That Friday
November 22, 2019
JFK in Dealey Plaza moments before he was shot on Nov. 22, 1963
ALAN writes:
This essay began as a reminiscence I wrote for my 8th-grade classmates.
There was grey overcast with light rain in St. Louis on that Friday in November 1963. My classmates and I were seated in our classroom on the second floor of the “new” St. Anthony of Padua school building, just down the street from Behrmann’s Tavern. It was early afternoon when our teacher, Sister Rita Bernard, told us something we never imagined we would hear.
At that same time, my mother was shopping at the Sears-Roebuck department store, less than a mile away. She was on the second floor when she saw people walking over to the area where television sets were on display. So she followed them to find out why so many people were congregating there. That is how she learned that President Kennedy had been shot.
Those who fawned over the Kennedy Family and those who demonized them left me equally unimpressed. Had I been old enough in those years to understand such things, I would have opposed certain ideas and policies promoted by the Kennedy administration. But that does not alter the horror of that weekend or its effect on American life. Regardless of one’s estimate of John Kennedy, his family, or his administration, a political murder had been committed, in response to which the federal government staged a pretend “investigation” and the “independent, watchdog press” revealed an astounding degree of incuriosity.
My mother drove to our school to pick me up after classes ended that afternoon because we had intended to go to the parish’s annual Fall Festival in the high school building auditorium. I remember sitting in the passenger seat of our 1961 white Ford Falcon as we drove along Compton Avenue and turned right on Meramec Street. We walked into the auditorium and among the booths but did not stay there long because what otherwise would have been a festive occasion had now been altered beyond anything we could have imagined when we awoke that morning.
Throughout that evening and that weekend, my mother and my grandfather and I watched television news reports about the events in Dallas. One night I fell asleep with menacing visions of a “sniper’s nest” in the corner of a warehouse building, scenes of which doubtless I had seen and heard described on television a few hours earlier.
Memory is very selective and highly unreliable. In 1965, my mother and I took a trip to Washington and visited the White House and Arlington Cemetery. Yet today I have no concrete memory of being there. On the other hand, I can remember sitting on the floor in our living room on Dewey Avenue in the summer of 1963 and listening to the long-playing record album “The First Family” while my mother and a friend were talking in the kitchen.
In June 1963, we visited my railroad uncle and his wife at their home in the old railroad town of Denison, Texas. One day they took us to Dallas. And yet today I have no concrete memory of that ride to Dallas or why it was that we went there.
In the aftermath of that weekend in November, my mother purchased the book The Torch is Passed, likely by mail order from the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, and then, in 1964, a copy of the Warren Commission Report from the Government Printing Office. I remember sitting there at home in the years 1964-’66, paging through that thick volume and trying to glean some sense from that mass of words. Did they express the truth about that murder?, I wondered. I did not know and could not tell. How was I to determine? What means were available to me by which to evaluate that question?
The murder of John Kennedy took place right smack in the middle of two of the best years in our lives, amid yellow days of happy adventures with newfound friends and serene evenings of card games and leisurely walks in our neighborhood.
I don’t recall that there was ever a lot of conversation in our home about the events of that weekend. The impression I recall is that the older folks in my extended family were not especially inclined to give the matter a great deal of thought, and generally accepted the official verdict about the events in Dallas.
But I do remember talking about those events at great length with my father in 1966-’67. He, too, accepted the official findings. But I had my doubts. The official truth was not persuasive enough to inspire my confidence. It may have been official, but I was not at all confident it was the truth.
A decade later, on a night in November 1975, I sat in the first row of chairs in the Sesquicentennial Room on the St. Louis University campus with hundreds of people who had come there that evening to hear former New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison talk about his investigation and assessment of the murder of President Kennedy. He spoke and answered questions for two hours. Afterward, when I had left the building and was waiting at Grand and Lindell for a southbound Grand Avenue bus to take me home, I could hear Jim Garrison’s booming voice from down the block as he said “Thank you so much” to certain people who had come there to hear him speak. Judging by St. Louis “newspapers” the day after, readers would scarcely have known even that Mr. Garrison was in St. Louis the night before, let alone that he had spoken at length about the most significant political murder in our lifetime.
And even that evening has now become part of the distant past. The black-bordered photograph of John Kennedy on the cover of Life magazine, the unforgettable memory of Caroline Kennedy when she was a little girl and rode her pony Macaroni on the White House grounds, the multi-hour debates on television in 1966-’68 involving men like Mark Lane and Harold Weisberg and Louis Nizer and Jim Bishop, the night in early 1968 when I sat there listening as Johnny Carson spoke with Jim Garrison on “The Tonight Show”…..all those things are now as distant from us today as the murder of Lincoln would have been to our grandparents in 1915.
And yet who of our age could ever forget that weekend in 1963?
It is hard for me to look today at those crystal-clear photographs of Caroline Kennedy with her pony. It is hard because those photographs conjure an entire constellation of memories of how it was to be alive in 1962, of a time and place where many examples of decency could still be seen in public life, of a world now lost: Of how young and still-in-love-with-life we were that year; of the simple childhood joy that we knew that little girl felt with her pony because we were not that far apart from her in age; of hearing portions of presidential press conferences on the olive-green radio in our kitchen in 1961-’63; of the night in 1962 when CBS reporter Charles Collingwood and Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy led television viewers on a tour of the White House; of the heroism of Project Mercury astronauts, who appeared often in photographs with President Kennedy; of the confidence and optimism that were palpable in American life in the early 1960s; and of the feeling of uplift in songs we heard on radio, like Bobby Vinton’s “Roses Are Red”, Linda Scott’s “Never in a Million Years”, Robin Ward’s “Wonderful Summer”, Jimmy Dean’s “P.T. 109”, Ned Miller’s “From a Jack to a King”, Paul and Paula’s “Hey, Paula”, Ruby and The Romantics’ “Our Day Will Come”, The Chiffons’ “One Fine Day”, and Nat Cole’s “That Sunday, That Summer”.
People who were not even born then like to claim the reality in those years was not as bright and shiny as we thought it was at our young age. They are wrong. There was a certain elevating tone and texture to everyday life in 1961-’63 that Americans in later years would agree to surrender and cannot be seen at all in today’s hyper-casual, ill-mannered, profanity-soaked, dumbed down culture.
Lawrence Auster wrote about what he called “The Breakdown of Western Form” as an example of the degeneracy in American life today. He was right. But substantial portions of that form still existed in the early 1960s. Opposition to degeneracy was still firmly in place in many sectors of American life. The USA was still essentially one culture in those years. Most Americans still understood and endeavored to uphold longstanding rules and standards. Here is one example:
I have long thought that photographs and films taken that day in Dealey Plaza are of historic and cultural interest for a reason quite apart from the horror of that crime.
Look at photographs of office workers—men and women who worked in the Texas School Book Depository Building—and other citizens standing and walking about in Dealey Plaza in the moments before and after the presidential motorcade moved past them. Observe the way they dressed—and then compare that with the slobby, shabby, careless manner of dress that we see today in any public or semi-public setting, and ask yourself: Who are the grown-ups and who are the perpetual adolescents?
Yes, a presidential visit to their city was an extraordinary event in their lives, but otherwise it was an ordinary workday for most of them. They dressed and acted that day the way they dressed and acted on other workdays—i.e., in a manner of dress that upheld hierarchy, a manner of dress by which they understood themselves to be grown-up and worthy of grown-up responsibilities, a manner of dress by which they showed they had no intention to remain perpetual children or adolescents.
No women in those photographs have tattoos or are dressed in tee-shirts, blue jeans, ball caps, or tennis shoes. They are wearing dresses, feminine hats, dress shoes, and attractive, feminine hairstyles, not looking as if they had just completed a course in Advanced Slobbishness, as many do today. No men or women are lugging backpacks, as many do today. No men are carrying shoulder-strap purses or wearing earrings, ponytails, or excessively long hair, as many boy-men do today. They are wearing white shirt, tie, suit, serious hats, and dress shoes—not tee-shirts, blue jeans, ball caps, or tennis shoes.
Those photographs show how grown men and women dressed and therefore acted in a big American city at a time just before a cultural revolution would alter their understanding of the connection between those things.
Standards of Western Form were also upheld in popular music, entertainment, and comedy, although those things would come under increasing assault after 1965. The comedy in the enormously-popular LP album “The First Family” was as restrained and self-effacing as the comedy of Jack Benny on television and the comedy of Allan Sherman in his LP records. In none of them was there a trace of resentment, anger, or vulgarity. In none of them was there any similarity to the filth that passes for “comedy” today and that Americans are now stupid enough to think represents talent.
Form was also upheld in many other examples. I distinctly remember the orderliness in President Kennedy’s press conferences, in which reporters did not bark or shout. Nor in those years was the tempo of life as unreasonable as it is today, because Americans’ lives were not saturated with round-the-clock entertainment and propaganda.
On the morning of Sunday, November 24, 1963, we were not among those who watched a murder take place on live television. The oral polio vaccine was being offered to city residents that Sunday at various locations in St. Louis. My mother and I and a friend of ours drove to Cleveland High School—four blocks from our apartment on Dewey Avenue—late that morning and were standing in line there to receive that vaccine when, unknown and unimaginable to us, Jack Ruby walked into the frame on millions of television screens across the nation and shot Lee Oswald in as professional and effective a job of silencing as any group of master planners could have hoped for. And I thought the sob story Mr. Ruby offered afterward to illuminate the reasons for his act of murder was just darling, even though he was not nominated for an Academy Award for fine acting.
As I sit here writing these words in November 2019, another memory occurs to me of hearing St. Louis radio personality Jack Carney talk about the Dallas case and his interview with Jim Garrison on some of his morning programs on KMOX Radio in early 1975. And now a third of a century has gone by even since Jack Carney was alive.
On his all-night program in the 1970s, KMOX’s legendary announcer and World War II veteran John McCormick occasionally talked about the murder of the president. I could take him seriously because he spoke sensibly and there was nothing trendy about him or his conversation. He was the same age as my father. Conspiracy-mongering was the last thing in the world that would have appealed to that quiet, conservative radio announcer. But he did not buy the Washington Party Line regarding the murder of President Kennedy. He was a skeptic regarding the Warren Commission’s claim that Lee Oswald shot President Kennedy and did so alone. I, too, was a skeptic. He doubted the story of the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle allegedly used by Oswald to shoot the president. On May 6, 1975, he said:
There are many of us who believe the Warren Commission report to be the greatest whitewash that was ever brought along. …..many, many of us, for very good reasons, don’t believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Whether there was a conspiracy or not, I’m not concerned with right now. But to do it with that beat-up, Italian carbine – oh, no.
[I know his exact words because I tape-recorded his remarks and these words are transcribed from my audio cassette.]
Over a span of many years, I spent hundreds of hours reading and thinking about the events of that weekend in November 1963. I read the books and listened to all the arguments and counter-arguments. In 1966-’67, I found sober articles on that matter in magazines I purchased for 35 cents at a nearby drugstore. My mother and I talked about it as late as the mid-1990s when she was 75 years old but still could not be confident about what to believe regarding the murder of the president. I was never confident about it.
On the contrary, I had learned by then that the most brazen lies are often asserted and repeated in plain sight, a circumstance made more likely, not less, by the so-called mass communications industry and an extraordinary degree of credulity on the part of many Americans.
In 2013, I wrote a 51-page essay expressing my views on the murder of the president and its official non-investigations. I did not know then (and do not know today) the truth about that crime and I will die without knowing it. I do not know who shot the president or why, and I loathe speculation.
Having seen the expansion of Big Government and Mommy Government, and having seen the increasing power of the mass communications industry and knowing that it is also and at the same time a mass indoctrination industry, and having seen the lies, fallacies, distortions, misrepresentations, and fairy tales that both industries promote regarding matters that ordinary men and women have understood clearly for centuries, and having seen how agreeably the “independent, watchdog press” will echo the Washington Party Line to advance a common goal…..having seen all of that over the span of my life, I have no difficulty imagining that the “official truth” about the murder of the president includes all those things as well as many exquisite examples of the art of selective omission. Nor is it hard for me to imagine that Lee Oswald told the truth when he denied shooting anybody.
At a high-tone party in 1933, a man heard certain influential people talking about a revolution-in-the-works to overturn the American way of life and convert America into a Communist nation. A year later, the partygoers who made those remarks denied making them. They lied, congressmen who claimed to be “investigating” the matter failed to expose their lies, and the “independent, watchdog press” fell in line by echoing those lies and laughing at that man, the only one among them who told the truth. [Details in Diana West’s 2013 book American Betrayal, pp. 1-6, and also in J.R. Nyquist’s essay “A Brief History of the Deep State, Part One”, here: A Website for Patriots Who Think J.R. Nyquist. ]
Thirty years later, the identical tactics of evasion, omission, and denial were at play in the official pretend-investigations of the murder of the president. The difference was that by 1964, the wonderful new gadget called television enabled both the central government and its lapdog press to promote lies, fallacies, and misrepresentations more slickly than they could in 1934. Conspiracies existed in 1933 and 1963, but there was no investigation of those conspiracies. Instead, there were well-crafted propaganda and salesmanship.
I could take Jim Garrison seriously because he had the moral courage to call a fraud a fraud. I am confident he was following a productive path in his investigation. But even he failed to consider one group of possible architects of the assassination: The same group who attacked the USS Liberty in 1967 and called it an “accident”, and who engineered the murder of James Forrestal in 1949 and called it a “suicide”.
All these years later, it occurs to me that the murder of the president provided a pretext for those two powerful industries to do what they do best: Entertain and distract. The official non-investigations, the dissenters, the video “documentaries”, one after another and each one worse than the next, and the endless debates…..nearly all of it was Theater.
The murder of the president and its official non-investigation had the effect of undermining Americans’ confidence in themselves and their government. Doubtless that was one of the purposes of those who engineered those things.
A team of experienced homicide investigators and detectives — not bound by the self-serving constraints imposed by federal agencies or beholden to the mass communications industry — could have solved the murders of John Kennedy, Officer Tippit, and Lee Oswald. But that was not what Americans got. They got Theater instead. That they had permitted their government and their mass communications industry to become so powerful in the first place was probably a guarantee that they would get Theater instead of accountability and the truth.
