The Assassination of John F. Kennedy

Political Trauma and American Memory

Alice George

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136323492
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

On November 22nd, 1963 the assassination of President John F. Kennedy set into motion a series of events that irrevocably changed American politics and culture. The media frenzy spawned by the controversy surrounding the death of JFK has since given way to a powerful public memory that continues to shape the way we understand politics, the 1960s, and the nation.

In The Assassination of John F. Kennedy: Political Trauma and American Memory, Alice George traces the events of Kennedy's assassination and Lyndon B. Johnson's subsequent ascension to the presidency. Covering both the political shifts of the time and the cultural fallout of the national tragedy, this book introduces students of the twenty-first century to both an iconic event and to the context in which that event was heralded as iconic. Drawing on newspaper articles, political speeches, letters, and diaries, George critically re-examines the event of JFK's death and its persistent political and cultural legacy.

Chapter 1
Unforgettable

“From Dallas, the flash apparently official, President Kennedy died at one o’clock Central Standard Time—two o’clock Eastern Standard Time—some thirty-eight minutes ago.”

Walter Cronkite, November 22, 1963¹

John F. Kennedy’s assassination is probably the most thoroughly investigated murder in human history. Classicists may still ponder the death of Julius Caesar, but two millennia of study cannot match the intense scrutiny and the technological tools applied to the study of Kennedy’s murder. If curiosity about events in Dallas had died with the 1960s, Kennedy’s death might have faded into the past like James Garfield’s or William McKinley’s; however, the unending quest to know more about JFK’s passing and the development of new investigative weapons have made it an unending story, one in which the accumulation of evidence and evolving methods of analysis may actually make it more difficult to see the truth.

Why so much sustained interest in Kennedy’s death? Neither a savior nor a saint, he was a son who fulfilled his father’s dreams; a man who made mistakes and learned from them; a leader who gravitated toward crisis management rather than long-term solutions; a president who was popular with the public but largely ineffectual in his dealings with Congress; a husband and father who flouted traditional morals. Neither his strengths nor his shortcomings seem to have affected the public fascination with his death; instead, it remains a vivid moment in American cultural history because it ripped through the fabric of America’s self-image. By showing the lie inherent in Americans’ belief that they could accomplish anything with ingenuity and a can-do attitude, the assassination bred distrust and, over time, it became impossible for Americans to believe any simple solution to such a momentous event. Not all Americans were sorry to see Kennedy go, but most were startled by his murder more than sixty years after the most recent presidential assassination. Since McKinley died in 1901, Americans had learned to fly, eradicated polio, developed radio and television, launched men into space, and created bombs that could kill millions, and yet human nature stayed the same. The capacity of petty men to slay leaders remained unchanged.

When shots sounded within Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, no one could have guessed that the truth about Kennedy’s assassination would remain contested territory almost five decades later. Continuing debate about possible conspiracies reveals Americans’ unwillingness to let go of their questions and accept the simplest explanation of all—that one political rebel bought a mail-order gun and changed history. In the years since his death, JFK has held on to a corner of America’s center stage. Fifty-six percent of Americans initially believed the Warren Commission’s 1964 findings that the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had acted alone in slaying the president;² nevertheless, by 1967, 64 percent of Americans, including President Lyndon Johnson, were open to the idea that Oswald, a one-time defector to the Soviet Union, was part of a conspiracy.³ By 1983, about 70 percent gave credence to the idea of a conspiracy, and after Oliver Stone’s 1991 conspiracy-theory film, JFK, a poll showed 77 percent of Americans thought a conspiracy was possible.⁴ A Gallup Poll in 2003 found that only 19 percent of Americans believed the assassination was the work of one man,⁵ and a Fox News Poll in 2004 revealed that 74 percent of respondents thought that a government cover-up continued to hide the facts about JFK’s death.⁶ And interest in this topic is not restricted to those old enough to remember the assassination. A thirtysomething woman told this author, “When I get to heaven, my first question for St. Peter will be: ‘Who killed JFK?’”

Continuing and sometimes obsessive interest in Kennedy’s death suggests that the assassination remains an open wound in the American psyche. When the injury occurred, there was no readily available cure. After surprise attacks on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and on the East Coast on September 11, 2001, military action provided an outlet for overflowing emotions, but in the wake of an assassination with no surviving assassin, there was no satisfying recourse. Even today, mention of Dallas conjures up dark images of a motorcade, a mad rush to Parkland Hospital, the oath of office administered aboard Air Force One, Jacqueline Kennedy’s bloodstained clothes—slow-motion memories cast in black and white.

Many Americans maintain a strong emotional connection to Kennedy. In the year prior to his death, one million people visited Arlington National Cemetery, but during the first six months after his slaying, nine million traveled to the cemetery.⁷ The current number of visitors is about four million per year.⁸ The John F. Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston attracts about 225,000 visitors each year,⁹ and the Sixth Floor Museum, set up in Oswald’s Dallas sniper’s nest, draws 325,000 visitors annually.¹⁰

In The Making of the President 1964, Theodore H. White described initial news of the assassination as “an episode to be remembered, a clap of alarm as sharp and startling as Pearl Harbor, so that forever they would ask one another—Where were you when you heard the news?”¹¹ And indeed, that question became an eerily universal and often-repeated topic of conversation among Baby Boomers and their parents, even decades later. Testifying to one’s position on that day at that time seems to be a way of situating one’s self within the larger event—an event with such a wide impact that each individual pinpointed his own position on the broader canvas. In this way, the assassination drama encompassed every workplace, every classroom, every supermarket, and every automobile. It became our story, one that touched every facet of American life on that November day in 1963, and, because of its breadth, the event became a rare cultural phenomenon. Letters of condolence to the Kennedy family, now stockpiled at the John F. Kennedy Library, demonstrate this well. While voicing their sympathy to Mrs. Kennedy, many letter writers felt compelled to tell the former first lady where they had been when they heard the news, as if hearing their stories would mean something to the woman who cradled the dying president’s head in her lap.

Twentieth-century technological advances contributed to the stunning nature of the day’s events. Kennedy was shot, treated, declared dead, loaded into a casket, and returned to Washington in less than six hours. The gunman was able to fire accurately from a sixth-floor window because of the scope on his rifle. Radio and television spread news of the assassination at unprecedented speed. A jet carried the coffin from Dallas to Washington in a little more than two hours. And, perhaps most disorienting of all, Americans could sit in their living rooms and see JFK alive and well, joking with Texans just hours earlier.

Two days later, Jack Ruby deepened the feeling of unreality that rattled the nation by gunning down Oswald on live TV. Then came the ritual and pageantry of a state funeral unlike any other and filled with memorable scenes that would flutter at the edges of American consciousness for decades to come. That weekend almost half a century ago remains an all-too-familiar blur viewed through the numbness of shock and the cascade of tears. The martial drumbeat, the riderless horse, the eternal flame—all have become icons of an event we cannot forget, a weekend when Americans learned that, while flames might be eternal, even a charmed life is fragile and transient. So much of John F. Kennedy’s rhetoric had been crafted to envision a better tomorrow, achieving the “High Hopes” of his 1960 campaign theme song. On that day, the promising tomorrow seemed to vanish. In the words of TV anchorman David Brinkley, “the events of those days don’t fit, you can’t place them anywhere, they don’t go in the intellectual luggage of our time. It was too big, too sudden, too overwhelming, and it meant too much. It has to be separate and apart.”¹²

The assassination represented a disconnect in the flow of history during the 1960s—and it jolted Americans’ expectations. The event was so unexpected, so unsettling, that it resulted in a collective trauma that, like all cultural traumas, raised questions about beliefs in society. The trauma itself reverberated with disbelief about the violent death of a young and vital national leader. Incredulous, many Americans commented that this was not the type of event that happened in America. Violence against a leader was something that happened in other nations that were less developed, less democratic, or less civilized than the prosperous and powerful United States of the postwar era. Ruby’s actions reinforced nagging questions about what kind of nation the United States really was. Generally, the experience of a cultural trauma involves some acceptance of responsibility for shocking events. Although many Americans openly accepted shame for being part of the violent culture that spawned the president’s murder, others rejected any responsibility. Part of America’s sadness sprang from a loss that went far beyond the death of one man. Arthur G. Neal has argued that “the conditions surrounding a trauma are played and replayed in the national consciousness in an attempt to extract some sense of coherence from a meaningless experience. When the event is dismissed from consciousness, it resurfaces in feelings of anxiety and despair.”¹³ Certainly, anxiety and despair stalked the land for much of the mid- to late 1960s as new traumas piled atop this most disquieting event. While JFK’s assassination seemed unthinkable in 1963, the subsequent assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy felt almost inevitable in the tumult of 1968.

Many view JFK’s assassination as a detonator, setting into motion the upheaval and disorder of the 1960s. Twenty years after Kennedy’s death, Time noted that his assassination had two obvious effects: It provided an impetus for passage of his long-stalled legislative program, and it “let loose monsters, to unhinge the nation in some deep way that sent it reeling down a road toward riots and war and assassinations and Watergate.”¹⁴ In his 2008 book Boom! Talking about the Sixties, Tom Brokaw contended that November 22, 1963 was really the first day of “what we now call the Sixties,” that ragged time of discord and distrust.¹⁵ Frederic Jameson wrote in 1985 that the assassination “played a significant role in delegitimizing the state itself and in discrediting the parliamentary process.” Jameson was politically skeptical about Kennedy, but he saw JFK’s lasting impact in “the rhetoric of youth and of the ‘generation gap’” later in the 1960s.¹⁶

A collective trauma threatens to topple the building blocks that give meaning to a society. Initial responses to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death were, in many ways, similar to those noted after the assassination: incredulity, anxiety, and grief.¹⁷ After more than twelve years with FDR as president, the idea of change was disconcerting, but the natural death of a man does not generate the same kind of nervous collapse as an assassination. The slaying of a leader creates a growing sense of vulnerability among the population. Some may have thought: If someone murdered the president, are any of us safe? Others feared the assassination was one step in an attack on the nation as a whole. Some thought it might be a prelude to nuclear war. Johnson promised continuity, but he was very different from Kennedy. Those differences created a briefly held but memorable feeling of discontinuity, which was minimized within a few days as Johnson grappled with his new role and won voter confidence.

Twenty years later, Ladies Home Journal tried to explain the nation’s emotional response to Kennedy’s assassination: “His office conferred on him the status of national patriarch, but his full head of hair, impish small children and glamorous young wife made him also seem a brother, a son, a contemporary. If he was so vulnerable, who and what could the rest of us take for granted? If his time was so savagely cut short, what use should we be making of ours?”¹⁸ In a 1965 article in the New York Times Magazine, James Reston provided this vision of America’s loss: “What was killed in Dallas was not only the president, but the promise. The death of youth and the hope of youth, the beauty and grace and the touch of magic.”¹⁹ One man wrote to his sister on November 22, 1963, “His death is disquieting to me beyond reason, perhaps, but the death of an ideal is profoundly worse.”²⁰ The New York Times’ Tom Wicker later wrote about America after JFK’s death, calling it a “dark and malignant place” and declaring that “the chill of the unknown shivered across the nation.”²¹

Trauma does not always imply large societal change. Kennedy’s death did not precipitate sharp changes in policy during Johnson’s presidency. If anything, the shock may have made it more difficult for Johnson to see and adopt policy options that Kennedy might have chosen if he had lived to be re-elected. Because Johnson followed the well-liked, martyred JFK, he felt locked in to policies as Kennedy left them. Though Kennedy later might have veered away from some earlier choices, LBJ seemed riveted into pre-set directions. Continuity was his primary theme in 1964 and to a degree, it colored his administration until the end.

As Johnson knew well, Kennedy was not just a president of the United States; he was the most popular president since political polling began during Franklin Roosevelt’s administration. He was well regarded outside the United States, as well. When he visited Mexico City in 1962, people wept at the sight of him, ogled his wife, and cheered his words—and he generated similar reactions in other places like West Berlin and Ireland. Immediately after the assassination, U.S. News & World Report reported stunned disbelief in London, Paris, Bonn, Geneva, Rome, Caracas, Ottawa, Mexico City, and Tokyo.²² Decades later, writer Pete Hamill got a flat tire as he was driving through rural Mexico, and when a man stepped outside to welcome Hamill into his modest home, the American journalist was surprised to see two pictures on the wall: one of the Virgin of Guadalupe and one of John F. Kennedy.²³

Politicians as diverse as Bill Clinton, Gary Hart, and Ronald Reagan have tied themselves to American memories of Kennedy. Twenty years after the assassination, historian William Leuchtenburg wrote that Kennedy had become part of myth more than part of history. “Like the fair youth on Keats’s Grecian urn, Kennedy will be forever in pursuit, forever unfulfilled, but also ‘forever young,’ beyond the power of time and the words of historians.”²⁴ Revisionist historians began pummeling Kennedy’s record in the 1970s, but by the early years of the twenty-first century, Kennedy’s stock was rising among historians. A C-SPAN survey of sixty-five historians in 2009 showed JFK ranked sixth among all presidents in leadership. He finished just ahead of Thomas Jefferson and was the only president in the Top 10 who had not served more than one term.²⁵ He had ranked eighth in a similar C-SPAN survey in 2000.²⁶ (Abraham Lincoln topped both surveys.) These ratings indicate a marked rebound in Kennedy’s standing among historians. His handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which some had labeled as reckless, gained new praise as evidence showed that his approach had been far more cautious than revisionists had believed. Some historians have questioned Kennedy’s claim to the “liberal” label, given ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Introduction
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Timeline
• 1 Unforgettable
• 2 Texas Tragedy
• 3 Mourning in the Shadows
• 4 Life After Death
• 5 Culture of Conspiracy
• Documents
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index