JFK Redux

PBS-UNCTV aired a two-part four hour retrospective on JFK. We TIVOed the series and finished watching last night. A heart-rending piece, bringing back many memories of that awful event in 1963. We were 20 somethings, living on Nob Hill in San Francisco, right behind Grace Cathedral. I was traveling a lot. I had in fact just arrived in my corporate home office in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was driving a rental car, and had just pulled into the driveway of our office. The radio was on and the announcer was telling us that JFK had just been shot. It was not immediately clear what had happened, or whether the president would be ok. Then came the fatal news. The president was dead . . . dead!. It took some time for that news to sink in. I just sat in the car, in disbelief to what I had just heard. Who, why . .?
I went inside to report what I had just heard. Everyone knew. They all sat around in stunned silence. I called my wife in San Francisco, She answered the phone and told me that, she learned of the news because the bells at Grace Cathedral had been sounding in a mournful alert. She couldn't figure out what was going on, until she tuned in to hear the news herself. She was in deep shock. The news was so hard to grasp. Who would want JFK dead . . . a crazy person? What followed on the news (we had no TV at the time, having thrown out our TV as a useless invention five years earlier) seemed even crazier than our wildest thoughts. The guy who ostensibly did the deed had been caught and was then himself shot by some other bozo, while surrounded by police. Now if all that didn't arouse suspicion of a conspiracy, what would?
But we were stuck with it all. We now lived in a crazy world of thuggish people, armed and willing to kill at the drop of a hat. Nice.
From that point on, the notion of mortality entered my brain and has never left. My fear of flying began. Despite the significant travel I continued to do in my consulting business, I began to hate flying. And now, many years later, we have given up flying, after discovering that today's airlines, led by USAIR, are in fact dysfunctional.
But life goes on, and JFK is an increasingly distant memory. Ah Camelot. It was a wonder for a time . .

November 22, 1963

We were living in an apartment in San Francisco then. I traveled a lot. On November 21st, I had traveled to our company’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A couple of us had gone to visit a client and were just returning. We had the radio turned on. Suddenly, as we pulled into the company parking lot, the announcer came on and informed us, solemnly that “ . . . the President of the United States has been shot . . .”
At first, nobody seemed to know whether he was ok, or not. Then the fateful words. “He has been killed. The President of the United States has been killed."
We were dumbstruck. Surely that couldn’t be true . . . but it was true. We had just lost John F. Kennedy, the most promising President in years. I was 29. JFK had appealed directly to me and to my generation.
But who would do something like that . . . here in the United States? This wasn’t some banana republic where violence ruled the day. We were a nation of laws . . . or maybe not.
It just all seemed like a bad dream, but on awakening, the same reality was present. Flying home the next day, I was still in a state of disbelief. On boarding the plane, and hearing the doors close and the engines begin their roar, I became aware of a sudden unease. I had always loved flying. I flew a lot, and the experience continued to delight me. On this flight home, however, I became nervous with every change in sound. Landing was both a great relief and an exercise in terror. Would the plane crash?
I was vulnerable. The flight had been entirely uneventful, but for the first time, I felt vulnerable. The feeling has never left me. The Nation has never been the same for me.
Sitting here, this November day in the year 2010, our Nation seems even more vulnerable. We are a nation at War with itself, a sort of latent Civil War. It wasn’t always so. It is now. Republicans insist.