Lapointe: Has it really been 60 years since President Kennedy died?
Walt Cisco, Dallas Morning News, public domain
President John F. Kennedy in the limousine in Dallas, minutes before he was assassinated. The car is on display at the Henry Ford museum in Dearborn.
To have a living memory of John F. Kennedy’s life and death, you must be at least 65 years old. Before you say “OK, Boomer” and turn the page, imagine what it was like to be a Catholic school kid that dreary Friday afternoon.
Like millions of other students everywhere, we learned the news over the classroom intercom. Our school was St. Martin of Tours in the Jefferson-Chalmers neighborhood in the southeast corner of Detroit.
Speaking was a parish priest. He told us President Kennedy had been shot and wounded. We would walk now over to the church to pray for his recovery.
We were seventh graders — in identical uniforms, of course — most of us 12 years old, whispering and worried as we filed into the pews.
Soon, Father Ward stepped up into the pulpit with an updated bulletin: The president was dead, he said. Let us pray for his soul. I wish I could remember which prayer. It may have been “Our Father.” That was the middle of the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963.
With this year’s 60th anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination now upon us, the reminiscences are plentiful — the facts, the conspiracy theories, and the folklore that pours from the books, the television documentaries, and the magazine articles.
Some of us read them and watch them because we still haven’t gotten over this frozen moment and we probably never will.
It was a pivotal event from which time is measured, before and after. Historians often suggest that the era we now remember as “The Sixties” — with all that strife and turbulence — began with JFK’s death and ended with President Richard Nixon’s resignation 11 years later.
Although Kennedy was a son of New England wealth and power, he projected a unique “family man” mystique for working-class people not found in any president since. His image was the perfect pose for the post-war Baby Boom, which began in 1946 and ended in 1964.
Kennedy himself had eight siblings; my family had eight boys and two girls, and we weren’t even the largest brood in our parish. The nuns had mentioned that Kennedy was the first Catholic president at a time when some of our fellow citizens still considered “mackerel snappers” to be the “other.”
We’d heard the stories of the Catholic candidate Al Smith in 1928, only 32 years before JFK’s election. Smith identified as Irish, just like Kennedy and my mother, too. She explained to me why some Irish-Americans might have held a chip on their shoulder over Smith’s rejection.
Ever hear the old joke about “Irish Alzheimer’s?” (You forget everything but the grudges.) The term “identity politics” was not yet in vogue, but that was part of JFK’s appeal. Plus, he was so darn telegenic, even in black and white.
I remember my parents in the summer of 1960, watching the Democratic convention on TV and then the election returns that November and how happy they were. It was my first political awareness.
I recall coming home from school one day to find my mother in the living room, working on the ironing board, set up in front of the TV, so she could enjoy JFK’s press conference banter while she dealt with the laundry for a family of 12.
He always made funny quips and his smile dazzled. And Kennedy had another connection to both of my parents. Both were World War II veterans who’d served in the Navy, like Kennedy, who had heroically commanded his PT-109 crew in the Pacific. So there was that, as well.
But beyond that, John and Jacqueline Kennedy (“Jack and Jackie”) looked like movie stars and they sure knew how to play to the cameras, both film and still. They charmed a nation with their relative youth, their beauty, and their “vigor,” to use a JFK word.
They oozed “cool” back when that word was cool. Kennedy, the youngest elected president, was 46 when he died. He set style by wearing skinny neckties and no hat on his head and his thick, full head of hair would blow in the breeze.
Catholic school kids then didn’t know much about Kennedy’s foreign policy mistakes, his personal infidelities, or his chronic illnesses. Instead, we accepted the image of a robust leader — our Jack — who threw footballs across big, green lawns with his children and many relatives.
In the summer before her husband’s death, Mrs. Kennedy had suffered a miscarriage. Boomer families could empathize. The grief of the Kennedy family merely hinted at what was to come a few weeks later at Dealey Plaza, in Dallas, Texas, where Lee Harvey Oswald fired three rifle shots from a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository.
I first visited there in 1977, on Christmas, of all days, having traveled that morning from Chicago to cover a football game the next day. This was before the establishment of the Sixth Floor Museum at the shooting site. I paid a security guard $5 to let me look out from Oswald’s window onto Elm Street.
My first thought: What an easy shot, especially for a Marine-trained rifleman looking almost straight down at a target. From that window, aiming at a man riding slowly in the back seat of a convertible, I thought, why, yes, of course, it sure could have been Oswald.
Given enough range to swing his arm overhead, a sniper from that window could’ve hit JFK in the head with a snowball or a fist-sized rock. So it seemed entirely plausible that this deadly deed was done by a single misfit with a single gun just because he had a random chance.
Of course, skeptics will debate that theory into future centuries.
After visiting the window, it being a nice day, I sat for a few minutes on the Grassy Knoll, overlooking the death site (a painted “X” on the pavement marking the spot) with the Triple Overpass to my right. I absorbed the view and the déjà vu of a space that felt like a spiritual place.
Even on your first visit, you sense that you’ve been there before and you get the same jolt every time after. The Plaza is smaller than you might have imagined from the films and photos; they haven’t changed many of the buildings over the years and let’s hope they never do.
You can stand on the spot where Abraham Zapruder famously filmed Kennedy’s head shattering in Frame 313 of his silent, color movie. (Imagine if witnesses had smartphone cameras then.) Zapruder’s film also shows the heroic Secret Service agent Clint Hill, who saved the life of Kennedy’s wife, who had climbed onto the back of the limousine.
Had Hill not run to the car and pushed her back in, Jackie might have slid off the back and onto the pavement and into a motorcade about to speed up. Ten years ago in Hyannis, Mass., I met Hill and shook his hand after he gave a talk to publicize his book Mrs. Kennedy and Me.
I don’t have many heroes in this world, but Clint Hill tops my list. He is prominently featured in the new National Geographic TV documentary, a three-part series called JFK: One Day in America. It’s available on streaming services.
Particularly jarring are some of the archival motion pictures. Many black-and-white videotapes and news films have been colorized, to mixed results. In some ways, this tampering reminds me of what happened to Kennedy’s death car, which has been on display for more than four decades at the Henry Ford museum in Dearborn.
Actually, it’s the same car only in part. It has the same frame, anyway. But, inexplicably, they rebuilt it shortly after Kennedy’s murder and used it for other presidents right through Jimmy Carter.
Clint Hill told me he actually had to ride inside it again, and wasn’t exactly thrilled. At least he got to sit up front. It is worth a visit to the Ford museum to see Kennedy’s X-100 limo and to hear the comments of the visitors.
And if you need to read a good book about the JFK assassination, skip for now even the Warren Commission report and William Manchester’s magisterial history The Death of a President. Instead, try a work of fiction from 2011 by the author Stephen King called 11/22/63.
His is a brilliant concept, beautifully executed: A guy travels back in history through a time warp to prevent the assassination of JFK. With a deft touch, King presents an exquisite atmospheric of the early 1960s far more nuanced than mere nostalgia.
Of course, I won’t spoil King’s ending here. But I’ll stand and applaud the novel’s central yearning in the American spirit since the day JFK died: If only we could go back in time, back to November 22, 1963.
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