The Assassination of JFK Continued...

In a related vein, here is Kennedy, who had captivated a world audience with his wit, charm, and intelligence, on a glorious November morning in Dallas, the sun is shining brightly, his beautiful and glamorous wife Jackie is at his side, he’s smiling and waving to the crowd as his presidential limousine proceeded down Elm Street. He’s on top of the world, and a second later it’s all over with.  Many Americans found it hard to accept that President Kennedy, the most powerful man in the free world — someone they perceived to occupy a position akin to a king — could be eliminated in a matter of seconds by someone whom they considered a nobody. On a visceral level, they couldn’t grasp the enormous incongruity of it all. To strike down a king, as it were, something more elaborate and powerful just had to be involved. “It’s preposterous on the face of it to believe that a mousey little guy with a $12.95 rifle could bring down the leader of the free world,” someone wrote. But of course this type of reasoning has no foundation in logic. The lowliest human can pull a trigger just as effectively as someone of power and importance. And bullets are very democratic. They kill or injure whomever they hit.

Also, in a way, it’s even possible that Kennedy himself -- yes, Kennedy himself -- may be responsible to a degree for the conspiracy theories that have proliferated around his assassination for almost 45 years. As already indicated, Kennedy was among the most attractive, charismatic presidents in our history, arguably the most, and was loved and continues to be loved by millions of people. They simply do not want to let go of him and his memory. Can it be that believing in a conspiracy is a subconscious way of hanging on to him? In all deference to Kennedy’s successor, LBJ, does anyone really believe that if he had been killed under the identical circumstances as Kennedy there would  have been one-tenth the interest in the circumstances surrounding his death as there has been for Kennedy? It’s the type of question that answers itself.

As to the significance and consequence of the Kennedy assassination, it is difficult to overstate it. Even if we were to confine ourselves to the time in 1963 that he was killed, the significance would be prodigious by any standard of measurement.

With the lone exception of China, the entire world mourned Kennedy’s death. Indeed, it was said that more people mourned Kennedy’s death than that of any other human in history. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in torch-lit marches in the great capitals of the world, and peasants in the dustiest little villages of South and Central America wept as if they had lost a member of their family. Remarkably, despite the fact that it was at the height of the Cold War, even the Soviet Union and all its satellite countries behind the Iron Curtain took his death almost as hard as America did. Nobel Prize-winning novelist John Steinbeck was in Warsaw, Poland, on a cultural tour of Iron Curtain countries for the U.S. State Department when news of Kennedy’s death reached the Polish capital. He said that the “great sorrow” among the Polish people over Kennedy’s death “was the most fantastic thing I ever saw. I’ve never seen anything like it. The Poles said they’d never seen its like either, for anyone.”

Political author Thomas Powers cannot be accused of hyperbole when he observes that Kennedy’s assassination “was probably the greatest single traumatic event in American history.” Though Powers made his remark several years ago, its truth continues to this day. For instance, there isn’t too much comparison between the nation’s response to Kennedy’s death and its response to the World Trade Center catastrophe on Sept. 1, 2001, even though the response to the latter was enormous. Just two indications among many of the difference: On the day of Kennedy’s assassination and for three consecutive days thereafter, all three national television networks suspended all of their commercial shows and advertising. Nothing remotely close to this followed 9/11. And while only a relatively small number of books have been written about 9/11, far more books continue to be written to this very day, close to 45 years later, about Kennedy’s assassination. How can one death cause greater personal anguish to more people than 3,000 deaths? The World Trade Center victims were known only to their loved ones, entirely unknown to the rest of the country. But the dazzling first couple of JFK and Jackie, and their two children, Caroline and John-John, were looked upon by many as the closest to royalty this nation had ever seen. Nearly all Americans felt they knew JFK intimately, his charm and wit regularly lighting up the television screen at home. This is why polls show that millions of Americans took his assassination like a “death in the family.” A national poll at the time showed that the majority of Americans were moved to actual tears over the president’s death.

When we look to the historical consequences of the assassination many point to Lincoln’s as being right up there with Kennedy’s. But the comparison is not a robust one at all. At the time of Lincoln’s death in 1864, the population of America was around 35 million; at the time of Kennedy’s death, almost 190 million. Moreover, at the time of Lincoln, America was for the most part an isolationist country, in large part because of primitive communication. But in 1963, not only was America as much a part of the international community as it is today, it was the leader of the free world. I was saying earlier that people mourned Kennedy’s death around the world. At the time of Lincoln’s death, how many people around the world, most of whom probably never even knew of his existence or more than his name, could have possibly mourned his death?

As far as the long-term consequences of Lincoln’s death, although I am not an historian, what were they? I don’t recall hearing that there were any. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which did have enormous consequences, was signed on Jan. 1, 1863, a year and quarter before his death, so it obviously could not have resulted from his death.

The long-term consequences of Kennedy’s death are obvious, if for no other reason than that the Vietnam War, the cataclysmic consequences of which resonate to this very day, would probably not have happened if Kennedy had lived. Although whether or not Kennedy would have ultimately gone to war in Vietnam is lost to history, one thing is known. He did not want to do so. Indeed, a month before he died, he signed National Security Action Memorandum No. 263 providing for the withdrawal of 1,000 U.S. personnel from Vietnam by the end of the year.

More extravagantly, historian Stephen Ambrose wrote in 1993: “There’s a very strong sense that if Kennedy had not died, we would not have suffered the 30 years of nightmare that followed -- the race riots, the white backlash, assassinations, Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra.”

The unprecedented nature of the Kennedy assassination was summed up by Dan Rather this way: “I’ve never covered anything like it. Not before, not since, and I don’t expect to in my lifetime, nor any lifetime beyond, to infinity and beyond.”

The fascination, even enthrallment with sensational murder cases cannot be considered in any way to be a healthy sign of a civilized people. But until there is a surgical operation on human nature that eliminates the instinct of some humans to commit often unspeakable atrocities upon their  fellow man that feeds this fascination, it will continue for as long, as an old American Indian treaty read, “as the wind blows, and the grass grows, and the river flows.”