Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (41 page)

November 22, 1963, I wasn’t feeling well. I was lying down; it was in the morning. The phone rang, and it was my husband, Alan Livingston, from Capitol Records. He said, “Nancy, are you watching TV?”

I said, “No, of course not.”

He said, “Turn it on; the president has been shot. I’m coming home. We’re closing the company.”

Within two seconds, the phone rang again. It was the school, the John Thomas Dye School, where I had Jenny and Liza, and they said, “We are closing; come and get your children.” I had a carpool with Judy Balaban, who was then married to Tony Franciosa, and she said, “You’re not feeling well; don’t worry about it, Nancy. I will pick up the children.”

Then we began to chat a little bit. We were both in absolute shock, grief, disbelief, and it hadn’t been announced who shot him or that that he was even dead yet. He was on his way to the hospital, and I started ranting and raving with her and said, “Those miserable, conservative, Southern, right-wing—” I went on and on and on, and she said, “Nancy, it may not be any of those people. For instance, there’s that young man in New Orleans—he’s got three names. It’s something, something, Osborn, Os-something.” I said, “Whoever it is, please, dear God, get him.” We hung up. Within half an hour, they were at a theater ambushing a young man they were after, Lee Harvey Oswald.

To this day, it gives me shockwaves to try and understand how she knew. First of all, she’s the smartest woman I know, and she reads everything, the
New York Times
. Both of us, we talk about what we read in the
New York Times
. She said there was a page printed at that time, just before the editorial page, that talked about news roundups from around the country and had a picture of Lee Harvey Oswald on the street corner in New Orleans. There was a story about him leaving the Marines, that he had gone to Russia, and he’d come back, and he lived in Dallas. So she said, “It could be anybody. It could be someone like that.” Can you imagine?

I have a feeling about his legacy. He was president for such a short time, a thousand days. When the Russians sent
Sputnik
up into the
heavens, he very resourcefully and creatively thought of something. I saw him on television, and he said to me and the world, “We are going to the Moon.” It’s like a fairy tale: We’re going to go to the Moon, and dance, walk, and look back at our world—and he actually put in motion the funding for NASA. He meant it. It happened, and there has been an explosion of science that has revolutionized the world ever since; it hasn’t stopped. When I think of him, I bless him for that. I’m very grateful that he was president. We learned something from him. We learned something from that family, the magic of that family, the beauty. It was a remarkable period to remember.

My first husband, Alan Jay Lerner, wrote
Camelot
. After the president’s assassination, Jackie was interviewed by William Manchester among others and she said, “I kept thinking about
Camelot
.” I thought she of all people understood the poetry not only of
Camelot
but of her life. She had a kind of literary wisdom. She was extremely well read. She had an appreciation of things that were beautiful. She was an interesting person. She had the instincts of a great movie star.

Rose Styron

In 1963 Rose Styron was a thirty-five-year-old poet, journalist, and human rights activist married to Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist William Styron. She had first met Kennedy years earlier when he campaigned on her college campus, but the president and first lady invited the Styrons into their inner circle after the literary couple attended an April 1962 White House dinner honoring Nobel Prize winners. Rose was a founding member of Amnesty International USA and has since served on the board of many nonprofit organizations, including Human Rights Watch, Equality Now, and the Project on Justice. She is also an overseer for New York University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Council of Foreign Relations.

W
hen I first met John Kennedy, he was running for Congress. It wasn’t his first time, but he came and talked to those of us who were in the Wellesley center, the little political group. Of course we thought he was incredibly attractive. He looked you directly in the eye and seemed to be listening just to you and to be really interested in what you were saying. The magnetism was right there in the eyes. We liked everything he said, and we were rooting for him for reelection.

When my husband, Bill, and I went to the White House for the Nobel Prize dinner, it was exceedingly glamorous, and I, as a poet, was very excited to be there because he was the first president who had ever asked a poet, Robert Frost, to be at his inauguration. I remember Frost with his hair blowing on that very windy day, trying to read this wonderful poem. Robert Frost was at the dinner, so as a poet I was particularly impressed. On the other hand, there were all Nobel Prize winners, and there was Linus Pauling, who had been out picketing the White House
that morning. He went back, put on his tux, came to the White House, and got up and danced to the Marine Band, which I don’t think anybody had done before. All of it was quite amazing.

We knew some of the other people there. There were a couple of our neighbors, like Frederick March. Bill kept saying, “Why are we invited? Jimmy Baldwin and I are the only young writers.” Then he said, “I bet I know. The son of a bitch is after my wife.” Which was, of course, not true at all. That was a sea change for the White House, to have those kinds of evenings: Pablo Casals playing at the White House, making it welcome for artists and Nobel Prize winners. That was the night the president made that wonderful remark about how there was more talent and intellect in the room than there had been possibly since Thomas Jefferson dined alone. He got a big cheer from all of us at dinner for that. He made everybody incredibly comfortable, and so did Jackie. You felt you were with a couple of friends, even if you weren’t friends, because they were so gracious and down to earth and brought you up to their level.

At the end of that evening, as we were about to leave, we were invited back—quite to our amazement—to the private quarters. It was very impressive being up there with Arthur Schlesinger, Pierre Salinger, and other Kennedys, waiting for the president to come in. Bill, who had been quite sick and was on heavy antibiotics, of course had had all the wonderful wine and champagne that was served that evening and sat down happily in the presidential rocking chair. When the president came in, someone nudged Bill to get up, which he did, greeted the president, and sat back down. The president very graciously nodded, sat on the couch with Robert Frost, and began to talk with him.

The president was particularly interested in what Bill was writing. He had just begun
The Confessions of Nat Turner
at that point, which Jimmy
Baldwin pushed him to write in the first person, I think. That was when Jimmy was with us, and they had long evenings together by the fire. Jack Kennedy really wanted to know more about it. He himself may not have been a profound reader of novels, but he read poetry. Jackie of course read everything. She was really literary and cared tremendously for all the arts, but Jack did too, and he had a very wide-ranging mind, a variety of interests, and a tremendous appreciation for the need of arts support in our culture. It was music, literature, dance, movies, all of it. He really saw the United States as a place in which life could be enhanced by free-wheeling artists.

After we’d been to the White House, we were lucky to go out on the presidential yacht with him from Hyannis to Martha’s Vineyard or around Martha’s Vineyard. They talked about what Bill was writing. The very last time we saw President Kennedy, which was in New York, he said to Bill, “How’s the book going? Where are you now?” and “Do you think you might want to come down to Washington and give me advice on who to talk to about what’s going on in the South, and about the racial problems we’re having there, which we’re really trying hard to solve?” He was killed a week or two later, so that conversation didn’t get finished.

I was in the chair at the dentist’s office in Woodbury, Connecticut, when I heard the news. The dentist had a little spray of water that he was putting in my mouth. We heard on the radio that Jack Kennedy had been killed, and the water went all the way down my throat. I went home to Bill; we turned on the television, and I don’t think we turned it off for a week. We sat and watched, and watched, and watched, and then Bill’s father came up from Virginia, and we watched the funeral together. We all sat and cried, as everybody in the nation did. We were all so stunned and so grieving. Bill said, “I guess we’ll never see the likes of him again.” We were very
down. We couldn’t imagine what would happen. Then President Johnson was anointed, and we still couldn’t imagine what would happen.

The assassination of John F. Kennedy triggered a series of events that changed the country. He had laid the groundwork for remarkable things. Of course he was hemmed in by the need for anti-Communism, for safety in the United States. But while he was securing that, which he did admirably in the very short time he was there, he was determined to open up America to the voices of intellectuals, environmentalists, and people who had something to say that would make America better. Johnson came in and tried to follow out those policies, and Clinton came in and enhanced those policies tremendously, so I think he had a great influence on us.

I became much closer to Jackie than I certainly had been to Jack Kennedy. We saw each other socially, but we never talked about her life with Jack. I saw quite a lot of her on Martha’s Vineyard and sometimes in New York. She came up to visit us the summer after her husband was killed, bringing Caroline and John-John with her, and stayed at our house. We had a couple of very funny incidents that happened, but Jackie really had to keep an eye on everything: on her husband’s legacy, on her children, on her life to come. She had quite a difficult time deciding, in both the family ways and her own personal life, travels, romance, and so forth. She kept it all going in an amazing way. She was a remarkable mother to those children.

She remained very close to Bobby and to Teddy and, I assumed, the sisters. I knew Teddy better than I knew any of the rest of them, and I knew Jean—those were the two I knew the best. But Teddy was very close to Jackie, and so was Bobby, so she had those two as anchors. But there
were so many Kennedys that by the time she moved to Martha’s Vineyard, she kept them at a bit of a distance, except on Labor Day, when the entire crew of all generations, from everywhere, came up to her beach. That was probably the most glorious day of the year on Martha’s Vineyard, when we were all there with her. She was fun and gracious and invited us all. It was quite informal. Caroline and my daughter, Alexandra, became very close friends.

The last summer before Jackie died, the end of the summer in Martha’s Vineyard, she said, “Let’s go sit on the beach.” We did, and she said, “I really want you to write a book about all your human rights adventures. I think it’s important to do that.”

I said, “I would like to write about all the extraordinary people I’ve met and things they said to me or they accomplished.”

She said, “But you have to put yourself into the book.”

I said, “I don’t know how to do that. I don’t want to do that.”

She said, “You have to, to make it a successful book.” She gave me some outlining stuff, and she said, “You think about this over the winter, and we’ll talk, and then we’ll meet here when I come in the spring. I hope you’ll say yes.”

I thought about it over the winter, and I decided I would do it with her. But she died before we got to meet again, so that book was never done. She was a really good editor and had a good eye for stories. I don’t know how I would have done that, but I trusted her and would have loved to have worked with her.

We were all young and private together; some of us got to meet the rest of the impressive people in the world who were quite extraordinary, and that produced a lucky life for me. John Kennedy ranks pretty high among those people. I was in human rights for a long time, as well as poetry. The Archbishop Tutus came in from a different angle, and the poets came in from a different angle, and I admired all the human rights activists and survivors in other countries under tyranny that I visited on
missions for Amnesty. But Jack Kennedy just stayed as a pure, fine figure for me. He once said: “When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.” That stuck with me.

I’ve been fascinated by all the things I’ve read since. I knew a great many people who were very close to him, so some of the things I knew before, but I read things in Chris Matthews’s new book,
Jack Kennedy,
which I hadn’t known at all, especially about his youth and about what was going on in his mind, the conflicts and decisions he always had to make. It only enhanced and deepened my feeling for him as a person. I hadn’t realized, until I read this book, how much he had suffered medically and physically as a kid and as a very young man. I knew what he had done in the war, and
Profiles of Courage,
and what he had done after he was a public figure, but I hadn’t known some of the private stuff. It deepened my respect for him.

I’m not a myth-maker, but the results of the myth-making are quite real in that we have a National Endowment for the Arts and the Humanities, which was in his speech at Amherst when Robert Frost died. He gave a wonderful memorial up there and talked about the importance of artists, of writers of all kinds, and those words for the nation inspired whatever arts and culture came after he died, which Johnson and others promoted. In my memory, he lives both for his foreign policy and his national policy and for his caring about the arts. We thought he was a very fine man, and it was exciting to have him for a president. It was exciting to have him and Jackie and Camelot, not for the glamour but for the promise. Fifty years on, what lingers is the feeling of hope for all of us, for artists, for civil rights activists, for political campaigners, which we all were. It was a time of incredible hope and promise for the future; I don’t think we ever had that again.