Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (28 page)

John Kerry

In November 1963 John Kerry was a nineteen-year-old, guitar-playing sophomore at Yale University. After graduation he enlisted in the Navy and requested deployment in Vietnam, where he was awarded three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star, and a Bronze Star. Returning to Massachusetts, he became assistant district attorney, lieutenant governor, and one of the state’s US senators. He ran as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate in 2004 and is serving as President Obama’s second secretary of state.

K
ennedy’s election was enormous. It was a huge transformative moment in my life personally as well as in our generation. It was sort of the breaking out of the 1950s. I remember it as transformative in many different ways. I was in Boston, going down to the dentist from school in New Hampshire, and it just by happenstance turned out to be the last night of the campaign at Boston Garden. I had to go to North Station to get a train back up to Concord, New Hampshire, but I played hooky for a couple of hours and waited for this rally to take place. I took reams of information back from this incredibly exciting event.

I actually wound up speaking before the school the next day, in a pre-scheduled debate with a Republican counterpart, doing a two-minute something before the morning studies. He represented Nixon; I represented Kennedy. It was my first political speech ever, first engagement ever. Of course he [Kennedy] won—he didn’t win at the school, which was overwhelmingly Republican—but it was the beginning of a wonderful journey for all of us about the civil rights movement, the nonproliferation engagement in the world, the Alliance for Progress, the opening up of doors of opportunity for people in the world, and it excited us. It gave
us a great sense of possibility and a lust for being engaged in the life around us in politics.

Did I think [the Kennedys] would define the rest of my political life? No, never had a clue. I graduated from high school in the summer of ’62 and went to work for Teddy that summer, full-time as a volunteer, during the course of which I met President Kennedy, and it was transformative. It became almost natural in the sense that this was what you want to be doing.

This is the noble enterprise, as President Kennedy himself put it, that politics is a worthy undertaking. We all came into it with this tremendous sense of changing the world. It was before the revolution of ’68. It was before Vietnam had a really pronounced impact on all our lives. It was filled with possibility until that dark November day of ’63.

In 1962, while I was working in Boston for Teddy, I’d been told we were going sailing, and I raced to get down to Hyannis in time. I was late. I arrived at a very different summer White House from anything you see today. It was one little security thing at the front gate. I said, “Here’s who I am,” and they said, “Oh, go ahead, drive up.” I drove up and got out in front. There was one guy in front. I walked into the house, and there was a guy silhouetted in the window, standing there alone, nobody else around. He turned around, and was the president of the United States. He walked over to me and said, “Hi.” I said, “Hi,” and, probably inappropriately, I think I said, “Mr. Kennedy.” I didn’t even know you call him “Mr. President” back then.

We talked for a minute. He asked, “What are you doing?”

I said, “I’m in between high school. I’m going off to college.”

He said, “Where you going?”

I said, “Yale,” and I grimaced, knowing he was a Harvard guy.

He looked at me, said, “No, no, that’s great, you know, because I now have a Yale degree.” He’d just gotten his honorary degree. He couldn’t have been nicer about it and talked to me about the campaign and what Teddy was doing. Then we all raced out to go sailing, and it was totally surreal. What was it like? It was: Pinch yourself. “Am I really here? What’s going on?” He disarmed me completely and made it meaningless that I was going to the rival school. He put me at ease and then exhibited all that charm, all that charisma that everybody saw in so many ways so many times.

Regarding his Cold Warrior persona, Vietnam hadn’t risen to a level of awareness where it was a major choice in our lives until after he had been assassinated. It was really Lyndon Johnson who bore the brunt of implementing “Bear any burden, pay any price.” Many of us opposed that at some later point in time, but with President Kennedy what we saw was the hope and possibility, and we saw his stand on civil rights. We saw him send the troops down to break the back of Jim Crow. We saw him with this exciting Justice Department and Bobby Kennedy, the challenge against organized crime, and all these efforts to set the world right. That was still in its most romantic, least impactful in any negative way, stage. I don’t think we saw that. I didn’t feel any confrontation with that at the time. Later, obviously, those words came back to be reexamined in many different ways at many different times, but it certainly wasn’t manifest in his presidency at that point in time.

The day he died is indelible, obviously, for all of us. I was playing in the Harvard-Yale soccer game, and I heard a ripple. I was playing, and I came out, sat down on the bench, and heard this ripple of conversation and concern and audible gasp go through the audience. The word was: “The president has been shot.” We didn’t know what had happened or anything. I remember just being completely disconnected from the game. It was just a shock. I mean everybody felt like, “What are we doing? We’re playing a soccer game, and the president’s just been shot.”

We played out the game, and we learned before the game had ended that he had died. It was sort of a lost period of time. I can’t tell you to this day who won. I don’t know. I’ve never gone back and found out. It was
such a state of shock for everybody that this could happen in America to the president. Notwithstanding that historically we’ve lost too many presidents to assassination. It’s sort of stunning when you go back and look at it.

There was a sense of turning everything upside down, a total sense of the order of things having come apart somehow. I remember being with my roommates; we spent the entire weekend glued to the television. Then of course you watched this next moment of surreality, when Lee Harvey Oswald was killed by Jack Ruby. We were all trying to find some meaning in it. How do you find meaning in something like that? I remember walking around New Haven at two or three o’clock in the morning with a cousin who came down to spend some time with me because he knew I was involved in the politics and involved personally. At that moment I remember saying, “We have to make sense out of this. We, all of us, have to find a way to do something that makes it right.” It was a very strong feeling of a responsibility to lead a life that made a difference somehow.

Regarding possible conspiracies, to this day I have serious doubts that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I certainly have doubts that he was motivated to do that by himself. I’m not sure if anybody else was involved. I don’t go down that road, with respect to the grassy knoll theory and all of that, but I have serious questions about whether they got to the bottom of Lee Harvey Oswald. I think he was inspired somewhere by something, but I can’t pin anything down on that. I’ve never spent a lot of time on it. But I think, after a certain period of time, and that period of time may well have passed, it is totally appropriate for a country like the United States to open up the files on whatever history can be shed light on. I think that is appropriate. It has to be done in the right way, by the right entities or people, but certainly by a valid historian or for some valid analysis; I think that everybody would benefit.

I enlisted back in 1965, not long after Lyndon Johnson’s call for five hundred thousand troops in response to the Gulf of Tonkin episode in 1964. The America of 1965 was just dramatically different from the America of 1968. Even 1966, when I graduated, was a world apart from the universities and campuses of late 1967 and 1968. I think the first draft card was burned and the demonstration against the Pentagon were in 1967. I was in uniform. I volunteered because I thought it was important to volunteer. I thought that’s what you should do. You should serve your country. You should spend some time in the military, and many of my classmates did: my brother-in-law-to-be; some of my best friends; my good friend, Fred Smith, who was in our class and later founded FedEx—they all volunteered. FBI director Bob Mueller, who wasn’t at Yale but at Princeton, volunteered, went into the Marines.

Initially I believed that America needed not to quit on it [Vietnam], not lose. I saw it in fairly traditional terms. I had doubts as I went. I have repeatedly said to people that I had serious questions as I went, which was 1968, because we were hearing from a lot of people coming home. There was a new debate. There were new facts. A lot of people had a better sense of what was happening there. Then of course I went, I learned for myself, and came back very much opposed to what we were doing, believing that it couldn’t work, that it was doomed almost from the beginning, because I had a better sense of what the reality was.

What would President Kennedy have done about Vietnam had he lived? I have no way of ultimately resolving it. But, like everybody who’s followed that question, I do believe he was, himself, having serious doubts about any escalation. Most of the records indicate that after the election he intended to draw down and not get sucked into a larger war. But in the end, we can only speculate.

I didn’t think at the time that Vietnam was Kennedy’s mistake. It was much more the hubris of what went on in the years after that. We learned that the Golf of Tonkin incident wasn’t real, didn’t happen. We learned that we were interpreting things completely wrongly. We were just dead wrong about judgments being made about the Domino Theory, Communism versus civil war. There was just a host of things I learned later—observations of people like Bernard Fall and others of that time
who had been completely ignored and/or distorted in order to fit this war into a compact theory that simply didn’t apply.

A lot of us felt very angry about that as the years went on. Back in 1963, I can’t remember the numbers now, but there weren’t that many people there. By 1968 you had the height, around five hundred thousand, and sixteen thousand died in 1968. Then you had Richard Nixon, who ran on a secret plan for peace that, three years later, was still a secret. That’s where the sense of bitterness and anger and frustration really set in. Back in the early 1960s, there was a kind of simplistic, fairly stereotypical, post–World War II, post-Korea view of the world. By 1968 it was hard to say there was an excuse for that anymore; and by ’72, ’73, and certainly ’75, there was none. Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon understood that, which is why they worked so hard ultimately to get an agreement that drew down and pulled out.