Saturday, November 22, 2003
Wild Bats
Twenty years ago, during the 20th anniversary observance of the Kennedy assassination, essayist Lance Morrow wrote in Time magazine: "The real 1960s began on the afternoon of November 22, 1963…It came to seem that Kennedy's murder opened some malign trap door in American culture, and the wild bats flapped out." In the 20 years that have gone by since the 20th anniversary, more wild bats have flapped out of other trap doors. We have had more "where were you" moments--the Challenger disaster, the fall of the Berlin Wall, September 11--but the Kennedy assassination remains the acknowledged champion, never losing its power to shock and sadden, even at an ever-growing distance of years.
We have been mourning Kennedy anew this week. The History Channel, normally devoted to all things World War II, has been all things JFK. Their special JFK: A Presidency Revealed, to be rebroadcast tonight, is a success both as a television entertainment and a work of history--lucid, involving, objective, mixing well-known detail with fresh material from new sources. (Alas, the History Channel devoted many more hours this week to the oft-repeated The Men Who Killed Kennedy, which regurgitates and then sensationalizes every conspiracy theory ever floated about the assassination, credible and otherwise.) Almost every cable channel this side of the Food Network, and all of the network news divisions, have weighed in with at least one special this week.
Many TV remembrances focus on the way the story was covered at the time. Many of today's elder statesmen of broadcasting were young bucks on the way up in 1963--Dan Rather, Jim Lehrer, Peter Jennings, Bob Schieffer. And as they reminisce about how it was on that day, they usually recollect how primitive news gathering was. One of Dan Rather's assignments was to get film from Dallas flown to network HQ in New York so it could be broadcast, and when it was shown, droplets were visible on the screen--the film was still wet from being developed. There were no cell phones, so reporters were at the mercy of pay phones, and sometimes hanging onto the phone meant beating the competition at the story. These media memories are an important part of our national observance because for many Americans, the Kennedy assassination was the first time they experienced something so momentous by way of broadcast media. It's widely agreed that it marked the moment at which television news came of age--when TV became the national hearth to gather around when tragedy or disaster struck us.
Reporters in 1963 often compared the impact of the Kennedy assassination to the sudden death of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945, but JFK's death dwarfs FDR's in memory because the power of television imagery dwarfs that of radio. And some of the images from those four days are shockingly powerful even after you've seen them dozens of times.
You can unroll many of them in memory without actually seeing them: Kennedy smiles in the open limo. Young women in cat glasses weep as the news of the assassination speads along the motorcade route. Jackie steadfastly refuses to change out of the pink pantsuit spattered with her husband's blood. Kennedy's body is transported back to Washington, arriving at Andrews Air Force Base in full view of TV cameras, his trusted aides unloading the coffin awkwardly from the airplane. Oswald answers questions from reporters and later gets smoked by Jack Ruby in the basement of the police station.
And then, the long shots of the funeral cortege, the band playing a funeral march, not a word from the network commentators along the route. Periodic cuts to Jackie and the children-- Jackie's dignity in grief was an amazing thing, doing as much to hold the country together on that weekend as our belief in our Constitution and laws. John-John salutes. The harsh light of the sun illuminating the funeral scenes makes the black-and-white footage seem more realistic than old black-and-white news footage usually does, as if the colors were there, but simply turned off. The flag is folded, the 21-gun salute echoes, the eternal flame is lit. You've seen it before, you know it's coming, and you still feel the loss after all this time.
We know now that the JFK mystique has much to do with the nature of his death and the many shadowy tales that have grown up around it--the second shooter on the grassy knoll, the connection with the New Orleans mob, the magic bullet, and all that. Furthermore, we know now that JFK was not a perfect knight in shining armor despite all the Camelot PR--he lived on a smorgasbord of drugs that would have made Fat Elvis flinch, and he adulterously bedded enough women to make a football team. He was slow to move on civil rights. His inexperience cost the U.S. greatly at the Bay of Pigs and at his 1961 summit with Khrushchev. So he wasn't a saintly leader, all powerful and wise, grappling surely with whatever the world threw at him, never making a mistake. He was, like all presidents, one of us, who had a job and did it.
And yet he did it extraordinarily well when it counted the most. He maneuvered the world through the Cuban Missile Crisis, perhaps the most dangerous moment in human history. And he had a unique talent for inspiring people to commit themselves to difficult tasks, whether it was reaching the moon or holding back the Soviets in Berlin. And so we mourn his lost potential, and we wonder what if? What might he have accomplished if he'd served his eight-year limit? What might the country have looked like after he left office?
It seems as though the world began to accelerate in the weeks after November 22, 1963--accelerate and come apart at the same time, as many truths we thought were firmly settled before then began to seem less so afterward. In the middle of history, we can never fully assess it for what it is--that's left to generations of historians whose grandparents are toddlers now--but it surely seems as if we have never stopped the spiral that began 40 years ago, that things move faster and continue to fragment. So when we mourn JFK and remember that afternoon, we mourn a world that was younger, whose dangers were more knowable, whose challenges seemed achievable. A world where the wild bats were still in their cages.
Note: This feature will be on holiday until sometime Sunday November 30. Until then, I recommend you read Best of the Blogs, Tapped, Joe Conason's Journal, Liberal Oasis, The Daily Kos, and Democratic Underground. And during this Thanksgiving week, be grateful that there's an election coming in a little over 11 months.
Twenty years ago, during the 20th anniversary observance of the Kennedy assassination, essayist Lance Morrow wrote in Time magazine: "The real 1960s began on the afternoon of November 22, 1963…It came to seem that Kennedy's murder opened some malign trap door in American culture, and the wild bats flapped out." In the 20 years that have gone by since the 20th anniversary, more wild bats have flapped out of other trap doors. We have had more "where were you" moments--the Challenger disaster, the fall of the Berlin Wall, September 11--but the Kennedy assassination remains the acknowledged champion, never losing its power to shock and sadden, even at an ever-growing distance of years.
We have been mourning Kennedy anew this week. The History Channel, normally devoted to all things World War II, has been all things JFK. Their special JFK: A Presidency Revealed, to be rebroadcast tonight, is a success both as a television entertainment and a work of history--lucid, involving, objective, mixing well-known detail with fresh material from new sources. (Alas, the History Channel devoted many more hours this week to the oft-repeated The Men Who Killed Kennedy, which regurgitates and then sensationalizes every conspiracy theory ever floated about the assassination, credible and otherwise.) Almost every cable channel this side of the Food Network, and all of the network news divisions, have weighed in with at least one special this week.
Many TV remembrances focus on the way the story was covered at the time. Many of today's elder statesmen of broadcasting were young bucks on the way up in 1963--Dan Rather, Jim Lehrer, Peter Jennings, Bob Schieffer. And as they reminisce about how it was on that day, they usually recollect how primitive news gathering was. One of Dan Rather's assignments was to get film from Dallas flown to network HQ in New York so it could be broadcast, and when it was shown, droplets were visible on the screen--the film was still wet from being developed. There were no cell phones, so reporters were at the mercy of pay phones, and sometimes hanging onto the phone meant beating the competition at the story. These media memories are an important part of our national observance because for many Americans, the Kennedy assassination was the first time they experienced something so momentous by way of broadcast media. It's widely agreed that it marked the moment at which television news came of age--when TV became the national hearth to gather around when tragedy or disaster struck us.
Reporters in 1963 often compared the impact of the Kennedy assassination to the sudden death of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945, but JFK's death dwarfs FDR's in memory because the power of television imagery dwarfs that of radio. And some of the images from those four days are shockingly powerful even after you've seen them dozens of times.
You can unroll many of them in memory without actually seeing them: Kennedy smiles in the open limo. Young women in cat glasses weep as the news of the assassination speads along the motorcade route. Jackie steadfastly refuses to change out of the pink pantsuit spattered with her husband's blood. Kennedy's body is transported back to Washington, arriving at Andrews Air Force Base in full view of TV cameras, his trusted aides unloading the coffin awkwardly from the airplane. Oswald answers questions from reporters and later gets smoked by Jack Ruby in the basement of the police station.
And then, the long shots of the funeral cortege, the band playing a funeral march, not a word from the network commentators along the route. Periodic cuts to Jackie and the children-- Jackie's dignity in grief was an amazing thing, doing as much to hold the country together on that weekend as our belief in our Constitution and laws. John-John salutes. The harsh light of the sun illuminating the funeral scenes makes the black-and-white footage seem more realistic than old black-and-white news footage usually does, as if the colors were there, but simply turned off. The flag is folded, the 21-gun salute echoes, the eternal flame is lit. You've seen it before, you know it's coming, and you still feel the loss after all this time.
We know now that the JFK mystique has much to do with the nature of his death and the many shadowy tales that have grown up around it--the second shooter on the grassy knoll, the connection with the New Orleans mob, the magic bullet, and all that. Furthermore, we know now that JFK was not a perfect knight in shining armor despite all the Camelot PR--he lived on a smorgasbord of drugs that would have made Fat Elvis flinch, and he adulterously bedded enough women to make a football team. He was slow to move on civil rights. His inexperience cost the U.S. greatly at the Bay of Pigs and at his 1961 summit with Khrushchev. So he wasn't a saintly leader, all powerful and wise, grappling surely with whatever the world threw at him, never making a mistake. He was, like all presidents, one of us, who had a job and did it.
And yet he did it extraordinarily well when it counted the most. He maneuvered the world through the Cuban Missile Crisis, perhaps the most dangerous moment in human history. And he had a unique talent for inspiring people to commit themselves to difficult tasks, whether it was reaching the moon or holding back the Soviets in Berlin. And so we mourn his lost potential, and we wonder what if? What might he have accomplished if he'd served his eight-year limit? What might the country have looked like after he left office?
It seems as though the world began to accelerate in the weeks after November 22, 1963--accelerate and come apart at the same time, as many truths we thought were firmly settled before then began to seem less so afterward. In the middle of history, we can never fully assess it for what it is--that's left to generations of historians whose grandparents are toddlers now--but it surely seems as if we have never stopped the spiral that began 40 years ago, that things move faster and continue to fragment. So when we mourn JFK and remember that afternoon, we mourn a world that was younger, whose dangers were more knowable, whose challenges seemed achievable. A world where the wild bats were still in their cages.
Note: This feature will be on holiday until sometime Sunday November 30. Until then, I recommend you read Best of the Blogs, Tapped, Joe Conason's Journal, Liberal Oasis, The Daily Kos, and Democratic Underground. And during this Thanksgiving week, be grateful that there's an election coming in a little over 11 months.
