Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (22 page)

It went on and on and on, and Kennedy wasn’t used to being talked to that way. Beyond that, he was never able to pull himself together to mount an effective defense. One, he didn’t really know much about Communism and Marxism; two, he was drugged up. He had been shot up with amphetamines by Dr. Jacobson for the pain, the huge pain he had in his back. What effect that had on his thinking and his ability to defend himself and the rest of us, we don’t know for sure, but obviously it had an effect.

The other great achievement, which he doesn’t get as much credit for from many people, is that America was being torn apart by a civil war, something it didn’t want. He didn’t want to deal with civil rights above all, but young blacks in places like South Carolina were listening to his words about doing and being and freedom. He meant those for Eastern European audiences, but it worked in Greenville, South Carolina.

Kennedy had been asking, “Why is this happening? Stop this.” He told Harris Wofford, his civil rights adviser, “Get your damn people off those buses,” and Wofford said, “It’s too late for that,” and it
was
too late for that. George Reedy, Johnson’s press secretary, in a memo to Johnson, who then passed it on to Sorensen, said, “They’re doing it because of you,
and this is going on because both sides, the Southerners in Congress, the white Southern establishment, and the black kids think you’re on their side. The politicians think you’re just doing this for black votes; the blacks think this is the revolution. Until they know which side you’re on, this is going to continue and get worse and worse.”

During the troubles at the Universities of Mississippi and Alabama, he went on television, gave one of the great speeches—almost without notes—in American history, in which he took the side of the minority, which is no small thing in a democracy. He said, “This is not a regional question, this is not a political question, this is a moral question. What kind of people are we, and are we the kind of people who are going to continually oppress and suppress some of us because they’re of a different color? After all, who among us, given a choice, would choose to be black?”

That was almost as great an achievement as the fact that missiles weren’t fired, that the president of the United States stood with a minority. At that point it almost didn’t matter what he did, because then the black people took over, white civil rights workers took over, and we were a better country for it.

I was a reporter for the
Newark News
when the phone rang, and an editor said, “The president’s been shot; get down to the office,” which was in Morristown. I went down there, and I had this surreal scene where the first other door I saw opening at Ten Park Square, an office building in Morristown, belonged to Ray Manahan, the chairman of the Democratic Party and the mayor of Morristown. I walked in to talk to him about it. His window was being cleaned. I was just picking up quotes they might or might not use. His window was being washed, and there was a guy out there with the belt and whatnot, laughing and smiling at us. We were practically in tears, and I thought,
I’m looking at the only man in the country, the guy out there, the window washer, who doesn’t know what just happened to America
. What happened to America was we lost our innocence. As the great Mary McGrory said to Pat Moynihan, “We’ll never laugh again.” And Pat said, “We’ll laugh again; we’ll never be innocent again.” It changed the country, and Kennedy is partly to blame for all that. If
there were another negative, it was that the Kennedys drove this aura of assassination that was in the air in the early ’60s: Patrice Lumumba, the leader of the Congo, had been assassinated just before Kennedy became president. Trujillo was assassinated in the Dominican Republic with help from the CIA and American weapons, and as we knew, maybe even then, there was plot after plot to try to kill Castro.

It never entered our minds—I don’t know if it entered Kennedy’s—that the most vulnerable leader in the world was the American president. He was the least protected, particularly in those days, much less than today. Maybe it was inevitable that some screwball—in this case, with a gripe about Cuba, which we were pushing around—would try to get the president. I don’t believe in any conspiracy theories on the president. I think Oswald killed him. He was nuts. He had a cause, Cuba, and he got lucky; and we all got unlucky and were never the same.

It was like lightning. I think that Vietnam and civil rights were what made young people lose faith in the credibility of their leaders. The people who ran to conspiracy theories are a different breed of cat. The conspiracy to them is more important than the event and its aftermath. I would put it down not to the Warren Commission but to public officials who lied to us that changed us. Public officials lied and lied to us about the war in Vietnam; that changed us as journalists, but it also changed citizens as people with faith in their system, their country, and their leaders.

There had been hundreds of books obviously, but in the end only two of them counted. A lot of them had to do with women, with attacks or defenses of his record. I had just finished reading a book called
The Emperor
by Ryszard Kapuscinski, the Polish writer, about the fall of Haile Selassie. It was this marvelous picture of talking to everyone around a major figure and figuring out from that what he was like.

I found myself thinking—I was living in Paris at the time—what did this seem like to Selassie? I didn’t know anything about Ethiopia or emperors, and I thought I could do a book like this. I’ve been around the White House enough. I can do a book about this, about how life looks to an American president. I picked Kennedy because the two pillars of Kennedyana
really were Schlesinger’s and Sorensen’s books, and it was twenty-five years later. Things had changed; people had changed. I thought that even though all these other books were out there, there was kind of an open field to try to cover him minute by minute, day by day—to know what was on his desk every day, to know what he said before he got to that desk and that kind of thing.

I was learning things. I learned big lessons, but they didn’t come immediately, because immediately I was thinking about compiling material and building it up. The big thing that surprised me, and surprises me to this day, is how reactive the presidency is as a job. The campaign doesn’t matter; in some ways the person himself doesn’t matter. Under our system, the presidency is really an act of faith on how the president will handle situations that haven’t yet happened. I’m sure Kennedy realized long before I did, since only thirty-five or forty guys really know what it’s like to be president: You’re constantly reacting to events you had no control over.

We would’ve eventually had a counterculture movement, but maybe “eventually” is fifty years. I do think he would’ve begun to cut back on Vietnam or at least assure young people. Young people were rioting because they were being drafted not because they developed a political ideology. In the beginning it was self-interest, and it became the ’60s. John Kennedy came to office when people wore hats and three-button suits, and he left when they were tie-dying—well, they weren’t yet, but because of his influence they ended up tie-dying—T-shirts and things. Because of the way he lived—glamorously, recklessly—we all took more chances.

I hate to say this, but I think it will turn out that Reagan, in political terms, will have been a more significant president. John Kennedy was a very good president and may have been on the edge of becoming a
great president, although great presidents, at least in my lexicon, are created by the events they have to face. Suddenly an oil rig blows up and fills the Gulf of Mexico with oil. You can’t anticipate that, but you have to respond to it. There were three out of four with Kennedy. He did a very good job in tamping down—and might have been on the verge of doing more than that—the rhetoric of the Cold War, which was much stronger than young people today understand. People talked about bombing each other all the time. But the relationship with the Soviet Union was better and less dangerous when he left than when he came in. He took the moral stand on civil rights, even though the worst people in it—the worst segregationists and bigots—were in his own party, the Southerners in the Democratic Party. He chose the minority over them, which was important. He brought out the best of us in many ways, including the Cuban Missile Crisis, and it could be argued the only thing a president can do in this great democracy is to bring out the best or the worst in the American people. Richard Nixon failed because he brought out the worst.

The fourth thing, which is a negative to me, is that he got us into Vietnam—not Johnson, not Nixon. Once Diem was assassinated, with his permission we owned Vietnam, and we went through that pathetic group of generals who only wanted to steal. I don’t know when he would’ve pulled out. He would’ve pulled out before Johnson, but he had a failing as a leader, which cost him in Vietnam: When things went wrong, Kennedy tended to think it meant we had the wrong guy in charge, so let’s put a new guy in and see until we get to the right one. I don’t think that’s a valid assumption, particularly for someone who controls as many people in power as a president of the United States. Vietnam is the black mark
on his record. With weaponry and civil rights, it verged on greatness. All in all, he was pretty good, and he was better at the end because he had some experience. He had much more sense of what he could do and what he couldn’t do.

So was he a great president? I don’t think so. He belongs in the near-great category—the best one-term president since James Polk.

Pat Buchanan

In 1963, native Virginian Patrick Buchanan was a twenty-five-year-old editorial writer for the
St. Louis Globe Dispatch.
He left to work in Richard Nixon’s New York law firm and soon transitioned to campaign advisor when Nixon began his quest for the presidency. Buchanan served as an advisor in the White House under Nixon as well as Ford and Reagan. With Tom Braden he founded the influential CNN program
Crossfire
in 1982. In 2000 Buchanan ran as the Reform Party’s presidential candidate; he continues to write and appear as a conservative analyst on MSNBC.

B
ack in 1958 I was down in Fort Lauderdale, and my girlfriend and my brother and his girlfriend were there. My father had been an accountant for a very rich man, Page Hufty. Page Lee Hufty was his daughter, and there was Alex Hufty, who was getting married. Alex said, “Why don’t you guys go up and represent me at the wedding,” so we went to the reception, and I will never forget it: In through the door at the reception comes John F. Kennedy, looking like a million bucks. My brother said, “Isn’t that Bobby Kennedy?” I said, “No, that’s Jack Kennedy, the senator.” He came through with tremendous charisma, immensely attractive, a tremendously likable individual, and a new-generation politician. He really had it.

When I was at journalism school, we were sent down to DC for what’s called field observation week. We went to the White House one day, the Congress another day, and we got to go to the president’s press conference—that was a press conference right after, I believe, John Glenn had come back from orbiting the Earth three times. This guy from the
Daily News
got up and said, “Mr. President, the
Daily News
has recommended that there be a holiday for school kids when John Glenn—comes to the White House,” and Kennedy said, “You know, this administration has always followed the policy of the
Washington Daily News
. There’ll be a holiday!” That was the charisma and the likability of him.

In St. Louis, we didn’t have TVs in our offices or anything. There was one office, a side office, and we watched television there right off the newsroom. We all got together and watched his press conferences. I watched every one of them when they were televised, and they all were. We went in there, and, even if you disagreed with the guy, you had to come away admiring him. You’d say, “The Democrats have really got a candidate. They’ve really got a leader, and we’ve got to get our own candidate.”

When I became an editorial writer in St. Louis, which was around August 1962, we were very critical of Kennedy, but we were very supportive of his actions in the Cuban Missile Crisis. We condemned him for the murder of [president of South Vietnam] Diem; we felt the administration had had a hand in that. They were in some way complicit with that, and that was appalling. We disagreed with him on a number of issues, but I supported Kennedy’s tax cuts in 1962. The rest of the editorial board didn’t.

On civil rights, it was our feeling that Jack Kennedy couldn’t get anything done. He wasn’t a terribly effective president in dealing with Congress. I’ll tell you what, though: We supported Jack Kennedy, and I wrote editorials about the showdown with Ross Barnett, who was the governor of Mississippi. Very soon after I joined the editorial page, in October 1962, Governor Barnett basically tried to block the entrance of black students, specifically James Meredith, to the University of Mississippi. I
wrote an editorial saying, “Governor Barnett says he’s willing to go to jail, and that’s exactly where they ought to put him.” We supported Kennedy and the courts and everything they did against Governor Wallace as well in June 1963. What we were against basically was folks from the north going down south, but we were pro law and order up and down the line, whether it was demonstrators on one side or governors on the other.

What was it Harold MacMillan said? He came back from a visit to Washington and said, “The Kennedys remind me of the Borgias taking over a somewhat respectable, small northern Italian town.” There’s a great deal of truth to it. These were tough, somewhat ruthless politicians. Jack Kennedy was wiretapping the steel executives. Jack Kennedy ordered the wiretaps on Dr. King. Bobby Kennedy told Hoover to go ahead and do it. These were tough customers. Jack Kennedy used to joke about how his father told him, “Don’t buy one more vote than you have to in West Virginia. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.” That’s the way they were. They were tough, irreverent politicians, and all three of them, Bobby Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, wouldn’t be in the pantheon they’re in today had they not died the way they did, by assassins’ bullets.

Jack Kennedy was admired at the Buchanan dinner table and by my father, who said, “We’ve got two good patriots running now.” He wouldn’t have said that in Truman’s and FDR’s day, but there was an admiration for Kennedy and for Richard Nixon. I preferred Richard Nixon, and I think my father did too. We couldn’t vote in those days.

But I’d carried Richard Nixon’s golf bag in Burning Tree Country Club, and we had watched him much more closely than we had Kennedy, so I would say most of us preferred Richard Nixon. When
he lost, there wasn’t great apprehension of what Kennedy was going to do. Arthur Schlesinger wrote
Kennedy or Nixon: Does It Make a Difference?
because the two of them seemed to agree on everything except Cuba, where Kennedy was tougher, and Quemoy and Matsu, where Nixon was tougher. There wasn’t this dramatic difference, the way there was in the 1940s, with those candidates. We felt that either one of these would be a good man and a good president. It was a new generation, and Jack Kennedy wasn’t a flaming liberal in our judgment. He was no Adlai Stevenson. We were glad to see Stevenson out and Kennedy in. Kennedy was a cold warrior. He was a tough customer. Back in the ’40s, some of his statements about FDR and the loss of China sounded tougher than Richard Nixon.

Nixon had great respect for Kennedy. He had admiration for Kennedy. I don’t believe I ever heard him really be derogatory about Kennedy at all. They had certainly been friends during the ’40s. They had traveled together to debate up in Pennsylvania. Joe Kennedy had given money to Nixon’s campaign. Nixon had liked Jack Kennedy. But whenever you go through a campaign, you can start off liking the fellow, but by the end you’ve got confessional material in your mind about what you think ought to be done to that guy.

We heard these stories about Kennedy when I was in St. Louis, but I would say, “Look, I don’t believe this stuff. This can’t be true.” There was sort of an unwritten rule among journalists in those days that you just didn’t write about those things. But I do believe this: If Jack Kennedy had lived, and had he won the election in 1964—which I think he would have—by ’66 and ’67, with all the assaults on the establishment and the way journalism changed, an awful lot of that would have come out. It would have been massively destructive to his reputation. John F. Kennedy
is a mythological figure today because of the manner in which he died and the pageantry of his funeral. But if he had lived, there would be no Kennedy myth. There would be no Camelot.

On November 22, 1963, I had just finished writing a major weekend article of two thousand words for the
St. Louis Globe Democrat,
saying, “Goldwater is going to win this nomination; I don’t care what the other folks say.” It was around noon in St. Louis. Then word came over the AP or UPI wire, and there was just a bustle. We all rushed into the room where the only TV sat, right off the newsroom. We sat and watched, and some of the women in the newsroom were crying, openly crying.

It was really appalling. We watched for most of the afternoon, and we sat around and talked. The publisher wrote the editorial on Jack Kennedy’s death. He was very conservative, but it was a good editorial. He put black lines on all the columns on the front page. I went back and took the piece I had written and threw it out. I said, “It’s irrelevant now. This is a new world.” My friend Denny Walsh and I saw the killing of Oswald a couple of days later, and then we watched that funeral.

That period, all of what went on, really made a tremendous impression on the heart and soul of the country and every individual here. You’re never going to forget that. Those are the hours and those are the days that immortalized Jack Kennedy and created the great myth of today.

It was a dramatic change [in America], and I was appalled. It was a horrible thing. But the editorial editor—he was an old fellow, Hamilton Thornton—he said, “You know, this has happened, but Johnson’s liable to be a better president.”

But I was just taken by it, as I think young people were at that time. Kennedy had just changed the whole world. I was part of the Goldwater movement, and that suffered a crippling blow the day Jack Kennedy was shot because of the blame or the association that this
was Dallas, the right-wing atmosphere, and all the rest of it. It took a lot of the fun and joy and joie de vivre out of politics.

The Kennedy assassination is a marker of a period. The Eisenhower and Kennedy era should be put together as almost an era of good feeling after the Truman-McCarthy period and before the Johnson-Nixon period, and the death of Jack Kennedy was an exclamation point at the end of that time period. While Johnson had great successes from his presidency all the way through 1974, Richard Nixon’s resignation from office really was a time of turmoil, hatred, and division in America; it poisoned our politics for a long time—and Jack Kennedy is on the far side of that. He’s back in the good old days, if you will, and what followed was quite an incredible period and very rough.