NOVEMBER 22, 1963

[Zlatko Waterman]

A brief reflection on a famous day . . .



Yesterday, November 22nd, was the 42nd anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

I didn't see it mentioned prominently on these boards, and the NPR story I heard about it wasn't on the assassination, but on the fact that it wasn't being commemorated as it had been in the past.

I had just begun college then, and was moving my textbooks at the college bookstore through the long checkout lines with the other students, when the word came.

I remember being afraid for the country ( I was 18 at the time) and for myself and my family. I briefly walked into the gathering called by the college president in the main theater. Many of the girls were crying.

Kennedy had been a handsome, movie-star president on tv, with a movie-star wife who wore tiny, aspirin-shaped. pastel colored hats.

Their little son, John-John, later to grow up and die in a plane crash

http://www.guardian.co.uk/kennedy/story ... 57,00.html


, saluted his father's coffin as it was conveyed into the military jet. And everyone watched and listened to Walter Cronkite's solemn narration for hours. In fact, most people I knew were solemn, respectful, and imbued with regret.

Later, I saw the Zapruder film of JFK's assassination, read Mark Lane's book ( and several others), became convinced ( and I am still) that the Warren Report was bogus in its attempt to account for the killing.

Oliver Stone's film, "JFK" is an interesting piece of fiction, whose fantasy probes at a more complex relationship among the elements involved in the assassination than does the Warren Report. It's also assembled with a good deal more imagination. Some people would find that a deficit. As an artist I find it a step closer to "truth."

Citizens of the US believed, I think, that Kennedy was a little special among the Presidents. They were ready for a youthful change ( and got it in the 1960's and early 70's) after the staid, but safe Eisenhower years.

Ah, but Tricky Dick ( Ike's protege and sometime rival-- read "RN") was waiting in the wings, and the US got another dose of something else they probably had coming to them.

It seemed my childhood and adolescence were filled with assassinations-- JFK and his brother, RFK, Martin Luther King-- and "lone nut assassins", we were encouraged to believe-- Oswald, Sirhan, and James Earl Ray, who somehow is always referred to by his three names.

I read a biography of him, too. What an unlikeable character.

And there was the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Bay of Pigs and, of course, Vietnam, then not quite the monster it became later for all Americans, not just the 58,000 who died there, including some personal friends and acquaintances of mine. I was drafted not once but three times, declared 1A and fit for service, and later medically disqualified.

"Camelot", as JFK's "court" was sometimes called, isn't even a pretense today.

We watch the criminals from the Bush administration ( as we watched the Ronald Reagan-eers), march to the scaffold, or get promoted and mustered out with their retirement bonuses.

Ken Lay, CEO and presider over the Enron debacle

http://www.riskglossary.com/link/enron.htm

once used his 10 million dollar personal stock bonus from the company to "pay down debt" rather than invest, since he was personally worth about 400 million dollars. He, along with other top executives, is said to have received a personal retirement bonus package of about 55 million dollars.

All this while his friends in the legislature made sure the minimum wage held at $5.15/ hour, the lowest in the Western developed world.

So perhaps "Camelot" and its legacy were all fantasy. Probably. It was a good time to be 18 years old and believe dreams came true.

I think all of us really did believe "The torch had been passed to a new generation . . ." One person in that ( and my) generation was George W. Bush. Another was Bill Clinton.

And maybe we all promised somewhere in our hearts ( I was 18, George and Bill were 17) that, from that day forward, we would
( at least some of the time) "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country . . ."



--Z

[jimboloco]

I had marched in the st pattie's day parade in dallass with my hs band in march of 1962, right by the place. jfk got shot.

Before that i had done a field trip to the Texas schoolbook and depository bldg in the spring of '56, yaz the third grade, where i saw a bus of black kids full and waiting and heard some kids on my bus yell, "hey snowball" several times. The black kids were quiet.

Oh yes, in March of '63 I was "Tex" at my new school in Michigan, lots of Catholics up there, when Kennedy got assassinated, they stopped calling me Tex. It was a shared tragedy for everyone.

Then not too much later, man, I remember one morning I opened my apartment door at college, there was this paper with the headlines, MLK shot. I said, "shit" I remember
my ROTC friends who were black wore black armbands along with the other black students, It was another hit at consciousness,

then later, in the summer of 68, stayed in Ann Arbor, living in hippie co-op, Nakamura, when Bobbie got shot,. I wuz getting set for ROTC summer camp, already somewhat drawn in an opposite direction from my intended goal, then the deaths at Kent State, then the carpet bombing on the Ho Chi Minh trail, then the breakaway. to hell with that shit.

The good die young. We grew out of that morass of illusions.