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Volume CXXXIII, Number 11 |
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Beyond the Pines: The Day JFK died
LUDWIG VAN RANG
CONTRIBUTOR
As it happened, my time in the Army more or less coincided
with the Kennedy years. However, I used to be a great fan, as some of
you may remember from last year's series, of Adlai Stevenson, the Democrat
who twice ran for President against, and twice lost to Dwight D. Eisenhower.
So I wasn't all that enthusiastic about the Junior Senator from Massachusetts
getting the Democratic nomination for President in 1960.
Jack Kennedy wasn't a true liberal, I thought. Besides,
I didn't much care for his Boston twang, though of course, like everyone,
else was impressed by his youthful good looks, and even more so by those
of his glamorous young wife.
By the time Kennedy had secured the nomination at the Democratic
Party Convention in Los Angeles in July, 1960, I was already with the
Army in Germany. Most of my buddies were for Kennedy, and even without
TV we followed the campaign closely on AFN (the Armed Forces Network)
or by reading The Stars & Stripes, the Army paper. In addition, I
read the New York Times. Kennedy was attracting large crowds it said.
When his motorcade passed, teenage girls in back of the crowd could be
seen jumping up and down to get a better view of him, an entirely new
and astonishing phenomenon staid 'Auntie' Times called it. Most polls
had Kennedy ahead of the Vice-President, if by a narrow margin.
In the end, it was a cliff-hanger, with the majority of
the popular vote much closer than in the Bush-Gore contest, and the state
on which everything rode was Illinois. Though sitting up all night listening
to the results as they came in on our fifties radio set at Rose Barracks
in Bad Kreuznach, we still didn't know whether or not Kennedy had won
by the time we were called out for reveille next morning. Illinois wasn't
officially called for Kennedy until 1 p.m. Central European Time the next
day. Though having considered asking for a recount in a number of wards
in Chicago, controlled by the Daly machine, Nixon finally conceded. It
seemed an anti-climax.
Nevertheless, as the realization sank in that a man who
looked and acted like an overgrown college kid was the new President,
euphoria belatedly gripped us and the rest of the world. Young businessmen
in Japan were said to have broken out the champagne. A new era had dawned,
everyone felt, soon to be dubbed "Camelot."
When Kennedy came to Germany in summer of 1963, less than
six months before his death, Helga and I went to Frankfurt to see him.
There was such a crowd, with teenagers bobbing up and down like yo-yos,
that we didn't get a "look in," as the English say.
At my parents' in Bonn a few days later, I had a better
chance. I saw Kennedy slowly driving past in an open limousine, standing
up and holding on to a handrail like his host, Chancellor Adenauer, an
octogenarian with the leathery features and wily look of an Indian Chief.
Kennedy, by contrast, just back from a state visit to Mexico, where, just
as everywhere, he was cheered by hundreds of thousands lining the streets
of his motorcade, looked like a bronzed movie star, with his frozen grin
making him look like his waxwork image at Madam Toussaud's. Standing at
the edge of the curb, I could have reached out and touched him.
A couple of days later, JFK addressed a huge throng outside
West Berlin's town hall, famously declaring, Ich bin ein Berliner. He
had been coached how to say this by Willy Brandt, then Mayor of Berlin
and later Chancellor, on the flight from Bonn to Berlin. It was a message
meant for those on the other side of the Berlin Wall still threatening
the viability of the beleagured "outpost of freedom." It was
the modern equivalent a free Roman proudly saying, civitus Romanum
sum. Everybody got the message.
Already with an eye on a second term, and in order to mend
political fences back home (where in some quarters they loved him less
it seemed than abroad) the President in November, 1963 went on his fatal
trip to Dallas, Texas. On Thursday, the 22nd, I was back home in Bonn,
after staying with my St. Tropez friends Redvers and Bradley at their
chic apartment in Paris. On the following Monday, I was to fly to San
Francisco to rejoin old Nellie (of Christmas Cove, Maine) at Carmel, California,
but without Helga. Instead I had my black beetle shipped to the West Coast,
at Nellie's expense.
About 7 that evening, my brother phoned to say we should
turn the radio on, President Kennedy had been shot and seriously wounded
at Dallas. We did, but half an hour later everything was over. Camelot
had lasted less than a thousand days. The shock was profound. I cried,
I'm not ashamed to say.
The right-wing media have since of course done their best
to discredit JFK's image. Even his fans were shocked to hear of his promiscuity.
An English journalist, reviewing a new biography of Jackie Kennedy for
the liberal Observer, accuses Kennedy of "indiscriminate priapism."
Don't bother to look the word up in the dictionary, it means "persistent
erection." I wrote the man a letter pointing out that this was a
phenomenon all too familiar to men between the ages of 15 and 50, and
in some cases beyond. Needless to say he hasn't replied.
Three days after Dallas, I returned to the States, a country in deep shock.