Reluctant as I am to add to the gushing stream of literary, video, audio, archival, historical and assorted other ‘ical references today about the events in Dallas on November 22 1963, here’s my two-cents worth.
I was (and still am to some extent, though the image is a bit tarnished) a fan of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. I was twelve years old when Mr. Kennedy came to Columbus, my home town, during the tumultuous 1960 campaign. I stood fifty feet from JFK as he spoke to a crowd on the west steps of our Statehouse, itemizing his vision of America and our way forward when— not if, but when—he became the 35th president of the United States. I watched on election night, and thrilled when he eked out the narrowest victory in any race in U.S. national election history. Little did I know or appreciate that election night in 1960 that his victory came about just as Kennedy would have wished. He savored that victory; relished the nail-biting aspect of it. Once, during the campaign in West Virginia, Kennedy was asked about the influence of his father’s wealth, that is, has Joe Kennedy been buying votes for you? The candidate’s response was standard John Kennedy. “Perhaps he has been buying votes for me,” he said. “But pop told me he’s damned if he’ll pay for a landslide.”
That was quintessential Kennedy, and a bit prescient as well. Why? Because Kennedy was, like all his brothers, his old man, too, a risk taker. He was a daredevil, someone who dove into the fray unafraid, even with relish. Kennedy never met a challenge or a risky opportunity he didn’t like, never encountered a danger that didn’t get his juices flowing. We saw it in his open, carefree style; we saw it in his history as a veteran PT boat captain whose ship was sliced in two in the Pacific; we saw it in the way he swaggered in front of a podium, in the debates with the cautious and pedestrian Dick Nixon during the televised debates. And we saw it that day in Dallas. Try to imagine someone assassinating Nixon, and the mind reels. Not only why would anyone do that, but why would Nixon put himself in harm’s way like that? Impossible.
Fifty years ago today I was a fifteen-year-old high school sophomore in a minor seminary, and an ardent fan of our first Irish Catholic president. Yes, I remember with perfect clarity where I was, what I was doing and the exact reaction I had when Father Sala announced in chapel that indeed “...the president has been shot and killed in Dallas.” My arms still mass with bumps as I write those words, the indelible emotions erupting as fresh as that terrible day half a century ago. The Kennedy assassination was without question the signal event of my youth, the 9/11 for my time. It’s taken me fifty years to truly understand my feelings about it, and the subtle, almost invisible resentment I have about the man and what he did. Not Oswald; Kennedy.
Like his brothers, his dad and even the Kennedy women to some extent, John F. Kennedy was a daredevil. Fifty years ago today I would have been flayed alive for writing these words, for committing them to a page that would be read by anyone, much less posted for the (potential) world to see and preserved for all time in cyberspace. But here it is. John Kennedy asked for it. Okay, no president asks to be killed, but Kennedy knew without question that in traveling to Dallas, in diving into one of the most sinister and dark, most overtly dangerous plots of real estate for him in America, he was courting not only political but physical danger. To parade through the teeming streets of Dallas Texas, the so called ‘city of hate’ at that time, was brazen. To do so in an open vehicle, and to wind through several sharp-angled turns and narrow streets was nothing less than foolhardy. Kennedy had been warned ahead of time by friends and foes alike that he was taking a real chance going to Dallas. Many advisers told him not to go. History records that he brushed the danger aside, saying, “If they want to kill me all they have to do is stake out the top of a building and use a high-powered rifle.” What the history of this infamous day does not record, or what it perhaps can only say now, half a century later, is that John F. Kennedy was a daredevil, and that he should have at least taken the offered precautions while flinging himself into the madness and danger of Dallas. I say he welcomed the danger, relished it.
In reference to the moon landing Kennedy once said, “...we choose (to go there) not because it is easy, but because it is hard.” I believe that part of the man welcomed the danger that Dallas offered, and for that very reason and no other he chose to go there. History has shown the rest. I wish I still had my unvarnished respect and admiration for JFK, but I admit that the tarnish is real, and that my resentment about his part in Dallas while slight, is real as well.