JFK
I.
That day I was in Ireland, in the dark, hard northern city of Belfast. I was there with my father, who had been away from the city where he was born for more than 30 years. He was an American now — survivor of the Depression and poverty, father of seven children, fanatic of baseball — but he was greeted as a returning Irishman by his brother Frank and his surviving Irish friends, and there were many Irish tears and much Irish laughter, waterfalls of beer, and all the old Irish songs of defiance and loss. Billy Hamill was home. And on the evening of November 22, I was in my cousin Frankie’s house in a section called Andersonstown, dressing to go down to see the old man in a place called the Rock Bar. The television was on in the parlor. Frankie’s youngest kids were playing on the floor. A frail rain was falling outside.
And then the program was interrupted and a BBC announcer came on, his face grave, to say that the president of the United States had been shot in Dallas. Everything in the room stopped. In his clipped, abrupt voice, the announcer said that the details were sketchy. Everyone turned to me, the visiting American, as if I would know if this were true. I mumbled, talked nonsense — maybe it was a mistake; sometimes these things are moved on the wires too fast — but my stomach was churning. The regular program resumed; the kids went back to playing. A few minutes later, the announcer returned, and this time his voice was unsteady. It was true. John F. Kennedy, the president of the United States, was dead.
I remember whirling in pain and fury, slamming the wall with my hand, and reeling out into the night. All over the city, thousands of human beings were doing the same thing. Doors slammed and sudden wails went up. Oh, sweet Jesus, they shot Jack! And They killed President Kennedy! And He’s been shot dead! At the foot of the Falls Road, I saw an enraged man punching a tree. Another man sat on the curb, sobbing into his hands. Trying to be a reporter, I wandered over to the Shankill Road, the main Protestant avenue in that city so long divided by religion. It was the same there. Holy God, they’ve killed President Kennedy: with men weeping and children running with the news and bawling women everywhere. It was a scale of grief Pd never seen before or since in any place on earth. John Fitzgerald Kennedy wasn’t “the Catholic president” to the people of the Shankill or the Falls; he was the young and shining prince of the Irish diaspora.
I ended up at the Rock Bar, climbing to the long, smoky upstairs room. The place was packed. At a corner table, my father was sitting with two old IRA men. They were trying to console him when he was beyond consolation. For the immigrants of his generation, Jack Kennedy was always special. After i960, they knew that their children truly could be anything in their new country, including president.
“They got him, they got him,” he said, embracing me and sobbing into my shoulder. “The dirty sons of bitches, they got him.”
And then “The Star-Spangled Banner” was playing on the television set, and everyone in the place, 100 of them at least, rose and saluted. They weren’t saluting the American flag, which was superimposed over Kennedy’s face. They were saluting the fallen president who in some special way was their president too. The anthem ended. We drank a lot of whiskey together. We watched bulletins from Dallas. We cursed the darkness. And then there was a film of Kennedy in life. Visiting Ireland for three days the previous June.
There he was, smiling in that curious way, at once genuine and detached, capable of fondness and irony. The wind was tossing his hair. He was playing with the top button of his jacket. He was standing next to Eamon De Valera, the president of Ireland. He was laughing with the mayor of New Ross in County Wexford. He was being engulfed by vast crowds in Dublin. He seemed to be having a very good time. And then he was at the airport to say his farewell, and in the Rock Bar, we heard him speak:
“Last night, somebody sang a song, the words of which I’m sure you know, of ‘Come back to Erin, mavourneen, mavourneen, come back aroun’ to the land of thy birth. Come with the shamrock in the springtime, mavourneen.…’ This is not the land of my birth, but it is the land for which I hold the greatest affection.” A pause and a smile. “And I certainly will come back in the springtime.”
II.
Twenty-five springtimes have come and gone, and for those of us who were young then, those days live on in vivid detail. We remember where we were and how we lived and who we were in love with. We remember the images on television screens, black-and-white and grainy: Lee Harvey Oswald dying over and over again as Jack Ruby steps out to blow him into eternity; Jacqueline Kennedy’s extraordinary wounded grace; Caroline’s baffled eyes and John-John saluting. We remember the drumrolls and the riderless horse.
But across the years, there have been alterations made in the reputation of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Those who hated him on November 21, 1963, continue to hate him now. Some who were once his partisans have turned upon him with the icy retrospective contempt that is the specialty of the neoconservative faith. And time itself has altered his once-glittering presence in the national consciousness. An entire generation has come to maturity with no memory at all of the Kennedy years; for them, Kennedy is the name of an airport or a boulevard or a high school.
Certainly, the psychic wound of his sudden death appears to have healed. The revisionists have come forward; Kennedy’s life and his presidency have been examined in detail, and for some, both have been found wanting. The presidency, we have been told, was incomplete, a sad perhaps; the man himself was deeply flawed. Some of this thinking was a reaction to the overwrought mythologizing of the first few years after Dallas. The selling of “Camelot” was too insistent, too fevered, accompanied by too much sentimentality and too little rigorous thought. The Camelot metaphor was never used during Kennedy’s 1,000 days (Jack himself might have dismissed the notion with a wry or obscene remark); it first appeared in an interview Theodore H. White did with Jacqueline after the assassination. But it pervaded many of the first memoirs about the man and his time.
Some of the altered vision of Kennedy comes from the coarsening of the collective memory by the endless stream of books about the assassination itself. We’ve had the 26 volumes of the Warren Commission report and dozens of analyses detailing its sloppiness and inadequacy. We’ve gone back again and again to Dealey Plaza and the Texas School Book Depository and the grassy knoll. In thousands of talk shows, magazine articles, newspaper columns, and books, we’ve heard the Cuban-exile theory, the Mafia theory, the Castro theory, the J. Edgar Hoover theory, the Jim Garrison theory, the CIA theory, the Texas-oil theory, the KGB theory, the E. Howard Hunt theory, the two-Oswalds theory.
We’ve seen documentaries and docudramas. We’ve watched the Zapruder film over and over again. We’ve heard sound experts tell us that the evidence proves that there was a fourth shot and therefore two gunmen. We’ve read cheap fiction about the assassination and superb fiction like Don DeLillo’s Libra. In the end, nothing has been resolved. If there was a conspiracy, the plotters got away with it. Twenty-five years have passed. Kennedy is still dead. And so is Oswald. And Ruby. And so many of the others. And in a peculiar way, the details of Kennedy’s death have obliterated both the accomplishments and failures of his life.
At the same time, other tales have helped to debase the metal of the man: the smarmy memoirs of women who certainly slept with him and others who certainly didn’t; the endless retailing of the gossip about his alleged affair with Marilyn Monroe, that other pole of American literary necrophilia; the detailed histories of the family and its sometimes arrogant ways. These days, with a renewed public hypocrisy in sexual matters, Kennedy has acquired the dreaded “womanizer” label, complete with half-baked theories about the origins of his supposed Don Juan complex. He was afraid of dying, say the theorizers. He was selfish and spoiled. He was revolting against his mother’s rigid Catholicism or imitating his father’s own philandering.