The Best of America: 1963 in 2023

Monday is the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963.  It was commemorated Saturday with another march and speeches in front of the reflecting pool.  It's been duly noted in some of the media. 

On Friday, the Hill website had a story related to the 1963 march, with a photo that showed demonstrators near the reflecting pool, but it was not of that march.  The signs were different--those in 1963 had a uniform style, having been printed in union shops.  Unions were big backers of that march.  And as an indication of how long ago that march was, the attire of the demonstrators was different in this photo--the casual clothes we're used to now.  In 1963 the women wore dresses and the men wore suits and ties, though jackets did come off in that hot sun.  I know these things not just from period photos, but because I was there.

The Guardian story was interesting in adding big picture information I didn't fully know--particularly the active participation of the President John F. Kennedy Administration in making the march a success, and partly through union leadership, encouraging white participation.  Attorney General Robert Kennedy worked closely with march organizers, and even brought black police officers down from New York because at the time there were no Black police in Washington.  The Kennedys also helped with the sound system, calling on their campaign expert. (Even so, it wasn't great.)

The story also quoted some participants' recollections today, and I was pleased to see they remembered how extraordinary the day felt, as I did.  It's my strongest lasting impression.  As one put it, "I felt like I witnessed the best of America." This is worth remembering now, when we too often see the worst, like the deliberate slaughter of defenseless Black people this weekend by a coward with the Nazi insignia etched on his semi-automatic.

So I'm repeating my post from the 50th anniversary. slightly expanded.  I remember a few more details, but this gets to the essence of it.  Here it is: 

 

I was 17 when I participated in what was officially called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. I was a student at a Catholic high school, and heard my own beliefs expressed by President Kennedy in his television address that June: “We are confronted primarily by a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.”

In the weekly newspaper for the Greensburg, Pennsylvania diocese, the Catholic Accent, I read about an organization called the Catholic Interracial Council that was inviting people to go to the March. I contacted the priest who was named and he talked to my parents. He must have been convincing because I got permission to go.

But I got my first indication of just how small this group was going to be when I attended a meeting, and it was two priests and me. A photographer from the Accent snapped our picture as I pretended to paint the already completed banner we would carry.

As it turned out we were the only three people from the diocese to march under that banner. We would meet other people from the Pittsburgh area, organized by religious groups of various denominations as well as by labor unions and civil rights groups.

Many traveled to the March from all over the country by bus, and a few by plane, including celebrities from Hollywood and legendary entertainer and activist Josephine Baker from Paris. I boarded a special train from Pittsburgh, one of the twenty or so originating from various places that were added to take people to the March. Recently reviewing video from that day posted on YouTube, I was amazed to see a few frames of my 17 year-old self arriving at Washington’s Union Station (at about the 11:32, 11:33 marks), walking towards the camera and trying to look appropriately serious, in my best suit, white shirt and tie.

I also looked alert. Vigilance to the possibility of violence was universal that day. From police commissioner Bull Connor unleashing police dogs on demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, to the murder of Medgar Evers outside his home in Mississippi, it had been a brutal summer in the South. It’s been estimated that over 14,000 demonstrators across the South (including high school students) were arrested during those months, with at least one death.

When I got home I wrote (in the Catholic Accent) of the “dedicated and dignified fervor” around me at the march. But high spirits were also part of that day’s rhythm. From Union Station to the Lincoln Memorial there was always singing. For me it started even earlier, when I restlessly explored the train, wandering through one quiet car after another until I suddenly pushed open a heavy door to a car literally packed to the rafters with young people. Some were perched in the luggage racks. Several at the far end of the car were playing guitars, and everyone was singing.

The march itself was like one long song. It is more powerful in my memory than the hours of speeches at the reflecting pool. Looking into the faces of the people nearest me, and all of us looking around, my feelings became a reflection of what we felt in common.

From the Lincoln Memorial, Peter, Paul and Mary sang the Dylan song I loved--it was still new then--"Blowin in the Wind."  Later we--all quarter-million of us--sang "We Shall Overcome" with them, Dylan, Theodore Bikel and the Freedom Singers.

We were astonished by our numbers, by the fact of us all there, of the reality that was completely new. The overwhelming mood was wonder. It was a sustained altered state, a living dream.

We had a sense of unanticipated numbers on the march, but the dimensions of the day weren’t clear until we got to the reflecting pool. So many people (since settled at 250,000, the largest demonstration in U.S. history to that date) and yet the transfixing feeling of peace—I don’t think anyone had foreseen this.

I saw the joy and wonder and the tears as black people of different ages and from different parts of the country saw each other there. I was also aware that in this context they could see a young white face undistorted by hate or contempt.

We’d marched and sung together, but even as an audience for the program at the Lincoln Memorial, the interactions didn’t stop-- interactions that in the mid-1960s were still rare.

Now we stood in line together at portable water fountains and toilets. We bunched and sprawled on the grass together, sweating under the same steamy sun, both drowsy and responsive to the inspiring words and music coming through the not always comprehensible fuzz of the sound system. We felt careful courtesy becoming a release into a common regard. We looked at each other.


We listened to Dr. Martin Luther King together, quoting an American hymn—“From every mountainside, let freedom ring!” We heard his American litany reach its crescendo: “Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!...Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!”

“And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring... from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’"

When a subjugated people are freed, everyone is freed--that's the message behind this day, that informs the most famous part of this speech, when he describes the dream--a dream that in some ways he saw reflected in the water in front of him.  (He'd used the "I have a dream" refrain before, and at the time I thought I had already heard it. That seems unlikely, so maybe it was just so right that it seemed like it had always been there.)

The official intent of the March was to support passage of the Civil Rights bill that President Kennedy sent to Congress a few days after his June speech. Immediately afterwards I recall commentary in the press calling it a failure because that bill was stalled in Congress (it would pass in early 1964.) Today the march is better remembered than the political reason for it.

Race has still not been erased as deep separation, nor has full racial justice been achieved. But sixty years after that day, my memories aren’t of politics or even history. They are physical. They are of a possible America glimpsed by being lived.

copyright 2013, 2023 by William Kowinski

Chicago 1968: An American Tragedy

My memories of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago fifty years ago this week are scattered fragments: blue and white images of demonstrators on a defective television, a conversation in Chicago during the convention with witnesses to the carnage, personal consequences of the generation gap and a strange encounter with a Chicago policeman, as well as more detailed television images of the last days of the convention, including the infamous beatings in front of the Hilton, covered live by the networks fifty years ago tonight.

In late August, Mike Shain and drove Bill Thompson and his bride, plus a trailer with their possessions, to Hamilton, Ontario, where Bill would attend graduate school and live, as it turned out, for the rest of his life.

Christopher Walken in 1968 Stratford
production of Romeo & Juliet

This actually was the subject of one of the last email discussions between Bill and me before his sudden and untimely death last summer, but letters I recently excavated confirm it.  The car belonged to Bill's father, so Shain and I also drove it back to Libertyville.  I actually remembered the trip back much better, because Shain and I stopped in Stratford, Ontario and saw two plays at the Shakespeare Festival: a Romeo and Juliet in the afternoon (apparently we saw Christopher Walken as Romeo), and a late night contemporary play in their studio theatre with the same actors, which was riveting.

(I also remember that in leaving Stratford we spotted a sign at a newsstand that said the London Times was on sale there.  In those days, the idea of seeing a real newspaper from England was almost magical.  But alas, it turned out to be the daily for London, Ontario.)

We must have at least spent the evening of our return to at Bill's parents, because I associate my memory of the blue and white television picture with Libertyville.

Soon however I was down in Chicago, though nowhere near the convention.  I met up with available Knox friends, who may have included graduates of earlier years. One was involved with several other former Knox students in a peace cafe in Old Town--it may even have been called Alice's Restaurant. (That Arlo Guthrie song became the unofficial antiwar anthem at Knox, sung spontaneously when encountering military recruiters on campus, for instance.) I don't recall who this ex-student was--the only name I remember as being involved with that project is Steven Goldberg. Maybe it was him.  Anyway, someone told us about Sunday in Old Town.

Lincoln Park during that day, before police attacked.

 On Sunday August 25, the day before the convention officially opened, a "Festival of Life" was held in Lincoln Park, organized by Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and the Yippies.

 Politics was leavened with music.  The park was open to everyone until the 11 p.m. curfew, when there were an estimated 2,000 people left. At that point the police moved in and started clubbing people, including those already attempting to leave the park, as well as reporters and photographers.  The crowd sought refuge in Old Town but police followed them and kept clubbing them.  Our friend told us that their peace cafe became a field hospital, as they tended to the injured.

It was not a complete surprise.  It had happened before, not only in the civil rights and free speech movements, but specifically to anti-war demonstrators.  In a 1967 letter to me, Knox grad Michael Hamrin described police busting up a demonstration in Oakland.  It had the same characteristics: indiscriminate violence by police--clubbing, tear gas and mace--against protestors, credentialed reporters and passers-by.

In fact, a specific warning had come out of Old Town earlier in the month, from a group that possibly included Knox people.  It was a letter warning peace demonstrators to stay away from Chicago, because "the cops will riot."  The festival of life could become "a festival of blood."   (The information that brutality was authorized may well have come from the local police they worked with in Old Town.)

The letter was published in a number of underground newspapers.  Such warnings are probably part of the reason I never thought about going.  In fact many demonstrators had been warned away.  I was on the busload of demonstrators from Knox that joined the 50 to 100 thousand at the Pentagon the previous October. Chicago didn't have nearly that many.

But the brutality script got even worse later in the convention.  Reporters were followed, harassed and detained, even delegates were harassed, on the convention floor.  On the day after the convention was over, police actually invaded the Eugene McCarthy suites in the convention hotel and beat up staffers, even breaking into rooms and pulling people out of their beds.

The Lincoln Park brutality was on Sunday.  On Monday night police attacked demonstrators, press and Chicago residents on their own porches in the vicinity of Grant Park.

On Tuesday there was more violence at Lincoln Park while the National Guard oversaw a peaceful Grant Park full of demonstrators.

But what most people saw on television happened on Wednesday, August 28.  In the convention hall, a carefully negotiated "peace plank" for the party platform, opposed by LBJ and his puppet candidate Hubert Humphrey, was voted down.  Inside the hall, people began spontaneously singing "We Shall Overcome," punctuated by the frantic gavel at the podium that failed to stop them.  But the news of the vote also reached demonstrators outside, in Grant Park.

It was perhaps the largest gathering of the week, estimated at 6,000.  Organizers once again attempted to march to the convention hall.  Police and National Guard (with machine guns) blocked the march and police were ordered to clear the streets.

“The police attacked . . . like a chain saw cutting into wood, the teeth of the saw the edge of their clubs, they attacked like a scythe through grass, lines of twenty and thirty policemen striking out in an arc, their clubs beating, demonstrators fleeing,”wrote Norman Mailer in his celebrated book on the two 1968 political conventions, Miami and the Siege of Chicago.

Demonstrators were backed up to the Hilton Hotel where networks had their cameras.  The resulting carnage--beatings, mace, tear gas--were covered on live television, along with the demonstrators' haunting chant: "The whole world is watching."

Delegates inside the convention hall were also watching.  They could see the police riot (as the Kerner commission later officially called it) on television monitors as nomination speeches for the party's presidential candidates were proceeding.  Delegates could be seen (and heard) reacting, but the convention chair tried to squelch any protest.

But then it came time to nominate George McGovern, a peace candidate meant to absorb votes of Robert Kennedy supporters who couldn't bring themselves to vote for Eugene McCarthy.

 McGovern's name was placed in nomination by Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, an RFK supporter who had served in JFK's cabinet. He looked down from the podium directly at Mayor Daley in the Illinois delegation that was positioned front and center when he said, "and with George McGovern as President of the United States, we wouldn't have Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago."  Daley, his face contorted with anger, shouted something back which some heard as "Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch."

Humphrey was nominated on the first ballot.  Some 400 delegates joined protesters in Grant Park.

The next day there was another emotional moment in the convention hall when a short film on the life and death of Senator Robert Kennedy was shown.  This was the first Democratic Convention since 1964, when Robert Kennedy introduced a film about his murdered brother, President John F. Kennedy.

Again spontaneous singing rang out in the hall.  This time it was The Battle Hymn of the Republic, which was the song that crowds in some places had spontaneously sung as Robert Kennedy's funeral train passed by.  One witness wrote of the singing in the hall, "It seemed that they would never stop."

It is highly likely that none of this would have happened if Robert Kennedy hadn't been murdered in June.  In 1968 the state primaries elected relatively few delegates--the power was still with party officials, who were essentially controlled by LBJ.  Even after RFK won the largest primary in California, LBJ's anointed successor, VP Hubert Humphrey, would arrive at the convention with more delegates.

But things would probably have changed there, and the key ironically would have been Mayor Daley.  Daley had no firm conviction about Vietnam, but he wanted a winning candidate, and he'd helped JFK win the White House.  He let it slip once in the time leading up to the convention that his candidate had died.

Two Conn. McCarthy delegates: Paul Newman
and playwright Arthur Miller

Even after RFK's death, Daley and reportedly many other party regulars knew that Humphrey was a weak candidate.  He was running far behind Nixon in the polls, and even behind McCarthy in Illinois.  Daley was one of those leaders who during convention week tried to persuade Senator Ted Kennedy to accept a draft for the nomination, but the Kennedy family was still in disarray after RFK's death and Ted was now the head of the family.  He was only 36, just a year beyond the age of eligibility to run for President.   In the end he declined.

But had RFK lived and Daley delivered the Illinois delegation, others would have followed, and it is likely that Robert Kennedy would have won the nomination, with every chance of winning the presidency and in short order ending the Vietnam war.

The demonstrations in Chicago would probably have been different as well.  Some groups had begun planning them immediately after the October march on the Pentagon, but when McCarthy and then RFK entered the race and were winning primaries, interest slowed to nearly a stop.  It was only after RFK's assassination, when it was clear that McCarthy wouldn't make a real run at the nomination, that calls for demonstrations became louder and more urgent.

Bumper sticker I plastered on my guitar case after 1972
election.  Particularly popular during Watergate.

The debacle of the nomination itself led to reforms within the Democratic party to give wider representation at the convention and more decision-making to voters, including the expansion of primaries that now usually decide the candidate.

 But the immediate effect was mostly to replace the violent chaos of 1968 with the joyous chaos of the 1972 convention.  Humphrey in 1968 came within a half million votes of the presidency.  George McGovern in 1972 went down to the most resounding electoral college defeat in history, losing every state but Massachusetts and DC to Nixon, re-elected by that margin despite what was already known about Watergate.

Part of the reason was that a lot of people didn't like chaos.  They didn't like rampant impropriety (and worse) that threatened stability and security, and seemed to insult their careful lives.  So even though polls and primary results showed that a great many Americans wanted the Vietnam war to end, and some saw the horror of official police violence, they tended to blame the demonstrators more.

That's why, some say, Humphrey lost in 1968, and a contributing reason for McGovern's loss in 1972. And it's probably why, one night of convention week in Chicago, I couldn't find a place to sleep.

A star of TV coverage, young Julian
Bond, who had to pass on a vice-
presidential nomination bid  because he was
too young.

I have strong memories of watching the TV coverage of the last three days of the convention.  I just don't remember where I was watching.  But it seems likely I left Chicago on Tuesday.  So it must have been on Monday night that I was out with Knox friends.  My train was leaving the next morning, so I needed a place for that night--in other words, the guest room or floor of somebody's parents' house in the Chicago suburbs.

But there was too much chaos on television, and one by one, my friends failed to get permission (let alone an invitation.)  I imagine the question was asked more than once, "Does he have long hair?"

So I had no recourse but to sleep in the train station.  I find myself in memory walking Chicago streets at night, a little stoned and a little lost.  I thought I was close to the station but wasn't sure.  I was cutting through a large parking lot when I saw a policeman in the gear I'd seen on TV, perhaps returned from the battle, leaning against a car in the semi-dark.  His head was down.  He seemed to be shaken.  I don't even think he saw me before I spoke. For whatever other instincts I had, my first was from childhood training: when you're lost, ask a policeman.

That's what I did.  He looked up to see a long-haired kid carrying a duffel bag and a guitar case.  I repeated the question and he straightened up.  He seemed to come to himself.  He thought about it a second and gave me walking directions to my train station.  I thanked him and moved off into the darkness.

Grand Central Station circa 1968, demolished in 1969.

Here's where the memory gets fuzzier.  I recall the station I was looking for as the Grand Central Station (which no longer exists.)  I know I sometimes took trains from there to Pittsburgh, and indeed there was at least one train--the B&O Chicago Capitol Limited--that still left from there.

Chicago Grand Central Station interior

But I was going back to Galesburg and eventually to Iowa City.  For awhile I thought it had to be Union Station but recently I found a note that suggested it was Dearborn Station, where the Santa Fe Railroad train left for Galesburg.

Santa Fe train leaves Dearborn Station in 1968.
These trains moved to Union Station in 1971.

In any case, I made it to the station that night, and was dozing in the waiting room when a worried looking man in a vaguely railroad uniform woke me up, and asked me what I was doing there.  I told him I was taking a train in the morning.  Somehow I satisfied him this was this case--maybe I had a ticket, or I bought one from him.  In any case his attitude changed completely once I was a passenger, and he escorted me up some stairs to another waiting room where other passengers were sleeping.  I would be safe there, he said.

There are many books, articles and videos on the Chicago convention, as well as information online. ( I found this timeline particularly useful.)  One of my favorite books covering the subject is An American Melodrama: The Presidential Campaign of 1968 by three British reporters.  But their title is wrong: this was an American tragedy.

There are recent recollections and commentaries, including David Denby in the New Yorker, who basically writes about Mailer writing about Chicago. He ends with a comparison to today.  He quotes Mailer:

"Since obsessions dragoon our energy by endless repetitive contemplations of guilt we can neither measure nor forget, political power of the most frightening sort was obviously waiting for the first demagogue who would smash the obsession and free the white man of his guilt. Torrents of energy would be loosed, yes, those same torrents which Hitler had freed in the Germans when he exploded their ten-year obsession with whether they had lost the war through betrayal or through material weakness. Through betrayal, Hitler had told them."

Denby concludes:

"This premonition of Donald Trump and of what Trump has “loosed” in his audience was written exactly fifty years ago. At the moment, not one word of it seems excessive. “Miami & the Siege of Chicago” was composed at the worst time in our national life, though the current moment is a close second. Reading it gives not only pleasure of a literary sort but strength and solace. If the country could survive 1968, it will survive Donald Trump, too."

Inevitably I think instead about contrasting moments in Grant Park.  Photos from 1968 show it filled with protestors, who on several occasions got battered by police.  It was in political terms the center of frustration and futility as well as brutality.

Then there was election night of 2008, when thousands gathered in that same Grant Park to hear the networks say that America had elected its first black President, and then to see Barack Obama and his family make their first post-election appearance on the stage before them.

It's not a sight that I would have imagined possible forty years before.  And now, ten years after, it's hard to believe that it ever really happened.

The Passing Show: Joe Kennedy

 Bill Clinton, who as a teenager shook hands with President Kennedy, was inspired by JFK to pursue a political career.  Barack Obama, too young to have met either John or Robert Kennedy (both assassinated in the 1960s), nevertheless was inspired by them.  The sudden support of JFK's daughter Caroline and then the rest of the Kennedys provided Senator Obama's campaign for the 2008 presidential nomination with a huge boost.  A special friendship developed between President Obama and Senator Ted Kennedy, ending only with Kennedy's death.

So in turn, when Representative Joe Kennedy gave the official Democratic rejoinder to the anti-president's state of the union address, he made a speech before an audience in a Massachusetts auto assembly plant that echoed Obama themes and language to an almost eerie extent.

Joe Kennedy is the grandson of Robert Kennedy, a US Attorney-General and Senator from New York who was fatally shot minutes after winning the final big primary of 1968 in California, preparing to go to the August convention with the most delegates won for President.

Joe's father, Joseph P. Kennedy II, served in the US House of Representatives for about a decade, from the late 80s to the late 90s.  He was actually the third Joe Kennedy in his family line.  The first Joseph Kennedy was the family patriarch who built a fortune and served as US Ambassador to England for FDR.  He was grooming his eldest son, Joseph Jr., to run for President, the first Irish Catholic to do so.  But Joseph Jr. was killed in combat in World War II, and eventually his younger brother, John F. Kennedy, ran for President in 1960 and won.

So this Joe Kennedy is political and American royalty, and like the young royals of the UK, he is informal and unassuming.  He doesn't seem to have a trace of the famous Kennedy accent, a unique combination of Boston and New York.

His speech was widely applauded, though some on Twitter etc. fixated on what appeared to be flecks of chapstick on a corner of his mouth.   He clearly has a political future if he wants one--the previous generation of Kennedys for one reason or another withdrew from political life after a time.

Joe Kennedy is an heir to Kennedy concerns (he served in the Peace Corps) but is also tech savvy (graduate of Stanford) and serves on the House technology committee, as well as foreign relations and energy committees.  But he will be only 40 in 2020, and hasn't generated the buzz needed to be a serious presidential candidate so far.

Yet Democrats know they need some younger prospects, and the time is getting short.  Immediately after this November's congressional elections, the media will focus on presidential possibilities.  Right now the Dems don't have clear choices.

Senator Bernie Sanders also gave a rebuttal to the state of the union, which was much more specific in response to the actual speech.  (Joe Kennedy's sounded as if it was written much earlier.)  But Sanders will be 79 in 2020.  Another likely candidate is Joe Biden who will be 78.  Even Elizabeth Warren, not talked about so much these days, will be 71.  (It was in a Harvard class taught by Warren that Joe Kennedy met the woman he would marry.)

There are a number of other names that insiders and media mention as potential presidential candidates next time, especially of women and Latino men, but none has emerged with the kind of support that Barack Obama had by the time he declared for the presidential primaries in February 2007.  He'd been talked about since his 2004 Democratic Convention speech. So there's still time but it's getting short.

It also strikes me that the pure Obama message of inclusion and change is probably not going to be enough.  That positive message is ultimately unifying, but already we can see how degraded our politics and our country has become due to the current administration.  That's going to have to be acknowledged somehow.  The right balance that at least acknowledges if not expresses anger and pain suffered by many these days is tricky.  It's going to take somebody special--as Barack Obama was--to heal these wounds and move the country forward.  Not to mention winning the primaries and the general election.

History and Memory

There are historical firsts every day, some more generally significant than others.  For example on Wednesday, for the first time, a player born in Africa played in a US Major League baseball game.  He's an infielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates, and in his first at bat he hit a single.  He has a great baseball name, too: Gift Ngoepe.

It's of special interest to baseball fans, and somewhat curious in general, in that many African Americans have played the game.  In fact, the first all-black starting lineup also belonged to the Pittsburgh Pirates back in the 1970s.

But the lack of African players has not been due to racial discrimination, at least not since Jackie Robinson. Baseball is apparently not a major sport in any African country, and to be born and raised in South Africa presents fewer opportunities to learn and play the game.

A flood of African players doesn't seem on the immediate MLB horizon, but there was another somewhat stunning historical first that may forecast the future. Reports Quartz:

The seismic shift in global energy production was powerfully in evidence today (April 21), when all electricity in the UK was produced for a 24-hour period without burning a single shovelful of coal—for the first time since the industrial revolution [began.]

Consider that the industrial revolution essentially began in England in the late 18th century, and that its growth is largely responsible for global heating and the Climate Crisis.  The massive burning of coal is historically the chief cause (though oil is catching up.)  This event hopefully forecasts a near future when a day without burning coal is a normal day in the UK and the US, and rapidly thereafter, everywhere.

Another historical first has more to do with our relation with the past.  The New York Times ran a feature on Emma Morano, who at her death recently was the oldest known person in the world.  She was 117.

She lived in a modest room in an Italian town, and the article ran large pictures of her possessions, as if they were already remarkable relics of a faraway time. Although to me they were quite familiar from my own grandparents and their friends and contemporaries.  Her odd habits weren't odd to me.  Some have been passed down.

But a kind of throwaway line in the story stopped me.  Here it is:" Ms. Morano, the last person documented as being born in the 1800s.."

So that's a big change.  If this is true, we have all lost forever direct contact with the nineteenth century.

I think of my Italian grandparents, both born in the 1890s.  I think of a grandparent of John F. Kennedy, who reputedly lived during both the assassinations of JFK and of Abraham Lincoln.  Or Kennedy himself, noting in his 1961 Inaugural that "the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century..."  He was the first President of the 20th century not to have been born in the 19th.

When time escapes memory it becomes history.  Photographs and sound recordings provide some connection, but especially writing--both diaries and memoirs as well as fictions based on times remembered rather than only researched.

We still have those from the 19th century.  But none of us will ever again touch the hand of someone who lived in it. Nor will we hear a new memory, perhaps one that had not emerged before.

June 6

Some will remember June 6 for D-Day, though with the last code talker dying last week, fewer and fewer.  Some will remember a speech Reagan made to commemorate D-Day.  I will always remember the end of a long night and the death of Robert F. Kennedy, shot by an assassin on primary election night in California in 1968, and the death of many dreams.

What Kennedy Said About Obama

Senator Kennedy made what he knew might be his last major public speech at the Democratic national convention exactly a year before his death, to support the candidacy of Barack Obama for President, as he had done at a crucial moment in the Democratic primaries. From his speech at the convention:

"I have come here tonight to stand with you to change America, to restore its future, to rise to our best ideals and to elect Barack Obama President of the United States...We have never lost our belief that we are all called to a better country and a newer world...

"For me, this is a season of hope: new hope for a just and fair prosperity for the many, not just the few. New hope--and this is the cause of my life--new hope that we will break the old gridlock and guarantee that every American-- north, south, east, west, young, old--will have decent, quality health care as a fundamental right and not a privilege. We can meet these challenges with Barack Obama--yes we can, and finally, yes we will.

"There is a new wave of change all around us, and if we set our compass true, we will reach our destination--not merely victory for our party but renewal for our nation. And this November the torch will be passed again to a new generation of Americans, and so with Barack Obama and for you, and for me, our country will be committed to his cause. The work begins anew, the hope rises again, and the dream lives on."

What Obama Said About Kennedy

From President Obama's eulogy at the funeral Mass for Senator Ted Kennedy:

"Ted Kennedy was the father who looked after not only his own three children, but John's and Bobby's as well. He took them camping and taught them to sail. He laughed and danced with them at birthdays and weddings; cried and mourned with them through hardship and tragedy; and passed on that same sense of service and selflessness that his parents had instilled in him. Shortly after Ted walked Caroline down the aisle and gave her away at the altar, he received a note from Jackie that read, "On you the carefree youngest brother fell a burden a hero would have begged to be spared. We are all going to make it because you were always there with your love."

"We cannot know for certain how long we have here. We cannot foresee the trials or misfortunes that will test us along the way. We cannot know God's plan for us. What we can do is to live out our lives as best we can with purpose, and love, and joy. We can use each day to show those who are closest to us how much we care about them, and treat others with the kindness and respect that we wish for ourselves. We can learn from our mistakes and grow from our failures. And we can strive at all costs to make a better world, so that someday, if we are blessed with the chance to look back on our time here, we can know that we spent it well; that we made a difference; that our fleeting presence had a lasting impact on the lives of other human beings. This is how Ted Kennedy lived. This is his legacy."

"The greatest expectations were placed upon Ted Kennedy's shoulders because of who he was, but he surpassed them all because of who he became. We do not weep for him today because of the prestige attached to his name or his office. We weep because we loved this kind and tender hero who persevered through pain and tragedy - not for the sake of ambition or vanity; not for wealth or power; but only for the people and the country he loved."

The Eternal Flame

They lined the highways and streets to usher his casket to the Kennedy Library, where tens of thousands filed past to pay their respects. Again they lined the streets and highways around Boston in the pouring rain, as Ted Kennedy made his final trip to Washington. There, they lined the streets and stood in front of the Capitol, where colleagues and former staff waited, and when the casket was about to depart, the crowd spontaneously sang "America the Beautiful," and people called out "Thank you!" and "We love you!" as the hearse moved slowly towards Arlington. There, in the swiftly falling darkness, the final ceremonies, the final loving words--this time from grandchildren--and as lightning flashed in the distance, Edward Moore Kennedy joined his brothers again.

Remembering Teddy

His brothers were JFK and RFK but he was always Teddy. The grandson of the Mayor of Boston who threw out the first pitch at Fenway Park, one of his last public acts was to throw out the first pitch there this spring. At his memorial on Friday at the Kennedy Library, he was remembered as a father (to the children of his fallen brothers as well as his own, when--as Joseph Kennedy, son of RFK said, "we really needed a father"), a friend, a colleague, a human being of great generosity and spirit, and one of the greatest Senators in U.S. history, who had a hand in most of the progressive laws passed in the last 46 years, including those that Americans take for granted, like Medicare, Title 9, voting age at 18, health care for children, the Voting Rights Act, the Family Medical Leave Act, the Disabilities Act, and so many more. His funeral will begin in a few hours, with a eulogy given by President Obama. (More on the meaning of Ted Kennedy to my generation at 60s Now.)

R.I. P. Senator Ted Kennedy

Senator Ted Kennedy, here in a recent photo with his niece, Caroline Kennedy, has died of brain cancer, his family announced early Wednesday. It is doubly sad since he didn't live to lead the fight for health care legislation and see it happen, for it was one of the persistent causes of his life. He was my Senator when I lived in Massachusetts, and I heard him speak several times over the years. I worked on his presidential primary campaign in PA in 1980. Coincidentally, he's quoted extensively from one of the times I heard him, in 1975, in the new posts at Kowincidence. There will be much more said about him today, and many more memories revived. For now, the NY Times obit, and this quote taken from it: Senator Kennedy: "We know the future will outlast all of us, but I believe that all of us will live on in the future we make.”