Television was part of it, too, for it made the Kennedys’ life in the White House more visible than that of any First Family before them. Because of these elements and, above all, because of the attractiveness of husband and wife, both of the Kennedys appealed powerfully and intimately to men and women in every age group and every walk of life, people who did not ordinarily think about politics or see their own lives reflected in any way in that of the First Family.
Far from being unusual, the Oswalds were in some respects typical. They were young, twenty-two and twenty-four years old, and they read eagerly about the Kennedys in every fan magazine they could peruse during their evening strolls past the newsstands of New Orleans. They speculated without surcease about every facet of the Kennedys’ lives. Even their speculations were typical. Each seems to have yearned a little toward each of the Kennedys. Marina, for example, considered Jacqueline Kennedy a “goddess.” Since she was a goddess, however, it occurred to Marina that perhaps Mrs. Kennedy was “cold,” and that the president might need extra warmth in his life, warmth that a less perfect, more earthy woman such as she herself might provide. In thinking thoughts such as these, Marina seems only to have been thinking what many American women thought. She was unusual, perhaps, in that President Kennedy was a physical reminder of the suitor she wished she had married. And she was unusual in that, unlike other women whose daydreams about the president were innocuous, she was married to a man who happened to be capable of killing.
Oswald’s feelings are difficult to surmise, although Marina confirms that neither he nor she had heard rumors of the president’s affairs with women, nor of his Addison’s disease. They thought the Kennedys were just another couple such as they were, raised to the thousandth power of beauty and success. Oswald approved of Mrs. Kennedy and knew of her troubles in having children. He was a considerate husband in one respect—he let his wife decide how many children they would have. It may be that in shooting the president, Oswald imagined that he was protecting “Jackie” from a sexually exigent Catholic husband—Oswald despised religion—who compelled her to have children no matter what the injury to her health. And it is possible, although again a matter of conjecture, that the act of assassination was enhanced, and not diminished, in its attractiveness for Oswald by the fact that Jacqueline Kennedy would be there, that she would see it, that she would witness the “deed of unheard-of prowess” that he was performing for her sake.[14]
To say that President Kennedy shared with his assassin a fatalism and perhaps a yearning toward death, and that the Kennedys were surrounded by a volatile set of symbols concerning both death and sex, may explain a phenomenon reported soon after they entered the White House by U. E. Baughman, head of the Secret Service.[15] In a book published in 1961, Baughman stated that the number of letters to the president increased by 50 percent during the early weeks of the Kennedy administration. Somewhat ominously, Baughman added that the proportion from what he called the “lunatic fringe” had increased by 300 percent, and that the number of “insane” people who tried to telephone the president or who stopped by the White House gates to threaten the president’s life or the lives of members of his family had also greatly increased. Thus there was an unusually large pool of potential assassins for this particular president. John F. Kennedy was, from the outset, highly assassinable.
There was another aspect of Kennedy’s special vulnerability that enhanced his appeal as a victim to Lee Harvey Oswald. It lay in the many roles he played, as a man, as a member of the Kennedy clan, as head of the First Family, and as president of the United States. Because he was vibrant and handsome, because his age gave him an across-the-board appeal, and because of his ability to project himself into other people’s longings, there was something in Kennedy for nearly everyone. There was scarcely any American who could not see something of himself in this president, or who did not want to. Countless men and women saw in him someone in their own lives who had been close to them, or someone they would like close to them.
Also, Kennedy had two living parents, an unusual thing for a president, and there must have been many older men and women who looked on him as a son, or as the son they wished they had had. And the children of such people could have been jealous of the president. John Kennedy was one of a large brood of brothers and sisters, and there must have been some among the population who viewed him as the fantastically successful older brother whose achievements they could not hope to match. These people, too, must have envied him.
Still others must have envied him his upbringing in a loyal and close-knit family. Oswald seems to have been one of these, for, switching things around in his mind, he told Marina that he himself would like enough children for a “whole football team.” There was only one family in America that was famous for having enough children to rouse up a football game at any moment—the Kennedys.
And Oswald appears to have envied the president not only the ebullient boyhood that was in such contrast with his lonely one, but he envied him his job—a job in which the president dealt daily with Russia and Cuba—for Oswald wanted to be president, and at the very age, forty-three, at which Kennedy had attained the office. Moreover, he wanted his “son,” the son he did not yet have, to be president. This, again, appears to have been a case in which Oswald identified not only with the president but with Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., “founding father” of the dynasty.
To the man who became his assassin, Lee Oswald, President Kennedy was not an accidental victim. To the contrary, and despite the huge element of chance, Kennedy was a highly determined target, and he might well have proved to be so to some other assassin than Oswald. But there was another side of the presidency that entered into Oswald’s motives, and it, too, was immeasurable in its importance.
We as a nation are a family, with the president as our symbolic father, or head. What is only beginning to be understood is that the president is not only a father, but to some he is a combined parent, embodying elements of the mother as well. He is therefore in a position to magnetize the emotions of those who have had particularly strong feelings about either or both of their parents.
It is perhaps a strain on the imagination to see President Kennedy, with his virile masculinity, in the role of a symbolic mother. But there was something motherly about his presidency, for it was family lore that Kennedys are in politics to “serve,” to give of themselves unstintingly and asked nothing in return. President Kennedy emphasized this by working full time for the country and giving back his salary to the Treasury. In his inaugural address he urged others to be altruistic: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” And he created the Peace Corps, so that young Americans could devote part of their lives to helping the less fortunate. In all these ways the president stressed the giving, caring, motherly aspect of his office.
Marina is still puzzled as to why her husband killed the president. “But he liked Kennedy!” she protests to this day. And this is the beginning of an answer, for the public figure who appeals to the good in men, who stirs in them visions of altruism and exhorts them to be better than they are, such a leader appears to touch a chord in his followers that renders him especially vulnerable to their disappointments.
And Lee Oswald’s life had been rich in disappointments. He had been disappointed in the mother who, he felt, let him down so egregiously while he was growing up that he came to feel deeply wronged by her. And he had been disappointed by the father who let him down by dying before he was born. It was not President Kennedy’s fault, it was his danger, that he stood in a position to magnetize the emotions of a Lee Oswald, who had had very little love in his life and whose feelings toward both his parents were so richly compounded of hate.
14
Not only would Jacqueline Kennedy witness Oswald’s act, but there was a real danger that he might hit her accidentally. When asked about this, Dr. David Rothstein of Chicago, who has written extensively about assassinations, suggested in conversation with the author on May 4, 1971, that Oswald’s willingness to risk hitting Mrs. Kennedy while aiming at her husband was an example of the “unconscious matricidal wish showing through.”
15
U. E. Baughman and Leonard Wallace Robinson,