Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (16 page)

When you look back on those times, you feel proud of what your country was doing and what it was working toward. Kennedy was there at the conjunction of a lot of different movements. You’ve got the civil rights movement; you’ve got the women’s movement. Those things are moving forward and fundamentally changing people’s lives, and the fact that he was there, even if he didn’t start those movements—he fostered them perhaps, and his being there helped to engender them—it reminds you of
what the country can be like. That’s really special. The other thing I think has lasted for him forever is photography and moving pictures.

Had he lived in the time of Lincoln, where we only would’ve seen him without a smile on his face, with his back stiff in front of a camera, in two dimensions, I’m not sure the hold would have been there. But we have that ever-present young person shot down in the prime of his life—so handsome, so vital, so full of life. Everybody looks back and remembers a time when he or she was young as a result of that.

On top of that you have the family. Had he not had Teddy and Bobby and all the people who have come since, you wonder whether the story might have had an earlier ending, but the family kept going on in public life. Then with the family having the deaths they had; when Bobby dies, you go back and watch JFK’s assassination, and you think about him. It just kept that memory alive for a much longer period of time. Modern technology and the photography, when he was president historically and what the country was going through, and the fact that there was a family so that the chapter didn’t end with his death, I think, makes a difference.

Mike Barnicle

Veteran journalist and commentator Mike Barnicle began his career as a speech writer and aid to prominent political figures, including former California senator John Tunney, vice presidential hopeful Edmund Muskie, and Robert F. Kennedy. Moving into journalism, he wrote for the
Boston Herald, New York Daily News,
and
Boston Globe.
Barnicle’s regular column in the
Globe
ran from 1974 to 1998, and his mid-1970s coverage of school desegregation in Boston helped earn the paper a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. He has won numerous awards and recognition for his work over the years—including honors from the Associated Press, United Press International, and DuPont Columbia—and has appeared frequently on MSNBC’s
Morning Joe, Hardball with Chris Matthews,
and NBC’s
Today Show.
In 1963 he was a twenty-year-old student at Boston University.

I
was in a second-floor apartment that I was sharing with two other guys. We were going to Boston University at 834 Beacon Street in Boston, Massachusetts, right outside Kenmore Square. Like most Americans my age, I can shut my eyes and see everything as if it’s a Moviola replaying itself. I can remember the bulletin on the radio: Three shots had been fired at the presidential motorcade in Dallas, Texas. I remember the bulletin a few minutes later that the president had been taken to Parkland Hospital and then reports that the president had died. I can remember going to the window of the apartment; there was a liquor store beneath. The owner of the liquor store came out into the street with her hands up in the air shrieking, shrieking, “
Someone shot the president!
” Passersby not knowing—there was no instantaneous communication news in those days as there is now—passersby stunned and shocked.

John F. Kennedy was shot on a Friday, and I took the train from Boston to Fitchburg, where my mother lived, that Friday afternoon. It was a train of grief—completely silent. By noontime the next day, Saturday, my mother insisted that someone had to represent the family at the funeral in Washington, DC. I didn’t have a car. I barely had a license. A couple of friends of mine, older friends, were going to drive to Washington to the funeral. We didn’t know anything from anything. We drove to Washington. We stood outside the Capitol for nearly a day, when the casket bearing the president was brought to the rotunda. We felt then that we had attended the wake of the president of the United States, and then we drove ten hours back to Massachusetts. So my mother was happy. She was satisfied that the family had been represented at the funeral. It was an Irish Catholic pilgrimage.

We weren’t alone, my two friends and I. People had come in buses and trains. I likened it to reading about Lincoln’s funeral and Roosevelt’s funeral, where the train came north from Georgia, because to look around the Capitol Mall and outside the Capitol from in front of the Capitol all the way to the Supreme Court: hundreds of thousands of people. They weren’t rich people. They weren’t famous people. They were ordinary people with calluses on their hands who had felt compelled and been drawn to Washington to bury their president.

The Kennedy compound is literally a bookend of so much of our history—the lawn we see here, the house itself, which is a museum to a family that has made a stamp on American history. Senator Ted Kennedy sat on this porch on summer nights, sometimes with me, and talked in a nostalgic and wistful way about the helicopter coming from Otis Air Force Base to land on this lawn carrying the president of the United States, his brother, John F. Kennedy. The children who were around at that time, the Kennedy children, competed with one another on the weekend to see which one was
best in order to take the helicopter ride back to Otis with the president on Sunday night.

All of this was started by Joseph P. Kennedy, who came here as a second-generation Irish American, a Catholic, who prospered and knew what he wanted for his family from a very early time. Only in later years did people like Ted and Robert Kennedy realize the hold, the grip, Ambassador Kennedy had on the family. The love they had for him and the influence he had on them, I think, only became apparent really as they proceeded to the presidency, in the case of John F. Kennedy, and to the Senate in the case of Robert and Edward Kennedy. The impact he had on the family, it’s here today. They were given a path, and they didn’t have to worry about what the rest of us have to worry about. But they worried about other things, they’ll tell you. They had the license and the liberty, freed from having to make money to feed their families that most people have to do. They had the license and the liberty to carve out their own lives, and that’s what Ambassador Kennedy really intended for them to do.

In talking to Ted Kennedy several times about that, part of John F. Kennedy’s appeal, part of his wry, ironic humor, his approach to life itself, was because he knew innately that he was number two in the ambassador’s mind in terms of who would be president, who could be president among his children. Joe Kennedy Jr. died over the English Channel toward the conclusion of World War II, and the mantle passed to Jack Kennedy, and he certainly was carrying the mantle. But he always knew, according to Teddy, that he was number two.

I became aware of them quite early in my life. I was a little kid. My uncle had been killed at Midway, and he received the Distinguished Service Cross, which was the second-highest award granted to those who die in a war. My grandmother thus was a gold star mother. When he was running for reelection to the United States Senate from Massachusetts in 1958, John F. Kennedy visited my grandmother at our home. I can remember then being dazzled by the sight of the United States senator—one, by an Irish Catholic United States senator, and two, by a United States senator and Irish Catholic who had almost attained the nomination for vice president of the United States in 1956.

They came to Hyannis on weekends. Politics was always the meal that was served here, I think, three, four, five times a day with everyone around the table. It was all politics. Fun—but it was always competition with the fun, the touch football games they did out here. There was always a fierce sense of competition that they handed down to everyone amazingly.

John F. Kennedy Jr. had a touch football team here. He gathered neighborhood kids, but he selected which kids in the neighborhood he thought were better than the other kids so that his team could win, so he could beat Robert Kennedy Jr. The competition gene in that family is incredible. As a family, they were all for one and one for all, but within the family the competition could be pretty brutal in terms of how they would go after each other. I don’t mean physically. But no one was spared the cutting humor, the joke, or, if they overstepped their bounds, getting called on.

I don’t think the succeeding generations can sustain the legacy. We think writing now is 140 characters in a tweet. Everybody has a blog. We beep at drive-through windows. We’re such an impatient culture. I don’t think the memory of that family, the legacy of the family, of the presidency, can sustain itself.

So that was the pane of glass I was looking through, and I still think I’m looking through it in a sense when I think of him, when I see him. I still see him in terms of either 1958, coming to visit my grandmother, or in 1962, the presidential motorcade going up Commonwealth Avenue in Boston as he was en route to a Democrat state fundraising committee
dinner on behalf of his brother, Ted, who was running for the Senate in 1962. I still see those things.

One night several years ago, the fog just coming in over Hyannis Port Harbor, Senator Ted Kennedy was sitting on the porch, smoking cigars, having some after-dinner refreshments. I asked him, “Do you ever sit here and look out at the ocean, and when you shut your eyes do you see your brothers?”

He said almost instantaneously, “All the time, all the time. When I’m out on the ocean in my boat, I can see them. I can feel them with me. They’ve always been with me. They’ll always be with me.” The house, the place, those memories, the presidency—quite a thing.

That was the beginning of the rock that began rolling downhill, and that’s one of the largest reasons that it [the assassination] still has such a hold, such a grip on us even before you get to the various conspiracy theories that are out there. The hold that President Kennedy had was on the nation, but more powerfully on our imaginations. It instilled such pride in people, my mother, my father. My father had died shortly after Jack Kennedy was elected president. The pride they felt in having an Irish Catholic in the White House—because they were of an age and of a generation where they could recall and recite various elements of prejudice toward them because they were Irish Catholic, coming to this country from Ireland—the sense of pride it instilled in people, my mother especially . . .

My mother had a picture of John F. Kennedy on the wall with a palm from Palm Sunday. The palm had to have been fifteen to twenty years old before she took it down. But she never got over the pride she had in the fact that John F. Kennedy was president. Nor I think did she ever get over the sadness of losing him. She felt it was a personal loss. I think many Irish Catholics, especially around Boston, felt it as a personal loss. They took that from us. They took him from us.