Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (25 page)

The last time we saw him was at the Mayors Conference in June ’63 in Hawaii. My mom and dad, my brother John, and I went out to that. My dad may have been president of the Mayors Conference that year. They had a big hall for him to come in and speak, and my brother John and I were standing on the aisle. Kennedy came down the aisle, and there was a lot less security back then, but there was still a lot of security. But as Kennedy was coming down the aisle, shaking hands with people, we were
trying to get to him like everybody else. He shook hands with us; he looked and went about two feet and then turned around and said, “What are you guys doing here? Where’s your father?” We said, “He’s up on the stage.” All these people are looking at us like,
What the heck did he stop and talk to them for?

Kennedy went up and gave his speech. My father had a tendency, as an Irishman, I guess, to get really red if he was out in the sun. He looked like a lobster. So on the way back out of the place, Kennedy came over and said, “Jeez, your dad’s really sunburned. Take care of him. Have a good time in Hawaii,” or something like that. But John and I were looking, and the people around us were like,
Who the heck are these two guys?

I was a sophomore in high school, and they announced on the PA system that he had been shot. We were in English class, and then they announced that he had passed away. We went to Latin class, and then they ended the day for everyone. We all left early in the afternoon. I got on the bus, and no one was talking. Women were crying as we went home. My brother and I were taking the bus home, and there was just a hush. When people did talk, they talked in hushed tones; there were women crying, and you could just see the stunned look on everyone’s faces.

We lived in a very ethnic, Catholic neighborhood. Obviously all the churches opened up that evening, had some sort of prayer service. There was just an enormous pall over the city that I don’t think I’ve ever experienced. It was probably somewhat similar to 9/11. That night, Friday night, my dad came home for dinner, and that was only the second time in my life I ever saw him cry: when his father died and that night. I think my father was of the sense that things were possibly spinning out of control. How could this happen? With all the other social changes going on,
there was great fear that there was something—an undercurrent—here that was going to be very bad for the country.

We saw ourselves vulnerable as a nation to things that were foreign to us. At the time of the Cold War, the racial changes, the social changes in the country, Kennedy was making changes and represented a new way of doing things. But with his assassination, there began to be a real concern: Were these new ways going to spin out of control? Were we going to change things fundamentally and lose control in a disorganized way and not with a game plan?

Then you went into the mid-’60s, the war and the disturbances throughout many cities in America and the rest of the world, and then you stumbled into ’68 and all hell broke loose—a president chased out of office, Bobby Kennedy assassinated, Martin Luther King, the Democratic Convention, the Russians invade Czechoslovakia—and nobody does anything, you know? You have the riots in Paris and the youth riots, and the whole world seemed to be spinning out of control that year.

My father was—in the sense that this person he had put so much hope in, and again this Irish Catholic thing—really strong. For someone with my father’s background, who fought to come up into politics and government and leadership and to have the chance to work with an Irish Catholic president—someone he was close to, had known for quite a few years, and had known the father for many years because they had substantial investments in Chicago—it really affected him. You could just feel it. You could see it. He acted that way for a while, for quite a while, and that transferred in many ways to Bobby and then to Ted Kennedy even many years later. He stayed very close to them and with many of the people who were close to the Kennedys.

Swanee Hunt

A daughter of Texas oil tycoon H. L. Hunt, Swanee Hunt was thirteen years old in 1963. Her father was a right-wing firebrand on the radio, and after the assassination, some believed that ultraconservatives in Dallas, including H. L. Hunt, may have played a role in JFK’s death. More recently, Swanee Hunt founded the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, and President Clinton appointed her as his ambassador to
Austria
. She is also the Eleanor Roosevelt lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy School.

D
ad was sixty-one when I was born, so he was in his late seventies as I was developing my own voice. It was actually my mother who—when she found out that Mark, the boy I wanted to marry, had voted for Hubert Humphrey—opposed our marriage adamantly, even though he was training to be a Southern Baptist minister. She opposed it and opposed it, but then when it became inevitable, she decided, “I’m going to get onboard. How do I tell your father?” She went into the library and told him. Mark and I were waiting, and then we went in, and he was very pleased. He said, “I think you ought to start having babies right away.” He was thinking more about legacy than he was about what my points of view were.

My first memory of John Kennedy was when my dad was in the paper and the headline was “Hunt Backs Jack.” It was so extraordinary because my father wasn’t just an ardent anti-Communist; he was really a voice for the rightest of the right. But he felt very disillusioned when Jack Kennedy came to be president; he figured that the Communists at Harvard had ruined him. Dad was a huge admirer of Joe Kennedy, so he was quite disappointed in Joe’s son Jack—but he just couldn’t stand Nixon.

Swanee Hunt with her father, H. L.

Dad wasn’t vitriolic, but he was very convinced that the Communists had infiltrated our country. It’s so interesting when we think about those times. The Soviets had instilled a reign of terror in Eastern Europe. Let’s not forget that when Khrushchev was banging his shoes saying, “We will bury you,” that was real. But dad had
Lifeline,
a series of radio stations with his program that he sponsored, and they were advocating things like getting out of the United Nations because it was Communist controlled—actually all the universities were Communist controlled. I went to SMU, ten minutes from the house, even though it was “Communist controlled.” I really wanted to go to Radcliffe, but because it was run by Communists, I couldn’t. And you know what? Fifteen years ago, when I went to Harvard to teach, Radcliffe asked me to come and speak there. I told them that story, that I really wanted to come to Radcliffe and my father wouldn’t let me because it was run by Communists. Someone in the back of the room yelled out, “We were,” so maybe there was more to it.

I didn’t share his views, but we didn’t argue with him—it was sort of a very old-style patriarchy. I’d say our family tree looked like a weeping willow. Of all of Dad’s kids, and there were fourteen living, I believe I was the youngest to pull out of that point of view. I was a child of the ’60s. I was born in 1950, so as I was shaping my own view of myself and also of society, Gloria Steinem was out there leading the women’s movement; there was the civil rights movement, the anti–Vietnam War movement. I was really influenced by those in a way that my older brothers and sisters weren’t.

Regarding the climate in the city, I went to an all-girls school that had an unusual number of what we would call liberal students because
they were from the Jewish community. And yet I remember being on the playground playing tetherball, and we were chanting, “We’ll have a World War III. We elected Kennedy.” If you want to understand the culture, one of the good places to do that is on a playground, because the kids are soaking it up from their families at home.

I found out from John Kenneth Galbraith, who’s now deceased but was a friend, that Dad called Galbraith and said, “Why don’t we have a radio program, and you and I will represent different points of view.” I think that’s fascinating. My father had no formal education. He left home when he was about eleven, jumped on a railroad car, and laid railroad tracks. He planted eucalyptus, was a short-order cook, a lumberjack. He was born in 1889, so he was of the era of what we call self-made men, that American phenomenon. It actually did exist.

Everything about our upbringing was uncomfortable except for the First Baptist Church. I’m not now an evangelical fundamentalist, but at First Baptist Church you had the strong evangelical Christians, fundamentalists who were really reacting against the social gospel, which was saying we need to care about civil rights and things like that. They said, “No, it’s your relationship to the Lord, to Jesus.” Well, that was at a crossroads with political conservatism, the far right, and out of that came the religious right. It happened at First Baptist Church. I was there. First Baptist Church had two pastors in ninety-six years. My father was representing the political piece, and my mother, God bless her, was representing the religious piece, and it was happening at the church. We were at the church eighteen hours a week.

I was drawn into politics because it was political conversations every night. I would ask questions like, “Who is Alger Hiss?” and Dad was furious when I asked that. He said, “You don’t know who Alger Hiss is. That shows you’re being influenced by Communist dupes.” You couldn’t really ask a question even about a person I thought would show that I was engaged. But no, we didn’t have that ominous feeling about Kennedy in my in my circle.

The week that Kennedy was coming to Dallas, there was a great sense of expectation—it was exciting that he was coming, and I wasn’t afraid in any way. Everyone in the country knows where they were, what the room
looked like, what the sounds in the air were when they got the news of the death. I was in a science class, and it came on over the loudspeaker at the school. I was thirteen. The teacher’s face became ashen. I remember getting a beaker from the lab and getting some water to take to her, and then all of a sudden the principal knocked on the door and asked me to come out of the room. My sister Helen, who’s a year older, was already in the hallway, and we were whisked off in a police car, an unmarked police car as I recall, and taken to the home not of friends in our inner circle at the church but of the next town. We were told never to tell anyone where we were. We didn’t see our parents for weeks. My sister, who was in the university, was taken in by a professor. My brother stayed close to the frat house because of death threats against my family. That wasn’t the first time we had had death threats. I remember being on an airplane. The plane landed, and everyone was asked to keep their seats, and then my family was taken off by security people, sort of guarded so that we wouldn’t be shot by a sniper. That was part of our life.

My father disappeared, and my mother disappeared. We found out later that they had put on some sunglasses and essentially gotten the hell out of Dodge. They went incognito out of Dallas and were gone for quite a while, but we didn’t have contact with them. We didn’t know what was going on. I never had a one-on-one conversation with him about what happened—we never had conversations. I don’t remember Dad ever asking, “How was your day?” We saw each other every day; at six o’clock we were to be at the table because
Lifeline
was going to start, and the radio was on the table. After we heard the fifteen-minute show,
he changed the dial and heard another fifteen-minute show. That was our thirty minutes at the table. But he adored Helen and me and my brother and other sister, and he had us sing for company every night. We always had company, five nights out of seven, and Helen and I would sing anti-Communist ditties: “Put on your thinking cap, and see the big booby trap and the mistaken bait for you and me, and if we don’t awaken we will all be taken, and we’ll never more be free,” instead of “Put on Your Old Grey Bonnet.” It was pretty far out there.

Those radio programs were very popular in the rural South. We have our comparables now, but it wasn’t mean; it wasn’t a Rush Limbaugh name-calling. He didn’t want to say “Communist” on the air, so it was “the mistaken enemies of freedom.” I think that “mistaken” is a very respectful word to use as I look back on it. It’s just that they were behind every door and under every rug.

My father’s name continued to pop up, however, when there were conspiracy theories. It was pretty hard. Not long ago, in 2006, I was in doing some work at an inner-city school in Boston, where I live, and saw a chart the kids had made about the Kennedy assassination. How amazing is that? They showed the different theories, and there was H. L. Hunt. Like, whoa! Even now, there’s that thought. But those ideas really didn’t go anywhere; people have studied them, looked so carefully. I don’t let it haunt me.

At the end of his life, Dad was still very concerned about the country, but he had passed that on. I was one of what he called “the youth freedom speakers,” so there was a sense of his passing on the baton to people like me. He thought I would still be making speeches about the Communists
and Cuba and how they’re so close to our shores and that sort of thing. But you know what Dad was able to accomplish? He passed his zeal on to me, my two sisters, my brother, and others. He had a vision that he was going to save the country from the Communists. Can you imagine that kind of vision? I have a vision too. I’m working on how to double the number of women in Congress. I’m working on how to stop sex trafficking around the world. I’m working on how to stop war by elevating women’s voices. That comes from Dad. It comes from Mom and her religious commitment.

When I was living in Heidelberg, in my twenties, I went to a movie with friends. It was on an Army base actually. We watched whatever movie was coming through. It was called
Executive Action
. We were half an hour into it, and I realized it was about the assassination of Kennedy, and they’re talking about my father as having bankrolled this and that. I think they even called him “Harold”; my dad’s name was Haroldson. Those kinds of moments probably happened five or six times, and they were gut-wrenching. But I’ve talked to people who’ve looked so carefully at this, and I am convinced that it is part of that whole conspiracy attraction, the seduction.

I heard about the Oswald letter to my father on the radio. No one told me that it was coming. It made big news where I was living in Heidelberg. Actually it was written to “Mr. Hunt.” People who’ve looked at it very carefully over several years have discovered that it was actually intended for E. Howard Hunt, who was involved in the whole Watergate mess. It was also a forgery by the KGB. It was never even really for Mr. Hunt [or my father].