The
question I’ve asked myself for the last fifty years is probably very much like
the question some young man began asking himself in 1865, after the
assassination of Abraham Lincoln. How could such a loser – such a scumbag in
life – have so altered the momentum and movement of history?
by Charlie
Leck
Where were you
on that day in 1963 – November 22, 1963 – when you first heard that John
Fitzgerald Kennedy, the President of the United States of America, had been
assassinated in Dallas, Texas? I don’t want to review my answer to the
question. I’ve written about it before, here on this blog and in other places.
Nevertheless, I will, to a certain degree, revisit some of that day in order to
make a few points.
Let me just say
that it was a debilitating day, weekend, week for me; and it took many weeks
before I could resume anything like a normal life again.
I hadn’t voted
in the 1960 election. I wasn’t old enough. I do remember the summer of ’60,
leading up to that election. I was back in New Jersey after spending time in
the southwest and in the great Midwest. I was uncomfortable in Jersey. My
thoughts kept returning to the Midwest and I was anxious to go back there. I’d
completed a satisfactory year in college. I liked the quieter, easier pace of
Midwestern living.
Back in New
Jersey, I worked in a factory days and played town ball a few times a week with
a couple of semi-professional baseball teams in the early evenings. Both in the
factory and on the ball field the discussion was often about the coming
election. Richard Nixon was campaigning hard against John Kennedy. I hadn’t yet
established a political stance and I didn’t know much about either of these
guys. Kennedy was elegant. Nixon was workman-like. My old man was a Republican.
My older brothers wouldn’t talk about the election and gave no indication about
what they’d do, but I suspected they’d vote for Nixon.
I worked on an
assembly line with another college guy. He was attending Drew University. He
wanted to be a reporter. He liked Kennedy. He wanted to stage a mock debate
over the lunch hour. He asked me to take the Nixon position. We did it as a
lark. He was better prepared than I and he whipped me in every which way in our
little, staged dispute; yet, the factory workers, who had happily gathered
around us to listen to the debate, cheered and clapped and hooted for me and my
positions on Nixon. It told me where my little, rural town in New Jersey stood
on this election. My very temporary friend and I laughed about it when we got
back on the line. We conceded that neither one of us really knew what we were
talking about.
On the day of
his inauguration, I became a Kennedy man. Within the first year of his
presidency, I became a dedicated Democrat. In the fall of 1963 I enrolled at United Theological Seminary up in the
Twin Cities of Minnesota. I was to study theology and prepare for a life as a
clergyman in the very liberal United Church of Christ. John F. Kennedy was, at the
time of my enrollment, one of the heroes of my life. I wouldn’t miss one of his
televised press conferences. He handled the press with great genius, cunning
and humor. His sense of humor was clever and dry. I tried to begin developing a
similar approach to humor. JFK’s smile was genuine. His love of life was
immense. I enjoyed the film clips of him on his sailing yacht, on the golf
course, on the beach where he played with his children, and with his
knockout-beautiful wife, Jackie. By mid-November, 1963, I was totally a Kennedy
man and I was looking forward to the 1964 election campaign.
Then, in an
instant, it all came to an end. A classmate came rushing into the lunchroom
where many of us were gathered. He told us that the President had been shot. It
appeared to be very serious. I had never experienced such a sense of foreboding
and sorrow. The heaviness of it nearly crushed me.
The
mother-fucking television could not be correct! It couldn’t be! No little,
squirrely, know-nothing son-of-a-bitch socialist could possibly bring down this
glorious, bright and handsome leader of the free world! NO!
I went to my one
o’clock Old Testament class. Herr Doctor McCallaster stood before us, behind
his lectern. He suggested we all sit silently and pray and meditate. After ten
minutes, or so, someone knocked on the door and then opened it slightly. The messenger
spoke in hushed words with the professor. He returned to his lectern to tell us
that the President was dead. He began to speak in tones so tender and
compassionate. I don’t remember what he said, but, whatever it was, it had
healing qualities. Somehow he related it all to the great stories of the Old
Testament, but nothing, in the end, really made sense.
Nothing would
make sense to me for weeks. I knew that millions of people were feeling exactly
the way I felt in these days following John Kennedy’s death. I was as low as I
had ever been or ever would be in my entire life. I sat glued to the television
for the funeral and burial. I remember the John-John salute to his father so
clearly that it is as if it were yesterday. I cried like a baby and the pain and
agony of the moment were overwhelming.
I was both stuck
in desperate despair and terribly, terribly angry. Who was this miserable
son-of-a-bitch who could do this to our nation? How could it happen?
Robert Stone, in
the NY Review of Books, summed Oswald
up brilliantly in his review the Norman Mailer’s book about the assassin [Oswald’s Tale].
“Lee Harvey Oswald, as he appears in Oswald’s Tale, was a loser’s
loser whose chance of fame would always be proportional to his willingness to
self-destruct. He would never prove a lover or a hero; his options were only
shades of villainy, something which he naturally failed to understand. In the
Marine Corps, he was just another one of those mouthy sea lawyers full of
pseudo-intellectual yammer about their far-out politics, one of the
revolutionaries who would go to Russia when they got out. The difference
between Oswald and the rest was that he actually went. And then, instead of
skulking home when his money ran out, he insisted on staying, even to the point
of making a superficial suicidal gesture when he was asked to leave. He was
determined to achieve the status of “defector.” This was a man whose only gift
was the wit to compound his mistakes exponentially. A man to turn a personal
fuck-up into a national disaster and make his problems everybody’s.”
Quite early in his
book Mailer, almost regretfully, writes:
“It is virtually not assimilable to our reason that a small
lonely man felled a giant in the midst of his limousines, his legions, his
throng, and his security. If such a non-entity destroyed the leader of the most
powerful nation on earth, then a world of disproportion engulfs us, and we live
in a universe that is absurd. So the question reduces itself to some degree: If
we should decide that Oswald killed Kennedy by himself, let us at least try to
comprehend whether he was an assassin with a vision or a killer without one.”
Vincent Bugliosi, a successful prosecutor (Charles Manson)
and an immensely successful writer [Helter
Skelter] of the most successful crime book in publishing history (over 7
million copies sold), has an interesting take on Oswald. He talks about the man’s
great desire to do this awful deed without help, with no support, as a way of
showing up the American system for which he (Oswald) had absolutely no love.
Bugliosi also talks
about Oswald’s great love for Fidel Castro. And, one must remember that Oswald
was a declared communist. He had early defected to the Soviet Union. He wasn’t
very welcome there during the short time he lived there, but it was clear that
this was Oswald’s chosen political mode. Then one must remember that shortly
before his assassination, Kennedy made an appearance in Miami and spoke
forcefully to the Cuban people and urged them to rise up against the dictator.
It angered Oswald to no end. This has been established by entries in Oswald’s
journals and in interviews with his widow, Marina.
However, I think
it is Norman Mailer [Oswald’s Tale] who
catches the reasons for Oswald’s actions better than anyone else who has
written about this strange and very insignificant little man: “It was the logic
of his life!” Kennedy represented everything and everyone who Oswald hated. If
he could bring down the man on his own, with no help and no support, it would
be his crowning and defining achievement. It would be worth whatever happened
to him as a result.
Indeed, Lee
Harvey Oswald was “a loser’s loser.”
The odds that he
could succeed that day were overwhelmingly slim. Nevertheless, the meaningless
little prick was able to do it against all those odds. Because there were so
many impossibilities in the story of this assassination, it would quickly birth
all kinds of conspiratorial tales. It is almost, even now – fifty years later –
impossible to accept that one low-down, slimy, and miserable little, nearly
meaningless man could have done this.
In fact, he did!
He did it fifty years ago today and there are some of us who have quite
literally never gotten over it.
_________________________
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