Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (43 page)

We canceled the concert immediately and made arrangements to get out of town. But I remember not really feeling the impact of it until about a week later. It’s like when you lose a parent, and you get through the funeral OK, but then a week later when you want to call them to tell them something and they’re not there—that’s what it was to realize that we had lost one of the great presidents of our time. That was amazing.

YARROW: We had done a concert the preceding night in Houston, and we were scheduled the next day to do a concert in Dallas, which we canceled. That doesn’t really matter, but for me, I’ve wiped out the memory of the moment when I heard. All I remember was saying, “I’m getting out of here.” I was so traumatized by it that I rented a car and started driving. I wanted to get out of there. As I drove, I began to be able to breathe again—because it was unthinkable. We adored JFK; we didn’t just admire him. He was more than a president, however esteemed and honored the term “president” might be. He was somebody who gave us hope, direction. He had a heart that we felt was embracing us all, and we loved him; we didn’t just admire him. Years later, people said, “You can’t personalize the relationship and deify a president. You have to look at them as guys or gals with a job.” But at the time, we didn’t have that kind of perspective.

There had been other moments when I’ve felt that I really love somebody who is in office, Gene McCarthy being one of those people, and with a
lot of people to one degree or another—but not like this. JFK was in people’s hearts, their own flesh and blood. He was America personified, and to lose him was unthinkable. It wasn’t something that you could grasp. It took a long time to accept that it had occurred and to process it in any way that we could even start to grieve because, as far as I was concerned, I was scared, I was panicked, and I wanted to get the hell out of there—and I did. It took a long time to begin to process this loss.

STOOKEY: If I was reading this as a mystery novel and I got to the part where Jack Ruby shot Oswald, I’d say, “You’ve solved that one; you’ve solved the assassination,” because I don’t think Ruby acted out of a pure motive of revenge to avenge the death of the president. That’s the key. The Warren Commission did what they had to do—but they did it probably with tainted and/or limited resources. There’s more there that we don’t know about.

YARROW: For me, as much as we needed to get a handle on how this happened, at this point whether it was the Mafia or whether it was something completely out of the blue that was internal to the political system—which I totally cannot imagine and won’t subscribe to—what’s important isn’t unraveling that secret. The only thing that would make that important is if we found that there was a further danger to the United States and the things we believe in that we need to eliminate, so for that, but not in terms of letting John Fitzgerald Kennedy rest in peace. God bless him; he did extraordinary things for all of us in this country. What he initiated, not just in terms of a heart space but also in terms of the pieces he put in place, like the Peace Corps, those have changed America in ways that still allow us to see ourselves as inherently committed to doing the right thing, to helping other people, whether it’s our own or all over the world. That remains immutable. That’s part of our memory of it, and that sustains. That gift is part of all Americans who somehow inherit that legacy.

STOOKEY: The impact of Kennedy’s assassination, added to that of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, created a wall that shut out all the sunlight that had been coming in. To the extent that I was a progressive liberal, and aware now of the good that some political and community work could do, the obvious message to me, written on this wall
created by these three assassinations, was: “Don’t do it. People who care get shot at.” I didn’t feel that so much in the music, but, boy, within a year’s time, it seemed like music stopped talking about those things we shared as a community and started saying, “Dance. Just get out and dance. Life is frivolous; it has no meaning, no purpose. Get out and dance. Dance, dance, dance.” For the next ten years of our lives, with the exception of “Abraham, Martin, and John,” I didn’t hear any music that was deeply convicting or moving.

YARROW: Life separated itself more and more frequently. To those who, for whatever reason, say, “No matter what, we carry on,” there were a lot of people who were exhausted by these losses; there were a lot of people who felt consequently disaffected from the process. They felt mangled by the sense of disappointment, as if all those people who are aspiring to good are living in great jeopardy. “They will not survive.” This was the way it was going to be.

There was another impulse that came to me from the years prior to the trio, that I actually wrote about in a song at a later time, when I asked myself, “Is what we’ve been doing really consequential, or is this all something we’ve made up? Are we accomplishing anything, and did we get anywhere?” So I wrote these lines:

You remember when you felt each person mattered

and that we all had to care or all was lost,

but now you see believers turn to cynics,

and you wonder: Was the struggle worth the cost?

And then you see someone too young to know the difference

and the veil of isolation in their eyes,

and inside you know you’ve got to leave them something

or the hope for something better slowly dies.

So carry on, my sweet survivor, carry on, my lonely friend.

Don’t give up the dream; don’t you let it end.

Carry on, my sweet survivor. You’ve carried it so long

so it may come again.

Carry on.

STOOKEY: If it was at all like my personal experience, the country went through an incredible period of denial, where for the first couple of hours they hoped that it was not true. For the next several weeks, they hoped that whoever did it could be punished. For the next several months, they kept their hopes alive by reading
National Enquirer
or pulp magazines that appeared next to the checkout lanes that said Kennedy was alive, living on some island in Cuba or off Cuba or in the Bahamas or in long-distance grainy telephoto shots where people looked like the Invisible Man, wrapped in gauze. There was just a spiral of stupidity that was kept alive by the press for a long time until finally it disappeared, and what we were left with was, “Okay, where do we go from here?” It’s amazing that Richard Nixon got elected president. Is that what we came to? In a sense, though, he was the representation: “We’ll take a firm wall, and no one’s going to get past it, and that’s what I’m standing for, and that’s why I’m going to be your next president.”

YARROW: The legacy of it also was that it made people not trust other people and institutions, that now we don’t trust the government, we don’t trust the CIA to be telling us the truth. We don’t trust the information we’re getting. We basically have to see every issuance of a piece of information from the news media or from the government itself with skepticism. In a sense, that was a loss of innocence and a coming of age, because we needed to be more rigorous in our evaluation of the information and the ideas that were offered by magazines and newspapers, where we now know that a lot of that stuff was made up to sell. But it also served us in good stead when people questioned the validity of the Vietnam War, which we now know was based on a whole cloth of lies, where what was reported was success and what was happening was the decimation of the Vietnamese people, of
our own young men, to no end, because, as Robert McNamara specifically told the president, it was not winnable. Part of the legacy made us healthily more careful about what we bought into and believed.

STOOKEY: It’s a thin line between skepticism and cynicism.

YARROW: Some people wandered back and forth, and they felt,
I don’t know what I’m doing in these vineyards, working in them
. But it was very important for us to step back and reassess that part of the mythology of America as a fountain of wisdom and truth that didn’t have to be examined, to see if that was verifiably the case.

STOOKEY: There is a certain strength in vulnerability insofar as it reveals a process that other people can have access to: “Oh, yeah, you’re making a mistake,” or “You’ve made a mistake—I can do that, I can learn from your mistake.” Something as abrupt as an assassination carries with it the realization that you can terminate a life, but you cannot stop an ideal that is of its time.

When you live your life for an ideal, it is the ideal that is communicated. A young person looks at this streaming past them, and they don’t think in terms of their own death or their own mortality, but they are looking farther down the road at those ideas and those values worth holding onto. Insofar as Kennedy’s legacy suggests a transparency that has been inherited by the Obama presidency, that it suggests a youthful
ardor that is available to all of us and a dedication to a broader, longer term principle, that is a great gift that Kennedy left us.

YARROW: Framed in my terms, I would say to young people: Do not give up even though it seems as if you are surrounded by enormous challenges that are insuperable. We have seen extraordinary things happen in this country, many of them emerging from the ethos and heart of the Kennedy administration and what the person John Fitzgerald Kennedy was. We have seen extraordinary change in this country. Where people of color walked the streets in fear and couldn’t vote, and [now] we have a black president. We have seen women come closer and closer to equal power, position, prestige, and respect in this land. We have seen the people rise up to stop a war that should not have been entered into, that was unethical, that was based on false principles.

The second thing I would say is that we need to continue to believe in and study about these events so that we can harness them in our lives, learn about them, and learn from them, because we have to not recapitulate our mistakes. We have a predisposition in this country to just forget about what we did that was wrong. I don’t think, if we really had the kind of open, heart-to-heart commonality of national examination of what we did in Vietnam, we would have easily gone into Iraq, which was parallel in too many ways.

If you’re a young person watching this or listening to this, hang in there, but also try and fathom what was good and what was faulted historically, and realize we have had huge victories that will need to come again in terms of the struggles of your own time. Do not be afraid to love someone you respect. It will empower you. Do not see them simply as functionaries. See them as an expression of your heart. Embrace them as that, carry them in your heart, and it will empower you as you go forward.

Judy Collins

Starting as a Denver-based piano prodigy before discovering the guitar and the powerful lyrics of music icons Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, Judy Collins in 1963 was a Grammy Award–winning twenty-four-year-old folk singer and Greenwich Village staple, with three acclaimed albums already under her belt and many more to come. As her career blossomed, Collins devoted more time to social activism. These days, in addition to touring, she is also a UNICEF representative.

T
he ’50s altogether were very Hollywood: very big bands, big orchestras, the “moon, June, spoon” music. The politics were pretty rigid in terms of you did “this and this and this”—although in my family we didn’t do “this and this and this” because my father was in the radio business. He spoke openly about the Vietnam War and about McCarthy, but there was the terrible McCarthy scare. Many people were hounded out of their jobs, accused of being Communists, and had their careers tainted.

It was a very conservative time. I had a bob like Dorothy Collins, and I wore a little poodle skirt when I was fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen years old. But suddenly I found folk music, and that sort of cut through all of that for me. When the music began to kind of bubble up, it was 1959, and the “Folk Scare” was happening, and that cut through all these other things that were playing on the radio. Previously you had “Wee Small Hours of the Morning” with Frank Sinatra, “Earth Angel” and “One, Two, Three O’clock, Four O’clock Rock,” and other songs, but then came the folk music, and that began to carry the political changes right along. People were beginning to wake up, because we got into Vietnam early. We had advisors there with the French. Indochina was a problem during those years people didn’t talk about. A lot of people didn’t know about that, but
it was happening, and it was sort of secret, sort of covert, and there was a lot of that going on.

There was a combination of things going on in the run-up to JFK. Kennedy’s father was a patriarch who was the ambassador to England; he wasn’t so terrific politically and had a lot of sympathy for Hitler. He was also a huge, wealthy industrialist. He was a bootlegger, a skirt chaser who had affairs with Gloria Swanson and others. It was a very aristocratic family, but it was an aristocratic family with very high ideals of behavior not on the dad’s part but on the kids’ part. They were certainly raised with a great deal of devotion to the Constitution and devotion to human rights. I think it was already there. I’ve read many indications that they were well-read. They were well educated, and they had service in mind.

Perhaps that paved the way. Perhaps they had suffered from the 1950s in the way a lot of us had—that closed-down state where you don’t tell the secrets. You don’t talk about alcoholism in your family. You don’t talk about the affairs our politicians were having, including Roosevelt. You don’t talk about those things.

Joe Kennedy certainly had aspirations for his children of doing the right thing and also being in power. He wanted to see his family in power in politics. JFK didn’t do much as a senator really. He was sort of like an LBJ when he was in Congress. He just sat through a lot of things, but he was building his idea of what he wanted to do. Kennedy was suffering a lot. He had a lot of pain, and that’s always a good teacher. But he was also, I think, ready for what was happening.

I do think that’s one of those incredible historic moments where so many things come together. They were coming together musically, culturally, and socially in every way. The war was out there by the early ’60s,
and by the time Kennedy was elected it was going strong. The music was beginning to tell the story. In all the little places in Greenwich Village, Chicago, and Los Angeles, there were singers with guitars cutting through with lyrics that had stories, that had a point of view, and that in many cases had a political edge. People like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger were doing all kinds of things, helping to get the news out that there was something else going on, and it was very powerful.

It was very exciting to have this new presence in politics because he was talking about things that had value and had immediacy, and he was closer to our age. He was a young president; he was a young man. He had a young spirit. He had young, youthful ideas. He had ideas that could cut through, at least what we thought was, a lot of the fog of confusion and secrecy.

He was, I thought, doing many of the right things. We were so involved in the marches against the war in Vietnam, against the advisors, because the first death in Vietnam actually was in 1957, perhaps earlier. But he was taking actions, doing the right thing. The terrifying situation with the Cuban Missile Crisis he handled brilliantly. He didn’t take the advice and just open up and fire away, which was what he was advised to do. His advisors were hot on the button to get it done and get it over. But he didn’t do it. He put it off. He made the right decisions by being cautious. Whatever happened between him and Khrushchev resulted in this dialogue in which Khrushchev actually opened up a conversation. They’d opened up a dialogue after the Cuban Missile Crisis passed. That was a huge relief. People were terrified. People were expecting to be bombed out of existence.

He was on the right side of the arts. His wife, Jackie, the first lady, was very involved with bringing the White House into the social and cultural milieu that was happening. She was beautiful. She was intelligent. She spoke eloquently. It was a big showing of all the things we all believed in: art and culture and doing the right thing, treating humanity with dignity, and that everybody has dignity and should be respected.

I had been in the hospital in Colorado with tuberculosis for a number of months, and they let me out. I’d already made my debut in New York, but I was also in a divorce. I got a call from my manager saying, “They’d like you to come to Washington to sing for the president of the United
States.” It was a big dinner at the Shoreham Hotel, an honorary dinner for President Kennedy. He was being honored by B’nai Brith. The people on that show were Josh White, the Clancy Brothers, me, Lynn Gold, Will Holt, and Dolly Jonah. It was incredibly thrilling to sing—and there he was, sitting there, listening to our music. I couldn’t believe it.

Afterward, we all got to meet him, and the charisma was unbelievable. I’d met some stars. I’d met some people in Hollywood. My father was a big star in his own pond of Denver. People were very fond of him. He was very famous, and we as his kids got that; it rubbed off onto us a little bit. But I never met anybody with that kind of allure and power and sparkle, where also you felt that he was on your side and he was going to do what was right for you.

The civil rights movement was still in big trouble. The first big bill to pass in 1957, which LBJ pushed through, was the stepping-stone, I suppose. It wasn’t what everybody wanted. There were still problems that had to be addressed. But I think everybody had the feeling that Kennedy was going to get it done somehow. America of November 21, 1963, was a place filled with optimism.

It was a cold day but not terribly cold. I got a bus to go to LaGuardia Airport to get on a plane to go down to Washington, DC, where I was working at a club called The Shadows. I got on the bus at about the time of the shooting, and the driver said, “Our president has been shot.”

Then we had to drive to LaGuardia, and during that drive I was thinking,
Please, God, don’t let it be somebody who’s black.
That was my first thought, because we were already in trouble. There were some riots going on. We had a lot of problems with the racial division and the racial tension in the country. Then, when I got to the airport, the driver said, “He’s gone.” It wasn’t very long—an hour, maybe. I continued my flight to Washington and went to see my friends Beverly and Lee Silberstein, who had an art gallery in Georgetown, and we sort of buttoned ourselves up around the television set and watched this drama unfold of the murder of Kennedy and the murder of Oswald by Jack Ruby in that police station. It was unbelievable.

By the night of November 22, we were crushed. It was over; we were done. This exciting, young, optimistic activist in a lot of ways—imaginative, artistic, articulate, stirring in his speeches, eloquent in his discussion, with an ability to move around in the world, help us not to be blown to pieces, and help us find our way—was gone. The feeling was devastation really. The Shadows and The Cellar Door in Washington, DC, were where I was going to sing—in the days immediately after the assassination, all performances, all shows, all joy it seemed were canceled. Everything stopped. It was like the world came to an end.

We didn’t know there was a communication between Khrushchev and Kennedy, which had become quite extensive and had been initiated by Khrushchev. We who were marching against the war in Vietnam didn’t know that Kennedy had proposed bringing one thousand troops home at the end of 1963. We didn’t know that. Christmas was the date, and they were coming home. We didn’t know that he’d proposed a civil rights bill—I think we might’ve known that it had been on the table. We didn’t know that his nuclear disarmament agreement had been agreed between him and Khrushchev. We didn’t know that. We didn’t know those things. We were still devastated, but we didn’t even know all the seeds of what he had been planting, what he was going to do.

Then Lyndon Johnson has become president in this bizarre scene on Air Force One, where Bobby is feeding him the lines for the words he has to say when he’s declared president, and he’s gathered Jackie into the picture, who’s still dressed in her bloody dress. These were the images we were seeing. He’s taking the oath of the president of the United States. We didn’t know what we know about Lyndon Johnson today. We certainly didn’t know that history in depth, and we would soon know, before the ninety days were over and the State of the Union was given, that he was not going to adhere to the withdrawal of troops, that he was going to conduct a build-up of troops in Vietnam, that he was going to get President Kennedy’s Civil Rights Bill done—which he did and which
was genius. We soon knew that Lyndon Johnson had his foot on the pedal along with his generals and his bloodhound associates in his cabinet, that he was going to go forward in Vietnam with a will to win and that he was going to follow through with President Kennedy’s Civil Rights Bill.

He’d had all the experience in the Senate before, where he learned how to manipulate them in the most extraordinary way, which few people, if any, have ever been able to repeat in my lifetime, and he did force it through. That was the first real breath of hope and hallelujah that came out following the assassination, because we finally had a civil rights act passed. In that year, in 1964, the Mississippi summer is going on, and I and a lot of people I knew were going to Mississippi to help register voters, so it was a year of momentous change and tremendous activism on the part of many people.

There was a whole bursting of the bubble with the death of President Kennedy, and it was that now all our illusions were really gone. We didn’t have illusions anymore. We now had the reality of the war, which was going on and on and on, and which most people I knew were marching against and speaking out against. The music was so diverse. It started to become just bubbling with contrast. That kind of eclecticism that was going on with Elektra Records was happening all over the country, as it was happening all over the world. The English rock scene was coming on. The Doors, the Beatles were coming through. We could dance to them. We could listen to them.