Forty-five years ago, on a sunny Friday afternoon, I walked into a physical education lecture hall at Cole Field House, in College Park, where a squat, crew-cut instructor named Fluke, having heard the first sketchy radio bulletins about a shooting somewhere in Dallas, tried to sneer in the face of history.
“Everybody just sit there,” he ordered that classroom full of University of Maryland freshmen. “I’ve got a lecture to deliver. When I’m done, then you can go find out whether or not the president’s dead.”
Forty-five years later, everybody who was alive back then can still remember where they were, and how they felt, when they got the news that John F. Kennedy had been murdered. This was the precise moment that changed everything, that wiped out so much hope and replaced it with so much cynicism.
Just sit there, Fluke said.
So we did. In our last moment of innocence, in our last minutes of blind respect for all authority figures, we sat there while an hour-long lecture slowly, slowly passed, and the world changed, and finally we emerged to learn the worst public news of our lives.
This weekend – specifically, Nov. 22 – remains draped in mourning cloth, one of the three darkest days on the American calendar, along with Sept. 11, 2001, and Dec. 7, 1941.
This is the weekend we lost our innocence, and gained a new way of discovering the news. We were glued to the television as never before in our lives. It kept bringing us the next fresh draft of history.
There was Jackie, arriving at the airport in a bloodstained dress; then, the nation’s first mass trip to Arlington; and then Jack Ruby, advancing from the shadows to strike at Oswald.
The historian Arthur Schlesinger worked in the Kennedy White House. In the newly-released volume of his journals, he writes, three days after the shooting, “The agony continues, and one can still only intermittently believe it…Pat Moynihan was asked whether we would ever laugh again. He replied, ‘Yes, we will laugh again. But we will never be young again.’”
How do we explain to those who weren’t yet born why it meant so much?
John Kennedy’s appeal went beyond politics, and beyond party. When he moved into the White House, he was leading a nation that had endured a long and debilitating economic depression, and a ghastly world war, and a 1950s that seemed so plodding and uptight that much of the country seemed narcoleptic.
Kennedy asked for more. He was young, he was handsome and smart, and he made us want to be better than we ever were. He made it cool to feel idealistic. He asked us to help people in distant lands who were having a tough time. He told us not to ask what our country could do for us, but what we could do for our country. The line became a national mantra.
He asked us to look at people whose skin color was different than our own, and said we all deserved to be treated the same way.
Nobody had said such a thing in such stark terms since Lincoln. He told us we should shoot for the moon.
That moment in Dallas symbolically ended the Fifties, a decade so long and boring that it took 13 years to run its course. After Dallas, everything in the world seemed to happen in a matter of minutes: the assassinations, the riots, the political corruption, the fighting in Vietnam and half the country burning flags and half draping it over the coffins of the poor kids coming home from the war.
Time has dimmed some of the Kennedy romance. In his lifetime, nobody heard about the extramarital business, or the mob connections. Those revelations reduced him in stature. But they didn’t remove what he’d given us: idealism and high aspirations, not prejudices and cynicism.
“I was talking about Kennedy’s death,” Mort Sahl wrote some years back, “and a woman said, ‘You evoke such guilt, what do you want us to do? I have a shrine to him on my mantle, a picture of Kennedy and two candles. I light them every time it’s his birthday.
What do you want me to do?’
“I said, ‘I want you to blow out the candles and curse the darkness.’”
I have an old recording at home of Walter Cronkite looking back at the Sixties. There’s a clip of a radio announcer’s voice from the presidential motorcade that day in Dallas 45 years ago. There’s a rifle shot. The announcer spots Kennedy’s car, and shouts frantically into his microphone, “Something is terribly wrong.”
On days like this, you can see the whole procession of somethings that will go wrong for so many years to come.
