Many Americans, maybe especially those of us in the Baby Boom, describe the Kennedy assassination as an end of innocence. It was a lot of things, but it wasn’t that.
Looking at what came afterward… riots repeatedly tearing our cities apart, Vietnam, assassination after assassination… the time of JFK takes on a glow. Bracketed by the frumpiness of Ike and the vulgarity of LBJ, Kennedy’s glamor does indeed seem like “one brief shining moment.” Surely HE would have kept us out of Vietnam. Under HIM, Civil Rights would have moved forward, and the nation remained in peace at home and abroad.
But the idyll for which we’re so nostalgic was not so much the product of innocence as it was the product of ignorance… or even the product of ignoring. We forget that he was elected partly because of his saber-rattling, get-tough attitude. We’ll close the missile gap. We’re hardened by war. We’ll bear any burden, fight any foe.
We also forget that just about his last major act just before his own assassination was to connive with Vietnamese generals for the overthrow (which led to the murder) of President Diem, in hopes of getting a more vigorous war against the Communists.
We also forget that his legislative accomplishments were so-so, especially in the realm of Civil Rights. It was sloppy, appalling Johnson who hammered through the great Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 – and probably nobody BUT Johnson could have done it. When he stood before Congress on national television and announced, “We SHALL overcome,” it struck like a lightning bolt in a nation where millions “knew” that Civil Rights was a Communist plot commanded from Moscow, weakening America for the takeover.
It was not that we were losing our innocence. It was instead that we were not permitted to go on pretending. Millions of our people lived in the direst poverty. Millions more lived in moment-by-moment danger of death under a system as arbitrary and as violent as that of our Communist enemies. We repeatedly hear the conclusion of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. We rarely hear the earlier paragraphs, where he praises the rising spirit of militancy, and prophecizes that America will never know rest or tranquility until it deals with its crimes.
People often mourn for what we’ve lost, but when we take off the rose-colored glasses we can see that we a far better country now than we were in 1963.
We in the Baby Boom connected with Kennedy in a special way. He was energetic, dynamic… a dad like our dads, with kids like our little brothers and sisters. This was a tragedy we could understand, and could fear ourselves.
The storm that dropped a few inches of snow on Washington dropped many more in the northeast, so many of us were home from school on inaugural day. The TV brought us his short, inspiring, easy-to-understand address. And most of us were in school when we got the word that he’d been shot, if not yet the word that he’d died. It was the first great television news story, and most of were glued to the set.
So in many ways he seemed like “our” President, and we felt the loss deeply, as did most of the rest of the nation and even much of the world. His murder was a crime and a tragedy, and we owe him a lot – but he wasn’t magic, and our country wasn’t a paradise. On that day in Dallas furious right-wingers were plastering up “wanted for treason” posters with his photos like mug shots. In that season millions were kept from the polls by violence because they were black, or because they were Mexican-American. Native people and Jewish people were the butts of jokes. Many Americans insisted that Catholics (like Kennedy) could never be loyal citizens, never be fit for democracy, never be trusted with public office. Women couldn’t get loans. Segregation was still the law of much of the land. Lynching was so frequent that it scandalized the entire world, and over the years hundreds of anti-lynching laws were introduced. Congress rejected every one.
I liked my life in 1963. The midst of the Baby Boom, in a lot of ways, was a great time to be a kid. Life in many ways was wonderful, at least for a northeastern white boy whose father was a mechanical engineer. But even then I knew that millions of kids didn’t live the life that I lived. Even then I knew that looking at America honestly is the very first thing that you can do for your country.