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.  

Then and Now: Conspiracy Theory

 Sixty years later, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy still reverberates through American culture and politics.  For example, the matter of conspiracies.

 Apparently the first "conspiracy theories"that were applied to a presidential assassination, followed the 1881 shooting of President James Garfield and his subsequent death.  What befuddles me is that hardly anyone mentions the documented conspiracy to commit the first presidential assassination, of Abraham Lincoln.  John Wilkes Booth conspired with at least two others to also kill the vice-president and secretary of state on the same night. They were angry white supremacists and ardent supporters of the defeated Confederacy.  But our histories tend to ignore this, and focus on Booth as a deranged lone gunman with mysterious motives.

Still, the contemporary pattern of conspiracy theories really began a few years after JFK's death in Dallas on November 22, 1963.  The Warren Commission Report in 1964, published in a fat tome that a lot of people bought (including me) and almost no one read, repeated the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman.  But talk of conspiracy began almost immediately: it was the Mafia, it was the Pentagon, it was the CIA, it was Cuba, it was LBJ, it was none or all of the above, mix and match.  There was so much of it that Barbara Garson wrote a Shakespearian parody called MacBird! that pinned it on LBJ, and it ran for several years in various theatres on the West and East coasts beginning in 1966.  

At first the receptivity to these possible conspiracies was fed by the sense of loss--not only of JFK himself but of his promise--of the kind of presidency and country he embodied.  LBJ was a lesser usurper in every way; JFK's differences with some military leaders during the Cuban Missile Crisis and perhaps the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty fed other (or contributing) scenarios.  That LBJ and the military and "Intelligence" establishment swiftly escalated the war in Vietnam that JFK was winding down, only added credibility to these impressions and suspicions.

And then the evidence started coming in--not of actual conspiracies, but of the implausible single gunman/"magic bullet" official explanation.  The same debates are renewed today as they basically were formed over the past half century.  A conspiracy in which nobody talked remains as implausible as the magic bullet single assassin explanation.  Now nearly everyone who might have been involved is dead, and pretty clearly, we will never know.

Just to entertain the idea of some dark plot among the powerful was further encouraged by the revelations of the conspiracies of lies that supported the Vietnam war.  That systematic lies and secret wars and assassinations have been used by US government agents since at least the start of the Cold War if not much earlier, is documented.  

With those shocking revelations and speculations as background, all kinds of conspiracy theories are now available for those who need them.  Perhaps only a small number of Americans believe the transparently absurd conspiracies pushed by Qanon and other extremists, but apparently a lot of Republicans believe federal and state governments conspired to steal the 2020 presidential election (though they seem less willing to concede that the Republican Supreme Court actually did steal the 2000 election.)  

The link specifically to the JFK assassination is strong, as in the QAnon announcement two years ago that its anniversary in Dallas would be marked by the return of John F. Kennedy, Jr., to stand beside Donald Trump as they triumphantly expose the usual suspects, and return to the White House.  For just as tabloids for years "revealed" that JFK was still alive and hidden on an island, his son's death in a plane crash also didn't happen.  These wish fulfillments have apparently become part of today's extremist fever dreams, complete with a MAGA conversion. (See this Guardian piece by Steve Rose for more.)  

This 60th anniversary also marks the first year in which a Kennedy not of JFK's generation is ostensibly running for President, though not nominated by either major party.  Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s candidacy has been linked with a number of what are called conspiracy theories.  I don't know all that much about him, but he does seem a puzzling and paradoxical character.  He was a persistent and effective environmental advocate (and still supports efforts to address climate distortion), and his foreign policy speech earlier in his campaign put his finger on the change that JFK brought, from a policy of war to a policy of peace, and of the return since to what RFK jr. called "the forever war," and the attitudes it reflects and engenders applied to every area of foreign policy.  His distrust of Big Pharma is well-earned, since he represented its victims in many successful lawsuits.  But even though some nuances in his positions do get ignored, he does go to extremes, which we identify with the extreme right, along with playing fast and loose with facts.

A piece this summer in Slate reviews his positions and troubling tendencies, and relates them to the characteristics of conspiracy theories and those who adhere to them.  But it never mentions what is very likely their origin in his life: the assassinations of his uncle and his father in the 1960s.  Reputable sources have suggested that RFK senior did not much believe in the Warren Report explanation.  Others suggest the killing of RFK was not necessarily as simple as reported.  When I was the editor of an alternative weekly called Washington Newsworks in 1975 and much of 76, we covered the forthcoming congressional hearings that seriously examined alternative explanations to the lone lunatic orthodoxy of the killing of Martin Luther King, Jr. In fact, Coretta Scott King (we learned exclusively) was coming to Washington to be part of it.

It now seems likely that there will never be explanations of any of these monumental and world-changing events that convince everyone, or perhaps even a majority.  But there are distinctions to be made between credible conspiracy "theories," and insane explanations promoted as fact.  

I reinterate: I don't know Robert Kennedy, Jr.  But it's not hard to imagine the residual suspicions and perhaps the psychological damage that might come with the burdens of uncertainty with such high stakes, for a nephew of JFK and the eldest son of RFK.  A very long book about Robert Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign by Lewis Chester, Godfrey Hodgson and Bruce Page was titled An American Melodrama.  I think of RFK Jr.'s campaign as an American tragedy, a further ramification of that day in Dallas sixty year ago.

But there is another 60th anniversary this week that is of course related but too often gets overlooked as it is conflated with the assassination itself: the funeral of John F. Kennedy, and what that was like for America and the world.  Which is my subject next time.

TV and Me: Viewing the 60s

 Television and I grew up together.  This is our story.  Latest in a series.

By the 1960s TV news was growing up, at least to some extent.  The Camel News Caravan disappeared in 1956, replaced by the Huntley-Brinkley Report, which became the dominant evening news broadcast on television (though for awhile, the sponsor’s name appeared prominently on the set.)

  With this competition, CBS replaced Douglas Edwards at the evening news desk in 1962 with Walter Cronkite, who had co-anchored the network’s 1960 political conventions coverage with Murrow.  About a year later it became the first half hour network news (fifteen minutes had been the norm), with NBC soon following, and fledgling ABC several years later.  Cronkite remained the CBS anchor until 1981, with his familiar closing: "And that's the way it is."  According to polls, he became the most trusted news voice in America, and his on-air analysis of why the Vietnam war was failing legitimized mainstream opposition; "losing Cronkite" and hence much of America allegedly became instrumental in President Lyndon B. Johnson's decision not to seek re-election.  

 The early 60s team of Huntley-Brinkley (Chet Huntley reporting from New York, David Brinkley from Washington) was famous for David Brinkley’s unconventional speech pattern and wry takes on the news, and for the “Goodnight Chet,” “Goodnight David” sign-offs.  The first Telstar communications satellite linking television transmissions from the US and Europe in 1962 led not only to an outstanding hit record by the Toranados, but a celebratory TV program with participants from all the networks—allowing Walter Cronkite to say for once, “Goodnight, David.”

 I was a big Huntley-Brinkley fan, and later when I did the late night news on our college radio station with an expected audience of near zero, I liked to amuse our station engineer by re-writing and reading wire service news stories with the cadence and inflections of David Brinkley.  Beginning with NBC’s coverage of the 1960 Democratic convention, NBC was my first choice network for news, the rest of that fateful decade.  

Grissom, Shepard, Glenn:
first 3 Americans in space

One continuing news story of the 1960s was the US manned space missions.  Launches of the first US manned spaceflights were covered live on television, and Americans learned to say "A-OK" and call the launch a "lift off" instead of the "blast off" of Saturday morning science fiction.  I watched Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom on their sub-orbital flights, and then John Glenn’s three orbits of the planet, all described and shown (within fairly primitive technical limits) on live television as they happened.  Later in the decade the Apollo missions were covered extensively, and the first human step upon ground not on Earth was seen (more or less) as it happened when Neil Armstrong stepped off the lander onto the Moon.  

The Kennedy presidency, it was said, was the first television presidency.  The first-ever televised debates of the 1960 campaign helped him get to the White House, and his televised press conferences became viewing sensations, demonstrating his knowledge of detail and his ready wit and ironic humor.  Kennedy sat for long, thoughtful televised interviews, with single reporters or groups of them in year-end retrospectives.  In these he talked about the institutional and practical limits of presidential power, and the challenges ahead—seminars in themselves.

 I absorbed every scrap and pixel of information I could about the Kennedy administration when I was in high school in the early 60s, and almost felt I was part of it. (I can still recite the members of the JFK cabinet, but not of any administration since.)  I had a world affairs column in the high school paper and maintained a world news bulletin board in a classroom. It soon became impossible to ignore that world anyway.

  Thanks to an official of the local political arm of the AFL-CIO who my friend Clayton’s father knew, we got to attend President Kennedy’s only speech in Pittsburgh in October 1962, officially as ushers.  Part of our responsibility was to alert Secret Service agents of anyone acting suspiciously. 

A few days later, President Kennedy saw surveillance photos of Soviet offensive missiles in Cuba, and I was soon watching the Cuban Missile Crisis unfold on television, along with the rest of the country.  In school one day I was reprimanded for being late to class, because I had stayed beside a radio to ascertain whether Russian ships were going to fire on American ships quarantining Cuba, giving us perhaps hours or even minutes before we would be engulfed in nuclear war.

 Months later in June 1963 I proudly watched coverage of JFK giving his American University speech, which proposed the first break in the escalation of nuclear weapons, the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, with an eloquent case for the necessity of pursuing peace. Then the very next night I watched his powerful nationally televised  address from the Oval Office on racial justice (carried by all three networks), introducing the legislative ideas that would eventually become the law of the land in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts.

 And then one November Friday afternoon in 1963 we heard principal Father Sheridan’s voice announce over the public address that President Kennedy had been shot. After the next school period I was walking up the steps from gym class held outdoors, having almost forgotten about it, or convinced myself I would learn that he would be all right, when a student going down to the locker room told me that the President was dead.  That day I knew my life and the world around me would not be the same as it might have been, and I wasn’t wrong. 

To an extent it would be nearly unimaginable now, the entire nation was in shock.  There was nothing on television that weekend except coverage of the assassination, the capture of the suspect Lee Harvey Oswald, the preparations and then the funeral, with retrospective footage of JFK.  I watched it all, almost every waking moment.  I couldn’t even be pulled away on Sunday to go to church with my family, and so it happened that I was watching a live picture as Oswald was being transferred.  I jumped when I saw what I thought was a gun, but I saw then it was a microphone (you can see it in this screenshot.)  A moment later, a man rushed into the badly lit black and white picture, the crackling sound of gunshots, a glimpse perhaps of Oswald grimacing and crumpling, then rushed away, before I could be sure of what I saw.  What I’d seen, however obscurely, was a man murdered on live television.

 Until then I’d accepted television as a given part of my ordinary living.   But that weekend in November 1963 solidified it as a participant, wanted or not, in major moments of what turned out to be my life.

 By this time, I had served my short and tempestuous turn as the freshman editor of the monthly high school newspaper (at least Edward R. Murrow might have approved of me) and had joined speech club. After a couple of years doing my best JFK style ex temp speeches on various topics (lugging file folders of clippings and index cards down hallways of schools where we competed), I went on to debate, partnering with my friend Mike Krempasky. We won two district championships in our senior year.

  Because of all this, I was subscribing to and reading a lot of news and political issues magazines, and haunting the periodical room at the Greensburg library, with occasional forays to the college libraries at Seton Hill and St. Vincent.  As well as keeping up with TV news, commentaries and documentaries.

 I was reading in other areas, following my nose in areas of classic and contemporary literature. But these concerns with current events were regular activities. These interests and passions regarding the issues that TV news programs discussed to some degree, influenced some of the non-news television shows I watched in the early to mid 1960s.

 Once I started high school my viewing was more sporadic and limited—I had more homework, debate research and preparation and other extracurricular activities, and the semblance of a so-called social life (mostly related to school—football and basketball games, school dances, band concerts.) The speculative and melancholy mooning over girls took up their own infinities of time. So there were shows I watched when I found myself with the time and inclination, but there were others that I made sure to watch. 

There were two courtroom shows that featured characters that would become all but unknown in television thereafter: idealistic defense lawyers, fighting for justice. The Defenders is the better known, starring E.G. Marshall and Robert Reed, and written by Reginald Rose, a veteran of live drama anthologies.  It ran from 1961 to 1965.

 The other is more forgotten now as it was obscure even then: The Law and Mr. Jones managed just two seasons (1960-62) starring James Whitmore as a modest fighter for the rights of the little guy, espousing principles he quoted from Lincoln, Olivier Wendell Holmes and other greats.  I didn’t know anyone else who watched this series, and so it was my personal nurturance.

 For a year or so, The Defenders and The Law and Mr. Jones were both on, along with an early evening commentary show by Howard K. Smith, one of Edward R. Murrow’s protégés at CBS who was fired for expressing outrage at the conspiracy he’d uncovered between Birmingham, Alabama police chief Bull Connors and the KKK to beat up Black civil rights protestors. He moved over to ABC, where this commentary program was broadcast.  I made sure to see it, and its tenor seemed to fit into the same context as those two courtroom shows.

 

Beyond the courtroom, the struggle for social justice was waged by social worker Neil Brock, played by George C. Scott in East Side /West Side.  It ran for only one season, beginning in the fall of 1963, but I saw every episode every Monday night.   I was not only inspired and excited by the passion that Brock/Scott brought to injustices and inequities behind the tragic consequences he had to deal with as a social worker, but I learned a lot as well. His partners in these efforts were played by Elizabeth Wilson and the very young Cicely Tyson (the first Black woman in a featured TV role, a few years before Nichelle Nichols.) James Earl Jones was among the guest stars.

 Late in the series, Brock caught the eye of an ambitious liberal Member of Congress in the JFK mold (played by Linden Chiles), and Brock is persuaded he could do more good if he worked in his legislative office.  But the process is full of compromise and too slow.

Cicely Tyson, Scott, Elizabeth Wilson

  As far as I can recall, things were unresolved until CBS cancelled the show, sending the real life Scott on an epic drunk (according to someone who had worked on the show I met years later.)  I met Elizabeth Wilson in the 1980s and told her of my admiration for the show.  Also in the 80s, I saw George C. Scott in a production he also directed of a Noel Coward play, Design for Living at the Circle on the Square theatre in New York.  I was seated on the aisle in the top row of the steeply raked auditorium, and Scott made his entrance from just behind me—before I saw him, he shouted his first line directly in my ear. I was so stunned I missed most of the first act.

 The coincidence of these three shows in particular (The Defenders, East Side/West Side and The Law and Mr. Jones) during my junior and senior years of high school, when I was engaged daily with some of the same issues in interscholastic debate, were important to who I was becoming.  Shows like those, that explore real issues and model responses to them, are always rare.  The later years of Boston Legal came the closest to the approach of those lawyer shows, and to my knowledge there’s never again been anything like East Side/West Side.  One series much later that dealt with social issues but from the perspective of reporters was Lou Grant, which also renewed that Monday at 10 p.m. appointment.

 Viewing this combination of news, documentary and these shows concerning the law and social justice, together with whatever impressions I’d absorbed from those topical dramas from the Golden Age 50s, all informed the scripts I wrote that won National Scholastic Magazine awards, the ones that got me my college scholarship.  One of those scripts may have been a courtroom drama but the one I more specifically recall involved Senate hearings.  (Of course, of all the nonsense I saved from those years, these scripts are absent.)   

Nancy Ames

A somewhat related show came soon after. I had already assembled some friends to enact my own audio scripts of topical satire into a tape recorder when suddenly (in January 1964, when I was still in high school) there was a television show that did it all in a big way: That Was the Week That Was, a weekly satire on the news and culture, introduced by a song about that week’s events to the theme tune, sung by Nancy Ames, on occasion her blond hair swinging as she gently propelled her rotating office chair. 

 David Frost was the host, bringing a British edge to the satire by a group of regulars, which included Buck Henry and Phyllis Newman.  Burr Tillstrom (Kukla, Fran and Ollie) provided Emmy-winning puppetry, guest comedians included Nichols and May, Woody Allen and Mort Sahl; Comden and Green provided their music, and Tom Lehrer sang his subversive songs—so wildly popular later on campuses and record albums—such as “The Dance of the Liberal Republicans” and of course my favorite, “The Vatican Rag:” Genuflect, genuflect, genuflect.  Other guests included Roscoe Lee Brown, Steve Allen, Elliot Gould, Ann Bancroft, Alan Alda and Kim Hunter.   

Mostly my viewing was catch as catch can: watching Perry Mason and The Fugitive with the family, or a western (my favorites were Have Gun, Will Travel and Maverick, but only when James Garner was appearing.)  The family watched the Dick Van Dyke Show sitcom, which I liked when I saw it occasionally, and even more in syndicated reruns every afternoon in the summer.  Though I appreciated some of its formal deadpan humor, I never took to The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. Bob Denver's Maynard G. Krebs was funny, but I didn't dig him as a representative beatnik. I liked Tuesday Weld and Zelda.  I just really didn't like the character of Dobie.

  

 The one sitcom I made sure to see was Hennesey, staring Jackie Cooper as a peacetime Navy doctor at a San Diego base (1959-1962.)  It was gentle, human and humane humor, with a sweetly jaunty opening theme (which I can still reproduce.)  My old Dumont favorite Roscoe Karns was Hennesey’s irascible superior officer, and I had a crush on Abby Dalton, who played his nurse and love interest, and in the last season, his wife.

 These were my teenage years, so in addition to everything else I was listening to the latest music on the radio, following the top ten and the “Wax to Watch” on KQV.  I watched American Bandstand after school, and Dick Clark’s Saturday night show, as well as a local Pittsburgh version, “Dance Party” on Saturday afternoons hosted by disc jockey Clark Race. I once saw him so apparently enthused by the Marvellettes dancing and lip-synching to their new record, “Please Mr. Postman,” that he had them repeat it twice more. (These scenes take on a question mark with the revelations a few years later of payola.) 

By now - after 1957-- television had videotape, and programs were often, as they said, “pre-recorded.”  In addition to live interviews with kids and guests, and live dancing, the music shows of Dick Clark and imitators featured singers and bands miming to their records, before and after which teenagers danced to other records, and some of them were selected to rate a new record.  Their responses were almost always so much the same—“It has a good beat.  You can dance to it.  I give it an A”—that they might as well have been separately pre-recorded and inserted.  TV was moving farther and farther from live performance.   

 In the later 50s I had watched Your Hit Parade with my family, in which a half dozen regularly appearing singers did versions of that week’s hits.  It had been an important radio show, at one time featuring Frank Sinatra.  But after 1956 or so, half the fascination was noting the struggles that regulars like Dorothy Collins, Snooky Lanson and Giselle Mackenzie were having with rock and roll tunes, until the program, like an old soldier, finally faded away.

  The early 60s made a few attempts at live pop music programs but I wasn’t grabbed by any of them.  For a year or so there was Hootenanny to feature the folk music boom, but it never had very prominent acts.  Years later I learned the reason: the show was incredibly still obeying the Blacklist fears of folk performers like Pete Seeger, and because of that, the stars of the day like the Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul and Mary refused to appear. 

There were a few shows that everyone I knew at school watched and would talk about.  One was The Twilight Zone, especially its first few years. I can recall several of those shows even now, as probably others who saw them can.  Nuclear apocalypse was a frequent theme.

  Later there was 77 Sunset Strip, with its finger-snapping theme song, Kookie the hip parking lot attendant, and some decent detective stories with stars Efrem Zimbalist, Jr and Roger Smith.

 But in my high school there was one show that was wildly popular, at least among the students I knew, even though watching it would seem imprudent if not impossible, because it didn’t end until one in the morning.  

 It was the latest iteration of the Steve Allen late night show. No one disputes any longer that Steve Allen created the template for late night shows with the program he refined for local New York City audiences that NBC broadcast nationally as The Tonight Show in 1954.  At the same time he hosted a Sunday prime time variety show, which by the early 60s had moved to Monday and then Wednesday nights.  When that show ended, he immediately returned to late night. 

This show was produced through Westinghouse Broadcasting, and it so happened that its flagship station was KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh (the former Dumont affiliate as WDTV), so we had the opportunity to see it.  It was broadcast from an old vaudeville theatre in Los Angeles, rededicated as the Steve Allen Playhouse.

 I was too young for the Steve Allen Tonight Show (or for his successor Jack Paar), but I was a big fan of his Sunday show.  The Westinghouse late night show was even wilder.  Allen was a bundle of intellectual energy with a surrealistic edge. Sitting at his desk sipping orange juice, he theorized that some words were innately funny, because of their sound.  Three of his candidates were “smock,” “fern” and “creel.” Thereafter he might punctuate whatever he was doing by suddenly shouting “Schmock! Schmock” like wild bird cries, or seriously ask a guest, “How’s your fern?”  His fascination with words led him to play Mad Libs (filling in the blanks of a narrative with random words, and then reading the result) with his audience.

  Jay Leno later called Steve Allen the first modern comedian without vaudeville ties and schtick, but as this show proved he was also adept at creative and outrageous physical comedy as well as satirical skits and wisecracking commentary befitting the best vaudevillians.  One of his regular offbeat guests was the health food advocate Gypsy Boots, who entered by swinging across the stage on a vine.  

What Steve Allen could do that no other late night host did was play piano with his band and musical guests (mostly jazz)--and he did this frequently.  He was also a composer, and would challenge audience members to give him three or four numbers corresponding to notes on the keyboard, and he would use them to compose a song on the spot.

 When I interviewed him in the early 1990s in Los Angeles I referred to this game, though I suggested he used letters.  He corrected me, saying he used numbers. Until we were backstage at the 40^th anniversary Tonight Show (his last appearance, as it turned out) when he was chatting with comedian Phil Hartman who referred to the same bit, and also thought it was letters—so a thoroughly confused Allen mumbled, sometimes numbers, sometimes letters.  But much later I realized the source of my mistake—I had borrowed the bit in high school to dazzle female classmates, substituting letters in their names that matched keys for numbers to compose a rudimentary tune on the piano. 

The show was so popular with my contemporaries who really shouldn’t have been up that late that the class ahead of mine selected the Steve Allen Show as the theme of their class variety show, with Jerry Celia at a desk wearing his Steve Allen glasses, orchestrating the music and mayhem, including the patented Gypsy Boots entrance. 

This iteration of Steve Allen’s show—and a late 60s revival—were often cited as inspirations for the next generation of late night comics, including David Letterman, who shamelessly stole many of Steve Allen’s bits—that is, the ones Johnny Carson wasn’t already doing on the Tonight Show. I  remember as well that late 60s revival, being home from college in the summers and waiting all day to watch it in the silence of late night. 

 In the fall of 1964 I went off to Knox College in Illinois (carrying with me the Kenyon Hopkins album of his jazz compositions for East Side/West Side, and an LP of Steve Allen leading a jazz band, Steve Allen at the Roundtable.)  

While there I won a national college writing prize, again with a television script, but I never had a TV set.  I occasionally watched something on the big console in the student union (Star Trek, the Monkees) and caught some reruns in the summers (those same shows plus Get Smart, The Man From U.N.C.L.E), but during the school year there was far too much else to do, and other claims on my attention.

 Ironically perhaps, this was also when I became besotted with the writing of Marshall McLuhan, who proclaimed that television heralded an entirely different view of reality.  His insistence that the importance was not in the programs but in the medium itself was new to me, and pretty much everyone else.

 The only television show I associate with college was a few months of gatherings at a student apartment (either James Campbell’s or Bob Mizerowski’s) to watch the campy Adam West Batman series, after which we went out on the lawn to toss around a Frisbie (then also new and hip.)  Most of network television seemed dismal: the vast wasteland.

 Television’s potential power began to be felt immediately in the 1950s, but as television grew, it was the decade of the 1960s that opened more eyes to its still unfathomed cultural, societal and political influences and impacts.  John F. Kennedy was said even at the time to be the first television President, and Vietnam was the first television war (or “living room war” as it came to be called.) 

 But the profound and even shocking effects on political life and power became more striking and more ominous in 1980 when Ronald Reagan, known nationally as the genial host of television’s General Electric Theatre and Death Valley Days (brought to you by Twenty Mule Team Boraxo) was elected President.  Before that, Reagan at least had two terms of government experience as governor of California. But in 2016, a man with no governing experience on any level was elected President, his self-created caricature of an image having been burnished and elaborated on a nationally popular television reality show.  There’s a detailed study to be made comparing his campaign and presidency played on television, with the radio rise and reign of Adolf Hitler.

 Before the decade was out, television would make me witness to Vietnam and the antiwar demonstrations I didn’t attend personally, student uprisings on other campuses, and the out-of-body moment when we heard LBJ announce he would not run for President again (which at the time seemed to promise an antiwar candidate.)  

And more than a witness to horrors of Martin Luther King’s assassination aftermath, and especially Robert Kennedy—the speech in Los Angeles after he won the last and biggest primary of all, and hours later the news of his being shot, then many hours, days and nights, of the deathwatch, then the funeral and the funeral train. The coverage became surreal as reporters tried to find interviewees and so on to fill the time while Robert Kennedy's life was still in question, and one of the remaining unknowns was the alleged assassin Sirhan's first name.  I watched NBC's Sander Vanocur, on the brink of physical and emotional exhaustion, try to report the breaking news answer with objective gravity: his first name was Sirhan.  He was Sirhan Sirhan.

Then that summer the Democratic Convention and televised police riot in Chicago, cops smashing clubs on protesters, with witnessing crowds then chanting (for the first time): The whole world is watching!

 Even without these associations, I was more repelled than attracted by television in those years.  In the later 60s, as countercultural pursuits emerged to absorb my attention and alter my focus, television programs seemed even more out of it.  Laugh-In and The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour were of some interest, but at least for a time, it seemed that while I’d grown up with television, I’d now outgrown it.  But there would be more to it than that. 

Dreaming Up Daily Quote: Nov. 22, 2020

 

"As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words but to live by them."

President John F. Kennedy

His November 1963 Thanksgiving Message.  He did not live to see that Thanksgiving.  He was shot and killed on November 22, 1963.

JFK Books

Before I pack many of these JFK books back in their box (for there is no room on the overflowing shelves) I thought I'd give them their close-ups.

These books remind me that at least in my lifetime there has never been as broad and extensive interest in a presidency as there was of JFK in the early 1960s.

Consider this as well as an appendix to previous History of My Reading posts, such as this one and this one.

These are books that JFK authored.  Why England Slept was based on his Harvard undergrad dissertation, originally published in 1940, about how and why England failed to prepare for World War II.  He authored Profiles in Courage while a US Senator while recovering from a recurrent back problem.  It profiles 8 Senators in history and their acts of political courage  It was a best-seller and won the 1957 Pulitzer for biography.  JFK acknowledged the role of special assistant and speechwriter Ted Sorensen, though perhaps not the extent of his contribution.  The role of writers such as Sorensen in books by public figures is now assumed.

A Nation of Immigrants was JFK's statement on immigration policy published in 1958 when he was in the Senate.  The other books are principally collections of speeches: To Turn the Tide covers roughly the first year of the presidency, The Burden and the Glory covers the remainder.  The Strategy of Peace selected Senator Kennedy's statements on foreign policy issues, plus an interview with him.  Published in 1960, it was meant to articulate positions he would advocate in his presidential campaign.  I got my first copy from the Citizens for Kennedy office on Main St. in Greensburg, PA, where I did some campaign work.

Three editions of Profiles in Courage still in my possession.  My first was a paperback written by "Senator John F. Kennedy." It was reissued when he was President, without changing the photo or the cover.  That's the bottom one.

 I'm not sure when I got the Inaugural Edition but I got the Memorial Edition as a gift in 1964.  It's physically a little bigger than the Inaugural Edition with a different back cover photo.  The foreword by Robert Kennedy is notable for the sentences: "President Kennedy would have been forty-seven in May of 1964.  At least one half of the days that he spent on this earth were days of intense physical pain."

Theodore White's account of the 1960 presidential campaign, from the primaries through the general election contest between JFK and Richard Nixon, was the first of a now-familiar genre.  It just hadn't been done before.

 Published in 1961, The Making of the President 1960 was a sensation, at the top of the best-seller list for months.  Teddy White wrote three more in his series, and using the Making of.. title or not, taking an inside view of presidential campaigns has become a publishing tradition ever since.

John Kennedy: A Political Profile was the first JFK biography and for awhile the only one.  Researched by historian and political science professor James MacGregor Burns in 1959 and 1960, it was published in paperback in 1961.

   P.T. 109 was the best-selling account of JFK's WWII exploits in the Pacific, leading 11 survivors away from their severed P.T. boat to swim for 4 hours to the nearest small island, JFK towing one injured man by a rope held in his teeth.  There were a number of articles about this incident (notably John Hershey's in Reader's Digest) but this book by a New York Herald reporter published in 1961 became the standard.  The 1963 feature film starring Cliff Robertson as JFK was based on it.

You can gauge the early 60s voracious interest in JFK--generally as well as mine--by the fact that The Kennedy Government, nothing more than bios of JFK's cabinet and White House advisers, was published in mass market paperback in 1961.

America's first man in space (Alan Shepard) and first to orbit the earth (John Glenn) were major events of the JFK years, leading to his commitment to land on the moon by the end of the 1960s.  This paperback (First American Into Space) is notable for its author, prominent science fiction writer and anthologist Robert Silverberg.  It was a time for s/f authors to claim some respectability, as the future they'd written about in their fantasies was becoming reality.

In the Kennedy government were authors of books already published, such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., J.K. Galbraith and Robert Kennedy.  Others published during the JFK administration, notably these two.  Point of the Lance was a selection of Sargent Shriver's speeches plus some additions relating directly to the Peace Corps, of which he was the first director.  Many years later I had dinner with Harris Wofford, an associate of Shriver's as well as White House operative in the JFK years, and later Senator from PA.  This book came up in the conversation, and Wofford said that he'd written most of it, completely uncredited. Under his own name he authored Of Kennedys and Kings, an account of the 60s.

The Quiet Crisis by JFK's Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall is a different matter.  It's first of all a real book, not a collection of speeches.  Published in 1963, it is an early argument for government action to save the environment, as well as a historical look at attitudes towards the natural environment in the US, beginning with "The Land Wisdom of the Indians."  Popularizing the great Aldo Leopold's concept of "the land ethic," Udall's book is a conceptual and policy breakthrough for the US and the US government.  President Kennedy wrote the introduction.

The early 1960s were rife with satire and political humor.  The Kennedys were gently spoofed in enormously popular recordings, beginning with The First Family in which comedian Vaughn Meader imitated the unique characteristics of JFK's speech and voice.  There were books of political humor as well, such as the Gerald Gardner series of photos with cartoon dialogue balloons, beginning with Who's in charge here?

Meader and Gardner were witty about JFK, but JFK surprised the country with his dry sense of humor and deadpan delivery.  He was particularly adept at demonstrating it in his press conferences, which were carried live on national television.  Bill Adler selected zingers for his very popular paperbacks such as these two, The Kennedy Wit and More Kennedy Wit.  For example, from a press conference:
QUESTION: The Republican National Committee recently adopted a resolution saying you were pretty much of a failure.  How do you feel about that?
PRESIDENT KENNEDY: I assume it passed unanimously.

Before digital, there was usually about a year between an author finishing a book and its publication.  So many books that were prepared during the JFK administration only came out when it was abruptly and unexpectedly over.

Jim Bishop had done a series of "A Day in the Life" books.  He followed the Kennedys for four days in what turned out to be during the final weeks of JFK's life.  It is written in October and November 1963, and JFK press secretary Pierre Salinger was reading it in typescript when he learn of the murder in Dallas.
Written in the present tense, and published in 1964 exactly as written (according to Bishop),  there are the inevitable eerie presentiments, especially as JFK spoke fairly often about the possibility of assassination.

 Hugh Sidey was the White House correspondent for TIME Magazine, and was granted a lot of access and time with JFK.  His book, he says in the preface, was supposed to be "the beginning of the story."  Instead when it was published, also in 1964, it became the first book about the entire Kennedy presidency.

President Kennedy was killed by an assassin's bullet on November 22, 1963.  There were many memorial issues of newspapers and magazines (I still have several) and there were books that were quickly published like this one, compiled by UPI and American Heritage Magazine.  It is mostly photographs covering that indelible weekend from the murder in Dallas on Friday to the funeral and burial at Arlington on Monday.

The official investigation into the Kennedy assassination was headed by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Earl Warren.  The Warren Report, widely criticized over the years, was published in 1964.  My copy was a Christmas gift from my mother, which seems weirder now than it was then.

Death of a President is a long and thorough historical account--more than 700 pages--published in 1967.  It is by historian William Manchester (his two volume set, The Glory and the Dream, has been my Bible on the Roosevelt 30s to 1972.)   Manchester had the cooperation of the Kennedys but Jacqueline Kennedy had strong second thoughts and tried to stop publication.  Deletion of a few paragraphs concerning the assassination was negotiated.  The book was an immediate best-seller but went out of print until 2013, which perhaps makes my crumpled second-hand paperback a rare book.  

These are the first definitive accounts of the Kennedy presidency by insiders who also were adept at objective research and were exceptional writers.   Kennedy by Ted Sorensen was published in 1965.  I wrote a long review of it published in the April 1966 issue of Dialogue, the Knox College magazine.  Arthur Schlesinger's A Thousand Days was published later in 1965, which won both a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize.  These are my well-worn, much-used paperbacks.

Then there were the personal memoirs, such as these two, written by Kennedy's secretary Evelyn Lincoln (published in 1965; paperback a year later) and another by Kenneth O'Donnell and Dave Powers, who had known and worked for JFK since he first ran for Congress.  To suggest the continuing fascination with JFK, this one wasn't published until 1972.

The 50th anniversary of the Kennedy administration was the occasion of another flood of books, including two unique volumes, both essentially transcripts of enclosed audio recordings.  Listening In: The Secret White House Recordings of John F. Kennedy (Hyperion 2012) presents mostly recordings from 1962 and 1963, after JFK installed a hidden taping system in the Oval Office, and took to recording phone conversations.  The technology was comparatively primitive, so transcripts are essential.  (The recordings themselves can also be heard over the Internet from the JFK Library.)

There are also JFK's private dictations, all meant to create an historical record and probably to aid him in writing his memoirs.  Some of the recordings are stunning--as we hear General Curtis LeMay sounding like Gen. Buck Turgenson in Dr. Strangelove--as well as mundane and vaguely interesting, as in a brief presidential conversation with the teenage Jerry Brown at the end of a call with his father, California Governor Pat Brown.

More impressive is the 2011 Hyperion volume of Jacqueline Kennedy's reminiscences with Arthur Schlesinger in 1964.  She speaks with clarity and insight about specific events and policies in their historical contexts as well as observations on family, personalities and her own role in the White House.  Because she never spoke on the record about the White House years, which (her daughter Caroline recalls) she later called the happiest years of her life, her voice and to a great extent her role in that history has been overlooked.  Now it can be heard, in 7 CDs. Again, the recordings are online, as are many others in the Kennedy Library oral history project.

Both volumes include forewords by Caroline Kennedy, who was instrumental in releasing these sound recordings and creating these volumes.

These are two of the many new histories published during the 50th anniversary. (I wrote about them in more detail here.)  Though Clarke's book is a straightforward history (making much use of information that has come to light in the past 50 years) and Jeff Greenfield's speculates on what JFK's second term might have been like, based on the same sort of information, they come to remarkably similar conclusions, especially about American participation in the Vietnam War, which both agree JFK would have ended by 1965.

Let Us Begin

I was not yet 15 when I stood in the Washington cold to watch the Inaugural Parade for President John F. Kennedy.  Lou and Mary--a family relation (through the Severinis I believe) and his wife-- who were my hosts had brought along a friend of theirs, an affable, lanky man they'd described as a funny guy.  He was.  He had with him a pair of binoculars, but they helped us see only in a general way.  They were actually a flask, filled with tea laced with whiskey to keep us warm.

Somewhere nearby President Kennedy was also watching the parade.  He'd just been sworn in as President, and was about 44 hours away from another milestone (which was shaking my hand.)  But President Kennedy saw something in that parade that I didn't.  Moreover, he did something about it, and it changed history.

Robert Kennedy is in one of those cars. My photo
mostly shows the job done clearing Constitution Av.
of snow that had piled up from a storm the days before.

The parade consisted of cars carrying various officials and politicians (I snapped a photo of Robert Kennedy, though at quite a distance), floats from the various states, military vehicles (including--as history has seemed to forgotten--tanks) and marching contingents from the various armed services (I snapped the marching Midshipmen from Annapolis.)  But when the Coast Guard Academy contingent passed the presidential viewing stand, Kennedy noticed that there were no black cadets among them.

Back at the White House, he asked why.  Eventually he was told that there was only one black officer in the entire Coast Guard.  Again, he asked why.  It turned out to have something to do with Academy requirements.  Eventually he got those requirements changed. From today's perspective, we can see that it was in a real way a seed of Affirmative Action.

Washington Post front page 1/21/1961

I'm taking this story from the Sidney Hyman and Martin Agronsky chapter ("But Let Us Begin") from the book Let Us Begin: The First 100 Days of the Kennedy Administration.  The title is from one of the many celebrated quotes embedded in JFK's Inaugural Address, which the Washington Post in its first report (which I brought back with me)  recognized as "surely one of the most eloquent in history,"
a reputation it maintains to this day.

 Towards the end of his address, after speaking about the major goals and policies of his upcoming administration, Kennedy cautioned: "All this will not be finished in the first 100 days.  Nor will it be finished in the first 1,000 days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor perhaps even in our lifetime on this planet.  But let us begin."  

The "let us begin"--three short words, four syllables--he separately emphasized, pounding out the rhythm on the lectern.  References to the future now are prophetic and tragic.  But the words of action--that emphatic burst of intent--remain inspiring.

And they were true.  For reading this chapter now, I see how many beginnings there were: how many seeds were planted that did not fully bear fruit for years or even decades, but eventually changed things.  JFK and RFK often talked about "the unfinished business of this country," and of course that business remains unfinished.  But there was progress, and it was seeded, or began or was accelerated in the Kennedy administration.which began that day, January 20,1961 and ended on November 22, 1963.

Kennedy fought a tough primary in West Virginia and spent a lot of time in the state.  It was perhaps his first close-up view of poverty--including white poverty-- particularly in rural areas of Appalachia that rivaled anything seen in the Great Depression.  Perhaps this was behind his first executive order as President: to increase the quantity and quality of surplus food available to low income Americans.

The federal government distributing "surplus food" had been its main way of addressing hunger since the Great Depression.  Being on welfare was not required--families below a certain income could go to distribution centers and get everything from powdered milk and eggs to cheese and canned meats (including Spam.)  At a particularly lean time for my family in the 1950s, big blocks of surplus cheese and tins of roast beef (which tasted more of the tin than the beef) began showing up in our household.

Also in those first 100 days, Kennedy ordered a pilot food stamp program, so that eligible citizens could get the same food as everyone else at the supermarket, including fresh produce.  That became a full-fledged program in the Johnson administration, and food stamps replaced surplus food in the 1970s except as a supplementary program for targeted populations, such as Indian reservations.

Much of what Kennedy set in motion immediately was designed to take up the slack in the economy and "get America moving again," as he'd promised in the campaign.  But he made crucial changes within the government that seeded more changes to come.  His appointees made entire departments--from Defense to the Post Office--more professional and accountable.  He changed the composition of the Business Advisory Council within the Commerce Department from a self-appointment gang of cronies who used it to enrich themselves to a group selected by the Secretary of Commerce, with their meetings open to the press.  Greater transparency was coming to government.  At the same time, a more active Labor Department was looking out for workers but also entering labor disputes as arbiter.

Some of the most eye-opening changes concern the US military.  The defense budget had become a disorganized grab-bag decided on by the various services in conjunction with big arms contractors.  Kennedy ordered a complete review of US defense capabilities and needs, and after hearing from the military services and congressional leaders, created a defense budget that aligned with the findings of this review, and choices to upgrade and make defense more flexible.

This was a specific result of a more general policy of great importance.  Kennedy, this chapter asserts, "inherited a government in which high-ranking military officers had grown used to issuing pronouncements on diplomatic and security policies, however embarrassing to their civilian superiors.  President Kennedy lost no time in reasserting the Constitutional principle of civic supremacy."

This was a battle that would extend throughout his presidency.  Deferring to the military caused the Bay of Pigs debacle, while defying top military leaders essentially saved the world from thermonuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis.  But when the novel Seven Days in May, which depicted an attempted military coup in contemporary America was published in 1962, Kennedy told friends it was a plausible scenario.  Today civilian control of a more professional military is established.

Kennedy sent a stream of legislation to Congress, on everything from housing to national parks and scientific research.  Some of it notably was to continue or finish projects begun in the Eisenhower administration, including the federal highway program.  But much of it was innovative, and among these bills were several seeds for the future, notably the legislation on the issue then called "medical care for the aged," to be administered through Social Security.  Republicans opposed it as "socialized medicine" (much as they opposed Kennedy's call for a raise in the minimum wage to a grand $1.25 an hour, which they said would ruin the economy.)  Eventually "medical care for the aged" would result in what we know as Medicare.

In 1961 ecology was a future word and the environment was not yet a thing, but thanks mostly to his pioneering Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, Kennedy sent a special message to Congress about coordinated federal responses and policies to control air and water pollution, conservation of forests and water, and preservation of public lands.  These were the seeds of environmental action.

Early class of Peace Corps volunteers

The instant success of those first months was the Peace Corps, which he proposed in the 1960 campaign and was embraced in particular by the young.  Kennedy created the Peace Corps by executive order in March, 1961, and the first volunteers were in the field even before Congress formally authorized it in September.  The program got fully underway in 1962, and has been sending volunteers around the world ever since.

In Civil Rights, Kennedy instituted reforms that would ultimately result in the federal government leading the country towards equal opportunity and diversity in the workplace.

After the specific efforts to encourage racial diversity in the Coast Guard, the Kennedy administration took a number of meaningful steps in the civil rights area, including the Kennedy Justice Department entering several desegregation cases on the side of African American litigants.  But in terms of the future, Kennedy's major step in the first 100 days was to ban discrimination in federal government employment, as well as the contractors it hired. This covered nearly a quarter of the national workforce.

 But he did more to make the order effective.  He ordered a report "which would provide for the first time a statistical breakdown by color by all those whose work entailed the use of federal funds," as well as recommendations on how to remove inequities.  He created an executive structure to receive this report and to use it to end those inequities.

But even planting the seeds was not over in the first 100 days in the brief life of this Administration.  Some of the better known seeds were planted very close to the end.  The Limited Test Ban Treaty not only seeded the many arms reduction and anti-proliferation treaties entered into by the US, Russia and many other countries, it changed the dynamic of the Cold War.  Lines of communication and trust based on common interests and respect were, for one thing, suddenly crucial when the Soviet Union fell apart and nightmares of scattering bombs, or a collection of small and barely formed nations all with nuclear weapons, were avoided.

Kennedy breathed new life into the treaty negotiations with his historic address in June 1963, often considered his best speech after his Inaugural. (The basic themes were sounded in fact in that Inaugural.) The treaty proved unexpectedly popular, and Kennedy milked public support and also called in some crucial favors to see it ratified in the US Senate, which was in some ways more difficult than getting the USSR to sign it.

Then the evening after that landmark speech, he made another one--a television address, scheduled at the last minute, in which he announced his Civil Rights bill, the most sweeping in history.  He would not live to see it passed, but eventually two bills including the Voting Rights Act would become law.

The seeds continued to be sown until the end. Thurston Clarke's 2013 counterpart book, JFK's Last Hundred Days, uses facts gathered during decades of historical research and reportage to flesh out and at times reveal some of the dramatic accomplishments of Kennedy's last months, which included securing the Test Ban Treaty ratification.

Clarke makes a convincing case that JFK's horror of war and suspicion of military brass that began with his experiences in World War II, were paramount.  Some of the most prominent military leaders were pressuring him to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union in late 1963, when US missile superiority was at its height.  The Test Ban Treaty was even more crucial because of this pressure.

Still, the forces within the government opposing him, particular on military matters and policy regarding the Soviets, were known to simply not carry out his orders.  This included the failure to send the response that Kennedy wrote to the Soviet premier's friendly letter, and disregarding his order to close obsolete missile bases in Turkey that later became a point of conflict during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

March on Washington leaders with JFK immediately afterwards

In an important nuance often overlooked, the timing of the August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was to support JFK's Civil Rights bill, and President Kennedy supported the march.  He considered going, decided against it and immediately regretted not participating (Clarke writes.)  But he happily hosted the March's leaders in the White House immediately afterwards, greeting Martin Luther King, Jr. with the words "I have a dream."

There were smaller seeds sown as well in these last months.  He had ordered a report on how equality in hiring for women in the federal government and the private sector could be encouraged, and he spoke at the presentation of the report, despite being (in Clarke's terms) a male chauvinist through and through.

He also took affirmative action of another sort by appointing the first Italian American and the first Polish American to the cabinet.  He was criticized for doing so as base politics, not taking into account "Kennedy's determination to make it easier for other ethnic groups to walk through the door that his election had kicked open," as Clarke writes.  For Kennedy was the first Catholic to be President, and the first Irish American.

Clarke noted that these appointments of individuals from immigrant groups of a few generations past came at the same time as Kennedy (who'd authored a short book called A Nation of Immigrants and had sponsored bills expanding immigration as a Senator) had submitted to Congress an immigration bill that summer that promised "the most radical transformation of U.S. immigration laws in almost half a century."

Kennedy had argued for the end of discriminatory national quotas.  An immigration bill passed in 1965 (with the support of Senator Ted Kennedy),  that came significantly close to this goal, and effectively dumped the discrimination in favor of northern European immigrants that had been US policy since 1920.  Apart from issues of illegal immigration, this provision alone added to the diversity of immigrants and the country ever since.