Volume : SIRS 1991 History, Article 02 Subject: Keyword(s) : KENNEDY and ASSASSINATION Title : A Remembrance of Kennedy Author : Jim Henderson Source : Dallas Times Herald (Dallas, Texas) Publication Date : Nov. 20, 1983 Page Number(s) : Special Sec. 1+
. . . Reprinted with permission from DALLAS TIMES HERALD (Dallas, Texas) Nov. 20, 1983, Special Section, pp. 1+
A REMEMBRANCE OF KENNEDY by Jim Henderson Staff Writer
'Let the word go forth from this time and place...that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans--born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage.'
After 20 years, the events seem as compressed as a leanly edited videotape.
A sunny day, a dark convertible, a steady din rebounding from the canyon walls above a crowded street, three cracks from a rifle in a sniper's nest, a scramble below, engines racing, a sobbing black woman outside Parkland Memorial Hospital, a policeman shot across town, a pronouncement of death, a scrawny, handcuffed suspect in a corridor with Jack Ruby's .38 exploding in his belly.
The nation was stunned by the images that were transmitted from Dallas--hard images formed in terse, teletype prose and more vivid ones fashioned from bits and pieces of celluloid.
America paused to watch the newsreel.
A new President quickly sworn in and airlifted into command, a bloodstained widow never far from the coffin, a change to black, a bewildered daughter kneeling before a flag-draped box in the Capitol rotunda, the wintry streets of the capital, a dark riderless horse with empty boots facing backward in the stirrups, a slow-moving caisson, a young boy saluting the honor guard carrying his father to Arlington National Cemetery, the lighting of the eternal flame.
On the day John F. Kennedy was buried, Alistair Cooke wrote: "He was snuffed out. In that moment, all the decent grief of a nation was taunted and outraged. So along with the sorrow, there is a desperate and howling note from over the land. We may pray on our knees, but when we get up from them, we cry with the poet: Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
It is only in memory that the howling note from those four days flits past. Behind the newsreel, the hours were agonizing and interminable. For many, particularly in Dallas, time moved as slowly as a motorcade or a horse-drawn caisson.
Erik Jonsson, then-president of the Dallas Citizens Council, would recall the anxiety he felt when the President did not show up on schedule for a luncheon at the Trade Mart. What's going on? he asked himself over and over as the wait, only a few moments in duration, seemed endless.
After 12:33 p.m. Nov. 22, 1963, the time the first news bulletin notified the republic that its President had been shot in Dallas, the city stood motionless and helpless, waiting for the firestorm of scorn. It came in searing, overlapping bursts. "Are these human beings or are these animals?" Adlai Stevenson had asked moments after he escaped from a violent crowd in Dallas a month earlier.
The world looked again at Dallas with the same question. It would seem, in the slow-motion drift of events, that the answer would never come. Dallas mourned the assassination as the rest of the nation mourned it, as a deeply personal tragedy. Schoolteachers wept as they broke the news to their classes. Men cried in public. Rage and shame and guilt and dread melted into one great immobilizing glob of emotional turmoil.
An eternity, two hours and 20 minutes, passed before the truth would be known. Kennedy's assassin was not of Dallas, was far removed from the nation's perception of the city and the city's own worst fears of itself.
In time, the world, as well as Dallas, would believe the city was merely caught in one of history's inscrutable warps, that it was only by chance that the light passing through the long prism of that era intersected in Dealey Plaza.
The howl that was heard through the dark night of those times had the tone of a primal scream, a victim raging against a felon. In truth, it was a cry of national doubt, of the sense that America would not be the same. More than mere innocence was lost that day in Dallas. With it went the cable that anchored the nation to its sense of order.
To the historians who define eras in terms of events rather than years, the decade of the '60s was born in Dallas.
In a great, shuddering spasm, the fragile floodgates that had held back the reservoir of a restless social movement was punctured by the bullets that rained down from the Texas School Book Depository.
Within months, America would experience the first of her long hot summers, just the beginning of another newsreel: the dogs and fire hoses of Birmingham, the first smiling Marines marching into Vietnam and returning in body bags, campus radicals occupying the administration building at Columbia University, rioting outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the fires of Watts and Newark and Detroit, Dr. Strangelove, Apollo 11, Woodstock, Charles Manson, the cultural revolution, the counterculture revolution, the sexual revolution, the yippies, the hippies, the peaceniks and the crazies.
In 1968, Stuart Udall, secretary of interior for both Kennedy and Johnson, was asked his opinion of the times, which seemed to be reeling out of control. He offered a sober, but startling, observation.
"This may be remembered," he said, "as the most creative time in our history."
It did not seem such an outrageous judgment when the hurricane had passed. A sorting out had occurred in the storm. Not many years would pass before a black preacher from Chicago would run for the presidency. Women would flood the work place and supervise staffs of men. Men with an eye on the White House could talk of a female running mate without risking ridicule. Wars would be harder to make, nuclear waste harder to conceal, books harder to burn, air harder to pollute, justice harder to deny.
America was starkly different. Kennedy's presidency and his assassination may have been essential to unlocking the passions of the time, but what the land became was neither his legacy, nor Oswald's nor Dallas.'
After the trauma and shame and guilt were gone, the judgment of history would be that Kennedy and Oswald, Edwin Walker and Martin Luther King, George Wallace and Stokely Carmichael, Angela Davis and George Lincoln Rockwell, Dallas and Los Angeles, Memphis and Birmingham, Detroit and Da Nang were fragments of the American character, slivers of the dream and the nightmare.
The legacy of that sunlit moment in Dallas was a nation's fretful and all-consuming search for itself, a long and howling rage against the dying of the light.