Then and Now: Mourning in America

 In a 1964 essay Joseph Campbell chose as his example of  "the high service of ritual to a society" the funeral of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963:  "For here was an enormous nation; yet during those four days it was made a unanimous community, all of us participating in the same way, simultaneously, in a single symbolic event.  To my knowledge, this was the first and only thing of its kind in peacetime that has ever given me the sense of being a member of this whole national community, engaged as a unit in the observance of a deeply significant rite."

It's not hyperbole (if a bit exaggerated in detail): that's how it was.  And as it has never been again--which probably makes it inconceivable to the majority of Americans today, who were not old enough or even alive then, sixty years ago this month. 

Among the contributing factors to the national response was the status of the presidency, and of the President as a kind of personification of the nation, that's largely gone now.  There was the shock: it broke the continuity of time.  Few if any then alive could remember McKinley's assassination in 1901.  There was also the new intimacy which the Kennedys brought, largely through the relatively new national medium of television.  People had never been as familiar with a President and his family.  

John F. Kennedy became a national figure at the 1956 Democratic convention, one of the first covered by television, when the presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson left the choice of the vice-presidential candidate to the convention.  So there were nominating speeches and a tense vote.  Kennedy came up short by about 20 votes, and took the platform to move that the nomination of his rival Estes Kefauver be made unanimous. 

 Early in 1960, Kennedy was frequently seen on the evening news as he took the new route to the presidential nomination of competing in primary elections.  The campaigns in Wisconsin and West Virginia were particularly dramatic and heavily covered.  The Democratic National Convention was in media-saturated Los Angeles and dominated the networks all that August week, as they played up the drama, though eventually Kennedy secured the nomination on the first ballot.

The 1960 campaign featured the first four televised debates.  The election was close and so demanded a lot of media attention.  Once Kennedy became President, he and his administration and especially his family were everywhere in the broadcast and print media, which included not only newspapers but magazines from newsmagazines to glossy photo-rich weekly magazines like Life and Look, plus glossy women's magazines like Good Housekeeping that featured Jacqueline Kennedy and daughter Caroline. Jacqueline Kennedy refurbished the White House public rooms to reflect their historic character, and the networks all carried her one-hour tour of the result. 

The nation watched not only as JFK confronted crises in Berlin, Cuba and elsewhere internationally, and domestic crises like his confrontation with Big Steel, but as he and his wife brought a baby boy into the White House, and also lost a son at birth.  Kennedy was the first to hold live televised press conferences, which displayed his charm and wit as well as command of the issues.  He entered the White House at age 43, as the youngest man to be elected President in American history.  

In other words, the American public had the opportunity to become more intimate with JFK than any President before him. 

In both senses of the word, Kennedy appealed to a wide variety of Americans.  The industrial and working middle class was strong and unionized, and he was supported by the unions.  His first big legislative goal was to increase the minimum wage (to $1.25 an hour.  Opponents warned it would tank the economy.)  The young flocked to join the Peace Corps that he began.  He proposed and fought for "medical care for the aged," that became Medicare, finally passed in 1965.  He spoke often about education, and about the arts.  He brought artists and entertainers to the White House.  He supported the sciences, committed the US to landing an American on the moon, which at first resulted in probably the global event that came closest to presaging the attention to his funeral rites, which was the fully televised launching of John Glenn as the first American to orbit the Earth, as well as those three orbits and his splashdown. 

 

Then there was the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962--which definitely had the nation's attention.  On its 40th anniversary, when several of the principals involved were still alive, his Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara and White House aide Theodore Sorensen agreed, that if anyone else then on the scene--Democrat or Republican-- had been President (with the exception of his brother Robert) and faced the same circumstances, thermonuclear war would most likely have resulted.

Kennedy called for and negotiated a nuclear test ban treaty with the USSR, crucially important as the first reversal in Cold War hostilities and the arms race.  He gave his signature speeches on the test ban and on civil rights one after the other in two days, and it was his words--the eloquence and directness of his argument-- even more than the acts themselves that set the stage for at least the near future, and that continue to echo through history. Most historians and political observers now agree that he was about to end direct American involvement in Vietnam.  As 1963 was coming to a close, he told political advisors his 1964 campaign issues would be pursuing peace and addressing poverty in America.    

 He was up and down politically, and he was hated by some. There were cynics, as there are many more now.  But Americans felt a connection, and he inspired widespread affection and admiration, confidence in his ability as President, and an optimism for the future.  His assassination was a shock on so many levels--of vulnerability, of an unimagined violence, of reality cut loose, then of grief for a young family we'd come to know. Part of it for many was the feeling that it was a turning point in history--a turning back, a turning away.  It turns out sadly that we were right.  

It is true that most of us experienced those four days through television.  Although I don't recall watching all that much on Friday, the day of the assassination itself.  I was in an afternoon class in high school when the principal, Father Sheridan, came on the p.a. (as he often did), but this time announced that TV was reporting that President Kennedy had been shot in a Dallas motorcade.  My next class was gym, which we held outside, engaged in some sports activity that allowed me to almost forget what I'd heard, as if it hadn't happened.  Then we showered and dressed, and as I walked up the narrow stairs to the gym itself, a boy coming down for his own gym class answered my inquiry with a fatal nod--President Kennedy was dead. 

I remember wandering the dark silent halls, then walking home with my two best friends, including my debate partner, Mike.  We were scheduled to work on our debate case at my house.  Instead we spent the evening talking about what had happened and what might happen next.  

But by the next day I was watching almost all the time.  The entire broadcast day was devoted to this news coverage, and would be through Monday.  There were no commercials whatsoever.  Much of the time on Saturday especially, the TV coverage highlighted events in Kennedy's campaign and presidency--at least for another day, he was more alive than dead on the TV screen.

  On Sunday I didn't go to Mass with my family so I could watch the procession to the Capitol, and thereby happened to witness Oswald being shot on live TV.  A moment before I'd been startled by what I thought was a gun, but it turned out to be a microphone. Then the real shot, and the chaos.  Like most people, I watched the funeral Mass (in the same church where, two days after his Inauguration, Kennedy reached back to shake my 14 year old hand), then the procession to Arlington National Cemetery on TV (although Margaret, having grown up in Arlington, was there.)  We saw the caisson drawn by six horses--one of many deliberate echoes of Lincoln's funeral--and the riderless black horse, rearing and bucking.  We saw Kennedy's three year old son John and his salute, and all the closeups of Mrs. Kennedy, a contemporary portrait of Our Lady of Sorrows.

But though we were bound together through television, it wasn't the total measure of our participation or expression.  I remember going with my father to Main Street in Greensburg, probably late Friday or early Saturday, to the Singer Sewing Machine store he managed, where we placed one of my Kennedy photos in the storefront window, surrounded by black bunting.  Every store on the street had a similar display.  None of them would be open for business until Tuesday.  Main Street was in mourning--here and everywhere.

When Kennedy's coffin was displayed in the Capitol rotunda, nearly half a million ordinary Americans filed by to pay their respects, all day and night and into the next day.  On Monday, the coffin entered St. Mathew Cathedral at 12:14 pm.  Historian William Manchester wrote in his book The Death of a President, that "millions of individuals, reading the funeral timetable in the morning papers, had spontaneously chosen that moment to express their own bereavement."  

"For the next five minutes, the continental United States was virtually isolated: telephone and cable communication with the outside world was suspended until 12:19."  Traffic in cities stopped. The New Jersey Turnpike was deserted.  Trains across America stopped. Subway trains under cities stopped in their stations.  Buses pulled off the highways and stopped.  Planes scheduled for takeoff remained on the runways. Even elevators stopped.

There were official memorials: sailors on US ships at sea cast wreaths into the waters.  Thousands of artillery pieces at 7,000 US military posts fired salutes.  But citizens invented their own tributes.  Two Eagle scouts played taps to a totally silent Times Square, where taxi drivers stood by their cabs with bowed heads.  A railroad conductor got down from his stopped train in rural Pennsylvania and blew taps on his own trumpet.  And it wasn't just Americans.  It was rush hour in Athens but Greek police still stopped traffic for a period of silence.  A tribal ceremony of mourning was held in Nairobi.

Manchester reports that television viewing dipped to its lowest during the funeral Mass, as people attended memorial services in their own churches, synagogues and mosques, and in San Francisco, at Buddhist temples. There were memorial programs at all fifty state capitals.  These rituals kept the country from going crazy, but they did not heal the nation completely, nor the lives of many of us. 

The mourning, and certainly the effects, did not stop at the end of those four days.  But those days remain a moment in America without precedent and without repetition (though the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in 1968 prompted extensive response.)  For most Americans now I'd guess, it is only the faded black and white television images sampled briefly now and then that prevent it from sliding completely into the historical obscurity of the response to FDR's death, or Lincoln's assassination.  Those of us still around who lived through it consciously will remember a different America, and especially the different America that could have been.