Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (23 page)

I don’t believe the conspiracy theories. I tend to believe the Warren Commission. I believe Oswald fired the three shots. He had already attempted to kill General Walker. He was a Castro-ite. He was a radical. He’d been over in the Soviet Union. There was all the talk about the grassy knoll, but I never really believed it, and I don’t think there is as much belief on the conservative side, or even on what you might call the radical right side, in the conspiracy against President Kennedy. I was not as conversant with that as some of the theories you heard on the other side . . . because why would they do it? All the talk later on about the New Orleans crowd down there and all that, I’d leave that to Kevin Costner. I discredit it. I’ve seen the movies, I’ve seen all the material, and I believe Oswald acted alone.

On Vietnam, what concerned us was what happened to President Diem; it was impossible or difficult for some of us to believe this could
have taken place without the complicity of the government of the United States. Jack Kennedy himself had talked about “personnel changes,” and we heard reports that when Kennedy got word that not only was Diem overthrown but that he’d been murdered along with his brother in that armored personnel carrier, he got up, ashen-faced, and left the room.

If Jack Kennedy had not died the way he did, if he had lived, if there had been no assassination, he would have gone through the same hell that Lyndon Johnson did—maybe worse. George Wallace had announced for the Democratic nomination several days before Kennedy died, and Kennedy would have been on the ballot in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Maryland, where Wallace did extraordinarily well. Without Lyndon Johnson in office, Wallace would have torn Kennedy up badly. We would have still gotten the nomination for Barry Goldwater. Goldwater would have been beaten by Kennedy, probably by ten points rather than twenty, but Jack Kennedy would have continued down the road into Vietnam, which was a very popular war in 1963 right on through 1964. His political end might have been as bad as Lyndon Johnson’s, if not worse.

Kennedy was a good president. The Cuban Missile Crisis was handled correctly—even if he did give away the Thor and Jupiter missiles in Turkey and Italy and even if he did agree not to invade Cuba—because we really were there on the threshold of a possible mistake that could have led to nuclear war and the destruction of an awful lot of what we all love. That was handled statesmanlike, and he deserves permanent credit for that.

But do I think he’s a great president? No, I don’t think he’s one of the greats. If you look at his domestic achievements, Lyndon Johnson’s far exceed what he did. Kennedy got the Trade Expansion Act. He wasn’t a strong president legislatively. He didn’t get any civil rights bill. What Kennedy is famous for is that he has become an enormously inspirational figure in history for young people, for generation after generation. But again, that’s got to do with the way the man died. Richard Nixon felt that he was always held to a more severe and harsh standard than the establishment ever held Jack Kennedy or Bobby Kennedy to, and I think he was right in that. I do think there was a measure of real resentment at how he was treated compared to what others got away with.

Frank Gannon

A twenty-year-old student at Georgetown University in 1963, Frank Gannon regularly played piano for President Kennedy. In the early seventies he worked as an intern to Donald Rumsfeld in the Nixon White House. With then-girlfriend Diane Sawyer, he helped organize Nixon’s memoir,
RN,
and later became a conservative fundraiser in New York. In 1982 Gannon began segment-producing
The David Letterman Show
and videotaping interviews with Nixon, some of which proved too frank for public consumption. Gannon now runs the New Nixon website and the Richard Nixon Foundation blog.

I
was a senior at Georgetown. For the last couple of years, I had worked my way through school by bartending and playing piano at 1789 in Georgetown. I had been discovered as a piano player earlier that year by Red Fay, the undersecretary of the Navy, who had had been President Kennedy’s roommate at OCS at naval training. They were great friends. When Red became the undersecretary to the Navy he started giving parties aboard the secretary of the Navy’s yacht, the
Sequoia
. I was playing in 1789 one night, and as I walked out to thunderous applause, he tugged my coat and asked, “Do you play for private parties?”

I said, “I haven’t, but I would. Why not?” That was a Friday night, and on Sunday night I was aboard the
Sequoia
playing for the president of the United States. It was incredible for any number of reasons. First of all, I was young, and suddenly you’re with a president and the whole panoply of it. We would board the
Sequoia
at the navy yard and then steam across the Anacostia to the air naval station. One of the most vivid memories I have is of him arriving. This was a new level of busy, a scary level of busy that I’d never seen—he’s in the back of the limo with a desk, and he’s signing things and reading things as they come up. Then he’s piped aboard.

The concept of the pressure he was under was another impression I had—the intensity, almost in some cases near hysteria, of the people on the boat to relax him, to make sure he had a good time. It was quite an experience for a young college student.

I’m guessing that I played for him between a dozen and twenty times. I became briefly fashionable, because all the people who were on the boat then hired me to play on land for their private parties. The money I earned from that allowed me to go to graduate school in England. Looking back, I see he was working the room. I was part of the room, and he worked me to a tee. It’s become a cliché that when a politician talks to you, he or she makes you feel that you’re the only person in the room. That’s how I felt. He would come over. His briefers had told him I was president of the student body, so he asked me about my campaign and what the issues were. He would always come over at the beginning. He would come over and ask, “How are you?” and “How are things at school?” And before he left he would come over and say, “Thank you.” That was the extent of our relationship.

I was the only piano player, so if it was going to be on a weekend night, they would call in advance so I could ask the owner if I could take off. Early that week, that week of November 20, I got a call from Red’s office saying the president was coming back from Texas. If he wasn’t too tired, they were going to have a party that night; the
Sequoia
was going go into dry dock, and the next window of opportunity would be April. Every expectation was that it would be a go.

When I finished my noon class and walked down the street, there was a car stopped in the middle of the street, a white Buick convertible with the top down—it was a fairly mild day—and a growing number of students, to which I was added, listening to the radio turned up. That was the first news that the president had been shot. Then I went into a bar
with a television set above the bar and listened. Twenty minutes later it was announced that he had died. It was impossible to believe. I was thinking that I was going to be playing for him that night, and then two nights later I was on the forty-block line at the Capitol, waiting to walk past his coffin. It was unimaginable.

Before Billy Joel coined the phrase, I was a piano man, and one of the things a piano man does for his tip jar is have songs that you play for people. Just as I believe that graphologists can tell you a little bit about somebody from their handwriting, I think a pianologist can also tell you something about people by their songs. I had a song for everybody, and the president’s song, contrary to conventional wisdom, was not from
Camelot
. It was from the Pulitzer Prize–winning show
How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying
. It was the song “I Believe in You.” I can see that. Robert Kennedy’s song was from
Camelot,
“If Ever I Would Leave You,” which is a more brooding, melancholy, thoughtful song. Mrs. Kennedy’s song—I only met her in April 1964, after the assassination, on the
Sequoia
. I asked Red if she’d like a song. He came back about forty minutes later and said, “She does have a song. She wants to know if you can play ‘Me and My Shadow.’”

It was a perfect storm in a perfect sense. At the time there was an exponential rise of [household] television sets, and by 1960, 90 percent of American homes had at least one television set. How perfect that, when the medium was in place to bring politics, to bring the first family into every American home, you had the most telegenic first family imaginable in history—and not just the president but the kids. I mean, everybody knew. Even if you weren’t a Kennedy supporter, a Democrat, or a liberal, you knew John-John; you knew Caroline. It was an invigorating, inspiring time. You’d have to be either very cold or very unimaginative not to have been touched by that.

I helped Nixon on the research, organizing the research, and writing the memoirs, so it was a very interesting relationship. There’s a wonderful handwritten letter in the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda that Kennedy sent to Nixon when Nixon was nominated to be vice president in ’52. In it
he says, “I always knew you’d go far, but I didn’t think you’d go quite this far this fast.” They had been friends when they were bookends on the House Education and Labor Committee in 1947 because they were the two youngest members. The Kennedys—Jacqueline and John—invited the Nixons to their wedding. As president of the Senate, Nixon did a number of things that were greatly appreciated by the Kennedys, and they wrote numbers of letters to express that appreciation when Senator Kennedy was sick and had back problems. Nixon extended votes and did things in order to accommodate Kennedy’s problems. They were very cordial, friendly—they were very different people and of different parties—but they had a thing. When Nixon was in Europe in the late ’40s with the Herter Committee, the two Kennedy sisters, Jean and Eunice, were there, and Nixon went touring with them one day. There was this kind of relationship. Joe Kennedy had sent, via Jack Kennedy, a check for one thousand dollars to help Nixon in his House race in 1948.

I think the thing that changed it [their relationship] greatly, that was searing for Nixon, was the ’60 campaign and coming up against the political organization—the money, the intensity, the ferocity was something. It must have been something to be on the receiving end of it.

On November 22 Nixon was [working] at a law firm on Wall Street. He had been in Dallas the night before and had left that morning. He talked about how when he drove out he could see signs—some not friendly—preparing for the president’s arrival coming from Fort Worth that day. He got off the plane at LaGuardia, and they were driving over the Queensboro Bridge. They stopped at a light, and someone rushed out of the shop and said, “The president’s been shot.” The cab went to 810
Fifth Avenue, where Nixon lived, and he went up and called J. Edgar Hoover. As he describes it, he said, “Who, Edgar, who did this?” Edgar says, “It’s a Commonist”—that’s how he pronounced “Communist.” That was how he found out, stopped at a traffic light on the Manhattan side of the Queensboro Bridge.

It’s the most traumatic event for the nation, along with Vietnam, of the latter half of the twentieth century, and I don’t think we’ve actually processed either of them yet. They’re still open and raw and unsettled. It changed everybody. But it certainly changed the world for Nixon.

The Kennedy history is one thing, and historians and others for years are going to uncover, analyze, and deconstruct his record and his personality and his peccadilloes. That’s not necessarily going to be positive, but that’s history.

The Kennedy legacy is going to be the Kennedy mythology. We like to think we’ve grown out of mythology, but obviously it has a very long pedigree where human beings are concerned. The Kennedy mythology is almost archetypical—a young hero and beloved leader felled at the height of his powers and before his time while trying to lead his people to an exciting, challenging, noble new frontier. That’s not necessarily true, but as long as we’re still around, and I think for a very long time, that mythology isn’t going to be changed or challenged. I think that’s a good thing. That’s certainly a powerful legacy for any president to leave.

What I think about is a card that’s still on my wall from JFK’s Navy secretary. A couple of weeks after the assassination, I got this Christmas card from Red Fay, and on the inside he had written: “Frank, you added to his happiness. Red.” So in “the watches of the morning,” when I finally wake up and surface, if I think about those days, that’s what I think about.