carriage) was a normal, traditional, entirely unremarkable occurrence.(yes, there was a bubble top car, but it was used more for inclement weather).
McKinley was shot while on the road, pressing the flesh. Garfield was shot in a train station, Lincoln in a darkened theater. That a parade or motorcade would be used for a shooting was not inconceivable, but neither had it happened here. Had anarchists tossing bombs into a carriage (Russia, for example) or shooting at a vehicle (Archduke Ferdinand, for example) had a record of operating in the U.S., things might have been configured differently. But those were deemed the types of things that happened either ‘over there’ or in benighted lands.
Jimmy Carter’s walk from the inauguration to the White House was not only iconic, it was courageous.
Jeremy
@Suzanne: That same thought always comes to mind whenever the JFK assassination comes up,especially after assassination attempts on previous presidents.
shortstop
@Linda Featheringill:
Fortunately, your violence-solves-violence worldview was in the distinct minority. I just read in William Manchester’s book (haven’t looked at his sourcing) that something like three-quarters of those polled just after Kennedy’s death expressed hope that Oswald wouldn’t be lynched or shot himself.
I wonder what that number would be today in a similar situation.
Schlemizel
@c u n d gulag:
In his defense LBJ as not excited about escalating in Viet Nam. The recording of his phone call with McNamara just after the Gulf of Tonkin was both illuminating and and saddening. LBJ knew the event was fake, he says so on the phone. He had sent McNamara to the Pentagon to ferret out the truth so that he would not be in a position he had no choice but to escalate. He knew he was being railroaded by the Pentagon & wanted to know who exactly and how he could expose them. McNamara was coming up dry. The sad part was LBJ said he didn’t want to escalate but the election was coming up and the GOP would eat him alive if he did not respond or prove the attack was a fake. He made the mistake of putting the election ahead of what was best for the country.
They were unable to get the proof needed & the country paid a terrible price.
shortstop
@NotMax: Reading about the weekend’s events, I always thought it rather brave of Johnson to walk for part of the funeral procession — well, I can’t remember whether it was the funeral itself on Monday or the transport of Kennedy’s body from the WH to the Capitol on Sunday. But walk he did through the streets of Washington, and Jackie Kennedy thanked him for it later. It was courageous because the notion lingered widely that weekend that this might be a wider conspiracy against the government. Kind of strange that the Secret Service let him do it.
Chris
@c u n d gulag:
I’ve only speed-read through Caro’s book on LBJ, but yeah. From what I remember, the fact that he grew up in politics through the ranks of ultra-Dixiecrat Texas politics was a huge asset in getting civil rights passed. The segregationists saw him as one of them, so he was able to string them along in the beginning by saying “look, you gotta give the liberals something. Trust me, I’ll make sure it’s nothing really big.” Took them a bit of time to realize they were being played.
shortstop
@Chris:
That’s books with an S, pal — soon to be five volumes. They’re a slog to read cover to cover, but thoroughly engrossing if you can find the time.
ETA: Dallek, too. Since you’re talking about the passage of civil rights legislation and Caro’s volume on the LBJ presidency is still in preparation, you might be thinking of Dallek?
aspasia
I was twenty and in college when JFK was murdered. When Oswald was killed on live TV, most (or at least many) of those watching smelled a rat. I knew people (my dad, for instance), who predicted it before it happened.
In the terrible years that followed, Malcolm, MLK and RFK were assassinated. I readily joined the anti-war and anti-establishment movements, doing what little I could in the face of increasing repression. I admire those who continue resisting today–the Dreamers, for instance–in the face of an uncooperative media and the slow disappearance of left discourse from public space (BJ is an honorable exception). It’s hard not to wonder if JFK’s murder represents the beginning of all that.
Chris
@Suzanne:
And this was just a few years after De Gaulle’s whereabouts had been turned into a fucking shooting range, too, which you’d think would’ve made them think twice…
That’s the one silver lining from the Age Of Political Assassinations for me: as many people as “they” got, they never got De Gaulle. And God damn did they give it all their best shots, too.
Chris
@shortstop:
“Master of the Senate,” if memory serves. It was about before he made it to the White House.
shortstop
@Chris: That’s an exceptionally good volume. And I may be wrong about how far the fourth volume goes. It’s the only one I haven’t read — sitting on my nightstand lined up behind a few other reads. It may go farther into 1964 than I assumed. Am sure someone here can verify.
Baud
@shortstop:
The fourth is the only one I’ve read. It goes until just before the 1964 election. It’s all about the assassination and the transition to LBJ and then the passage of the Civil Rights Act.
ETA: Lots about the LBJ/JFK/RFK relationship also.
Cervantes
@aimai: Mostly I’ve been struck by the hostility displayed towards people who want to think about or remember what seemed a pivotal event for them and their families and the country.
It’s insensitivity, nothing less but also nothing more. I would just let it be.
Cervantes
@MikeJ: If the Vietnam war was the price to pay to end Jim Crow it was cheap.
Nice of those Vietnamese to die for us.
Chris
@shortstop:
What I’m remembering is LBJ’s maneuvers in Congress, I believe. Not the 1964 Civil Rights Act yet, but the whole buildup to it. There were a bunch of weaker civil rights acts who were introduced, in some cases even passed, during the late fifties and early sixties before the real thing came through.
I may be wrong, but I also think LBJ wasn’t playing at first – he really did start off as run-of-the-mill Dixiecrat scum, but came around at some point between then and his presidency.
Cervantes
@Suzanne: No one imagined that bad shot could happen? Are you fucking kidding me? McKinley had been shot. Lincoln had been shot. Come ON.
Not only that, there were more recent assassinations, including one (of a civil rights activist) earlier in 1963.
Villago Delenda Est
@GregB:
I’m listening!
c u n d gulag
@Villago Delenda Est:
Cruz and Trump?
They’re like two cheeks on the same ass.
GregB
@Villago Delenda Est:
I posted almost the exact same comment about the Cruz/Trump fecal mind meld. So I deleted it lest I be called a hack.
Touche’.
Goblue72
@NotMax: it was the outgrowth of the New Deal. LBJ was a New Dealer to the core. Most of JFK’s New Frontier was nibbling around the edges, typical of the Kennedy administration.
Kennedy wasn’t fit to hold Johnson’s jockstrap – no matter how many soft focus lenses you look through at the Kennedy years.
Ruckus
I was 14 at the time and my recollection is that this was the start of the conservative take over of this country. Ye we had LBJ and his positives but we also had Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs, Cuban missile crisis, RFK, MLK, the draft, 68 Democrat convention, Nixon, Kent State….
You had a very growing segment of the population against the war, willing to do almost anything to stop it. @nancy: Has a very valid point. Coming of age in this time and hearing/seeing all these events unfold left many with the idea that we stood a better than even chance to not make it to even middle age. Don’t forget we had been raised with duck and cover, a band aid for major arterial bleeding. We knew at a young age that wouldn’t work, as we got older we felt that the reality of that, things not working, would get even stronger. There really was a palpable fear in the land. Given that conservatives always had been against change of any kind they used this fear to set up the political direction that we see today. Not that they hadn’t been already going in that direction, these events just helped the momentum.
Goblue72
@Chris: Johnson was complicated and his need for power immense. Look at his first Senate campaign – he literally stole the election. And a future Supreme Court justice would defend him in court. ( Abe Fortas)
He was a New Dealer at his core, not a Dixiecrat. But Southern Dems controlled the party – the Solid South. And as power was his first priority, he allayed himself with the conservatives in the party in order to seize control of leadership positions at a young age.
Chris
@aspasia:
Oh, man. I forgot about Malcolm X. It’s always the other three we talk about.
RonzoniRigatoni
@Betty Cracker: Winter’s Bone was Oscar material, but I guess they figured she was just too young. I just watched it again recently, and still believe she shoulda won. Powerful stuff. I forget who actually won that year, but seems to this ol’ cracker that it was a pretty good film itself.
aspasia
@Chris:
And you could add in Fred Hampton, Chaney-Goodman-Schwermer, and the kids killed at Kent State as representative of many others.
Another Holocene Human
@Suzanne: And everyone forgets that a Puerto Rican nationalist attempted to assassinate Truman with a gun on the Senate floor.
The Puerto Ricans were the terror babies killing banksters on Wall Street decades before Muslims got into the game.
Patty K
When my father’s cousin, who taught German at Bryn Mawr, visited Germany in the ’30s, he said openly in public “But Hitler is crazy!” And his friends and relatives said “Shh, Max, shh!” My father told this laughingly; as though to say what a ridiculous country Germany must be. So years pass, the assassination occurs, and some time later I read the Ramparts account of the Zapruder film, showing that Oswald could not have been the shooter, and I excitedly called my parents to tell them so. And my father said, urgently: “Shh, Patty! Shh!”
I’m just sayin’.
joel hanes
@NotMax:
I do (being a skosh older than the apparent modal age in this commentariat). Also the Hog Farm — hippies who lived their values and attempted to be the change they wanted to see in the world, and worked hard at it.
joel hanes
@Elizabelle:
LBJ … couldn’t see the great things he accomplished, and those opposed to the War refused to see them too.
I fall into that category — as an activist against the Viet Nam war, I despised Johnson. I was more than half-wrong to do so.
My only defenses : Johnson was a complicated man, and besides Viet Nam, there were many appalling things about the him — his long and successful Senate career of helping Richard Russell stonewall civil rights and voting measures, the way he picked up his beagles by the ears, his sometimes crass public manner, unsuited to the Presidency (showing reporters his gall bladder surgery scar), the way he treated his wife (obvious even then to a teenager with no social skills, and long before we knew for sure about his serial infidelities), his Texas boosterism.
His deep empathy for the disadvanaged was not accompanied by the kind of charisma that could make it human and appealing.
aimai
@Cervantes: Of course I’m “Letting it be” what do you think? I’m planning to firebomb someone? I’m just noting it. Because I think its indicative of something interesting which is the evolving split between the generations fostered (to my mind) by right wing attempts to set senior citizens against school kids, and future tax payers against senior citizens.
joel hanes
@Suzanne:
The thing about the JFK assassination that always surprised me, though, is that no one seemed to have imagined that that could happen.
You are too young to remember the innocent confidence and optimism of those times. It really was inconceivable that someone would murder the President, or pose a threat to the security of (white) Americans.
When we went on vacation, we left the house unlocked so the neighors could take in the mail.
While home, we left the keys in the ignition of unlocked parked cars, in case someone needed to move them.
These things seem silly now, but that’s a bad change in us; there’s nothing silly about secure optimism.
Only the music remains to remind us:
You gotta go where you wanna go
Do what you really wanna do
This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarias
The kids are all right
Groovin’ on a Sunday afternoon
It’s a beautiful mornin’ ahhh
I think I’ll go outside a while
An jus’ smile
Slow down, you move too fast
We’ve got to make the morning last, just
Tripping down the cobblestones
Looking for fun, and feeling groovy
What a day for a daydream
Custom made for a daydreamin’ boy
—
The time was right for dancing in the streets
Wolfdaughter
Everybody I know who is over, say, 55, remembers exactly what they were doing and where they were on that day. I’m in Arizona, so the first news came around 11:30. I was with my boyfriend, on our way to lunch (we were juniors in high school). A friend came up to us, most distressed, with the news, and we laughed because we thought he was joking. After all, we’re the USA, and assassinations only happened in banana republics. What a dreadful awakening it was.
We also spent the weekend glued to the tube. We saw Jack Ruby kill Lee Harvey Oswald. We watched the funeral. I can still hear the strains of Chopin’s “Marche Funebre”. Even my father, diehard Republican that he was, was sniffling as we watched the doleful ceremonies. The nation, regardless of political persuasion, mourned with the Kennedys. I’m not sure that would be the case today.
Why do we have to have such horrible 50th anniversaries? Why can’t we at least get along?
Shortstop
@Another Holocene Human: Two PR nationalists tried to kill Truman in front of Blair-Lee House, where he was living during WH renovations. What was the incident on the Senate floor?
David Koch
Watching C-SPAN III
Doctor who treated JFK in the ER is on and insists back of Kennedy’s head was blasted out and giant wound could only be an exit wound.
Cervantes
@aimai:
Yes, that’s what Joe Klein told me you were planning.*
Could be.
As I said, I think it’s just garden-variety insensitivity on the part of individuals — people not knowing how much this kind of you-had-to-be-there event means to others, and feeling left out of (often repetitive and simplistic) “conversations” forced upon them by the mass media.
At least, I hope I’m right that there’s nothing more systematic involved..
*Just kidding. Joe loves you. Really.
p
it is rather amazing to me that, in my lifetime, i’m on my eleventh president.
& that two of them – ronald reagan and george d. bush, managed to ensconce the destruction of the middle class.
Bill Arnold
@shortstop:
Clearly a very different era. In the current era, conspiracy theories are propagated so quickly that the immediate buzz would have been that LBJ was directly involved in a JFK assassination conspiracy. The generation of the theories is nothing special; e.g. I would have considered the idea definitely, but with open easy mass communications, it is often the case that a non-empty subset of the people with conspiracy theory thoughts feel compelled to broadcast them. Up to the internet era, this sort of communication took weeks or more to spin up. [Almost certainly not an original thought, but it is starkly obvious in this example.]
Bill Arnold
@handsmile:
This must have been simple miscalculated risk.
Americans are not unfamiliar with long-range sniping, starting with the “Kentucky Rifle” e.g. during the American Revolution. (The U.S. Civil War had snipers with scopes.)
Also the armed services trained a lot of marksmen. Hunters used/use scoped rifles.
Jasmine Bleach
@David Koch:
I have to admit I’m more than a bit on the “conspiracy theory” side of things. Mostly because of what I see in the video of his death.
Kennedy’s head violently and suddenly jerks backwards during the fatal shot. This is plain to see. Now, some folks say that it’s because the car suddenly lurches forward and speeds away, but if you watch the video, that doesn’t happen until many frames after the shot takes place. Also, curious how Jackie is completely unaffected (movement-wise) when the shot comes, so the car speeding up theory is completely out.
Now, I’m not an expert on ballistics physics, but I don’t (for the life of me) understand how a shot can come from behind and make someone lurch backwards violently. The force is going in the opposite direction, after all. I’m open to be educated on this, but it really, really looks like he’s shot from the front (the final shot, at least).
goblue72
@joel hanes: You do realize JFK was even more of serial wife-cheater than LBJ? That his aides and Secret Service would procure PROSTITUTES for him? That’d he’d share mistresses with his brothers?
Tehanu
@NotMax:
Sure, I remember the Diggers — they were sort of the hippie version of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers. There was an awful lot of goodwill in those long-ago days, just as there was an awful lot of naivete. I don’t think most people thought that JFK’s assassination was evidence of some kind of political conspiracy; that came later. At the time I think most people accepted the lone-wolf theory, but that (as Aimai said @29) in itself was horribly, horribly shocking, especially if like me you were a teenager, old enough to realize how big a thing it was. Loss of innocence is a good thing overall, if it means loss of ignorance; it’s how you lose your innocence that makes the difference between just growing up or being traumatized. And I think JFK’s murder traumatized not just my generation but the whole country.
Also, again with Aimai on the shock and dismay when Reagan was shot. I hated the old bastard then and I hate him worse now, but I didn’t go out “cheering” when it happened. Murder is not how our political system is supposed to work. Nor did we cheer when Ruby shot Oswald; we were horrified that anyone would interfere with the trial system. That’s when the first thoughts of “Wait a minute, now how will we find out what really happened?” started.
@Wolfdaughter: You and I are the same age and my memory is very close to yours. The whole nation mourned — not just the Democrats.
J R in WV
There were at least two shooters; no one can look at the film and believe anything else. There was at least one conspiracy. Who foisted the lie that North Vietnam attacked our navy in the Gulf of Tonkin? The same people who killed Kennedy.
There is a Right Wing conspiracy that tries to take control of this country continuously; they hate President Obama with a vitriol I find hard to believe. They are the same people who Photoshop pictures of our President as a witch-doctor. I lack the words to describe them
Omnes Omnibus
@goblue72: And?
Shelton Lankford
I was reading through the comments here and trying to remember why I read BJ. Oh, yeah, it is because of the apparent intelligence of the commentariat and the general orientation of the blog. As in most blogs, the subject of JFK sends the apparent average IQ of the contributors on a crash-dive, seeking the bottom. I have to remind myself that these are the same people I read almost daily and find their remarks frequently thoughtful or at least sane most of the time. This is an above average group of Americans with an interest in and a certain amount of passion for politics, not a god-mazed gaggle of evangelicals just hanging on until the second coming to go home to jeebus.
I have suffered through this week. The lock-step, seemingly scripted, recitation of the main points of the lone gunman thesis that has opened each newscast and each appearance of the sages of the mouse circus (h/t Driftglass) to speak with authority on how Oswald really did it all by hisself (although no expert has ever been able to repeat the feat).
I really can’t claim that my advanced age or the fact that I was legally an adult in 1963 gave me any advantage in identifying Nov. 22, as a black operation and only the beginning of a psychological operation that it seems will continue throughout the rest of my life. I have gained that perspective by reading many dozens of books and weighing countless arguments.
As the records continue to be withheld and the facts continue to be distorted with each Posner, Bugliosi, Gary Mack, etc. etc. that appears on the scene to breathlessly say that the Warren Commission, by golly, got it right, I watch TV hosts and pundits in vain for one to yell bullshit, and explain why. There are sagacious nods all around the table, and they move on to discuss domestic policy, Jackie’s fashion sense, or the good taste the Kennedys ushered into Washington.
NSAM 263 gets no mention. Everyone is sure that JFK would have taken us deeper into Vietnam, despite his having issued guidance that would specifically reverse course and have troops out by 1965. James Douglass might just as well saved his ink. It never dawns on anyone that the President and Vice President were diametrically opposed when it came to Vietnam, and that a great many of the people around JFK shared a hatred that varied from mild contempt to white-hot rage directed against him and his brother. The Bay of Pigs disaster and the missile crisis, topped by his refusal to get sucked into launching a unilateral first strike against Castro, and thereby, against the Soviets added, to the list of grievances nursed by Curtis LeMay, the military, and, above all, the CIA. I am fairly certain that his VP noticed that all of these grievances, as well as a few potential storms brewing in Texas which might sweep LBJ off the ticket in the ’64 election and lead him to a jail cell instead of the oval office, could be taken care of with a few well-placed rifle shots. He even had among his retinue, a few people who could do it, and a fair number of allies who would back his move. The stars aligned, as did the political forces, and the deed was done.
Instead of a full and free debate and unfettered investigation into the crime we got another murder by Jack Ruby that silenced Oswald, Allen Dulles, the fired head of the CIA as a member of the Commission, and a cock and bull story forcefully pressed home by LBJ to the commission that put them on notice that a nuclear exchange might result from the wrong findings – but, hey, no pressure, guys.
I have no idea how many coups d’etat have been attempted in the USA. 25 years ago I would have answered none, but it would not have occurred to me to consider anything after the beginning of the 20th century. American History is a remarkable collection of fairy tales and myths, much like our religions. Now, I have no idea. I think there have been two in my lifetime. 22 Nov. 1963 is one and 9/11 2001 is another. But when the smart people of a nation can’t see things right in front of their noses, what do you figure the chances of success are for the country when we let the dumb people shout us down and run things from a minority position, and everyone pretends that if we just let the rich assholesthat run this outfit get a little richer they will let us live here, provided we send them our sons and daughters to fight their wars and don’t interfere with the casino operation.
Almost all “conspiracy theories”, given enough time, will be proven true.
(my apologies to the few commenters who have rallied in defense of reason in the latter part of this thread)