Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (27 page)

I’m not like a lot of other people. I really was for him when he ran in the primaries. I just thought he’d really done a good job; he meant something to the country, and he symbolized the future. It was as if it was snuffed out.

They [Jack and Bobby] seemed young and beautiful and full of life and vigor, and they were killed on the job. I think that had a lot to do with it. I was older when Bobby Kennedy was killed, and I also got to meet him once. He came to Georgetown and gave a speech at a deal I was sponsoring. I really was crushed; I thought he had the capacity to change the country.

Jackie had this curious combination of youth, beauty, and style. She really had a very pronounced diction, but she seemed like somebody you’d like to be with. Later in her life, after I became president and even when I was running, Hillary and I became friends with her. For reasons I never fully understood, she supported me in the primary in 1992, and she came to one of my early events in New York. One of my prized pictures is sitting with her at dinner in the summertime in Martha’s Vineyard. I just loved her, and Hillary really was close to her.

In a way they symbolized our growing up, our aspirations. For my whole generation, the first time we looked at politics, there they were, and we liked what we saw. In her case, because I really got to know her, the more I knew her, the more I liked her.

I did [think about the parallels]. I think historically the time I served was more like the time that Theodore Roosevelt served, but psychologically it was the same thing [as the Kennedy era], with the generational
change. You were assuming all these responsibilities, and you knew people would have questions about how you handled the security issues—probably more for me than for him, although he faced them too.

I always tried to find people who had different experiences than I did, who had different skills and different knowledge. I thought about that a lot. There’s a huge danger in Washington, both within the White House and within the larger community, of groupthink. You’ve got to fight it all the time. The very first week I was in office, I told all the young people who were working for me that they should never come into the Oval Office and tell me what they thought I wanted to hear—otherwise I could run the place with a computer.

It’s important not to minimize the fact that the Kennedy team’s economic policy worked; that they built important things like the Peace Corps and the Alliance for Progress; that they and he did a good job handling the Cuban Missile Crisis. They were smart, and they did a lot of things well, but they were a little too prone to groupthink. They sometimes didn’t know what they didn’t know.

I’ll remember how I felt when I was arguing for his election when I was fourteen. I’ll remember how I felt when I met him the Rose Garden when I was almost seventeen. And I’ll remember how I felt when he was killed. I will remember how well I thought President Johnson did when he took over, and I’ll remember how badly I wanted Bobby Kennedy to be elected in ’68 and how sick I was when he was killed. It was a rough decade. Things seemed to be coming apart. In some ways—socially, economically, and otherwise—it prefigured the kinds of unraveling we’ve had over the last forty years as we moved into a very different world. We now know of course that there were ambiguities, conflicts, concerns. It’s never perfect when anybody’s president, but I’ll be grateful that he served. I think he did a lot of good.

Joseph Biden

In 1963 Joseph Biden was a twenty-one-year-old political science major at the University of Delaware. He served on the Delaware County Council before becoming a US senator in 1972. Reelected to the Senate six times, he served as chairman of the
Foreign Relations Committee
and the
Senate Judiciary Committee
. Barack Obama selected Biden as his vice presidential running mate in the
2008 presidential election
. Biden is the first Roman Catholic and the first Delawarean to serve as vice president.

I
was a senior in high school when John Kennedy was elected. To me it was all about possibilities. He always talked about everything, but you had a sense that there was nothing beyond our capacity. From his inaugural speech to the speech about the moon shot, it was all about possibilities. That’s what sticks with me most about his legacy. His legacy is that that’s what we are as a nation. We’re a nation that attracts people because of the possibilities that exist. I was a Catholic schoolboy, Irish Catholic, Jean Finnegan’s son, going to an all-boys Catholic school. I had two reactions. The first reaction was: My God, this may be the final validation of us Irish Catholics, that we’re totally accepted.

I know this sounds strange, that Irish Catholics in the ’60s would think somehow they were second class, but that’s how it was. There was that sense of exclusion from certain areas of social and public life. But there was the other piece. The other piece was that I couldn’t picture him at our kitchen table. I mean, John Kennedy was almost princely and very wealthy. That was different than the Irish Catholic neighborhood I grew up in. I lived in a neighborhood where I was one of only three Catholic families—a development, seventy-nine new homes built—and there was a
real division about President Kennedy. But there was this great sense of pride about it. I had a professor named Dan Carroll in what we used to call Problems of Democracy, POD. I remember him talking about how consequential West Virginia was and what this meant for the American democracy, that finally there was this mixed sense of overwhelming pride. But it wasn’t the kind of connection I had with Robert Kennedy as a collegiate law student. I could picture Robert Kennedy at my table, but I could never picture John Kennedy.

My sons, my daughter, and my granddaughter talk about it like this guy was so overwhelmingly popular. We barely, barely won. There were allegations, all the usual stuff. But today when they talk about it, my Lord, everybody loved John Kennedy. But the interesting thing was, after his assassination there was this sense of the country coming together. That didn’t exist in my memory as a junior in college, that it existed when he got elected. There was a change in attitude almost immediately.

Concerning Cuba, if you think of his foreign policy, the Democratic Party at the time was viewed as a robust internationalist party, taking on Communism—the legacy of Truman—and John Kennedy was viewed as being very aggressive and tough on foreign policy. I think the Democratic foreign policy today, after we got over the Vietnam War, is much more internationalist, less what we were when I first got to the US Senate in ’72. There actually are more similarities today, and my guess is that he’d have a different attitude about Cuba. But Cuba was then part of a bipolar world, and the question was: Was it essentially a pawn of the Soviet Union? Was it a staging place, et cetera?

What resonates is that he was calm, collected, absolutely resolute. Having gone through war personally, I think he had more confidence in
both assessing and challenging military judgments. So I think there was a sense of calm and resoluteness. I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, sitting in what we called the student lounge and scrounge, the television on with fifty other people watching black and white, and John Kennedy coming on and explaining what the situation was. I remember the sense of real concern but also confidence. He communicated: “I’m in charge. I’ve got this handled. I’m OK. We’re OK. But here’s what it is.” He was like the doctor who came in and said, “You have cancer, but I think we can take care of this. I’ve done this before. I know”—even though he had never done it before; it was just confidence. He exuded confidence, and it was contagious.

It was a Friday afternoon; I remember it vividly. I was on the steps of Hullihen Hall on the mall at the University of Delaware. It was a warm day; we had just come out of class. As we were walking through the hallways, we heard that the president had been shot. I had a car on campus—I wasn’t supposed to, but I had a car on campus—and three of us we went to my car, got in the car, and turned on the radio. It was disbelief. I remember it was almost like a frozen frame in time. Instead of everybody on campus running and saying, “Did you hear?”—there were these quiet groups of people saying, “Can that be true?” You’d see five students in a corner. It was almost like if you said it out loud, he was going to die. Half an hour later, or almost an hour later, whatever it was, it was, “He’s dead,” and “How can that be? How is that possible in the United States of America?” If it happened today, you’d have great crowds gathering in the street, but then it was private. Whomever you were with, you just pulled aside and said, “Is this real? Is this really happening?”

I do think Bobby reflected the change that took over the country. With him, there was always a greater sense of urgency and the need to deal
with it, whether it was the civil rights movement or the war in Vietnam. I always had the sense that Bobby Kennedy was saying, “This is who I am. This is what I believe. This is worth fighting for. Here I stand.” There was more of a declarative sense of what this nation should be. Everything had changed—not just because John Kennedy was assassinated but because the world was changing rapidly.

When I think of John Kennedy, I still find myself wanting to focus on his heroic sense of this country, his heroic sense of what his obligations were, about being able to absorb pain and suffering and move on—the resilience. My dad used to say, “It’s not about whether you get knocked down but how quickly you get up,” and John Kennedy was just totally resilient. The Kennedys, no matter what hit them, they got back up. They got back up. In that sense, in my mind as a kid, and even as an elected official, they came to represent the resilience of this country. When I think of Kennedy, I think about the notion of possibilities. There’s nothing beyond our capacity. It’s not naiveté; it’s a sense of our capacity.

He’d feel a sense of vindication and surprise that there is an African-American president. I never doubted his desire to integrate African Americans fully into society. But, if I can compare him to his brother, he just thought that it would take a long, long time, that there was a process. I think he would be surprised at the additional complexity of the presidency. It’s a very different world. In many ways there’s a lot more on a president’s plate than there was when he was president. I think he would be disappointed in an institution I think he cared about, Congress,
the Senate. I think he’d wonder how it had gotten to this point, because when he was there, there were still real divisions in the country, like what I got the tail end of in 1972. There was the old segregation, the South, but it [Congress] still functioned. It still was viewed as the most responsible legislative body. I think he’d be surprised how it has lost that standing.