JFK woke us from our sleep in the tower
After the drab Eisenhower years, President John F Kennedy stunned young Americans like student Janet Daley with his dynamic personality and his thrilling rhetoric about the ‘New Frontier’
ODDLY enough, the first I heard of what had happened did not make that much of an impression. I was an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley in November 1963. On my way to a morning class, I heard a young guy — the sort of athletic crew-cut type who would not normally be associated with human sensitivity — ask incredulously: “They’ve shot our president?”
I was struck by the shock and sense of personal loss in his voice (“our” president). But it did not occur to me that the news could possibly be true. We were not some tinpot rogue nation in which leaders were gunned down and regimes toppled by outlaws. Presidential assassinations were part of a mad, bad history that impregnably safe modern America had left behind.
By the time I reached my seat, the news was racing around the room. The visiting Oxford philosopher began her lecture and then faltered: she sensed the atmosphere and asked whether we wanted to go on. It was impossible.
I remember walking away from the building with a few friends, stopping to talk to knots of stunned people who were still unsure of the details — even whether the president was dead. But as we walked on, the bells in the campanile on the campus began to play the national anthem very slowly so that it sounded like a dirge. That was when we knew.
It is almost impossible now — two generations and many national crises later — to appreciate how traumatic that event was. In the days that followed at Berkeley, religious services were held in the open air and people of all faiths and none gathered spontaneously to participate. Some students went home to be with their parents — because it felt as if the world was ending.
Author and activist Norman Mailer once said he thought the US had had a collective nervous breakdown after the John F Kennedy assassination: it was that catastrophic blow, he said, that had given rise to the youth culture of the 1960s and its peculiar mixture of high idealism and narcissism.
Certainly, it was the craziness of it — the dreamlike insanity of those few days — that remains in the mind. Because it was not just the public murder of the president, the first assassination of a major head of state to be filmed as it happened, but what followed: the shooting of the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, by Jack Ruby, caught by the cameras and broadcast live to a nation already stupefied with shock. It was like watching all the normal expectations of an ordered universe fall apart.
For all we now know about Kennedy’s sordid private life, I still find it impossible to watch the film of his funeral without being reduced to tears. The memories of that day became part of my own life story — the riderless horse, the widow and the brother following the coffin, and the young son saluting his father’s body. The revelations that came decades later about Kennedy’s sexual predation and the moral corruption it created among his associates have helped to obscure the historical truth of that time.
For my generation of young Americans, Kennedy was a seminal figure who spoke of a future — a “new frontier” — that only we could enact. The immediately preceding decade had been notorious for its conformity and quietude — its “silent generation”. And then, suddenly, here was this heroic national leader — a young president with a vision so stunningly different from predecessor Dwight D Eisenhower’s America, and a rhetoric that took the breath away.
As a schoolgirl, I had been in the Los Angeles arena in 1960 when Kennedy made his acceptance speech for the Democratic presidential nomination. My best friend and I stood and cheered as he spoke of “rejecting the safe mediocrity of the past” and asked “each of you to be pioneers towards that New Frontier”.
He may have said: “My call is to the young in heart regardless of age.” But we knew different. His call was to us: to me and my contemporaries who felt that we had been waiting in the tower to be awakened by a voice like this. And then he made it all possible. He created the Peace Corps. He began the process that would put an end to official segregation in the South and then to the unofficial kind in the North. Of course, the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the beginnings of the horrendous Vietnam venture were his responsibility, too.
Had he lived, the contradictions would almost certainly have meant that the very idealism he inspired would have exacted its price on his credibility. But, as it was, his successor, Lyndon Johnson, took the rap for Vietnam — and received less credit than he deserved for getting the Civil Rights Act through Congress.
At Berkeley, we accepted the torch that had been, as JFK had put it, “passed to a new generation”. The next year, in response to a ban on political speaking and activity at the university, we created the Free Speech Movement — which became the international model for student protest.
What followed was an era of almost fanatical idealism in which extraordinary numbers of young people risked their futures to do what they believed to be right. Some became civil rights workers, travelling to the South to register black voters — a journey from which, after the murders in Mississippi, they had good reason to believe they might never return. Others burnt their draft cards — a federal offence — in their determination not to be conscripted to fight in Vietnam.
By the ’70s, it had degenerated into genuine madness and surreal hedonism, but for a brief moment there was a display of mass moral conviction and individual courage that I do not expect to see again in my lifetime. — © The