It’s after midnight. So, as we know from the parade of TV specials this week, John F. Kennedy was killed forty years ago tomorrow.
Obviously, I was not alive. It had a profound effect on my parents, especially my mother, the liberal Irish Catholic college freshman. My father went through a (fortunately brief)* Goldwater phase around that time, so I don’t know if it hit him as hard.
Political assassination—and untimely death in general—seems to haunt a lot of Democrats, even those of us who are too young to remember Dallas, Memphis or Los Angeles. (I’d guess Wellstone’s death last year was an unneeded reminder. Even though it was accidental, it was so completely out of nowhere.) Among other Dean volunteers and on the campaign website the subject occasionally comes up, and immediately half a dozen people say they’ve had the same fear; ask the campaign whether those dangerous small planes are really necessary, whether they’ve thought about secret service protection. I’ve had the same fear, for that matter (especially after the gay marriage decision and Dean’s history with the issue–it was bad enough in Vermont, and Ruth Dwyer is no Fred Phelps). Do Republicans and other candidates’ supporters share this worry, or is it our particular neurosis?
I wrote something sort of relevant three or four years ago, though it’s much more about JFK’s younger brother.**
*if it wasn’t brief, I wouldn’t exist.
**warning: long. And you can probably tell from the writing style that I was several years younger when I wrote this.
“My father went through a (fortunately brief)* Goldwater phase around that time, so I don’t know if it hit him as hard.”
“*if it wasn’t brief, I wouldn’t exist.”
Ordinarily, my hackles tend to rise at anything that might be considered a slight to the late Senator Goldwater–who I admire a great deal, his occasional mistakes aside. However, under the circumstances your attitude is reasonable. . .:-)
In his autobiography, Goldwater spoke at length about having looked forward to facing Kennedy in the 1964 election, and of his belief that the two of them would have run a far more issue-based campaign than the one he had against LBJ (whom he loathed as a despicably dishonest individual–though he put Nixon first in that category). Goldwater may have been romanticizing a bit–the Kennedys and their allies were no strangers to bare knuckle politics–but it is definitely an interesting “what if?” scenario.
“Among other Dean volunteers and on the campaign website the subject occasionally comes up, and immediately half a dozen people say they’ve had the same fear; ask the campaign whether those dangerous small planes are really necessary, whether they’ve thought about secret service protection.”
You couldn’t get me into one of those things at gunpoint. Any mode of transportation that combines the gut wrenching fear of not being in control of your own fate with the cold statistical reality of being more likely to get you killed than driving a car is not for me. One would think that two dead senatorial candidates in a two year period (not to mention Senator Heinz and former Senator Tower a few years earlier in separate incidents) would get the message across that this is a stupid way to travel for the frequent flyer.
Rule of thumb: Never fly on any flight that needs to know how much you weigh before you get on.
My parents were and are very conservative Republicans. I was only two so I don’t remember it but my mother has told me how devastating this was. It didn’t matter that they didn’t stand on the same spot on the political spectrum; he was their president. I would hope the same feeling would exist today if, God forbid, such a thing happened again.
“In Memoriam”.
I was talking to my 13 yr old daughter and explained that subsequent presidents (and candidates) had assassinations attempted and generally it was a problem that there are crazy people out there:
Reagan – Hinkley was a nut
Ford – two nuts! and one was a Manson girl!
George Wallace – Bremer was a nut and Really wanted to kill Nixon!
So aside from the Hussein plot to kill Bush I, the assassinations after the 60’s looked very different from the Kennedy/King/Kennedy things.
Or were Oswald/Ray/Sirhan crazy people who may or may not have happened to be paid?