There’s been a call for an open thread about the 50th anniversary of the assassination of JFK. It’s a tragedy that I don’t understand at all, neither in terms of how it happened nor in terms of what it meant. I thought this Sam Tannenhaus piece was pretty good:
It is inspiring, but also deflating, to see and hear again (and again) the handsome, vigorous president, the youngest ever elected to the office, as he beckons the country forth to the future, to the “New Frontier,” and its promise of conquest: putting a man on the moon, defeating sharply defined evils — totalitarianism, poverty, racial injustice.
This, we have been reminded, was the dream Kennedy nourished, and much of it died with him, when the sharp cracks of rifle fire broke out as his motorcade rolled through the sunstruck streets of Dallas. With this horrific, irrational deed, a curse was laid upon the land, and the people fell from grace.
But this narrative and the anniversary remembrances have obscured the deeper message sent and received on Nov. 22, 1963. In fact, America had already become a divided, dangerous place, with intimations of anarchic disorder. Beneath its gleaming surfaces, a spore had been growing, a mass of violent energies, coiled and waiting to spring.
“The sniper’s bullet left one wound that is not healed, a wound to our consciousness of ourselves as Americans,” the culture critic Dwight Macdonald wrote in December 1963. “Despite all the evidence in the newspapers, the daily stories of senseless brutality and casual murder, we have continued to think of ourselves as a civilized nation where law and order prevail.”
I think I do understand the political meaning of the Civil Rights movement, and why the last 50 years have dominated by its consequences. It’s not that complicated — Republicans turned the maintenance of white male privilege into political gold.
But I can’t really understand the optimism people describe in pre-Dallas America. It’s too alien to me.
Redshirt
I’ll make the argument that without JFK’s death, we don’t get all the programs ushered in by LBJ. Not including Vietnam.
Tom Levenson
What the Boston Symphony Orchestra did on hearing the news. Scroll down to listen.
barbcat
The fact that the JFK era was glamorized by, and simultaneous with, the rise of all things televised is more likely the cause of the end of innocence. Vietnam War was the next big thing to watch after endless replays of that day in Dallas.
Yatsuno
FYWP. No really.
I was still an egg. My mom was 13 years old and she remembers where she was when she heard the news. My very Catholic grandparents were devastated at his death. They had a portrait of him in their house that was right up there with the Jesus painting.
Chris
I asked this in an earlier thread:
Given what an absolute shitshow America would turn into in the ten years after JFK’s death (urban riots, white backlash, drugs, Vietnam, ultimately Watergate), could it be that the JFK myth is simply wish fulfillment? That since he was the last president before that whole mess, people like to imagine that if only he’d stayed alive, he could’ve guided us all through that and it all would’ve been okay?
monkeyfister
At age 45, I can say this: I was sick of hearing about the JFK assassination by the time I was 12.
Baby Boomers roll around in it like a dog in some roadkill stink.
schrodinger's cat
There is a tendency to romanticize the time of one’s childhood, when all your needs are taken care of. I wonder if the parents of the Boomers look at that era with rose tinted glasses, also.
Gin & Tonic
Ike was old and boring and represented the past. Jack and Jackie were young and telegenic and represented [John Huston voice] the future. Not very complicated. It was only 15 years after the end of WWII, and America wanted to feel good.
JFK really fucked the Berlin situation, though, and the Cuban missile situation. WWIII was days away (maybe hours) at least twice in his short time in office.
artem1s
I’ve been listening to the CBS rebroadcast. It’s hard to imagine the media today handling something like this so calmly. I was also surprised to see Cronkite showing still photos of the motorcade and events earlier in the day that had been wire transmitted to the NY office. I had no idea they could do that at that time.
Richard Shindledecker
I’m a little older than Yatsuno’s mother. The festering issues were there already and I doubt kennedy could have solved them. We had to go through the hell we’re in one way or another cause we gotta solve these issues one at a time – fantasies of saviors are fantasies none the less.
Violet
@Yatsuno:
I’ve heard this kind of thing a lot. Who puts pictures of the President up in their homes these days? Do a lot of people have pictures of President Obama up in their homes? Reagan, Bush or Clinton? I don’t understand why someone would do that these days. Have we changed that much as a country in terms of how we think of Presidents.
Richard Shindledecker
FYI faxing was invented in the early fifties here. It took the Japanese to make them common place. They were first popular for police work.
BGinCHI
MLK’s take:
(via wiki)
beltane
Since this country was hardly conceived via the political equivalent of immaculate conception and thus had no innocence to lose, I’m guessing that it wasn’t optimism that was lost but the sense of post-war invulnerability that a generation had come to take for granted. A lot of Americans believed, and continue to believe, that history is something that happens to other people in other places. Any time some televised event suggests that American exceptionalism is overstated, there is the inevitable hand-wringing about our tragic loss of innocence and optimism.
Chris
@monkeyfister:
Speaking as someone who’s still in his twenties, all this stuff about the JFK assassination this week has had me thinking “Christ, I’ll probably still be around for the 50th anniversary of 9/11.” I was already sick of the death porn for the 10th anniversary, really not looking forward to the big half-century mark.
schrodinger's cat
I got a lot of interesting responses yesterday when I wondered about the God-like status of Kennedy.
schrodinger's cat
@Chris: Tell me about it, I am already sick to death of it.
Pen
My first political memory as a child was listening to all the adults out over a president getting a blow job and how it was an impeachable offense because they needed to “think of the children”. After that I lost interest in politics until Junior was elected (4 days before I turned 18) because the Supreme Court decided a minor delay in vote counting was a grave enough concern that they could just give the election to the guy who had fewer votes.
Needless to say my entire life has been one “why the fuck are you people Republicans” moment after another, so the idea of political hope… I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to process that. It’s too foreign, and at times I think my neighbors would be happy in a world run like Watchmen or V For Vendetta.
Kate from the Golden Gate
I do remember the assassination, though I was much too young to understand the implications of much pre- or post-Camelot — I wanted a pony because Caroline Kennedy had one and that was the limit of my interest in the Kennedys. So wasn’t the event itself that was shocking to me, but the realization of how it shook up the adults in my life. I still expected them to understand things and take care of things, and all of a sudden everyone was crying and staying up all night worrying. I could sense how much their entire sense of the world had changed, even if I couldn’t have explained it to anyone.
In a way I’ve always thought that JFK’s assassination was just a long fuse that really didn’t blow until the two-three punch of MLK and RFK five years later. Vietnam was in there of course, and remember the Beatles showed up just a few months after Dallas, so there were many factors in the turbulence of the times. But after 1968, there was a sense that there was no point, that nothing really mattered anymore. Either they’d ship you off to Nam and give you a gun, or someone would gun you down over here. Again, I was a child, but I remember the Sixties as being full of anger, an Us vs Them, Longhair vs Shorthair, Hawk vs. Dove, that is not so different from the outrage on the fringe right today as all those stories of peace and love would have you think.
monkeyfister
@Chris: Same here, Chris.
We must HORRIBLE Americans.
I see no reason to rend my clothing and pull off scabs every 10 years for this sort of thing.
I’ve yet to see any evidence that it brings catharsis.
Chris
@Violet:
I could see Catholics in the sixties doing that. His election would’ve been a huge symbol to them of decades of oppression overcome, especially for the Irish.
Elizabelle
Thank you.
I realize a lot of you are sick of hearing about JFK and the assassination, but for some of us who were young, he meant a lot, even before the mythmaking took over.
I was in kindergarten when he died. We’d seen him in July 1963 when he visited our city; he’s on our home movies. He’s waving from an open convertible.
My younger sister had a pink plastic whale she named Caroline. We were very aware of the Kennedy children, probably because my mom admired Jackie so much.
JFK is not just a figure of history to me, and he’s still a tragic loss. Of potential, perhaps. But he had grace, and wit, and that is often sorely lacking.
Agreed, LBJ did much more about civil rights, and it probably would have taken longer had the nation not been shocked and grieving. I think history should be kinder to LBJ. He had faults, but he had aspirations to do good that weren’t the mere careerism you see today.
I remember the portraits of Kennedy in relatives’ and others’ homes.
And I am sick of Reagan’s myth being burnished and built up while Kennedy’s is torn down.
He got less than 3 years. The presidency has a learning curve. He probably did his best, and thought he had more time.
Belafon
Optimism is relative to what one remembers. A number of people at the time had the following things in their memories: WWI, the Great Depression, WWII. Since the end of that we were booming as a country. We’d grown so much that women and blacks felt they could do something about their situation.
And then we had those with guns try to prove that they were still in charge.
Roger Moore
@Chris:
Absolutely. The clearest sign of this is the way that people assume that Vietnam never would have blown up had Kennedy still been in charge. This conveniently ignores that Kennedy played a key role in escalating Vietnam, and that there’s no substantial evidence to suggest he saw anything wrong with our deployment there. It’s pure wishful thinking.
I assume that it is also significant that the Kennedy assassination happened at about the same time the oldest Baby Boomers were at the age of disillusionment. There’s a general tendency for people to have an unreasonably rosy view of the society of their youth and a jaundiced view of society of their adulthood, and to blame the difference on changes in society rather than their view of it. The JFK assassination was a critical point of disillusionment for many Boomers, so they tend to see it as a time of society getting worse rather than a time when they recognized how bad society had been all along.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Chris:
I think there’s a lot to this.
From the piece quoted at the top:
I don’t think any of that was anything new. Lest we forget, it wasn’t the first assassination by any means, and as far as civil and labor unrest all you have to do is look at some of the earlier times with strikers being mowed down, in some ways the 60s didn’t hold a candle to those days.
I have a private theory, about to become not private I guess, which is this. The next thing I’m going to say is my theory. Which is that many people who were alive and young in 1963 saw it as a brutal awakening out of a myth of innocence and security, but it was partly just because that’s the age they were and those things come along and wake you up. It’s by no means the first one, other generations had theirs. We’re just so steeped in how the Boomers (i.e. me) saw it, and most people born since then know about it from what those Boomers tell them about.
The end. It’s my theory, and it’s mine.
Josie
It seems like optimism, but it was actually naivete.
scav
@beltane: I’m with you along these lines. The regrowth of the feeling that bad things only happens to “those” “other” people (that thus deserve it, unlike innocent victim us) is strong in the national genome.
Randy P
We like to sort our culture into decades on dividing lines that are multiples of 10. But it doesn’t actually work that way. My view is that 1963 was just about the tail end of the “50s”, a time when there was still a lot of trust in government and a view (by the dominant white males) that life was just grand and everybody in America was comfy and safe and happy and well-adjusted. The dissatisfied white kids of “Rebel Without a Cause” and “West Side Story” didn’t exist in this world view, let alone did the dissatisfied non-white leaders of the civil rights movement or uppity dames like Betty Friedan and the “Feminine Mystique”. Despite the fact that all that stuff very much did exist, popular culture was able to pretend it didn’t.
So people pining for 1963 are pining for the same non-existent 1950s that the Republicans are. I guess it’s not that the country was so miserable for so many people, but that their misery could be successfully hidden from the innocent eyes of your typical suburban.
In this view all that nasty stuff came into existence spontaneously around 1965 with the hippies, and so if you punch enough hippies it will go away again.
1963 is also when the Beatles first hit the US big-time. Part of the same wave.
My personal data point: I just turned 6 a couple of weeks before the JFK assassination. I had no clue any of that was going on. My consciousness of the wider world more or less started around 1967. But in the 70s I had this kind of morbid fascination for the innocence of old rock and old high-school yearbooks. That’s when I kind of formulated this theory.
Cervantes
Another welcome run at a complicated subject.
For now I’ll note one thing:
Yes, there was optimism — or less strongly, what seems in retrospect to have been a kind of innocence, or possibly even mere relief that the 50s were over — but it was not universal. For example, Medgar Evers was assassinated in June, 1963. (And for that matter, his killer was not convicted until 1994.)
shelly
“I’ve heard this kind of thing a lot. Who puts pictures of the President up in their homes these days?”
*********
Saw a movie about the Magdalene laundries the other day; Irish institutions where ‘loose’ girls and unwed mothers were incarcerated, sometimes for years. Practically Dickensian. So when I say a portrait of JFK on the Mother Superior’s desk, my first thought was ‘Cripes, these places were still in existence in the ’60’s?
Alex S.
So I read today that Kennedy was the most popular modern president… He also had the shortest tenure.
Cervantes
@Redshirt: You will?
Geoduck
For anyone who needs a moment of topical levity, check out comedian Vaughn Meader’s album The First Family:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rs9gOrGU8wE
Elizabelle
You guys have more interesting to say than anything I’ve seen on the claptrap of TV today. Watching fitfully. Knew they’d commoditize it.
Not surprised Caroline Kennedy was delighted to have the opportunity to be anywhere elsewhere.
boatboy_srq
@Violet: In the 1960s/70s people who believed that the President could help mold a better America did that.
In the 2000s it was 1%er wankers who think of 330 million Ahmurrcans that 329 million of them are lazy, shiftless, greedy takers.
In 2013 there are two reasons: 1960s/70s Take Two – or as a dart board (same characters from the 2000s – as described above – for explanation of the latter).
Pen
@Chris: I can tell you a lot of what I was doing in school on 9/11 and, having returned to college 10 years older than the norm, I can already say I’m sick of hearing kids talk about it like they have a clue. I’m 29… I shouldn’t be feeling old already but the OMG terrorism and security theater that these kids just assume is normal behavior piss me right the hell off.
beltane
@Pen: My first political memory is Nixon’s resignation. I was 6 years old in day camp and, against the wishes of the camp director, some of the hippie-ish counselors brought a TV set into the gym so we could see what was happening. Afterwards, I asked one of the counselors what the difference was between a Democrat and a Republican and I remember being told “They’re the same thing.” I guess this means my first political discussion was with a firebagger.
schrodinger's cat
@beltane: Could have also been a centrist totebagger.
the Conster
@Tom Levenson:
Ron DellaChiesa’s recounting on BUR this morning of being there with his father had me all verklempt. What a way to start this day.
Elizabelle
There was so much new during Kennedy’s brief presidency.
I remember being outside in the street with most of the neighborhood, looking skyward to try to glimpse John Glenn orbiting the earth. 1962.
Don’t know if that was visible to the naked eye, particularly before dark. Was little enough I didn’t really know what I was looking for.
And my family was Roman Catholic and Democrat on my mom’s side. So JFK was a big, big deal.
Redshirt
@Cervantes: Already did! But the short of it is, LBJ was far more committed to civil rights and eliminating poverty than JFK was.
Roger Moore
@Alex S.:
Ford’s was shorter.
kc
I felt it briefly after Obama got elected. It didn’t last too long, though.
Davis X. Machina
@Geoduck: Article on Vaughn Meader’s life after the assassination….piano player, restauranteur, Hallowell, Maine civic fixture.
Elizabelle
@kc:
I am relieved, every single day, to wake up and Obama is president, and not McCain or Romney.
Huge difference. Anyone who will tell you otherwise is not worth talking with.
dewzke
Never a right thread but cbsnews ‘s supposed coverage is a bunch of crap ads.
Violet
@shelly: They were still in existence until 1996. There were a lot of them in the 1960’s.
beltane
I was 17 at the time of the Challenger disaster. I remember my teacher being completely freaked-out but all of us students seemed to have a “Shit happens” reaction. Maybe we were just bad kids.
srv
The boomers elders were still worshippers in the old FDR sense and Ike was a hero. They still felt they were at war and admired a young idealist “hero” and his pretty wife. Camelot.
Their boomer kids, still impressionable teens (or younger), saw their parents and teachers shock and internalized all that.
kc
@Elizabelle:
To be clear, absolutely, I am grateful that neither one of those dudes was elected. Things would be far worse.
But I don’t have any real optimism that things will get much better in the foreseeable future, either.
Raven
@schrodinger’s cat: so you have gone from sincerely trying to understand it yesterday to being sick of it today? And yet here you are talking about it ?
Violet
@Raven: She was talking about the future 50th anniversary of 9/11.
Alexandra
@beltane:
Just three weeks old when Kennedy was killed, my first clear memories of US politics was Nixon and Watergate on the TV every night for weeks. The first presidential campaign I remember kids in class taking sides over, including me, was Carter/Ford.
I know I keep saying this, but those born in 63-65, even a year or two earlier, really aren’t Boomers as is usually defined. Our seminal awakening moment, in my view, was when the world economy slumped during the oil crises of the early-mid 70s with stagflation rampant, with the stage set for the end of Keynesianism and the rise of Reagan, Thatcher and neo-liberalism. Punk told many of us there was no future, so no myth of innocence or security at all.
Er, yay us. Not.
/scratched record
MikeJ
All this talk of the New Frontier and no Donald Fagen?
BobbyThomson
@Bill E Pilgrim:
That moment came in November 1980 for me.
SiubhanDuinne
As is so often the case, Charlie Pierce is a fkin poet as he writes about his memories:
Most of Pierce’s column is about the Warren Commission, and a plea to open up the records. Whole thing is worth a read, both for the substance and for the sheer beautiful power of his wordsmithery.
/in B4 Anne Laurie
Elizabelle
911 has been fetishized. I don’t know that people will feel the same on its 20th and 50th anniversaries.
JFK’s death: we got civil rights, albeit circuitously.
911: we got Homeland Security, two wars, one of which was totally based on lies, and our public spaces will never look the same.
schrodinger's cat
@Raven: I think I was unclear, what I am sick of is 9/11 TV coverage years after.
feebog
For those born well after 1963 JFK’s assassination is something you have read in history books. For those of us who lived through it, it was every bit as traumatic and gut wrenching as 9/11/01. I was in my first year of college. I will never forget the shock, the anger, and the despair at the announcement that Kennedy was dead. Classes were canceled and I cried all the way home. I also will never forget walking into my house and seeing my mother ironing, tears streaming down her face. It was for me, and still is, a more traumatic event than 9/11/01. No doubt my age and great admiration for Kennedy had a lot to do with that, but there it is.
Raven
@Violet: aha,reading on this iPhone in the waiting room ain’t the best. At least I didn’t fly off the handle and have to aogize. . . Again.
Raven
@Violet: aha,reading on this iPhone in the waiting room ain’t the best. At least I didn’t fly off the handle and have to aogize. . . Again.
Cacti
Just a historical artifact to me. No different than the assassinations of any of the other three POTUSes, except it was caught on video.
Historically much less significant than the assassination of Lincoln.
I also doubt very much that Kennedy would have tried to muscle the Civil Rights Act through congress during an election year.
Raven
@schrodinger’s cat: I don’t think you were unclear, I’m a bad thread reader .
Davis X. Machina
@Elizabelle: No mention of 12/12/2000?
Historians with the added perspective of distance and time will point to the Court’s Bush elevation, and not 9/11, as the biggest body blow to the Republic during this period.
cleek
50 years from now, olds will look back on November 21st 2013 with the same sadness and lingering grief that Boomers feel about November 22nd 1963. for them, the day that the filibuster on lower level judicial nominees was killed will be the Day That Everything Changed.
Cervantes
@Chris: Given what an absolute shitshow America would turn into in the ten years after JFK’s death (urban riots, white backlash, drugs, Vietnam, ultimately Watergate), could it be that the JFK myth is simply wish fulfillment? That since he was the last president before that whole mess, people like to imagine that if only he’d stayed alive, he could’ve guided us all through that and it all would’ve been okay?
Or just that “if only he’d stayed alive,” there’s a possibility we might have avoided the kinds of things you mention.
In other words, it’s not so much how great JFK was or may have become — it’s how much worse things definitely got afterwards. For many (obviously not all) of us, after living through the horrors of the War, and then the 50s, the dawn of the 60s finally brought freshness, possibility, even hope. Quite suddenly — and even unto the White House! — public life was almost beautiful!
And then the grimness returned, with a vengeance.
Some losses are very difficult to grieve — and to accept.
I’m not explaining it well. Or as has been said: maybe you had to be there.
MikeJ
One thing that’s hard to comprehend for those of us born after the fact is what a big deal the first Catholic president was.
Violet
@Raven: Just wanted to make sure it was clear. It’s sometimes hard to follow a thread on a phone. I have a same problem.
Elizabelle
I remember the TV being on all weekend, whether anyone was in the room or not. Black and white world, and sad.
OT, but the Flintstones was in original production at the time. Adults watched it when it aired.
Cervantes
@Violet: Have we changed that much as a country in terms of how we think of Presidents.
Oh, yes. Johnson and (to a greater extent) Nixon took care of that.
Chris
@beltane:
Not necessarily. Back in the day, both parties were still pretty similar – liberal wing, conservative wing, moderates in the middle trying to balance.
Speaking of, here’s another question about the old, pre-Nixon days. Back before the Southern Strategy fused them together, what was the difference, if any, between the right wing of the GOP (the Birchers and McCarthyists and people who read the National Review) and the Dixiecrats? Were they the same people who simply had different party labels because the parties didn’t matter as much back then? Or were there actually real differences between them (other than membership badges and which parts of the country they lived in?)
Bill E Pilgrim
@BobbyThomson:
See, I would have thought October 3, 1951.
Okay, hmm, November 1980, I’m looking and drawing a blank. Probably something obvious…
schrodinger's cat
@cleek: Do you moonlight for Washington Post?
Elizabelle
@MikeJ:
Yeah, and the nation got a double dose of that with the funeral rites.
Omnes Omnibus
As someone too young to have experienced “Camelot,” the thought experiment I use is: Remember the “yes, we can” feeling following the election of a young charismatic guy with an attractive wife and two young children back in 2008? Now imagine what the reaction would have been had he been assassinated in 2011.
Randy P
Somehow we went from “we don’t want a country where the Pope is dictating policy” to “we need to have policies that the Conservative Bishops will approve”.
Also a Supreme Court that has, what, 5 Catholics? 6?
@Bill E Pilgrim: I’m gonna guess it’s the election of Reagan
Raven
@Violet: thanks
Raven
@Violet: thanks
Cacti
But for JFK’s death, RFK would also likely have remained a centrist hawk.
Chris
@Elizabelle:
I’m just curious to see if they’ll be able to do the same kind of rewriting of history that they did after Vietnam. Where it was a noble war that went wrong because liberals and Walter Cronkite stabbed us in the back and because we were too noble and civilized and restrained to do what had to be done. (That’s not a universally accepted myth, but a very widespread one just the same).
Violet
@Raven: @Raven: So nice, you thanked me twice!
Bill E Pilgrim
@Randy P: Ah of course. How did I miss that. I think of his term starting in 1981, which it did, but yeah the election.
That’s true for a lot of people actually. I distinctly remember when it was a complete joke that someone as far right as Reagan could become President, including as a gag in a Doonesbury cartoon. Quite a shock when he actually did it.
Elizabelle
@Davis X. Machina:
Oh yeah. Sandra Day O’Connor’s reputation tanked that day, among some folks. (Me, of course.)
JPL
@Raven: How’s it going?
Another Holocene Human
@Pen: I remember when you could just stroll into public buildings. You know, like you belonged there.
Roger Moore
@Alexandra:
FWIW, the original use of “Generation X” was to refer to people born in the 1961-64 era who were classified as Boomers based on demographics but didn’t have the same social experiences as the rest of the Boomers. It was only later that it was expanded to mean the whole generation after the Boomers.
schrodinger's cat
On a completely shallow note, 50 years later Jackie is still the most fashionable first lady. Michelle Obama is no slouch in that department, but Jackie is still the best.
beltane
@Davis X. Machina: In a way, these two events have become linked in my mind. The illegal installation of a president followed by an attack that made us look flabby and vulnerable are two parts of one tragedy. The look of almost animal-like cluelessness on Bush’s face when being told of the attacks spoke volumes about the mindset of Republican voters and their cheerleaders in the media. A lot of people were crowned with a dunce cap in those months.
Elizabelle
I was watching TCM’s documentaries on JFK and November 1963 last night.
It was a different country in a lot of ways. More formally dressed, slimmer, less cynical in those who were interviewed. I know that’s superficial. But it was the 1950s extended. The 1960s seems to have started mid-decade.
Raven
It’s so much different when it is personal. Andy was killed in battle 5 years to the day. Some think if JFK had lived, so would have Andy. http://www.vvmf.org/Wall-of-Faces/49649/PAUL-A-STEIN
Alex S.
@Roger Moore:
Oops my bad, I just looked at the full years… I wanted to express that if he had lived longer, he would have been more associated with Vietnam, he would have drawn some more ire from conservatives if he had enacted the Great Society programs, and he would probably have suffered from the disillusionment of his supporters like Obama.
? Martin
I’m going to go with Oct 1, 2013 as the day our grandchildren look back as the day HTTP 404 Error attacked and destroyed America.
Davis X. Machina
@beltane: The use of the forms of law to promote utter lawlessness is the common thread… there’s a straight line going back from Abu Ghraib through 9/11 to those 9 limousines scattering in the DC darkness.
Goodbye ‘E pluribus unum‘, hello ‘Just win, baby.’ They might just as well have put Al Davis on the dime while they were at it.
Cacti
@Elizabelle:
It was a different country in a lot of ways. More formally dressed, slimmer, less cynical in those who were interviewed. I know that’s superficial. But it was the 1950s extended. The 1960s seems to have started mid-decade.
I understand where you’re coming from. For me, the 80’s didn’t really culturally pass into the 90’s before Bill Clinton.
1990 & 1991 were Desert Storm, Bush, and hair metal still being popular.
beltane
@Omnes Omnibus: At least Sarah Palin did not exist in 1963, and the people like her who did exist were not held up as being serious voices from the heartland. I guess that with the Cold War over, we are free to revel in our wretched refuse.
Roger Moore
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Why would Bobby Thomson be disillusioned by October 3, 1951? I’d think he’d be thrilled.
Violet
@Elizabelle: It seems that time we think of as each decade, from a cultural, music, etc. point of view, tends to start in the middle of the decade. “The 60’s” started in 1964/5. “The 70’s” didn’t start until 1974 or so. “The 80’s” didn’t really get going until about 1984. In 1981 people weren’t wearing day-glo colors, for instance.
Amir Khalid
@MikeJ:
That JFK was the first Catholic POTUS is still a big deal, I think: over the past fifty years, there has not been a second .
celticdragonchick
@shelly:
They were still in existence into the 1990’s. I did a research paper on the Magdalene laundries and Irish suppression of women a couple of years ago.
Elizabelle
@Raven:
RIP Andy Stein. His is a greater personal tragedy; he got even less time to make his mark. Who would think he’d leave this world in Quang Nam province?
scav
Can I just say I love the raunchy ambiguity of the title and over a JFK post (not that it wouldn’t work with certain other presidents)?
Mnemosyne
@Alexandra:
My first and only vote for a Republican was voting for Ford over Carter in a grade-school election. For obvious reasons, growing up in the Reagan 80s cured me of that right damn quick.
Elizabelle
@Violet:
All those day-glo freaks who used to paint the face,
they’ve joined the human race,
some things will never change.
Omnes Omnibus
@scav:
Charlie: They said you was hung.
Bart: And they was right.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Roger Moore: The moment of waking up to the realization that you have nothing more to achieve that will ever match, er..
Okay I’ve got nothing. Saw the name, went for it without thinking it through. Not the first time I’ve teased him about it.
Josie
@Elizabelle: That is an excellent observation. Those of us who graduated high school in the early sixties were children of the fifties. We took that innocence to college with us and were devastated when Kennedy was killed. The political world was never the same for me again. As I said earlier in this thread, we were very naive.
Raven
@Elizabelle: He was a champion gymnast,rings,high bar, tramp. He was small but so goddamn strong they made him a machine gunner. I have a picture of him doing a handstand on the deck of the troopship on the way over.
Raven
@Elizabelle: get it on
David in NY
@ Violet: @Yatsuno:
I had a job that took me into a lot of people’s houses in Michigan in about 1971, and in African-American homes there was a common, and really touching, triptych — John, MLK, and Bobby. My bet is that, as I think Chris noted above, John’s election was a final, important sign of acceptance to Catholics (as Obama to both blacks and tea partiers, with opposite responses).
And we have a little souvenir creamer with a picture of Jack and Jackie on it, from my father-in-law, a Jewish, small businessman, Maine Democrat. They expressed an optimism that continued through the ’60’s, drowned at the end by the war and civil violence..
shortstop
This. And I’m at least 10 years older than you, probably more.
Mnemosyne
@Josie:
I remember hearing a filmmaker who made a film set in the 1970s referred to it as “a more innocent time.” The 1970s.
Basically, the mythical “more innocent time” is always the period of our own childhood when we weren’t aware of what was going on around us. I’m sure my niece and nephew will call the period after 9/11 “a more innocent time” because that’s when they themselves were young and naive.
Elizabelle
@Mnemosyne:
There is a lot of that. And the world is new. So much is off limits, and what you do see is often a mystery.
Raven
So we can’t see how people that had survived the depression and WWII were optimistic?
shortstop
@Belafon: I think this is exceptionally well stated. It wasn’t so much belief in a wide-open future, perhaps, as recognition that things were phenomenally better than what most people had already lived through…and hope that this trajectory would continue.
Raven
@shortstop: and I missed it on this damn phone!
Raven
Ack
shortstop
@Mnemosyne:
It is the blight man was born for. It is Margaret you mourn for.
Elizabelle
@Tom Levenson:
That poor audience. They are shocked with the news, and hear the word “funeral” about 20 seconds later. Before they even have time to process the first.
What stayed with me from TCM: long passage of Chopin’s funeral march, played by military band as the caisson wound towards Arlington National Cemetery. The music throughout was moving and exquisitely sad.
Steeplejack
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yeah, that, plus what if no other president had been assassinated in the preceding 60-70 years. The shock would have been equally seismic.
Elizabelle
Also a society with more broadcasting and not the narrowcasting we can achieve today.
Life magazine. Marvelous photos. Brought us Appalachian poverty, I remember a kidnapped teenage girl who had to eat cold canned pork and beans and then her kidnapper was shot dead, the KKK in its awful robes and fire, pictures of dead servicemen and Vietnamese children. Astronauts.
Time magazine. Newsweek. Better written then, I think. Evening news broadcasts that were far better than the “Norwalk virus on a cruise ship — oh no! How do you protect yourself!” crap these days.
TooManyJens
@Violet:
I was once in the home of a gay Republican in DC who had a picture of Reagan hanging up. That was about 15 years or so ago.
David in NY
@Mnemosyne: I’ve always thought that things might have turned out better had Ford been elected. There wasn’t really such a great difference between him and Carter, and they both were farther away from Reagan. Ford would have gotten stuck with Iran and the double-digit inflation, not Carter. And the Senate probably wouldn’t have turned over in ’80. Wouldn’t have affected the Supreme Court — Ford nominated Stevens, and there were no vacancies from ’76 to ’80.
But alternate histories ravel quickly, pull one thread of history and the whole thing comes apart, so who knows.
priscianus jr
The optimism of the Kennedy years actually started before Kennedy was elected.
I don’t understand why you don’t understand it, but I’m sure part of it is that you weren’t there. I was, so that helps.
To understand the optimism of the late 50s, you would definitely have to understand the 1950s, when our fearless leaders and media were constantly informing us that the world could be destroyed at any minute, and that would be best, to protect us from the Red Menace.
I’m not sure you really want to understand. Maybe that’s the real problem.
Anyway, don’t believe the hype. JFK was one of our very greatest presidents.
Turgidson
@Chris:
Having read Perlstein’s Goldwater book, my sense is that the Bircher crowd and the Dixiecrats certainly had racism and a generally regressive worldview in common. I think the way they were distinguishable was that the Dixiecrats were more than willing to sign on to New Deal programs and interventionist government as long as their pockets were lined by it and, most importantly, the nears didn’t get a cut of it. The Birchers were more consistently and virulently anti-government across the board.
But of course, my parents were teenagers at the time, so I’m just spitballing based on stuff I’ve read.
shortstop
@priscianus jr:
Why are you taking an inability to really understand it as a criticism of it?
priscianus jr
@TooManyJens: Do a lot of people have pictures of President Obama up in their homes?
I’ll bet they do.
We do, at least on our refrigerator.
Elizabelle
@Steeplejack:
William McKinley assassinated September 14, 1901.
But we got President Teddy Roosevelt out of that, so a step forward.
Cannot imagine Glenn Beck would be trying to pass TR off as a teabagger, should he live still today.
Betty Cracker
@TooManyJens: I have a client who has a life-size fake oil portrait of Ronald Reagan in his office. Hence the pseudonym…
The Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion
@Violet: I do. A framed print of the famous campaign poster, matted so that a close up of the face is the only thing visible. Floating suspended from the frame is a silver star with the word “Hope” emblazoned in cut out letters. In the living room. First thing you see on walking through the front door.
fidelio
@Raven: How are things going? I know it’s been a hard week for you two.
Raven
I have a 6ft yellowfin tuna on the wall.
shortstop
@TooManyJens: Not the same thing, but made me laugh. A young guy who used to come to our dog park had a gorgeous sheepdog named Reagan. He stopped coming because too many of us laughed uproariously, and not in a complimentary fashion, when he told us his dog’s name.
David in NY
@beltane:
She and her ilk have always been with us. You had to read the John Birch Society newsletter (ranting about that Commie Bayard Rustin, etc., etc.) to find them, though, and they were in disrepute. Dwight Eisenhower famously wrote that only a bunch of Texas oilmen wanted to away with Social Security, labor laws, and so on, and that they were “stupid.” Things have changed (see Koch Bros.).
Betty Cracker
@Elizabelle:
Teddy Roosevelt would mash the quivering, gelatinous mass that is Glenn Beck between his two massive paws, compacting Beck until he was the size of a small frozen frying hen. Then TR would hurl Beck into the maw of a stuffed lion.
Jeremy
@Violet: JFK was a big historical figure being the first Irish catholic president in U.S history. So it’s no surprise that many had pictures of the man in catholic homes. The same is true of President Obama and First lady Michelle Obama. You can find pictures of the obama’s in African American homes and businesses. I think Obama is the last president since JFK to get that kind of treatment.
Elizabelle
@priscianus jr:
Yup. OFA mailed out a gorgeous postcard of the Obamas and Bidens on Election night 2008.
Noticed one of my neighbors had framed hers and hung it in her study.
I’ve got one of the Shepard Fairey posters.
Steeplejack
@Raven:
Thanks for the link to that site. I looked up my uncle, a Green Beret major who died in October ’64, ten days shy of his 32nd birthday. Such a waste.
Which reminds me, as long as I have lived in Washington, I have never visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. I should do that and make a rubbing of Uncle Dean’s name.
Chris
@Turgidson:
So by the sound of it, economic conservatives “vs” social conservatives.
“Do you hate liberals because they support black people, or do you hate black people because they support liberals?” kind of thing.
Raven
@fidelio: it’s been hard for her and I’m waiting for them to finish the 30 minute procedure that she went in for 90 minutes ago. To be fair this was a sudden thing so were lucky she got in.
Elizabelle
@Betty Cracker:
And then he’d write a book about it.
Bully!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
One thing about JFK’s assassination that apparently it’s considered rude to talk about: its effect on LBJ’s legislative agenda and the ’64 election. The Green Lanternites never mention the effect Kennedy’s martyrdom had on politics, and still LBJ was done by what… late ’67?
Turgidson
@David in NY:
Ah yes, to add to my last post about the Birchers, (again, from my reading, not personal experience) they seemed much more frantically anti-communist than your run of the mill Dixiecrat.
Mullah DougJ
@Raven:
Not really, I’d just think that it would all happen again.
Elizabelle
@Raven:
wishing you and the bride the best.
Elizabelle
Doug’s put up a fresh post.
JFK and the Pogues and a Yatsuno quote. Riches await.
shortstop
@Mullah DougJ: Except that things were already better on the economic side — the 1950s were a prosperous era, at least if you were white, and that was a huge difference after the privations of the Depression and the sacrifices of WWII. And Eisenhower, regardless of his many flaws, wasn’t a rabid right-winger as we think of them today.
In contrast, Obama came along after Dubya completely wore this country out and crashed the economy to boot. So as hopeful as many of us were at the current president’s arrival, we were already cynical and overcautious based on what had happened pretty much consistently since 1980 with an eight-year semi-break for Clinton. We weren’t already on the upswing as people going into the Kennedy administration were.
Anoniminous
In the 1960s the GOP had a lock on the AA vote. Until 1968 the South was solid Democrat. California was solid GOP. I’m not even going to try to explain what it was like to live – even as a special snowflake – under Jim Crow; why we weren’t murdered in our beds remains a be-puzzlement.
It was a very different time.
gbear
Go listen to Donald Fagen’s ‘The Nightfly’ album a couple of times. He does a great job of capturing both the innocence and sweet irony of pre-Dallas.
Another musical touchstone of the era is the wild enthusiasm that welcomed The Beatles when they arrived in the UA about three months after the death of JFK. America was still in a post-Dallas funk, and here come four funny, exciting guys making great music that drove kids nuts and kicked America out of it’s doldrums. The Beatles were lucky enough to arrive just when America needed a diversion.
David in NY
@Turgidson: The Birchers. They were truly nuts. Dwight Eisenhower a Communist? I mean, you can understand the combination of racism-xenophobia that has created the Muslim-Kenyan-Socialist President in small minds in the South, mostly, but Dwight Eisenhower was a War-Hero-General-from-Kansas; thinking he was a member of the great Communist conspiracy (which they did) was beyond understanding.
Raven
@Steeplejack: yea just go at night or early in the am unless it is vets day or Memorial Day. It’s just another roadside attraction.
Raven
@Steeplejack: yea just go at night or early in the am unless it is vets day or Memorial Day. It’s just another roadside attraction.
gbear
@Anoniminous: Umm, my comment is a bit sunny coming after yours. My white suburban upbringing is showing….
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Raven:
On my walls, from left to right: Ella at the Downbeat in ’49 with Duke and Benny watching, the last pitch at Tiger Stadium, a poster of Klimt’s “Mother and Child”, a Bart Simpson parody of the old Maxell “Blown Away” ad, a poster for “Forbidden Planet” and, finally Eastwood in spaghetti western costume.
Yeah, I’m single.
Turgidson
@Chris:
Kinda. The Birchers were social conservatives too, I think. Just as much so, even. But they hated government, period. While the Dixiecrats were more like today’s “keep your government hands off my Medicare!” crowd, except also proudly racist. Fine with activist government, as long as they benefit from it and those people don’t.
AdamK
@monkeyfister: I’m a baby boomer. I could not be more sick of hearing about the assassination(s) in the media, endlessly repeated. It was bad enough to live through it once.
The media never have anything new. It’s the same old crap about the sixties, not only about Kennedy, but about the fucking Beatles, the fucking Doors, fucking Janis Joplin, fucking Woodstock, fucking hippies, fucking Vietnam.
Because the only thing they can report on now is the same thing they reported on then. History according to the media is only the history of the media, endlessly looped and slightly reworded. If they didn’t notice it in the 60s it never happened. They just skim off the tritest crap they can find and toss it back out.
(It’s not my fault.)
Elizabelle
@David in NY:
The Birchers were fringe, though. They weren’t your base, which you must appease and fear.
The infection is consuming the host.
Death Panel Truck
@Cacti: RFK hated LBJ with the white-hot heat of a million suns, so his flip from centrist hawk to dovish peacenik could have been in part due to that. Whatever LBJ supported, just do the opposite.
Jeremy
@shortstop: Yeah Eisenhower was a moderate who was progressive in a number of ways. But the republican party of today is not even close to the republican party of the 50’s and 60’s. If you read the republican party platforms from the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s you would think it’s the current democratic party platform.
NotMax
DougJ, please memorize and learn the difference between hanged and hung.
@Gin & Tonic
There are examples of eff-ups one could use about his shortened administration, but neither of those fit the bill.
For those around at the time, the sudden shock, the abrupt quenching of the “torch passed to a new generation,” the hush prevalent everywhere for days and days and days will never be forgotten. We all vividly saw the vibrant pink of Jackie’s gore-befouled suit, even though it was b&w TV, a macabre, disturbing splash of color in a world bled gray and dim in an instant.
For those not around then, but of a certain age, remember the first time you saw “Ordinary People” in a movie theater? How the audience, downcast and silent, shuffled out of the theater afterwards? Multiply that feeling of shared somberness times a million, and you’re getting close.
Sherparick
First, we humans like to tell stories about ourselves, and no one in many told better stories, more optimistic stories about us Americans then the Jewish American movie producers of the 1930s and 40s. The real America from the end of Reconstruction to Pearl Harbor, 1941 was a society riven with deep racial, class, and regional divides, Whites hating Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, and Asians; Capitalists and workers hating each other; Southerners hating Northerners; Westerners hating Easterners. Read John Dos Passos (U.S.A (and does not Dos Passos journey from firebrand Socialist/Bolshevik to Reactionary say a lot about the psyches of elite Americans). But WWII, which in some ways was the completion of the New Deal, with high taxes on wealthy and high wages to the workers produced an illusion of “liberal consensus,” a peaceful co-existence between Labor and Capital and a realization that the American apartheid system had to be broken up, especially since not keeping that peace and breaking that system up might give the advantage to the common enemy. But there was always a darkness, a nemesis Camelot. It had many ways made the U.S. a semi-totalitarian state from 1947-55, the McCarthy period, which proceeded McCarthy with Truman, Nixon, and Hoover etc. putting together blacklists of possible “Communists.” However, despite the fear of war and communists, our lives in the suburbs seemed almost idyllic in the early 1960s, a for our parents who had come of age in the Depression, like they traveled into Utopia of the 1939 World’s Fair. For an 8 year old in his 3rd grade parochial school class, President Kennedy’s assassination was the just a shock from which all the other future shocks would appear to flow. But that, like our suburban Utopia, was an illusion.
I have severe doubts now about all the conspiracy theories. They are literally full of holes. So I do think Oswald did it, although with a very lucky shot (the third). But the Warren Commission was a botch, because the Secret Service, FBI, and CIA were all trying to cover up their screw-ups in protecting Kennedy and not noticing that Oswald was working long the President’s route given his views (radical Left) and violent history. They were also concerned that all the little plots on Cuba and other Latin American tricks would come to light if to much investigation was done on possible triggering events.
Death Panel Truck
@AdamK: The media treated Jimi Hendrix’ death with barely concealed contempt.
Elizabelle
@Steeplejack:
Be sure to see the Korean War Memorial too, which is close to the Viet Nam one. Very well done.
I find them both very moving, the VN especially for what people leave behind.
Anniecat45
@ Mullah Doug J — you wrote that “! can’t really understand the optimism people describe in pre-Dallas America. It’s too alien to me.”
That’s what we lost that day.
Death Panel Truck
@Sherparick:
This. Oswald acted alone. There is an abundance of evidence supporting it. I’ll never believe anything else, unless it’s proven, and nothing else ever will be.
Anoniminous
@gbear:
The dichotomy of the 60s in two posts.
:-)
shortstop
@NotMax: Take it up with John, if you’ve got a good medium or Ouija board.
Elizabelle
Here’s an odd little blogpost — it’s about the Virginia hunt country estate in Middleburg area that JFK and JBK leased from 1961-62. Jackie, in particular, loved being there. Glen Ora Farm.
The owner decided she wanted to move back in, so it was a short-term respite.
The Kennedys built their own home (who knew?) called Wexford a few miles away. Wexford was completed in spring 1963; the Kennedys stayed in it only twice that fall, last just before the Dallas trip.
Jackie sold Wexford in 1964.
Interesting from the local newspaper clippings and photos: The Kennedys left infant John John behind in the White House one weekend visit very early in JFK’s term; they took Caroline with them.
And the Kennedys attended Mass in a Community Center. Did Middleburg not have a Catholic Church at the time? Maybe not.
shortstop
@Sherparick: What’s bugging me about current coverage is the sloppy conflation of multiple-shooter conspiracy theories with single-shooter-but-others-behind-the-scenes theories. That Oswald was the only shooter is virtually indisputable now, but what doesn’t get discussed is whether he was pressured by, influenced by, conspiring with, etc. someone else. That is not so clear, and we lost the ability to find out when Ruby (who had interesting connections of his own) took him out.
Tone in DC
@BobbyThomson:
Likewise.
Took me a while to notice what a waste of space Raygun and his team of enablers were. Then I saw. a bit later, that these gas-holes were truly foul.
Elizabelle
More about the Kennedys’ weekend retreat in Middleburg area:
fidelio
@Raven: Home soon, I hope. I’ll be thinking of you guys this weekend. It sucks to have to sit and wait and fret and not be able to help. I know because I’ve done it.
Elizabelle
Middleburg, VA is still in the South though. Item from the Middleburg Museum Foundation.
Origuy
I was seven and in second grade when JFK was shot. My childhood memories are hazy, but this was one of the first times that the outside world made an impact. They sent us home early from school; this was a small town outside Bloomington, Indiana.
People have been talking about the things that Kennedy left undone, but the things that he did or tried to do are what gave people hope for the future. Starting the Peace Corps gave young people the sense that they could make a difference in the world; proposing a man on the moon got people thinking that anything could be accomplished. The Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty went a ways toward reducing the fear of nuclear war and certainly reduced the rise of radioactivity in the atmosphere.
SiubhanDuinne
@schrodinger’s cat: I am not, myself, anything resembling a stylish person, but I have always had three style icons: Jackie Kennedy, Audrey Hepburn, and Grace Kelly. Coincidentally, they were all born in 1929.
Raven
@fidelio: 3 hrs and they just lit her up!
Raven
@Origuy: got a buddy from Seymour
Elizabelle
My comment in moderation because it used the word P h a r m a c y.
Elizabelle
@SiubhanDuinne:
to sound about a hundred years old: we could do with more of your style icons and less of the Miley Cyrus and Kardashian crowd.
I like how Angelina Jolie sometimes wears Jackie-esque clothing. With tattoos.
Hungry Joe
I was 13, in school in SoCal. Word went around that one kid said JFK got what was coming to him. I said to him, “You didn’t really say that, did you?” He said, “Yeah. I’m glad the son of a bitch is dead.” A few years later, for his 16th birthday, his father gave him a lifetime membership in the John Birch Society. A few years after that he overdosed on heroin. I didn’t say, “I’m glad the son of a bitch is dead,” but only because I didn’t think of it at the time.
srv
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Damn, it’s just like it was yesterday.
schrodinger's cat
@Elizabelle: They are hardly style icons, I mean Kardashian and Miley. I like Alexa Chung and Blair Eadie of the blog Atlantic Pacific, also Joanna Hillman of Bazaar.
Chris
@David in NY:
I can actually see how they got there (“Ike was a communist.”)
I mean, if you accept as a baseline that anything to the left of the Gilded Age is “socialism”/”communism,” which they do… then Ike was definitely a socialist. And given the way he kind of rode the Red Scare into power, I could see how right wing fanatics who despaired under Roosevelt and Truman would be electrified with the 1952 victory, seeing it as finally reversing the tide of socialism… and then plunge back into even deeper despair when it turned out that Eisenhower was just another New Dealer.
Take the sense of betrayal and dashed hopes that must’ve come from that and cross it with their belief that any “socialist” must be taking orders from Moscow, and you get “Ike was a KGB agent.”
J R in WV
A couple of things. First, WirePhoto was invented by Bell Labs in 1933, primarily for the newspaper business, also used by the newsreel companies. the first wirephoto was of a airliner crash. FAXing as a technology is directly derived from Wirephoto technology.
Secondly. Believe it or not, lots of people had pictures of Franklin Delano Roosevelt on their living room or kitchen wall. To them it was natural to put one up of JFK, even before his death.
It was a blue collar thing, I suppose, as well as more elderly folks, to whom FDR saved the country (world, really) from the Great Depression, not to mention saved the world from totalitarian rule by Hitler and the Japanese Imperial Army. Which was quite a second act if you ask me.
And yes, I know Churchill and Stalin had something to do with it – as well as the actual fighters in the trenches. But without the leadership of FDR the British wouldn’t have lasted until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, leading to America’s entry into the war. They nearly starved even with all the cargo and destroyers we could send them on credit.
I was 12 nearly 13 50 years ago, and my folks were real Republicans – but they were horrified when Kennedy was killed, even though they worked hard against him politically. No expected a political murder here in America – we were better than that, and we all knew it. Except we were, of course, wrong.
But that is why people were so horrified.
When Ruby shot Oswald, my Mom was watching live and literally screamed at the top of her lungs. She was speechless when I ran into the room, pointing at the TV, which eventually informed me of why she was hysterical.
Now that we’ve had war on live TV, multiple political murders, race riots, terrorist attacks, attacked other nations based upon plain old lies, etc, it might take more to get a real honest scream from a mom than seeing a guy killed on live TV.
I hope we don’t see anything that horrific in the rest of my life. I know that’s kinda selfish, but I’m feeling done with real life horror.
debbie
@Elizabelle:
Actually, he holds that TR originated the Progressive movement and is therefore the Devil.
debbie
@schrodinger’s cat:
I remember a television special in which Jackie led a tour of the White House. Very genteel (probably a bad thing today).
Elizabelle
@gbear:
Thanks for telling us about Fagen’s The Nightfly. Will check it out.
NotMax
@debbie
The parody of that program on the first First Family album has never stopped being humorous.
Long Tooth
“But I can’t really understand the optimism people describe in pre-Dallas America. It’s too alien to me”.
There never was an “era of optimism”. But there was definitely a pre- political assassinations era, a pre-Vietnam War era, and a pre-Watergate Scandal era. It was the trifecta of those back-to-back-to-back, excruciatingly painful ordeals that served to forever differentiate the America of pre-1963 from the America of post-1975.
Betty Cracker
@Hungry Joe: My mother tells me there was open rejoicing when the news came to rural Florida. Not everyone felt that way, but it wasn’t uncommon either. Even when I was a kid in the 70s, I heard old folks say the pope was really calling the shots when JFK was president. Anti-Catholic prejudice seems to have diminished considerably in our neck of the woods, which is a good thing.
Chris
@Death Panel Truck:
I think a lot of it’s the fact that Kennedy’s assassin was himself assassinated so quickly after being taken into custody. And that his assassin, himself, turned out to have some shady undert. So no matter what the investigation concluded, you were definitely going to have rich fodder for conspiracy theories right off the bat.
Chris
@Betty Cracker:
That’s why I take the “pre-Dallas optimism” thing with a grain of salt.
JFK’s election was the closest one in decades (this in an era when presidents often won by 20 point margins, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Johnson). Between that and his being the first Catholic (the two weren’t unrelated I’m sure), I figured there were about as many people freaked out about his presidency as “hopeful.” From what you said, sounds about right.
As for the previous decade, between the Red Scare (and the attendant purge of the hard left from politics) and the racial troubles bubbling to the surface already (Ike had to deploy the Airborne to protect desegregation FFS), the image I have of the fifties is one of paranoia and cultural angst cranked up to eleven, even if the economy was the best it had ever been.
Heliopause
Shirley you must have done a post title around “I.G.Y.” by Donald Fagen.
dww44
@Elizabelle: And, Thank you, Elizabelle. I was older than you in 1963 and JFK’s untimely violent death did damage us all. Yeah, he and Jackie and all the Kennedys were all too human, but, as Andrew Young said tonight in Tom Brokaw’s special, his (Jack’s) heart and indeed those of all the Kennedys were in the right place.
Then to mirror comments preceding yours, Brokaw interviewed Pat Buchannan, who of course, was the very opposite of grace, kindness and light. I muted that mean-spirited SOB and decided that’s exactly what’s wrong with Republicans. They never look forward;they only look backward and they’re just at their core miserable politicians because they don’t care about their fellow citizens.. JFK was the opposite and he had the wonderful ability to inspire us, something the Buchannan’s of this world could never do.
dww44
@Cacti: I’m not so sure about that. it was Robert’s experiences as Attorney General which caused him to keep his brother focused on civil rights. I believe those experiences were already changing RFK.
@priscianus jr: Bravo!
Miss Bianca
@NotMax:
I was only two months old when Kennedy was killed, so I don’t remember much about it. Re the “Ordinary People” reference, however: I remember that feeling. Indeed, I will never forget it. But then, the night I saw “Ordinary People” happened to be the first Tuesday of November, 1980. I’ve never been certain whether that feeling of numbness and dread I remember came from seeing that movie or from seeing the election returns on TV when I got back. I was 17 then, just too young to have voted for the first time.