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| Dealey Plaza, looking at the grassy knoll (left) and the former Texas School Book Depository Building (background). |
How long can a city wear sackcloth and ashes for a crime it
didn’t commit?
The memorial at Dealey Plaza was rather low-key, which could
have been expected even without the bone-squeezing wet cold of the day. Some
conspiracy theorists and some citizens protesting police brutality tried to
horn in on the solemnities. It could have been worse, however: it could have turned
into an anti-conservative bashapalooza.
The fact is, a
significant number of people younger than me — depending on where you place the
cutoff, I’m either at the trailing edge of the boomers or in the vanguard of Generation
X — tend to view the youth of the 1960s as supremely narcissistic, and the
annual spasm of grief over the assassination of John F. Kennedy as just one
more symptom of their emotional retardation. And, in all candor, the constantly
reiterated “death of innocence” line is not only tiresome and melodramatic but
inapposite, as cynics aren’t necessarily any more objective than are idealists;
cynicism is merely idealism distorted by despair.
Nevertheless, this cross-generational impatience is too
brutally dismissive. Even with a proper appreciation of Kennedy’s all-too-human
failings as a Catholic, a husband and a politician, there is still no known sin
in his life up to that point that made his death a poetic justice. Even Abraham
Lincoln’s most vociferous opponents were astonished and mortified by his death,
and Lincoln was a far more controversial man who held power during a more
violent, agonized period of our history. By contrast, even given some of the
tensions created by the civil rights movement during the time, nobody could
look objectively at the events of 1963 and say that Kennedy’s assassination was
inevitable. By any reasonable evaluation, it was a tragedy and ought to be
acknowledged as such.
However, in the midst of the ritualized outpouring of
nostalgia and mourning for a popular president gunned down in the prime of his
manhood, there has been some effort to rewrite the history surrounding Dealey
Plaza so progressives can draw parallels between 1963 and 2013 — parallels that
are far-fetched and, quite frankly, inane.
But if the JFK story has resonance in our era, that is not because it triggers the vaguely noble sentiments of affection, loss, and nostalgia that keepers of the Kennedy flame would like to believe. … What defines the Kennedy legacy today is less the fallen president’s short, often admirable life than the particular strain of virulent hatred that helped bring him down. After JFK was killed, that hate went into only temporary hiding. It has been a growth industry ever since and has been flourishing in the Obama years. There are plenty of comparisons to be made between the two men, but the most telling is the vitriol that engulfed both their presidencies.
Rich spends some time trying to nail Kennedy to the cross of
“hatred”, referring us to William Manchester’s The Death of a President, Stephen King’s 11/22/63 and even contemporary editorials in the Dallas Times Herald and the Austin American to convince us that
sectionalist rage somehow manifested itself in Lee Harvey Oswald. Nor is Rich
alone in this effort. In his
speech at Dealey Plaza, current Dallas mayor Mike Rawlings (a Democrat,
natch) intoned, “Our collective hearts were broken. … A new era dawned and
another waned a half century ago when hope and hatred collided right here in
Dallas.” And the
Kansas City Star quoted the Dallas Morning News as saying, “Indeed,
this city had a broad streak of in-your-face right-wing politics born of Cold
War anxieties and sectional resentments. The darker angels of our nature had
stature and voice, so much so that Kennedy said his Texas trip was a foray into
‘nut country.’”
It’s called a false correlation or cum hoc fallacy. E occurred while C
was present; therefore C caused E. Make reactionary hatred as significant a
feature as you want of Dallas in 1963, it still doesn’t follow that that
right-wing rage should find expression in a troubled self-described Marxist known
to his fellow Marines as “Oswaldovich”. Right there, credibility snaps; as if
one were to suggest that Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme or John Hinkley was an avatar
of liberal rage.
The point, of course, is to draw parallels between John F.
Kennedy, the first Catholic president, and Barack H. Obama, the first
African-American president. Quoth the editors of the Star:
We live again — or perhaps still — in angry times. And today, as in 1963, much of the anger is directed at a leader who is seen by many as “different,” a disruption of the image that some people hold of the nation and the person who represents it as president.In 1963, Dallas was a hotbed for conspiracy theories, contempt for the federal government and insinuations about the president’s loyalties and motives. Half a century later, all of that mistrust and anger has metastasized through the Internet, cable news and other media.
Except that, while we can never know for a fact why Oswald
shot Kennedy, we can be reasonably certain that it wasn’t because of Kennedy’s
Catholicism or his civil rights policies. Significantly, Oswald had earlier
tried to kill an outspoken anti-communist and segregationist, Maj. Gen. Edwin
Walker, an action that simply can’t be squared with sectionalist racial
prejudice. While Kennedy and Walker were functionally opponents on civil rights
issues, Kennedy had firmly established anti-communist policies; Oswald, who had
distributed pro-Castro literature in New Orleans, most likely saw Kennedy as a
threat to the success of Communism and may have persuaded himself that Johnson
would be more lenient towards Cuba and North Vietnam. Communism, not race, is
the common denominator.
This is worth dwelling on. As a Marxist, Oswald had more in
common with the progressives of today than with the reactionary businessmen and
angry racists evoked by Rich. A more logical connection can be drawn between
his own activities in 1963 and the work of the Symbionese Liberation Army
between 1973 and 1975. As significant as the reactionary rage was, it serves to
distract us from the violence perpetrated in the name of social justice over
the next couple of decades.
There’s no small measure of selective memory being exercised
here. The Dallas where businessmen declared Kennedy “Wanted for Treason” was
also the Dallas where thousands of residents packed the sidewalks along the
presidential route to cheer him lustily on. (Said a rider in his car, “You
certainly can’t say that Dallas doesn’t love you, Mr. President,” just seconds
before the first shot.) Some Southerners declared themselves happy that “that
n****r-lover” was dead; in Dallas, however, there was as much grief and fear as
there was elsewhere, nor has any longtime resident ever taken pride in the city
being the locus for such an act.
I would be a fool to pretend that Pres. Obama could never
suffer an attempt on his life. But nuts have tried to kill many presidents; including
FDR, Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan and — of all people! — Gerald Ford. Successful
and unsuccessful, assassinations have been attempted in many different sorts of
political climate.
But climates don’t kill people. People kill people.
By all means, let’s stop hating. But let’s also stop
pretending that Kennedy is a martyr to reactionary anger.
