Jaqueline Bouvier Kennedy and the Legacy of President John F. Kennedy
As Seen Through November 22, 1963 - Her Bad Day in Dallas
The following piece, updated here, was published as “Fifty Years Ago On Friday - November 22, 1963” at “Old Ones Dream” November 20, 2013, and as piece of the book “Magnolia Elegy: Place In the Edisto Fork” published April 14, 2022.
It was Friday and a sunny day in Gainesville, Florida where I was enrolled in the College of Accounting and Finance. I had finished class for the day and had negotiated the six lanes of traffic across the street to the student union to grab some lunch. I had my chicken soup and saltines and water by the time a student came running in and exclaimed “They shot Kennedy in Dallas”. And that is all we knew for a while because TVs running CNN and Fox were not on every wall of every building like they are now. I ate my lunch and drove the several blocks to the Herbert residence (friends of the family) where I watched Walter Cronkite deliver the bad news
Governor and Mrs. John Connally, of Texas, with the Kennedys, in the Presidential limousine, in Dallas, November 22, 1963.- The New Yorker Magazine, November 4, 2013; Closer Than That, by Adam Gopnik.
My apartment in Gainesville was the dead husbands workshop in the back of a widow’s garage north of town and it was fitted with a cot, a bath, a hotplate, and a carpenter’s workbench and some tools. The widow invited me to join her to watch the news, the Herberts did as well, and by the time it was over about ten days later it had included an interminable funeral train.
Whoa, there you go again.
There was no funeral train, that was Robert F Kennedy five years later. JFK’s body was flown from Dallas to DC, the White House, the Capital Rotunda, and then the funeral mass on November 25, 1963. It seemed like 10 years as the nation and I wallowed in our grief in front of mostly black and white TVs.
And through all of this I would have bet my bottom dollar that it was the result of a conspiracy to rid the country of a good man. In fact I wrote a sophomoric paragraph describing that “fact” and the consequences. Fortunately I can’t lay my hands on that writing. But for me, as is the case with many I think, these events changed my life. It came at a crucial time in my academic and professional careers and I was distracted by those 3 days and the following Thanksgiving Holiday and I never recovered. And I wouldn’t trade that for anything, because if I had continued on that career track I would have eventually felt as if I had burned out and sold out, and now I would be surrounded by a different home and family and I really do love the one I’ve got. So perhaps everything I am I owe to President Kennedy’s bad day in Dallas.
And to some extent the same can be said about President Kennedy. HIs legacy was sealed by the events of that day. Some said at the time that he was troubled politically and was in Texas mending political fences, and that he was on track to be a one term President. None said that some people wanted him dead. Until he was dead and then theory abounded. Today, fifty years later, he is not the man we thought we knew - the King in Camelot.
He was a graceful charismatic man with a great speech writer. His was the Bay of Pigs. His was the Cuban Missile Crisis that was promoted as a great back ‘em down and send ‘em home show down conducted by him in the teeth of the threat of nuclear holocaust. We know now, and the Defense Department and Department of State knew then, that he appeased the Soviets, against the unanimous opinion of his advisors, by complying with their demand that we remove our own ballistic missiles from Turkey. His was all of the serial womanizing with student interns and gangster’s molls and movie stars and the fraternizing with mob kingpins. None can realistically be a fan of Jacqueline and one of John as well. In 2010 Christopher Hitchens said: “If this vulgar hoodlum president had not been survived by a widow of exceptional bearing and grace, his reputation would probably now be dirt”.
Adam Gopnik’s current piece in The New Yorker is the “A Critic At Large” column and deals with the story of the assassination and the 50 years of paranoia in terms of the hundreds of books that have been written on the subject. There is an article on CNN.Com by Thom Patterson that is useful as well. Both of these treatments come to the same conclusion that of all the conspiracy theories, the only one that cannot be debunked and probably never will be is that Lee Oswald, while acting alone, was nonetheless under, at the least, mind control by the CIA — kind of Manchurian Candidate style.
But meanwhile back at the story, I was in Gainesville, Florida, and I never recovered academically from that week, and I am thankful for that — it changed my life.
This is good stuff; very interesting.