#803 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Friday November 24)
Good morning,
I hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving. While I did my best to make a dent in yesterday’s feast, I expect I’ll be continuing the indulgence through multiple rounds of leftovers today and tomorrow!
IT’S BEEN 60 YEARS
Bruce Powell reminded me that I couldn’t let November 22nd go by without commenting on the 60th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He’s right, so I will share some personal reminiscences.
When President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, it was only a couple of months after my seventh birthday. While I had some inkling of the world around me, like most kids of that age, I was more intrigued with a ladybug than with world events. The world was small and comfortable—my family, friends, school, holidays, goofy stickers, baseball, Sunday morning cartoons, and playing games.
In the fall of second grade, as part of a project for school or Cub Scouts (I can’t recall which), we were assigned the task of creating a scrap book about a news event of our choosing. Several years ago, this scrap book rematerialized amongst the many things my mother saved and which are resident in our garage.
I remember vividly choosing for this assignment what was a relatively insignificant car accident (well, probably more significant to those involved). The first page of the scrap book included news stories and pictures from the Los Angeles Times and the now defunct Anaheim Bulletin. But turn to the second page and there is an abrupt shift to stories about the assassination. First, of course, was the assassination, but my interest carried well beyond the event to follow the subsequent events—including the emerging explanations about how this happened, Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald, and the heartbreaking image of little “John John” saluting his father’s casket as the funeral procession went by. In some ways, this scrap book is the physical manifestation of the moment when my small inward-facing world began to take on greater scope. The world was neither as simple nor as safe as I once had thought.
The Kennedy assassination was the “biggie” that shifted many of us from childhood to the early stirrings of understanding the world. From the time of the initial reports (conveyed first, in my case, by our school bus driver), through the hospital reports, news on the death, and the oath of office to LBJ, events not only seemed to happen quickly but they were on view in our living rooms. The Kennedy assassination was the first “news item” that I, and I suspect many in my generation, followed diligently. It is a date that I will never forget. In many ways, it was an event that helped shape a generation.
The assassination forced my friends and me to acknowledge the randomness of life, the fragility of our existence, and the lack of safety in the world. There could, indeed, be a single person with a mission who could change the world with a few gunshots. There have been other attempts on presidents’ lives since then, including the near-successful attempt on Reagan. While I think the risk of a presidential assassination has been reduced, the chance for other political assassinations or kidnappings is real (just ask Governor Gretchen Whitmer or the members of Congress cowering in fear when the Capitol was breached). I fear 2024 may bring increased incidents of political violence and it worries me greatly.
EVENTS THAT FORCE US INTO ADULTHOOD
Other events in the 60s helped shape my generation’s awareness of the world, including the Vietnam War (which was a daily litany of news reports and body counts, the space program and Moon landing, the 1967 Six Day War, the civil rights movement, the riots at the Democratic Convention in 1968, and (for some of us) the advent of Earth Day in 1970.
I mention this awareness of events and the emergence of the early stirrings of adulthood and “adult thinking” as examples that apply to successive generations as well. I suspect there are events that are etched in the minds of GenXers in their formative years--Challenger explosion likely is high on the list, along the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Soviet Union, and Bill Clinton’s travails. For the Millennials, I suspect their world view was shaped by 9/11, the Great Recession and the 2016 election. I recently listened to a New York Times podcast where the commentators were asked what events most informed each of their political awakenings and many cited events this list. I’m curious what others feel about what shook them from childhood to adulthood.
READING LIST
We’ve all no doubt read a great deal about Jack Kennedy and his family (I suspect only Lincoln has more biographies), for an outstanding recent book on the JFK, the Kennedy family and the times in which they lived, I cannot recommend more, read JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century 1917-1956, by Fredrik Logevall. I hope there is a second volume coming.
For the definitive analysis of the assassination, one that meticulously recounts the story and debunks the various conspiracy theories, there is no better analysis than Case Closed, by Gerald Posner.
The Kennedy era was one that presumed any problem could be solved through the brightest people applying the appropriate amount of intelligence and analysis. The possibilities for the future and our capacity to solve problems seemed endless. Alas, hubris is a dangerous thing. For a book about choosing the best people, their various successes and their stumbling into colossal failures, The Best and the Brightest, by David Halberstam is a gem (for that matter, so are Halberstam’s other books, like The Fifties).
As for the loss of promise and idealism giving into a brutal reality, this song from Camelot, with which the time of John Kennedy often was (perhaps overly sentimentally) compared, sung by Richard Burton in 1978: Camelot sung by Richard Burton
A MANIFESTO FOR REASON
And this, from a friend of nearly 50 years, who will go nameless here because it is so reflective of my views and the views of so many others:
“You mention that you consider yourself to be a centrist. I would agree, in terms of rationality and essential American values. …I have always considered myself to be a centrist in the very same sense. I am deeply patriotic, and bemoan the movement of much of our nation and its populace, not only to the right, but to the irrational and anti-democratic (small d) right. I have always seen myself not only as a supporter of the most basic historically American values (in the good sense), but as one that would place the obligation to put those values into action above my own individual interests. My greatest sense of disappointment and isolation at this point in my life is the sense that rather than moving toward this as a universal posture (which in the long run is really the only way that it can work well), many (if not most) of my fellow citizens have been slipping and now are pushing far away from it…
Again, a very Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family! Despite everything else, we actually have so much to be grateful for.”
I’ll leave with that sentiment. Enjoy the long weekend!
Warmly,
Glenn