That remark in November of 1963 — often attributed to Daniel Patrick Moynihan — captured the despairing mood 50 years ago Friday when Lee Harvey Oswald fired three rifle shots and killed the 46-year-old Jack Kennedy. It was a “weekend that America lost its innocence,’’ said CBS newsman Bob Schieffer, who covered the assassination as a young Texas newspaper reporter.
To Americans, it was utterly unthinkable that a man who had inspired thousands of people to enter politics could be cut down in a matter of seconds by someone as inconsequential as the 24-year-old Oswald, a man who never seemed to hold a job, lived two years in the Soviet Union before returning to the United States in 1962, and hankered to move to Communist Cuba.
For baby boomers who came of age at a time when America seemed able to do anything — from trying to land a man on the moon to eradicating poverty to combating the Soviet Union — it was such a shock that “so many of the things we believed in seemed to be shattered that day,’’ Schieffer said last week.
Just that year, Kennedy signed a landmark treaty with the Soviets to ban nuclear tests in the atmosphere. He had asked Congress to approve a Civil Rights Bill aimed at dismantling Jim Crow in the deep South. He persuaded Congress to create the Peace Corps and vowed to place a man on the Moon by the end of 1969.
Coming one year after Kennedy skillfully prevented a thermonuclear war with the Soviets during the Cuban Missile Crisis, there seemed a sense of “hope and optimism,’’ said Thurston Clarke, author of the new book, “JFK’s Last Hundred Days.’’
“The two great threats seen to the country’s survival were nuclear war — as we almost had the year before and the racial conflict,’’ Clarke said. “Kennedy was on his way, or making an attempt, to solve these two threats — to settle the Cold War and end the danger of the racial conflict. Then to be cut down at that very hopeful period when things seemed to be going right, that’s what made his assassination so traumatic.’’
Andreas Etges, a Kennedy biographer and a history instructor at the University of Munich, said the reason Kennedy still resonates in this way is that his presidency “was left unfinished. The hope that was so closely connected to it was suddenly gone.’’
Kennedy and his glamorous wife Jackie projected good looks, youth, vigor and style that were ideally suited for the TV age, a White House era that presidential historian Theodore White dubbed “Camelot.’’ They were idolized as film stars rather than politicians and they seemed to personify America’s limitless power.
And yet that image collided with a hidden and less appealing side of Camelot. In contrast to Kennedy’s seemingly perfect marriage to Jackie — their photos graced the covers of Life and Look magazines — the young president conducted a series of extra-marital affairs during his thousand days in the White House that have since been well documented.
His lovers included 19-year-old White House intern Mimi Beardsley; actress Marilyn Monroe; Mary Meyer, a Washington artist and sister-in-law of Benjamin Bradlee, who later became editor of the Washington Post; Judy Campbell, who had links to the Mafia, and Ellen Rometsch, suspected of being an East German spy and a relationship so risky that even admirers such as Clarke acknowledge they are “dumbfounded by it.’’
Although a month before his death Kennedy declared there were “new rays of hope on the horizon’’ in America’s relationship with the Soviet Union, he often spoke in apocalyptic terms about the Cold War, warning in his first State-of-the-Union address that “each day we draw nearer the hour of maximum danger, as weapons spread and hostile forces grow stronger.’’
He not only spoke like the penultimate Cold Warrior, he acted like one. At a time when the U.S. already possessed a huge nuclear advantage over the Soviets, Kennedy dramatically increased the purchase of Polaris nuclear missile submarines and Minutemen land-based nuclear missiles.
“There are so many sympathetic biographers of Kennedy who keep insisting he was a dove,’’ said Jim Rasenberger, author of “The Brilliant Disaster,’’ a 2011 book about the Bay of Pigs invasion. “I suppose … what may hurt him in history is we may see him as someone who ratcheted up the Cold War rather than cooled it down.’’
In 1961, Kennedy ordered the catastrophic Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba and was so overwhelmed that spring by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s bullying style at the Vienna summit that one U.S. diplomat caustically described it as “Little Boy Blue meets Al Capone.’’
He did not protest that summer when East Germany constructed the Berlin Wall — which divided family from family until its collapse in 1989. And he initiated the steps that increased U.S. troop levels in South Vietnam from 700 in 1960 to more than 16,000 at the time of his death.
It’s all part of what some historians consider the Kennedy myth.
“A lot of things were ultimately lies,’’ said Thomas Greven, professor of political science at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University of Berlin. “His image as a young, radiant president was an orchestration as he was actually very sick. Same goes with his seemingly happy marriage to Jackie.’’
Just hours after Kennedy’s death, CBS’s Charles Collingwood, who one year earlier joined Jackie Kennedy in a TV tour of the White House, told viewers that afternoon that “all over the world, people are going to remember all their lives what they were doing when they first heard that President Kennedy had been killed.’’
Collingwood was right. At Brinkerhoff School in Mansfield, sixth-grader Sherrod Brown — now a U.S. senator from Ohio — heard the principal announce the shooting over the public address system.
In Sister Maria Theresa’s 8th-grade class at the Sts. Peter and Paul School in Cincinnati, John Boehner and the rest of his classmates “put our heads down on our desks and prayed.’’ The future speaker of the U.S. House would later recall his “family, like so many other Americans, took the loss personally.’’
Nearly 250,000 people lined up for 40 city blocks to view Kennedy’s casket in the ornamental Rotunda tucked under the Capitol dome. In London, flags fell to half-staff. In Berlin, thousands of people – including university students – took part in a ceremony at city hall and a late-night torch procession, something “unimaginable today’’ with an American political leader, Etges said.
The idealistic image of Kennedy endures to this day. In a poll conducted by University of Virginia political science professor Larry Sabato for his new book “The Kennedy Half Century,’’ Americans ranked Kennedy as the nation’s best president since 1953.
A 2009 survey of historians by C-Span named Kennedy the sixth-greatest American president, just behind Harry Truman and ahead of Thomas Jefferson, Woodrow Wilson, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Ronald Reagan.
He idolized two very different British prime ministers, including Lord Melbourne’s for his aristocratic and self-indulgent style. But he yearned to be more like Winston Churchill, with Clarke writing that Kennedy’s “terrifying ambition to be judged a great man was an obsession that, with the possible exception of sex, trumped all else.’’
Not everyone is convinced that Kennedy’s assassination alone ended an era of American innocence. Instead, some historians contend that American innocence unraveled because of a jarring combination of events – Kennedy’s death, the 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, the carnage of the Vietnam War that destroyed Johnson’s presidency, the Watergate scandal which drove Richard Nixon from office, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq based on faulty intelligence.
“The desire for somebody like Kennedy is still there,’’ Etges said. “People still long for a leader that inspires. And despite everything that happens, the world still looks to America in the hope of finding someone like that.’’
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