TV and Me: Viewing the 60s

 Television and I grew up together.  This is our story.  Latest in a series.

By the 1960s TV news was growing up, at least to some extent.  The Camel News Caravan disappeared in 1956, replaced by the Huntley-Brinkley Report, which became the dominant evening news broadcast on television (though for awhile, the sponsor’s name appeared prominently on the set.)

  With this competition, CBS replaced Douglas Edwards at the evening news desk in 1962 with Walter Cronkite, who had co-anchored the network’s 1960 political conventions coverage with Murrow.  About a year later it became the first half hour network news (fifteen minutes had been the norm), with NBC soon following, and fledgling ABC several years later.  Cronkite remained the CBS anchor until 1981, with his familiar closing: "And that's the way it is."  According to polls, he became the most trusted news voice in America, and his on-air analysis of why the Vietnam war was failing legitimized mainstream opposition; "losing Cronkite" and hence much of America allegedly became instrumental in President Lyndon B. Johnson's decision not to seek re-election.  

 The early 60s team of Huntley-Brinkley (Chet Huntley reporting from New York, David Brinkley from Washington) was famous for David Brinkley’s unconventional speech pattern and wry takes on the news, and for the “Goodnight Chet,” “Goodnight David” sign-offs.  The first Telstar communications satellite linking television transmissions from the US and Europe in 1962 led not only to an outstanding hit record by the Toranados, but a celebratory TV program with participants from all the networks—allowing Walter Cronkite to say for once, “Goodnight, David.”

 I was a big Huntley-Brinkley fan, and later when I did the late night news on our college radio station with an expected audience of near zero, I liked to amuse our station engineer by re-writing and reading wire service news stories with the cadence and inflections of David Brinkley.  Beginning with NBC’s coverage of the 1960 Democratic convention, NBC was my first choice network for news, the rest of that fateful decade.  

Grissom, Shepard, Glenn:
first 3 Americans in space

One continuing news story of the 1960s was the US manned space missions.  Launches of the first US manned spaceflights were covered live on television, and Americans learned to say "A-OK" and call the launch a "lift off" instead of the "blast off" of Saturday morning science fiction.  I watched Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom on their sub-orbital flights, and then John Glenn’s three orbits of the planet, all described and shown (within fairly primitive technical limits) on live television as they happened.  Later in the decade the Apollo missions were covered extensively, and the first human step upon ground not on Earth was seen (more or less) as it happened when Neil Armstrong stepped off the lander onto the Moon.  

The Kennedy presidency, it was said, was the first television presidency.  The first-ever televised debates of the 1960 campaign helped him get to the White House, and his televised press conferences became viewing sensations, demonstrating his knowledge of detail and his ready wit and ironic humor.  Kennedy sat for long, thoughtful televised interviews, with single reporters or groups of them in year-end retrospectives.  In these he talked about the institutional and practical limits of presidential power, and the challenges ahead—seminars in themselves.

 I absorbed every scrap and pixel of information I could about the Kennedy administration when I was in high school in the early 60s, and almost felt I was part of it. (I can still recite the members of the JFK cabinet, but not of any administration since.)  I had a world affairs column in the high school paper and maintained a world news bulletin board in a classroom. It soon became impossible to ignore that world anyway.

  Thanks to an official of the local political arm of the AFL-CIO who my friend Clayton’s father knew, we got to attend President Kennedy’s only speech in Pittsburgh in October 1962, officially as ushers.  Part of our responsibility was to alert Secret Service agents of anyone acting suspiciously. 

A few days later, President Kennedy saw surveillance photos of Soviet offensive missiles in Cuba, and I was soon watching the Cuban Missile Crisis unfold on television, along with the rest of the country.  In school one day I was reprimanded for being late to class, because I had stayed beside a radio to ascertain whether Russian ships were going to fire on American ships quarantining Cuba, giving us perhaps hours or even minutes before we would be engulfed in nuclear war.

 Months later in June 1963 I proudly watched coverage of JFK giving his American University speech, which proposed the first break in the escalation of nuclear weapons, the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, with an eloquent case for the necessity of pursuing peace. Then the very next night I watched his powerful nationally televised  address from the Oval Office on racial justice (carried by all three networks), introducing the legislative ideas that would eventually become the law of the land in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts.

 And then one November Friday afternoon in 1963 we heard principal Father Sheridan’s voice announce over the public address that President Kennedy had been shot. After the next school period I was walking up the steps from gym class held outdoors, having almost forgotten about it, or convinced myself I would learn that he would be all right, when a student going down to the locker room told me that the President was dead.  That day I knew my life and the world around me would not be the same as it might have been, and I wasn’t wrong. 

To an extent it would be nearly unimaginable now, the entire nation was in shock.  There was nothing on television that weekend except coverage of the assassination, the capture of the suspect Lee Harvey Oswald, the preparations and then the funeral, with retrospective footage of JFK.  I watched it all, almost every waking moment.  I couldn’t even be pulled away on Sunday to go to church with my family, and so it happened that I was watching a live picture as Oswald was being transferred.  I jumped when I saw what I thought was a gun, but I saw then it was a microphone (you can see it in this screenshot.)  A moment later, a man rushed into the badly lit black and white picture, the crackling sound of gunshots, a glimpse perhaps of Oswald grimacing and crumpling, then rushed away, before I could be sure of what I saw.  What I’d seen, however obscurely, was a man murdered on live television.

 Until then I’d accepted television as a given part of my ordinary living.   But that weekend in November 1963 solidified it as a participant, wanted or not, in major moments of what turned out to be my life.

 By this time, I had served my short and tempestuous turn as the freshman editor of the monthly high school newspaper (at least Edward R. Murrow might have approved of me) and had joined speech club. After a couple of years doing my best JFK style ex temp speeches on various topics (lugging file folders of clippings and index cards down hallways of schools where we competed), I went on to debate, partnering with my friend Mike Krempasky. We won two district championships in our senior year.

  Because of all this, I was subscribing to and reading a lot of news and political issues magazines, and haunting the periodical room at the Greensburg library, with occasional forays to the college libraries at Seton Hill and St. Vincent.  As well as keeping up with TV news, commentaries and documentaries.

 I was reading in other areas, following my nose in areas of classic and contemporary literature. But these concerns with current events were regular activities. These interests and passions regarding the issues that TV news programs discussed to some degree, influenced some of the non-news television shows I watched in the early to mid 1960s.

 Once I started high school my viewing was more sporadic and limited—I had more homework, debate research and preparation and other extracurricular activities, and the semblance of a so-called social life (mostly related to school—football and basketball games, school dances, band concerts.) The speculative and melancholy mooning over girls took up their own infinities of time. So there were shows I watched when I found myself with the time and inclination, but there were others that I made sure to watch. 

There were two courtroom shows that featured characters that would become all but unknown in television thereafter: idealistic defense lawyers, fighting for justice. The Defenders is the better known, starring E.G. Marshall and Robert Reed, and written by Reginald Rose, a veteran of live drama anthologies.  It ran from 1961 to 1965.

 The other is more forgotten now as it was obscure even then: The Law and Mr. Jones managed just two seasons (1960-62) starring James Whitmore as a modest fighter for the rights of the little guy, espousing principles he quoted from Lincoln, Olivier Wendell Holmes and other greats.  I didn’t know anyone else who watched this series, and so it was my personal nurturance.

 For a year or so, The Defenders and The Law and Mr. Jones were both on, along with an early evening commentary show by Howard K. Smith, one of Edward R. Murrow’s protégés at CBS who was fired for expressing outrage at the conspiracy he’d uncovered between Birmingham, Alabama police chief Bull Connors and the KKK to beat up Black civil rights protestors. He moved over to ABC, where this commentary program was broadcast.  I made sure to see it, and its tenor seemed to fit into the same context as those two courtroom shows.

 

Beyond the courtroom, the struggle for social justice was waged by social worker Neil Brock, played by George C. Scott in East Side /West Side.  It ran for only one season, beginning in the fall of 1963, but I saw every episode every Monday night.   I was not only inspired and excited by the passion that Brock/Scott brought to injustices and inequities behind the tragic consequences he had to deal with as a social worker, but I learned a lot as well. His partners in these efforts were played by Elizabeth Wilson and the very young Cicely Tyson (the first Black woman in a featured TV role, a few years before Nichelle Nichols.) James Earl Jones was among the guest stars.

 Late in the series, Brock caught the eye of an ambitious liberal Member of Congress in the JFK mold (played by Linden Chiles), and Brock is persuaded he could do more good if he worked in his legislative office.  But the process is full of compromise and too slow.

Cicely Tyson, Scott, Elizabeth Wilson

  As far as I can recall, things were unresolved until CBS cancelled the show, sending the real life Scott on an epic drunk (according to someone who had worked on the show I met years later.)  I met Elizabeth Wilson in the 1980s and told her of my admiration for the show.  Also in the 80s, I saw George C. Scott in a production he also directed of a Noel Coward play, Design for Living at the Circle on the Square theatre in New York.  I was seated on the aisle in the top row of the steeply raked auditorium, and Scott made his entrance from just behind me—before I saw him, he shouted his first line directly in my ear. I was so stunned I missed most of the first act.

 The coincidence of these three shows in particular (The Defenders, East Side/West Side and The Law and Mr. Jones) during my junior and senior years of high school, when I was engaged daily with some of the same issues in interscholastic debate, were important to who I was becoming.  Shows like those, that explore real issues and model responses to them, are always rare.  The later years of Boston Legal came the closest to the approach of those lawyer shows, and to my knowledge there’s never again been anything like East Side/West Side.  One series much later that dealt with social issues but from the perspective of reporters was Lou Grant, which also renewed that Monday at 10 p.m. appointment.

 Viewing this combination of news, documentary and these shows concerning the law and social justice, together with whatever impressions I’d absorbed from those topical dramas from the Golden Age 50s, all informed the scripts I wrote that won National Scholastic Magazine awards, the ones that got me my college scholarship.  One of those scripts may have been a courtroom drama but the one I more specifically recall involved Senate hearings.  (Of course, of all the nonsense I saved from those years, these scripts are absent.)   

Nancy Ames

A somewhat related show came soon after. I had already assembled some friends to enact my own audio scripts of topical satire into a tape recorder when suddenly (in January 1964, when I was still in high school) there was a television show that did it all in a big way: That Was the Week That Was, a weekly satire on the news and culture, introduced by a song about that week’s events to the theme tune, sung by Nancy Ames, on occasion her blond hair swinging as she gently propelled her rotating office chair. 

 David Frost was the host, bringing a British edge to the satire by a group of regulars, which included Buck Henry and Phyllis Newman.  Burr Tillstrom (Kukla, Fran and Ollie) provided Emmy-winning puppetry, guest comedians included Nichols and May, Woody Allen and Mort Sahl; Comden and Green provided their music, and Tom Lehrer sang his subversive songs—so wildly popular later on campuses and record albums—such as “The Dance of the Liberal Republicans” and of course my favorite, “The Vatican Rag:” Genuflect, genuflect, genuflect.  Other guests included Roscoe Lee Brown, Steve Allen, Elliot Gould, Ann Bancroft, Alan Alda and Kim Hunter.   

Mostly my viewing was catch as catch can: watching Perry Mason and The Fugitive with the family, or a western (my favorites were Have Gun, Will Travel and Maverick, but only when James Garner was appearing.)  The family watched the Dick Van Dyke Show sitcom, which I liked when I saw it occasionally, and even more in syndicated reruns every afternoon in the summer.  Though I appreciated some of its formal deadpan humor, I never took to The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. Bob Denver's Maynard G. Krebs was funny, but I didn't dig him as a representative beatnik. I liked Tuesday Weld and Zelda.  I just really didn't like the character of Dobie.

  

 The one sitcom I made sure to see was Hennesey, staring Jackie Cooper as a peacetime Navy doctor at a San Diego base (1959-1962.)  It was gentle, human and humane humor, with a sweetly jaunty opening theme (which I can still reproduce.)  My old Dumont favorite Roscoe Karns was Hennesey’s irascible superior officer, and I had a crush on Abby Dalton, who played his nurse and love interest, and in the last season, his wife.

 These were my teenage years, so in addition to everything else I was listening to the latest music on the radio, following the top ten and the “Wax to Watch” on KQV.  I watched American Bandstand after school, and Dick Clark’s Saturday night show, as well as a local Pittsburgh version, “Dance Party” on Saturday afternoons hosted by disc jockey Clark Race. I once saw him so apparently enthused by the Marvellettes dancing and lip-synching to their new record, “Please Mr. Postman,” that he had them repeat it twice more. (These scenes take on a question mark with the revelations a few years later of payola.) 

By now - after 1957-- television had videotape, and programs were often, as they said, “pre-recorded.”  In addition to live interviews with kids and guests, and live dancing, the music shows of Dick Clark and imitators featured singers and bands miming to their records, before and after which teenagers danced to other records, and some of them were selected to rate a new record.  Their responses were almost always so much the same—“It has a good beat.  You can dance to it.  I give it an A”—that they might as well have been separately pre-recorded and inserted.  TV was moving farther and farther from live performance.   

 In the later 50s I had watched Your Hit Parade with my family, in which a half dozen regularly appearing singers did versions of that week’s hits.  It had been an important radio show, at one time featuring Frank Sinatra.  But after 1956 or so, half the fascination was noting the struggles that regulars like Dorothy Collins, Snooky Lanson and Giselle Mackenzie were having with rock and roll tunes, until the program, like an old soldier, finally faded away.

  The early 60s made a few attempts at live pop music programs but I wasn’t grabbed by any of them.  For a year or so there was Hootenanny to feature the folk music boom, but it never had very prominent acts.  Years later I learned the reason: the show was incredibly still obeying the Blacklist fears of folk performers like Pete Seeger, and because of that, the stars of the day like the Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul and Mary refused to appear. 

There were a few shows that everyone I knew at school watched and would talk about.  One was The Twilight Zone, especially its first few years. I can recall several of those shows even now, as probably others who saw them can.  Nuclear apocalypse was a frequent theme.

  Later there was 77 Sunset Strip, with its finger-snapping theme song, Kookie the hip parking lot attendant, and some decent detective stories with stars Efrem Zimbalist, Jr and Roger Smith.

 But in my high school there was one show that was wildly popular, at least among the students I knew, even though watching it would seem imprudent if not impossible, because it didn’t end until one in the morning.  

 It was the latest iteration of the Steve Allen late night show. No one disputes any longer that Steve Allen created the template for late night shows with the program he refined for local New York City audiences that NBC broadcast nationally as The Tonight Show in 1954.  At the same time he hosted a Sunday prime time variety show, which by the early 60s had moved to Monday and then Wednesday nights.  When that show ended, he immediately returned to late night. 

This show was produced through Westinghouse Broadcasting, and it so happened that its flagship station was KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh (the former Dumont affiliate as WDTV), so we had the opportunity to see it.  It was broadcast from an old vaudeville theatre in Los Angeles, rededicated as the Steve Allen Playhouse.

 I was too young for the Steve Allen Tonight Show (or for his successor Jack Paar), but I was a big fan of his Sunday show.  The Westinghouse late night show was even wilder.  Allen was a bundle of intellectual energy with a surrealistic edge. Sitting at his desk sipping orange juice, he theorized that some words were innately funny, because of their sound.  Three of his candidates were “smock,” “fern” and “creel.” Thereafter he might punctuate whatever he was doing by suddenly shouting “Schmock! Schmock” like wild bird cries, or seriously ask a guest, “How’s your fern?”  His fascination with words led him to play Mad Libs (filling in the blanks of a narrative with random words, and then reading the result) with his audience.

  Jay Leno later called Steve Allen the first modern comedian without vaudeville ties and schtick, but as this show proved he was also adept at creative and outrageous physical comedy as well as satirical skits and wisecracking commentary befitting the best vaudevillians.  One of his regular offbeat guests was the health food advocate Gypsy Boots, who entered by swinging across the stage on a vine.  

What Steve Allen could do that no other late night host did was play piano with his band and musical guests (mostly jazz)--and he did this frequently.  He was also a composer, and would challenge audience members to give him three or four numbers corresponding to notes on the keyboard, and he would use them to compose a song on the spot.

 When I interviewed him in the early 1990s in Los Angeles I referred to this game, though I suggested he used letters.  He corrected me, saying he used numbers. Until we were backstage at the 40^th anniversary Tonight Show (his last appearance, as it turned out) when he was chatting with comedian Phil Hartman who referred to the same bit, and also thought it was letters—so a thoroughly confused Allen mumbled, sometimes numbers, sometimes letters.  But much later I realized the source of my mistake—I had borrowed the bit in high school to dazzle female classmates, substituting letters in their names that matched keys for numbers to compose a rudimentary tune on the piano. 

The show was so popular with my contemporaries who really shouldn’t have been up that late that the class ahead of mine selected the Steve Allen Show as the theme of their class variety show, with Jerry Celia at a desk wearing his Steve Allen glasses, orchestrating the music and mayhem, including the patented Gypsy Boots entrance. 

This iteration of Steve Allen’s show—and a late 60s revival—were often cited as inspirations for the next generation of late night comics, including David Letterman, who shamelessly stole many of Steve Allen’s bits—that is, the ones Johnny Carson wasn’t already doing on the Tonight Show. I  remember as well that late 60s revival, being home from college in the summers and waiting all day to watch it in the silence of late night. 

 In the fall of 1964 I went off to Knox College in Illinois (carrying with me the Kenyon Hopkins album of his jazz compositions for East Side/West Side, and an LP of Steve Allen leading a jazz band, Steve Allen at the Roundtable.)  

While there I won a national college writing prize, again with a television script, but I never had a TV set.  I occasionally watched something on the big console in the student union (Star Trek, the Monkees) and caught some reruns in the summers (those same shows plus Get Smart, The Man From U.N.C.L.E), but during the school year there was far too much else to do, and other claims on my attention.

 Ironically perhaps, this was also when I became besotted with the writing of Marshall McLuhan, who proclaimed that television heralded an entirely different view of reality.  His insistence that the importance was not in the programs but in the medium itself was new to me, and pretty much everyone else.

 The only television show I associate with college was a few months of gatherings at a student apartment (either James Campbell’s or Bob Mizerowski’s) to watch the campy Adam West Batman series, after which we went out on the lawn to toss around a Frisbie (then also new and hip.)  Most of network television seemed dismal: the vast wasteland.

 Television’s potential power began to be felt immediately in the 1950s, but as television grew, it was the decade of the 1960s that opened more eyes to its still unfathomed cultural, societal and political influences and impacts.  John F. Kennedy was said even at the time to be the first television President, and Vietnam was the first television war (or “living room war” as it came to be called.) 

 But the profound and even shocking effects on political life and power became more striking and more ominous in 1980 when Ronald Reagan, known nationally as the genial host of television’s General Electric Theatre and Death Valley Days (brought to you by Twenty Mule Team Boraxo) was elected President.  Before that, Reagan at least had two terms of government experience as governor of California. But in 2016, a man with no governing experience on any level was elected President, his self-created caricature of an image having been burnished and elaborated on a nationally popular television reality show.  There’s a detailed study to be made comparing his campaign and presidency played on television, with the radio rise and reign of Adolf Hitler.

 Before the decade was out, television would make me witness to Vietnam and the antiwar demonstrations I didn’t attend personally, student uprisings on other campuses, and the out-of-body moment when we heard LBJ announce he would not run for President again (which at the time seemed to promise an antiwar candidate.)  

And more than a witness to horrors of Martin Luther King’s assassination aftermath, and especially Robert Kennedy—the speech in Los Angeles after he won the last and biggest primary of all, and hours later the news of his being shot, then many hours, days and nights, of the deathwatch, then the funeral and the funeral train. The coverage became surreal as reporters tried to find interviewees and so on to fill the time while Robert Kennedy's life was still in question, and one of the remaining unknowns was the alleged assassin Sirhan's first name.  I watched NBC's Sander Vanocur, on the brink of physical and emotional exhaustion, try to report the breaking news answer with objective gravity: his first name was Sirhan.  He was Sirhan Sirhan.

Then that summer the Democratic Convention and televised police riot in Chicago, cops smashing clubs on protesters, with witnessing crowds then chanting (for the first time): The whole world is watching!

 Even without these associations, I was more repelled than attracted by television in those years.  In the later 60s, as countercultural pursuits emerged to absorb my attention and alter my focus, television programs seemed even more out of it.  Laugh-In and The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour were of some interest, but at least for a time, it seemed that while I’d grown up with television, I’d now outgrown it.  But there would be more to it than that. 

All History Is Local

 I'd been thinking about events and place, about how much happened in the downtown area of Greensburg, PA in my life, my family's and in history.  Did Stephen Foster and Andrew Carnegie meet, just where I used to sit as a boy watching for trains coming through the station?  I was trying to piece together bits of local history I incompletely remembered, and asked my sisters if a history of Greensburg I'd used for writing The Malling of America was still around.

It couldn't be found but my sister Kathy found another one for sale through Amazon, which came from Oregon with a note from the sellers about how much they enjoyed visiting Arcata, where I live now.  So there's a thread.

I've been reading this history of Greensburg, written in 1999, as the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy passed.  I noted one strange thing: though local response to the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968 was noted, and there was a passing mention of RFK's assassination that year, there was not a word about JFK's assassination.  That's hard to figure.  Like most places in America, it was a major event: that dark Friday, then the ceremonies in Washington, culminating in the funeral on that Monday in November 1963.

I've recorded on some of my other sites my recollections of that Friday: hearing that the President had been shot from Father Sheridan's voice over the high school p.a., going outside to gym class--I think we ran 50 yard dashes--and almost forgetting about it, until I was showered and dressed and walking up the narrow steps from the locker room as the next class of boys was walking down.  From one of them I learned that President Kennedy was dead.

I walked home with three friends, including my debate partner who normally would have taken the school bus eight miles home but we'd arranged to work on our debate cases that evening.  We tried for awhile but wound up talking about the assassination and what it might mean for the future.

For the next several days I was in front of the TV. All regular programs on the three networks were cancelled for four days and nights. Apart from the news about Lee Harvey Oswald, the new President, etc. there was the arrival of the President's body in Washington, the lying in state in the White House on Saturday, the public viewing in the Capitol rotunda that drew a constant line of citizens on Sunday, the funeral procession through the streets of Washington and the funeral on Monday.  While my family was at church on Sunday I stayed home to watch, and saw the live pictures of Oswald being taken through the Dallas police station.  At one point I jumped--I saw what I thought was a gun.  But it turned out to be a hand-held microphone.  A moment later I heard the shots, and saw Oswald killed.

The only time I recall leaving the house and the TV was probably on Saturday, when I went with my father to Main Street in Greensburg,  He was the manager of the Singer Store and I helped him decorate the storefront window with black crepe and a photo.  It was one of mine. I had the official presidential portrait framed, and a larger poster of President and Mrs. Kennedy.  We probably used the portrait.

All the stores on Main Street took down their normal window displays and put up a commemorative display.  My recollection is that no retail stores there were open at all that weekend, or probably even on Monday.  It was very quiet.  I remember some snow--I wonder if that memory is accurate.

Later I learned that students from my high school chartered a bus and went to Washington to walk through the rotunda to pass the casket.  It never occurred to me to do that.  I was very sensitive about what I thought was appropriate, at least for me.  I wanted to honor his life.

Still, I watched it all.  The funeral procession made the greatest impression--the caisson, the rebellious riderless black horse, the Kennedy family.  The funeral was at St. Mathews in Georgetown.  I was in Washington for JFK's inaugural and knew that when he was a senator he went to St. Mathews so I got the relatives I was visiting to take me there for Mass that Sunday.  As we were leaving we saw the cordons and the Secret Service, so we turned around and went back in.  After our second Mass of the morning, as JFK strode down the side aisle he shook hands with as many people as he could, and one of them was me.  It took a particular effort, he was reaching back a little.  I was astonished of course.  Now his funeral was in that same church, those few years later.

Somewhere in storage here I have items relating to that week.  The Four Days pictorial book.  A reply to my letter joining with thousands of others requesting that the new national arts center be named the Kennedy Center.  The embossed reply from Jacqueline Kennedy to letters of condolence she received (some of them now in a book published this year.)

But one memento I know I don't have. The next week my high school, Greensburg Central Catholic, organized its own memorial assembly.  As a known Kennedy aficionado I was asked to participate by writing something and delivering it from the stage, as several other students would.  I felt strongly at that moment that I didn't want to talk about my thoughts, but I would select and read excerpts from JFK speeches and writings.  The nun who asked me got testy and refused.

I was permitted to briefly play a few lines from JFK's Inaugural Address which my father had taped in front of the TV on his reel-to-reel while I was there in Washington. I played it on the same tape recorder at the beginning of the assembly, hunkering down backstage unseen.  Then my part was finished and I watched the rest of it from the audience. They had also asked to borrow my large poster of President and Mrs. Kennedy which was ultimately used as the centerpiece, affixed to the back curtain during the ceremony.  I believe there is a photo in my senior year high school yearbook of that stage with the poster in it.

My instinct about the event was justified as I recall one of my classmates sobbing from the stage about little John-John.  It was not a display JFK would have approved.

When the ceremony was over I had to ask for my poster back, but the nun in charge claimed not to have any idea what happened to it. She seemed completely unconcerned and no attempt was made to find it.  I never saw it again. And even today I've never seen that particular image again.

 Eventually I did write something for the school newspaper, which I reproduced recently here.

I may have Greensburg newspaper front pages from that weekend somewhere.  I find now that while the TV images and photos were universal, and many live on in cyberspace (at least for the moment), I look to a more local context to frame my memories.  This particular history of the city doesn't provide it.

The Future of Hope


We get hope in various ways from various places, inside and outside, in good times and bad. But there's often learning involved, and models. Something that we've seen work in the real world, and someone we could observe in some way, if even from a distance, and perhaps if even through a glass too brightly.

I'm reminded of this because in my meager campaigning efforts, I made some calls to swing states through the Kerry "phone corps" organized on the campaign website. I talked to a woman in Florida (I think it was), whose fifteen year old son was on the volunteer list, and my call to him hadn't been the first. She was a Kerry activist herself, and her son was involved in a political campaign for the first time, though she seemed to feel he wasn't ready for canvassing and phone banking activities. But John Kerry had sparked his interest.

I was fourteen when I got involved in my first political campaign, for John F. Kennedy. It was in a way the last of the old fashioned campaigns, and the first of the new media-dominated ones. I participated in what would be the last election eve campaign parade for many years in Greensburg, Pa. I imagine they've revived them now. John Edwards was speaking there yesterday.

It wasn't called a swing state in 1960. Greensburg was a pretty reliably Republican town inside a heavily Democratic county and region. We lived outside the city limits, in Democrat country. Unions were powerful, and though the tiny city hall was Republican, the big county courthouse was Democrat.

Now I'm out here in California, in a town where there are five Green candidates for city council, one of them named Harmony Groves, another Phoenix Fyre; three unaffiliated, one Democrat, and no Republicans. California was the key to Kennedy’s election, but this year nobody has even visited, certainly not in this little town. We're not a swing state. My sleepy little hometown of Greensburg was one of the first stops for John Kerry and John Edwards after Edwards was selected as the v.p. candidate.

But I know that in Greensburg now, as in Florida now and in Greensburg then, some young people are focusing their hopes on John Kerry, even as they are learning to define what they hope for. If he wins, as JFK did, they will be invested in learning even more. For instance, how to make their hopes happen. And what happens to hopes as they meet the present.

My hope is that they get that chance this time. The 1960 campaign was really formative for me, as was the thousand days of JFK's presidency. It happened to coincide with my experiences in high school forensics, in the system of extemp speaking and debating in competitions. I learned quite a bit from those experiences in those few years.

So in honor of all that, and in hopes that things will turn out well for John Kerry, I want to reproduce a column I wrote for the In Pittsburgh weekly in 1988, about those hopes on an election night when they were cut short.


Young Hearts

For awhile, there was hope. As the sky darkened to dusk beyond the glass wall of the Dukakis headquarters in Chatham Center [Pittsburgh], staffers started hearing about heavy turnouts and early strength in the key states.

The news sent another pulse of energy through the last hours of effort, as staffers collecting numbers from key precincts dispatched their troops---many of them college, high school and junior high students---to where they were most needed. Some volunteers had been up all night hanging leaflets on doors that said "Good morning! Vote Today/Dukakis-Bentsen." They'd been on the phones at the United Steelworkers phone bank, or canvassing and passing out flyers, knocking on doors and stopping people on the street, or simply standing at major intersections waving signs at passing cars. They returned for new instructions to this temporary office, where the message boxes for staffers were white Styrofoam cups tacked to a room divider. They picked at the wilting cold cuts and the pasta salad in the makeshift kitchen, then grabbed their maps and headed out again. For most of them, this was their first campaign.

I was fourteen when John F. Kennedy ran for President. That was my first campaign. I learned about primaries when he ran in Wisconsin; I learned poverty's name when he ran in West Virginia. I thrilled to my first roll-call of the states as I watched the 1960 Democratic Convention, and I taped his acceptance speech on a clunky cut-rate reel-to-reel: "But the New Frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises----it is a set of challenges. It sums up, not what I intend to offer to the American people, but what I intend to ask of them. It appeals to their pride, not their pocketbook---it holds out the promise of more sacrifice instead of more security..." This was the speech that Vice-President Nixon thought was over the heads of the American people.

I went to the local "Citizens for Kennedy" headquarters. The director there may have been the first adult in the public world to take me seriously. He gave me a copy of Kennedy's book, "The Strategy of Peace," which I still have. I handed campaign literature to strangers outside supermarkets and on the street. Once my two best friends and I were sent by bus to a nearby town, Kennedy posters affixed to our persons, front and back, and we stuck leaflets in doors in the pouring rain. I'd read those pamphlets---I was prepared to discuss the issues with anyone. I'm sure we won a few votes---we were so young and enthusiastic, and so completely devoted. And so soaking wet.

Around 8:30 pm, the young Dukakis volunteers began returning from the polls and streamed into the Hyatt ballroom, under the big banner that said, "The Best America is Yet To Come." By then the staffers already knew the score, and their eyes had that peculiar shining---part tears, part defiant excitement. I asked Peg McCormick, the western Pennsylvania campaign director and CMU professor, what effect a Bush victory might have on the young. "If I were sixteen years old and George Bush was President, I wouldn't have excitement about the future---and that's what this is all about, it's the future, it's for them."

I asked the same question of Margaret-Anne McKibben, who teaches some of these high school students. "It could be emotionally devastating," she said. "It's like first love. You believe it with all your heart. And that's why these kinds are here---they really care. They believed that if you work hard, it'll happen. And all these young hearts---they really did work hard."

I stayed up all night to watch the election returns, because it all came down to California. After a few hours sleep, I awoke in mid-morning to watch JFK read, in a voice thick with a morning cold, Nixon's concession telegram. My candidate had won. I had relatives in Washington and I took my first long bus trip alone to visit them on Inaugural weekend. We watched the parade on Friday, toured the monuments on Saturday, and on Sunday we went to the Georgetown church where JFK was known (by me) to go. We lucked out. We sat several pews behind him, and on his way out, the brand new President of the United States---my President---shook my hand.

When I was 15 I knew the names of everyone in the Kennedy cabinet (with a little time, I can recite them still.) I knew his speeches, filled with allusions to philosophers and statesmen; speeches about courage, commitment and moral responsibility, challenging the country to look beyond their immediate present to the future they created with every decision they made. I watched his press conferences, filled with fact and wit. I knew details of his programs---the minimum wage increase, the Peace Corps, the Alliance for Progress in Latin America---and I followed his battles with a reluctant Congress. I learned about the many facets of leadership, as I learned about the world. The next time I was in Washington was for the great Civil Rights march, but I never thought of this as opposing him. He understood dissent. He was my President. I imitated him in my extemp speeches. I played touch football, and learned to like Boston clam chowder, and to aspire to be educated and seek after greatness.

I was 16 when I watched the world almost end in the Cuban Missile Crisis. (When we came back to homeroom one day, someone had drawn a big mushroom cloud on the blackboard, ha ha.) I read and listened to everything about those events, and learned about decision-making, about strategy and the interplay of personalities, and about different kinds of strength. Then came the nuclear test ban treaty, and I learned what the presidency could be as a force for good, from a President who was so obviously learning and expanding his horizons every day, as I was.

I was 17 when my President was shot to death in Dallas. Kennedy had appealed to our youth with his sense of urgency, and held out to us the opportunity to make a difference, to move forward and not just fight to keep from slipping back; to get at what he always called the unfinished business of America. That sense of urgency filled those three years, the only three years in my conscious lifetime when I looked to a President for leadership. Then the man he defeated for his party's nomination became President and escalated the Vietnam war; then the man he had defeated in the general election became President and prolonged it, and lied and cheated and subverted the Constitution. The nightmare had begun.

That was 25 years ago, as a spate of television documentaries will remind us this month, interspersed with the dopey grin of George Bush, a President-elect whose campaign makes him impossible for me to respect; and the vice-president-elect of the United States of America, Dan Quayle. To me, the history of the presidency since JFK has been a prolonged insult, a black comedy, a tragedy of the absurd, starring twisted or ineffective men.

Even several of the Dukakis staffers from out of state were very young, just out of college. Reagan had been President for more than a third of their lives. Vibrant, intelligent and eager, they've never had a President to emulate, to respect. But there was no overwhelming pall of gloom in the ballroom as the networks made their fatal projections. It wasn't like Boston in 1972, when McGovern workers sat stunned in front of TV monitors, and the ballroom was empty and as quiet as a tomb. The Dukakis kids ran to the TV sets in the four corners of the room to cheer the good news they got, including the fruits of their own efforts: a 120,000 vote plurality in Allegheny County. They talked about catching up on sleep and laundry, and took snapshots of each other, and cherished the bonds they'd made and the feelings that only those who have fought together know. They found what strength and hope they could in each other.

But still...two college students watched Lloyd Bentsen speak to his supporters in Texas. "Mike Dukakis and I waged a campaign that's worthy of the American people," Bentsen said. "Too bad the American people weren't worthy of the campaign," one of them said. "The American people suck," said the other. This was their first campaign. The first one (she's a freshman) said it will be her last. The second (a junior) said she'll be back.

At one point, when Teddy Kennedy was being interviewed, I turned and looked at those who were watching the TV---there was something special in the eyes of the older ones. They remembered.

The young campaigners listened to comments from the podium by Peg McCormick, and County Comissioner Pete Flaherty, and United Steelworkers President Lynn Williams, all of whom took pains to tell them of the progress and the contribution they'd made, and gently urged them not to be discouraged. And when the ballroom became quiet and everyone clustered in the four corners to hear Mike Dukakis make his concession speech from Boston, he also singled out his young supporters, and urged them to realize the satisfaction of working to help others and---a specific Kennedy echo---of making a contribution. He called politics " a noble profession." In Boston, the crowd started chanting, "92!" In the ballroom here, a young voice shouted, "Don't give up!"

When Mike and Kitty Dukakis disappeared from the screen, Kenny Blake's band played again, and the young staffers and volunteers clustered together and hugged and said goodbye. Then they danced. And then the music stopped.
* * * *

Now the young Lieutenant Governor in the Dukakis administration is the repository of the hopes of young hearts like those in 1988 and 1960. Our hope is that as a result of their efforts, the music won't stop so soon. It'll still be playing on Inauguration Day.

Why I'm Not There

I watched my first Democratic convention on television in the summer of 1960. I was 14, an age for heroes, and I had one: John F. Kennedy. It was an exciting convention, in the conventional sense: the outcome was in doubt. Kennedy had won the most primaries, but not enough to assure him the nomination. There was powerful opposition from the party elders: none other than Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Truman included. They favored their two-time loser, Adlai Stevenson. Kennedy was too young, and his Catholicism was the unspoken fatal flaw. By the night of the voting, the Huntley-Brinkley and Walter Cronkite conventional wisdom was that if Kennedy didn't win on the first ballot, he might not win at all. So the first roll call of the states I ever saw was one of high drama as well as high theatricality. While reporters tried to keep up with Robert Kennedy's visits to key delegations, Kennedy did win on the first ballot.

Conventions since then haven't had that kind of contest, although they had plenty of drama in 64, 68 and 72. Except for 1968, when my candidate was dead and I was outside the Chicago hall in spirit and for a couple of nights, in fact, I always enjoyed watching the conventions on TV. I liked the speeches, the hoopla, the roll call of the states, the celebrations. I projected myself inside them, fantasized being part of them. But though I labored to one degree or another in various presidential primary and general election campaigns, I'd never been to a convention. So you'd think if I ever had the chance, I'd take it.

My chance came, as chances often do, as a surprise, or a series of surprises and accidents. About a year before the 04 campaigning actually started I had coffee with a new friend I'd met during the 2000 election campaign, who was soon to become the chair of the Humboldt County Democratic party executive committee. We talked about possible 2004 candidates and I mentioned John Kerry. It was the first he'd heard of him as a possible candidate.

By the by, a couple of summers ago when I was in Washington, eating the very good pasta cooked for us by the former Chief of Staff to Bill Clinton-and former classmate of mine at Knox College---John Podesta, I ventured to suggest that John Kerry might be the 04 candidate. Podesta thought not.

Anyway, as the California primary came closer, I responded to a meet-up invitation for Kerry here in Arcata. It was a very small gathering. There was my friend from the Dems, who'd become a Kerry enthusiast, and a few others. This is Green country, and Democratic activists tended to favor Dean and Dennis the K. The party wasn't terribly interested in the presidential primary, since Kerry seemed to have the nomination nearly locked up, and the chances of Bush winning California depended on the Democrats nominating, say, Osama bin Laden. So I found myself one of the few people willing to actively support the candidate most likely to win the nomination.

Brian Mau, my Dem friend (also known as Chairman Mau) had to find someone to speak for Kerry at a university forum, and at the county Democratic convention. As Chairman Mau, he couldn't do it. So I did, as I've described in an earlier entry. He also needed people to run as Kerry delegates to the convention. Only one other person was willing to do this, so I said I would, too, just so there would be Kerry delegates.

This delegate election turned out to be almost as private an affair as our meet-ups. But there were actually two elections to poll registered Democrats who showed up: one up here in northern Humboldt, and one in the southern part of the county. I believe there were slots available for two men, three women, and one male alternate. Everyone up here voted for the two of us who were there, and everybody down there voted for their folks. They however had more people at their polling place. If I had invited a friend or two, I would have won, but even in this odd arrangement, I was elected as the alternate.

I almost didn't run at all---for as I was filling out the form, very close to the end it mentioned that the delegate would be responsible for his or her own convention expenses, including transport and housing, and that this would be about $1500. However, delegates could raise funds from others to pay their way. $1500 is a major chunk of change for me these days. But I figured I'd cross that bridge when I came to it.

Having been unreliably informed that as an alternate, I wouldn't be going to the convention anyway, I relaxed. It was only much later that I learned I was not only eligible, I was expected to attend. And that $1500 figure turned out to be an estimate from some prior century. It was likely to be double that.

By that time I'd made several commitments for work that was actually going to earn me something, and that looked like it would take me through July to accomplish. It seemed to be what they call a no-brainer, which usually means an obvious practical decision based on balance sheet figures.

Still, I put off a final decision until I was getting so many emails and phone calls from the state and national Dems and the Kerry campaign that I had to commit one way or another. By that time I was deep into this work. I had a moment of enthusiasm about going to the convention, of realizing it was a once in a lifetime opportunity, and even that because I knew Boston and knew some people who might put me up, the expenses could be cut down considerably. But then all the noise about security and traffic, and security checks on delegates. And all the emails I was getting that cast being a delegate as being a fund-raiser. I don't actually know who the delegates are, but it seemed they were either fund-raising types, or members of unions and other organizations who were footing the bill for their attendance. (Politicians and officeholders have their own delegate slots.) And I can't say I felt a whole lot of encouragement to throw caution to the winds and go.

So I had to actually resign as a delegate, and thanks to the layers of organization involved, I had to do it at least twice. It was a bummer. I had a day of very gloomy second thoughts about it. What was I thinking? I thought. So what if I wasn't a typical delegate---I am a writer, I could write about it, right? When I was younger there wouldn't have been any hesitation. I would be off on the adventure. Now I thought about the physical demands: the travel east, jet-lag, the T to the convention, the standing around, the foot-miles in the city, etc. Even from a career point of view---I'd meet more and different people than I will sitting at home. What's wrong with me?

Then the mail started coming. I have a shopping bag full of it: from Americans for Democratic Action, Yankee the Magazine of New England Living, the Democratic Party Visa Platinum Card, the Mayor of Boston, American Association of Registered Nurses, Planned Parenthood, Greater Boston Convention and Visitors Bureau, Senators Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer and Edward Kennedy, Southern California Edison, National Democratic Ethnic Leadership Council, etc. etc., with invitations to cocktail parties, receptions, galas, breakfasts and a No Carb Lunch. As flattered as I might be, I somehow couldn’t believe I’d make much of a lasting impression.

Now that the convention is about to begin, I am only slightly uncomfortable. I realize that I could have combined a sentimental journey back to Boston and Cambridge and the Italian North End with witnessing some unique moments---Hillary and Bill Clinton, Edwards, the most important speech of John Kerry's life so far, plus all those balloons. And maybe if things had happened a bit differently---if I'd realized sooner that I was eligible to go and maybe found some support or at least thought about it more, if I hadn't happened to get more work this summer than I've had in many months, etc. When I was most upset about not going was when I was most upset with myself for letting the environment dull my sense of possibility and adventure, the lack of an echo chamber for my enthusiasms keep me from even considering them as legitimate.

But this didn't last long. Maybe it's just ego to recoil from the given role as delegate cog, assumed fund-raiser, with no voice except to say hooray. Or maybe I'm giving into my introversion, combining it with the age-related reluctance to push physical limits for vague purposes, and coming up with timidity. I do know one thing: I felt it would be lonely. In a city where I once belonged but do no longer, peopled by ghosts, and by people who no longer would take my calls. I would be a member of the California delegation---none of whom I know or who know me-- and of nothing else. I have nothing to offer lobbyists except explanations for why they ought not waste their time lobbying me. It would be noisy, frenetic and filled with people. Not everybody's definition of lonely, I admit, but for me it's not necessarily a contradiction.

There will be thousands of people writing about this convention, and if they are anything like the commentators on TV, they will be largely saying the same things. I don't think they need me there to add either to the noise or to the silence (since it's unlikely I'd get published anywhere but here.) I'll watch the speeches on TV, mostly on C-Span, where they won't be background noise for perky analysts chatter. I'll watch the roll call of the states, I guess. But if I don't want to watch it all, I can do something else. I suppose I can't really explain why I'm not there. Maybe it's as simple as being of the age to view resources---of money, energy, time and emotional resilience---as having limits. Or let's just say I didn't feel finally that it was my fate to be there. I have responsibilities here, and they are real. Though not all of them are very important in any greater sense, they are personal to me, while my presence was not required in Boston except as a body to fill a folding chair. I hope they got somebody to fill it who can clap loud and yell continuously for hours. That's the job, after all.

November 22, 1963

I was in room 207, my home room at Greensburg Central Catholic High School, when the voice of the principal, Father Sheridan, came over the school p.a. But this wasn't his usual late afternoon litany of announcements. He said that shots had been fired at President Kennedy's motorcade in Dallas, and it was believed that the President had been injured. I think he put on a brief radio news report, before it was time to change classes.

I went to my gym class, where at first we talked about the fact that they said only that Kennedy was shot, not dead. I don't remember what we did---I have a vague recollection of running sprints outside, which isolated us from further announcements, and for the last part of the period it was possible to forget what we'd heard, and the world was still normal. When we came into the shower room none of the coaches were around. After we dressed, I remember walking up the stairs and looking hopefully into the face of the first boy I saw heading down to the locker room. He just slowly shook his head.

The next period never really started, and everybody was sent back to their home rooms. The news of Kennedy's death was on every face, and blared from radios in several room, a few tiny TV sets. The next thing I remember was being alone in the dark empty first floor hall and looking out beyond the parking lot to the National Guard Armory, the only other building near our campus a few miles outside of town. I saw the American flag flying at full staff and for some reason this infuriated me. I actually called the Armory from a pay phone and asked why the flag wasn't flying at half mast. The polite male voice who answered didn't seem to know what I was talking about, and I did not want to be the one to tell him, so I hung up.

I walked home with my two best friends: Clayton, who I walked with most days (most students took buses, but I lived close enough to walk, and he walked to his grandmother's house to be picked up later) and Mike, who was also my debate partner. Though he lived some distance away, we'd planned to work on our debate case at my house after school. Another friend of ours, Johnny, may also have been with us that day-he lived a block or so from me, so he was a neighborhood pal. All I remember of what we talked about was that it was all up to Bobby now. Nobody would take Lyndon Johnson seriously as President. He could take over for now, but Bobby Kennedy was the one who should run in '64. This was November 22 of my senior year of high school.

While the television droned through the wall from the living room, Mike and I sat in my room, our debate materials scattered and forgotten, as we talked about how Kennedy's death might affect the world and our particular lives.

***
It was clear to me---in fact, it was probably clear to everyone who knew me---that Kennedy's death would deeply affect me and my life.

John F. Kennedy came along at a perfect time to define my life. Beginning high school as he began his presidency, I was beginning to enter the world, and excited that I had an entry to the whole world. I felt kinship with Kennedy partly because he was Catholic and ethnic Irish, two groups that had never been permitted into open national legitimacy, just as I was Catholic and ethnic Italian and Polish. Yet Kennedy was wealthy and educated with style and presence. Kennedy's success and example slayed several of the dragons I was only dimly aware of but powerfully affected by, both in the world and from my unconscious: religion and class (closely related in this case.)

And he was young. At 43, the youngest man ever to be elected President, and even though Nixon was only three years older (they'd both entered Congress the year of my birth, and had once traveled together by train to a joint appearance in a western Pa. town not far from mine) he and the Republicans made an issue of Kennedy's youth. But his youth and his aura of youthfulness was another liberation for me. Even the young could participate, and could lead.

His program accented youth and the new. He spoke of boldness, effort, leadership, challenges---all bracing and exciting and inspiring to a young heart. He had written intelligently about courage, and he had exhibited courage in his life. In his nomination acceptance speech in Los Angeles (which I taped with our bulky reel-to-reel, the microphone pointed at the TV set as I tried not to react audibly) he called his vision the New Frontier. (His longtime speech writer Ted Sorenson claimed in his biography that the New Frontier was Kennedy's own idea, although recently I came across one of Peter Drucker's early books, published in 1959, called "Landmarks of Tomorrow" which extensively applies the phrase New Frontiers to the American socioeconomic and political future. For example, in Kennedyesque phrases---which also describes Kennedy's view that the New Frontier is not a program but a reality---Drucker writes: "These areas of challenge, threat and opportunity to our post-modern world will be described in the next chapters...So far we have asked: 'What is the new reality?' Now we shall ask: 'And what does it demand of us?'" )

I worked in my first political campaign on Kennedy's behalf in 1960, organizing some of my classmates into a "Junior Teen Dems for Kennedy" club. We leafleted on a few occasions, and participated in what turned out to be the last traditional election eve political parade for a long time in my town. I stayed up all night watching the returns---it wasn't until morning that California's votes gave him the victory. I must have fallen asleep for a few hours, but I remember his statement that morning, which ended with "Now we prepare for a new administration---and a new baby." That baby would be John, born on November 22, 1960.

With some initiative and my mother's quietly excited connivance, I got myself invited to visit some of her relatives I barely remember ever seeing for the Inaugural in Washington. I took the bus to Washington, probably a six hour trip normally, but there was a titanic snowstorm. So I rode eight or ten hours alone through the darkness and the snow, and arrived in a city normally couldn't cope with a dusting but now had a foot or so on the ground. My relatives, an excited young couple, were at the station to meet me. The military cleared the parade route, and by Inauguration Day it was clear and dry. The parade was all I saw, freezing on an outdoor bleacher stand, accompanied by my relatives and a friend of theirs, who carried an ingenious flask shaped like binoculars, with warm whiskey inside, to augment the thermos of hot tea my relatives brought.

Back in Pa. (which it was then, sometimes abbreviated as Penna., for zip codes weren't invented yet) my father tape recorded the Inaugural Address (audio only, of course, though I saw the whole ceremony broadcast several times on TV that evening and that week.)

We did the usual Washington sight-seeing the next day, which included my first bowl of clam chowder (a Kennedy favorite, although I later discovered that I'd had the Manhattan version, not New England) in the cafeteria of the National Gallery. On Sunday I persuaded my relatives that the new President might be going to Mass at St. Mathew's in Georgetown, which is where he lived (on G Street.) So that's where we went. But no JFK. However, after the Mass we attended we exited to see a crowd held back by ropes, and Secret Service men all around. We simply turned around and went back into the church. The Kennedy contingent sat a half dozen rows ahead of us, about a third of the way back from the altar. After Mass, the new President walked smiling down the outside aisle and shook outstretched hands of people towards the end of the aisle. I held mine up and out, and as he approached, my mind and body froze almost entirely. I could see dimly that he was shaking my relative's hand next to me and I was sure he would be moving on, but then he reached back to grab my hand and shake it firmly. I shook the hand of my hero. I was one of the first non-celebrity Americans to shake hands with JFK since he'd become President some forty-eight hours before.

Back home after I'd described this to my parents, my mother disappeared into her bedroom and I could hear her on the phone. The next morning, there was a front page story about all this in the local newspaper, written by a reporter she knew and had called. This not only made me famous for a day in high school, it cemented the impression I already had as a kind of Kennedy continuation-a local manifestation, a New Frontiersman in embryo.

For the next three years, Kennedy was the center of my education and my activities. As he faced the issues of the day, so did I, reading several magazines regularly (Time, Newsweek, U.S. News, New Republic, Nation, Progressive, the Reporter, the New Yorker, etc.) and books on the issues (Michael Harrington's book on poverty, James Baldwins' essays) and on the presidency (Emmet Hughes, Richard Newstadt and JFK's own Ted Sorenson) as well as books by and about Kennedy and his administration (including an early call for confronting environmental issues, "The Quiet Crisis" by JFK's Secretary of Interior Stewart Udall; he's 85 or so now, and was just interviewed by Bill Moyers...) In the late 80s I managed to somewhat impress former Kennedy aide , then Pennsylvania Secretary of Labor and Industry and future U.S Senator Harris Wofford by recalling the colors of the cover on "The Point of the Lance," a book on the Peace Corps ostensibly authored by Sargent Shriver but mostly written by Wofford.)

I wrote a world affairs column for my high school newspaper, and during my brief tenure as editor I wrote a story about John Glenn's orbital flight, including a photo clipped and cropped from Life magazine of the three U.S. astronauts who to that point had been in space. I sent a copy of this issue to each of these three. I got a letter from Glenn, and a note from Gus Grissom, who also sent back the copy of the newspaper. I was a little insulted by this until I took a second look and noticed that he had autographed the picture, and had evidently gotten Glenn and Shepard to autograph it as well. (This is probably the most valuable piece of memorabilia that got lost somehow over the years.)

How serious was I about all this? Let me recite to you the first Kennedy cabinet from memory: Sec of State Dean Rusk, Sec of Defense Robert MacNamara, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Sec of the Treasury Douglas Dillon, Sec of Commerce Luther Hodges, Sec of Health, Education and Welfare Abraham Ribicoff, (later Anthony Celebreze), Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg, Sec of Interior Stewart Udall, Postmaster General Edward Day, UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson.

The only similar list I can still produce would be the starting lineup of the 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates. (Plus the pitching staff. I used to be able to do it in batting order, together with a reasonable facsimile of each batting stance.)

Of course I went way overboard in my enthusiasm. I began to acquire Kennedy gestures and vocal inflections in my extemp speeches for speech club tournaments. But I swear my back injury and subsequent back brace were authentic.

But Kennedy was the center of my education in other much more personal ways. He combined detailed knowledge and logic with wit and style. There didn't have to be this divide between being intellectual, or even as we deride people today, a "policy wonk" or a dweeb, and a funny, charming, sociable and attractive person. (In these same years, Steve Allen was combining a certain seriousness and hip musical/ artistic quality with humor that was wildly inventive, both verbal and slapstick physical. So it was okay to combine these things in one's own life.)

Kennedy was my prime model for how an ethnic Catholic could be comfortable in the big world. That his family was rich did not mean to me that my family had to be rich for me to learn from what I saw of him. Suddenly, Harvard didn't seem so remote.

His wit was playful, smart and could be gentle and courtly. He made literary allusions and championed the arts. This was very important to me, because the big conflict in my dreams for myself was between politics and literature.

There were certain encouragements to my delusions of being part of the Kennedy administration. For one thing, these were still the days when people in the government answered mail. I would write letters to the President stating my position on various matters, and I would get a letter back from, say, Ralph Dungan, special assistant to the president, who would pass on the president's appreciation for my thoughtful comments, which he had passed on to the State Department. And then I'd get a letter from somebody in the state department, about how they appreciated the opportunity to consider my views. I didn't for a moment believe that anybody was really paying any attention to what I wrote, but they were showing me respect anyway. It was a ruse I realized was designed to make me feel loyal to them, at the same time as it did make me feel loyal to them.

So now in my cache of memorabilia that has survived is a letter dated December 11, 1963 from a (Miss) Barbara Burns, Special Assistant to the Chairman of the National Cultural Center, thanking me for my letter suggesting that the center be named after John F. Kennedy. The letter does not look mass-produced, though it would have to be, since thousands wrote with the same suggestion, and so now we have the Kennedy Center. (The engraved reply which Jacqueline Kennedy sent to every American who wrote to her after the assassination has disappeared.)

During the mid-term elections of 1962, in that fateful October but before the Cuban Missile Crisis began, Kennedy campaigned in Pittsburgh. Thanks to my campaign work and my new Democratic Party and labor union connections, I was invited to be an usher for the event where he would speak. So that's when I saw him speak, with enormous passion and energy, so committed that his arms seemed to extend over the top of the podium as he gestured, coming out at you and pulling you in.

My friend Clayton was there, too (his father was there as a union rep; he brought us sandwiches because once inside we couldn't leave), as was a relative on my mother's side, Jimmy Falcon, who would later become a judge. He shook hands with Kennedy that day. Our duties as ushers were minimal, but we were introduced to several Secret Service men, told how to identify them, and instructed that if we saw anything suspicious, we should alert them immediately. This duty weighed on me so much that I had trouble concentrating on the speech. I turned in at least one man for putting his hand inside his jacket one too many times.

* * *

After Mike left Friday night, the feelings really began to hit me. First, the fact of his death, the finality of it. Everyone commented that he was so young, and more than that, a symbol of youth. I hadn't yet experienced the death of anyone close to me. Kennedy's was the first significant death in my life.

I turned to a poem about the sudden death of a young man, to Shelley's elegy for Keats, "Adonais." At that age especially I felt a kinship with the Romantic poets, and I turned to them. I found this poem in a college literature survey I found in a trunk in my grandmother's attic, a trove of mostly my uncle Carl's college books (and science fiction anthologies) with a few of my Aunt Toni's. I still have this book, dated 1951, and I'm looking at it now. I'm sure lines like these jumped out at me:

And thou, sad Hour, selected from all the years
To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers,
And teach them thine own sorrow, say: "With me
Died Adonais; till the Future dares
Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be
An echo and a light unto eternity!"

Apart from the death itself, but wound around it, was the shock and absurdity of it. It was as nightmarish as anything I've experienced, and it is that quality that remains with us in the obsessions over conspiracies and the details of the assassination. Forty years later, the consensus of experts seems to be coming around to what we believed that weekend: that one man had shot the President, through a combination of planning and accident (that he happened to be working in a building on the parade route, etc. It now seems likely that he hadn't decided to really try doing it until very close to the moment he raised the rifle.) It could have just as easily not happened. In fact, it could have more easily not happened. Then why had it happened? Why couldn't it not happen?

Vonnegut, Beckett, Ieonesco, Joseph Heller---they'd all lived through the obscene absurdities of World War II in Europe. But it was my generation's experience of the Kennedy assassination, I believe, that helped us understand their sense of absurdity and their gallows humor when all became highly popular in the mid 1960s.

As for what might have happened had Kennedy lived, again I believe we had the feeling then that we'd seen the best we would ever see---though it was a feeling we did not want to be any more accurate than we wanted the assassination itself to be real. I am sure the world would be a much better place, and the United States a much, much better country, had Kennedy lived.

I've read the critiques, I've heard the dour second thoughts: he wouldn't even have been re-elected, he would have done in Vietnam what Johnson did, etc. etc. It's all nonsense. Kennedy in 1963 had come into his own: the historic Civil Rights speech and bill, one day after his historic American University speech which led to the test ban treaty, which broke the back of the Cold War. The test ban treaty was wildly popular, in the U.S. and around the world. The South would hold for him enough to win, even though he knew that eventually Civil Rights would erode and perhaps doom the Democratic party there. Who was going to defeat him? Goldwater?

As for Vietnam, check out James Galbraith's meticulous exposition in the Boston Review which shows that Kennedy had already decided---and given the order-to withdraw American forces from Vietnam. (http://www.bostonreview.net/BR28.5/galbraith.html

Even without this evidence, it seems utterly implausible to me that Kennedy would not have seen what so many intelligent observers saw by 1965 and 1966. There is simply no way that Kennedy would have escalated the war as Johnson and Nixon did. He just wasn't that dumb: not just in sheer rational intelligence, but in humanity, public morality and his understanding of human behavior and emotion. The man who managed the Cuban Missile Crisis would not have escalated the Vietnam war. His brother Bobby knew that. And he ran for President to stop that war.

Many poets, writers, artists and intellectuals were among the first to oppose the Vietnam war, and they were demonized for it. A month before his assassination, Kennedy eulogized Robert Frost. Part of what he said was this: "If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our nation falls short of its highest potential. I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth."

If JFK had lived, we might live in a country with guaranteed medical care and probably a guaranteed annual income. A country that respected the arts and the intellect, that has become more sophisticated in exploring the real and present complexities, rather than having become more moronic each year. We would have made mistakes, but we would have realized them faster and fixed them. Eight years could have helped define this country for the next two generations. We had another chance to do that in 1968, and yet another absurd assassination robbed us again.

That night in 1963, Mike and I were supposed to be preparing to debate the issue of health care. One of Kennedy's first battles was to pass medical care for the aged, which became Medicare. The very program the current President is trying to dismantle, on this fortieth anniversary day. And still leading to preserve that program is Senator Edward Kennedy, Teddy, the last Kennedy brother, and the one thought least likely to succeed. I saw him on TV last night, with a firmer grasp of the issues, and a better presence and ability to communicate the issue, than any other advocate on either side.

Kennedy's death also changed my life personally. Although I remained politically active and interested, electoral politics was not the option it once might have been.

The Kennedy years were the first--- and would turn out to be the only-- time that I felt in alignment with people and institutions in my home town, those institutions being the local Democratic party and the labor unions. In my small but energetic efforts in the 1960 campaign, I caught the attention of a few people in the party and the union political committee. My father was a Democratic committeeman, and Clayton's father was a union member and a friend of the energetic young chair of the union coordinating committee. He really took a liking to me, and even a few years later---first in the LBJ campaign, and then when Johnson was starting the Great Society programs but before Vietnam heated up---he was offering me absurdly high positions for somebody not yet 20. Like becoming head of the local poverty program. I was a college sophomore at the time, going to school 800 miles away.

For a few years I was really connected with the up and coming younger people in local Democratic politics. In 1962 I worked on the successful campaign of a state rep who eventually became quite a powerful senior member of the state legislature and of the local party. Had Vietnam not upset the applecart, I might have had a real political future there. I was not as smart, or perhaps as calculating as Bill Clinton to keep myself in the game while opposing the war. (I'm clearly not as smart in any case.) I burned my bridges, inside as well as outside.

Beyond that, there is all that happened that probably wouldn't have in the country and the world, that forced the decisions that formed my life. It seems likely to me that had Kennedy still been President when I was in college, I would have graduated and gone onto further education and some kind of real career (although it's always possible I would have blown it all to be a rebel poet anyway). I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have spent my graduation day not graduating, and watching Robert Kennedy's funeral on television in the student union. Nor would my life have become so deflected and deformed by Vietnam and the draft, in the country that Nixon would soon bludgeon into shape for the zeitgeist presided over by Reagan and the Bushes to ruin beyond recognition. Maybe I didn't respond to all that very well. But it's hard for me to believe that my life wouldn't have been better, along with the world's, if all that had been avoided.

Forty years after his sudden death, JFK has mostly been reduced to a series of clichés and cynical gossip. The same line from his Inaugural is repeated endlessly by our media automatons, altered only to further shrink it into a kind of meaningless brand name slogan, so just as Martin Luther King has been reduced to "I have a dream today," just about all an entire generation has heard coming out of Kennedy's mouth is "Ask not."

His presidency is a sentimental soap opera called Camelot, or a lurid melodrama of sex with mob molls and movie stars. This anniversary of his assassination has become an almost pornographic festival of virtual reenactments. Some of this may be a healthy adjustment to the often uncomfortable complexities of reality. But mostly it's evidence of our descent into displacement, consumerist obsession, self-satisfied vulgarity coupled with self-righteous ignorance.

Kennedy symbolized the ascent of intelligence in American life. The Best and the Brightest suggested the price of arrogance, but real intelligence is not arrogant, or at least not for long. Our society no longer aspires to intelligence, and it hasn't for forty years. We're happy with the arrogance of ignorance. We don't even have to be ironic about it anymore.

****
The next day, Saturday, I became mesmerized by the nonstop television coverage. I took a break from it to go with my father up to the Singer store on Main Street, where he was the manager. He borrowed one of my JFK portraits I'd brought back from the Inaugural or extracted from Life magazine, and we made a memorial display in the window. Most places did. No stores were open for business. The entire country had shut down.

I was still watching Sunday, excused from going to Mass with my family, watching Lee Harvey Oswald being marched passed a crowd of press through police headquarters-I jumped when I saw a gun pointed at him, but relaxed when I realized it was a microphone. A moment later there was a shot, and I saw Oswald crumple on live TV.

Then the funeral, and the images that have haunted America for forty years-Jackie and Bobby, the casket and the riderless horse bucking its black mane, Jackie and Caroline and three year old John-John, and his salute to the flag draped casket.

Back at school Monday, the sisters were organizing a memorial assembly. I was among the students invited to speak. I remember sitting in the office of-I kid you not-the Prefect of Discipline, explaining that I didn't want to give a speech about Kennedy, there had been enough of them. I wanted to read from his speeches, so people wouldn't forget what we had been given and what we had lost, and what we should remember. She wouldn't let me do it. Miffed, she relented to let me play a small excerpt of one of his speeches at the beginning of the assembly, from off-stage. She also borrowed the largest of my JFK portraits, a now rare one of him with Jackie. It was mounted high on the black curtains behind the speakers on the stage. Much as I had feared, the speeches were largely sentimental, several mentioning brave little John-John. My fellow students wondered why I wasn't up there, why I was hidden in the wings, running a tape recorder. They thought I was in the doghouse again, and they were right. The next day I went back to the Prefect's office to get my portrait but she impatiently said she didn't know what happened to it, and dismissed me. I never saw it again.

After I'd sorted out my feelings enough to express something, I did write a piece for the school newspaper. I'm reproducing it in its entirety here below. Looking at it now, I see that I did something a little interesting with the central metaphor. I didn't use "Adonais" but instead the more familiar John Donne lines that we had just been reading in English lit class, and the "for whom the bell tolls" which was familiar from Hemingway. I didn't analyze it this way at the time, but I started with the bells tolling to mark a death, and ended with the suggestion that the bells toll for others as a clarion call, a kind of "and now the trumpet summons us again" (JFK Inaugural), a summons to confront life (political life specifically), in a way that makes Donne's "no man is an island" theme subsidiary to a call to replace the fallen hero--- perhaps more appropriate for JFK, and especially for the adolescent writing it.


* * *

titled (by the editor) John Fitzgerald Kennedy..."Now he belongs to the Ages."

The slow cadence of the muffled drums reflected the mournful heartbeat of Washington. The bells of St. Matthew's were echoed across the nation. The world heard them, and knew for whom they tolled. They tolled for the departed President, John F. Kennedy.

When a man and the Presidency meet, profound changes are worked upon both. John Kennedy brought to his office an immense intellect, a dashing style, a will to serve, a ready wit, an enormous potential, and a courage based on trust in God.

He gave the Presidency heightened prestige, grace and dignity, a foundation of leadership, and a position of strength.

This man who had been described by his queenly wife as "an idealist without illusions" came to the White House with a view that did not permit him to stand and watch the world march by, but demanded that he take an active part in determining its route and its final goals.

He was, as a British commentator described him, "a man so utterly right for the job." He molded the presidency as a citadel of power in the Cuban crisis and the steel situation. He provided moral leadership in civil rights and the nuclear test ban treaty. He set a new intellectual tone for the nation, and dedicated us to the adventure of conquering space. He showed through action his conviction that "if a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich."

His work was not done in the first one hundred days, nor in his lifetime. But he began.

He will be more than a footnote in history. His spirit will live on, especially in the Peace Corps that he founded.

In his last public speech, he pointed out that the New Frontier of which he had so often spoken was not a political program, but an existing reality. For the first time in history, man has the material power to abolish many forms of human suffering and want. The challenge is to apply our knowledge and resources to the problem.

John Kennedy's message was repeated over and over: "There is great unfinished business in this country."

His death brought an end to his efforts, but not to the problems themselves. There are still forty-two million Americans---a fourth of the nation---with levels of income, health, housing, and food below standards tolerated by society at large. There are still millions of unemployed, lacking the skill and education to support their families. There is still a large segment of our population who are insidiously denied their basic rights because of color. There are still the old people who suffer sickness three times as often, yet earn half as much, as younger Americans. There is still one third of a world rocked with poverty, hunger, and disease.

The death of John Kennedy does not discharge us from our obligations. It rededicates us.

"Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."