Remembrance of President Kennedy in November – 50 Novembers

By Stephen V. Russell

On November 22, 1963, at 12:30 p.m., CST, President John F. Kennedy, the youngest elected president in our nation’s history, was shot down riding in an open car in a motorcade in , Texas. Governor John B. Connelly of Texas was wounded, and so were the American people. For those of us who remember the event, the wound hasn’t healed to this day. In an instant, the fifties ended, and the tumultuous sixties began. And we have never forgotten President Kennedy and what he stood for.

I still recall the NBC-TV documentary Kennedy: What is Remembered Is Never Lost that aired the month of the first anniversary of Kennedy’s death. In his steady, reassuring voice, veteran NBC news correspondent Frank McGee introduced this no-frills black-and-white documentary. It was poignant to hear on the second track the resonant voice of the fallen president delivering portions of a medley of speeches, many of which were already embedded in the collective memory of Americans. While we listened to the president’s words, the camera panned familiar institutions and national monuments in Washington, D.C. ending with the pageantry of the solemn funeral procession through the streets of the national capital to Arlington National Cemetery, Kennedy’s final resting place.

During the 1964-65 television season, Executive Producer Robert Saudek presented twenty-six episodes of a series based on the late president’s 1956 Pulitzer Prize-winning Profiles in Courage. It portrayed courageous political leaders who dared to take unpopular stands at critical moments in American history. Nelson Riddle’s Orchestra provided the rousing musical accompaniment on the sound track. Saudek took home a Peabody award for this well-received effort.

Film producer David A. Wolper made a television documentary, shown in 1964, based on Theodore H. White’s The Making of the President, 1960, about the political campaign in which Senator Kennedy eventually prevailed, just barely, against Republican candidate Vice President Richard M. Nixon. Actor Martin Gabel narrated the telefilm, and the gravity of the voice perfectly complemented the subject matter. Wolper also produced a twenty-two minute tribute, John F. Kennedy – A Thousand Days, for showing at the 1964 Atlantic City Democratic Convention.

But these productions were mere previews to Wolper’s feature-length documentary that was made for theatrical release, Four Days in November, in the fall of 1964. According to the pressbook for the black- and-white film, it presented “a complete film chronicle and authoritative, exhaustive account of what occurred over those four days – minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour, day-by-day story with every detail revealed, every question answered.” From thousands of feet of documentary footage – newsreel and amateur -- the filmmakers superbly recreated the harrowing atmosphere of that November 1963 weekend. Theodore Strauss wrote the script, Mel Stuart directed, and Elmer Bernstein, composer of dramatic scores for Hollywood movies like “The Magnificent Seven” from 1960, provided the stirring music. The golden voice of actor Richard Basehart narrated; he was among the many actors over the years drafted to give gravitas to the Kennedy chronicle. Every November since 1964, the nation has commemorated President Kennedy’s tragic passing. During the most recent, fiftieth, anniversary, it was daunting to realize that five decades after his premature violent death, this president continues to rouse the emotions of Americans and of people around the globe. It is strange -- on the macabre -- to witness these commemorations.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the president’s youngest sibling, preferred to mark the anniversary of his brother’s birth, not his death, just as George Washington and are remembered on their birthdates in February. John F. Kennedy, however, has been linked to November on the calendar ever since 1963. For fifty years the November 22nd tragedy has created an ache in the American heart.

The media love anniversaries, especially the ten-year milestones and at the quarter-century mark. On the recent fiftieth, we faced a blitz of Kennedyana, books, magazines, symposiums, motion picture and television documentaries. The five-decades-long national conversation goes on unabated. The citizenry’s apparently insatiable fascination with the Kennedy legend has given rise to a cottage industry of material on the president, with a particularly prolific subset concerned with refuting the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin. Just this last year, Pittsburgh’s Duquesne University Cyril H. Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and Law conducted a three-day symposium that considered the various conspiracy theories of the Kennedy assassination, Passing the Torch. Ten years prior another three-day symposium held there was entitled Solving The Great American Murder Mystery. Baylor University in Waco, Texas, also conducted forums on the assassination, and maintains an archive of JFK material in the W.R. Poage Legislative Library.

In an article published on the tenth anniversary, a writer reflected upon the generations that have looked upon John Kennedy as a beacon, and who took to heart Kennedy’s words at his Inaugural, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” They have been called the Kennedy generation – those Americans who were in their teens or early twenties when John F. Kennedy was shot to death in Dallas. And they have not forgotten him or how, for many of them, he shaped their lives. The Kennedy inspiration carried one in that generation of believers to the White House, President William Jefferson Clinton.

I recall my own part in the yearly remembrances of President Kennedy when I was teacher at Ringgold High School’s Monongahela campus. On or near November 22, for a period of six years, I presided at fifty-minute classes that eulogized the president. We played Dion’s recording of “Abraham, Martin, and John” and screened the eighteen-minute 16 mm documentary made by Encyclopedia Britannica, John F. Kennedy, 1917-63. The turnout was exhilarating. Not the normal class size. Students from study halls and other classes flocked to the annual event and increased the numbers threefold.

During my years as a public school principal in the 1980s, the student council organized school-wide assemblies in November. Students not yet born at the time of the assassination spoke about President Kennedy and his time in office. Their remarks would be followed by a showing of the documentary John F. Kennedy: Years of Lightning, Day of Drums, made in 1965 by the United States Information Agency and intended only for foreign release. This hagiography portrayed the impact of Kennedy as a world leader. By a special act of Congress, Years of Lightning was eventually permitted domestic release, and just last year it was meticulously restored to its brilliant color for release in a special DVD edition for the fiftieth anniversary. In the film, actor Gregory Peck, in his sober narration, speaks of the six faces of Kennedy’s so-called New Frontier: Peace Corps, Alliance for Progress, Moon Challenge, , Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and Civil Rights. I assigned the film as a middle school theme for the 2003-2004 term.

In 1991, the release of controversial director Oliver Stone’s JFK, focusing on the assassination and disputing the Warren Commission, piqued the interest of middle school students with no personal memories of the late president. We provided students with a 29-page study guide on the assassination along with a class lesson. I maintained my own observation of the anniversary when on November 21, 1990, I addressed over 200 Pittsburgh Rotarians. My topic, “Nearly Three Decades Later: John F. Kennedy Revisited.”

These anniversaries shed light on the continued interest in Kennedy, an interest that never seemed to flag. At the time of his death, the so called “credibility gap” did not exist. Kennedy, with his vibrant youth and vitality, transmitted to the American people a new hopefulness and optimism. He represented high hopes and high expectations for the country. His death blindsided the country, and began the era of divided polarization of the populace. America lost confidence in the leaders who succeeded him. JFK embodied the American ideal that many still clung to, to the optimism that he represented in a world so altered since his passing.

American television grew up on the weekend of the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. The onslaught of its nonstop four-day coverage of events - - including the unprecedented live broadcast of a murder -- Jack Ruby shooting to death the suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald as he was being transferred to a new prison. Television was brought into its maturity, and the entire nation was brought together in front of their television sets -- from the first heartbreaking announcement, by news anchor Walter Cronkite, confirming Kennedy’s death to the funeral procession three days later on Monday morning, November 25.

We have seen these images over and over again – they have become an orgy of loss. We look at where we were at that time and continue to reflect; those who weren’t born yet hear of the Kennedy legend from their parents, their schools, and their elders. For baby boomers, like myself, our most potent images are of our hopeful young selves. Kennedy caught baby boomers at perhaps their most impressionable time of life, adolescence. The president’s words appealed to our vanity – and to our idealism. As the first “television” president, he was the last presidential orator in the mold of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt. We still miss the young president. To us he is forever forty-six-years old. Baby boomers are Kennedy’s Children.

It is an irony that despite a bibliography of books on Kennedy that likely number in the thousands, there is as yet no definitive biography of the president on the order, say, of Arthur Link’s magisterial five- volume biography of Woodrow Wilson, published 1947-65, or the still-to-be-completed monumental five volumes by Robert Caro on Lyndon B. Johnson, four of which have already appeared – the first in 1982 -- while a fifth and final volume awaits publication. Nigel Hamilton wrote JFK: Reckless Youth in 1992 in a projected multi-volume account of Kennedy’s life, but gave up on the idea after the publication of only one book. Perhaps no one can plumb the essence of President Kennedy who, for now, remains what Chris Matthews calls him in the title of his contribution to the endless bibliography of books on Kennedy, Elusive Hero.

Nevertheless, there are respected texts, Jill Abramson, briefly the first woman to hold the position of executive editor at the august Times, wrote in that publication in 2013 what she considers the go-to texts for the most insightful considerations of Kennedy, that define the man and not just the myth. She recommends Norman Mailer’s piece that appeared in Esquire and was written even before Kennedy had been elected to his high office. It is tantalizingly entitled, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket.” The books Abramson recommends are William Manchester’s 1967 The Death of a President commissioned by, and then, after publication, disputed by the Kennedy family; Richard Reeves, clear- eyed President Kennedy: Profile of Power (1993), and Robert Dallek’s An Unfinished Life (2003), with its new revelations about Kennedy’s health and extra marital romances. I would add one more to this list of notables, Geoffrey Perret’s Jack: A Life Like No Other (2001). It is the first comprehensive one-volume biography that had the benefit of previously unavailable diaries and declassified documents. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote A Thousand Days (1965), and it is a valuable insider account as he was in the administration as a close advisor to the president.

Even on the first anniversary, I remember being overwhelmed by the plenitude of books of Kennedy on display in Kaufmann’s Department Store in Pittsburgh. On every anniversary, the aficionado of such books is not disappointed. Last November, browsing in Barnes and Noble, JFK Conservative by Ira Stoll caught my eye and so did a perhaps unique what-if novel by the always astute Jeff Greenfield, If Kennedy Lived. “JFK 50” did not disappoint book collectors.

A truly impressive – and truly essential – contribution last year was The Kennedy Years, edited by the aforementioned Richard Reeves. Virtually its entire contents are gleaned from the pages of , representing coverage by the “newspaper of record” of John F. Kennedy by the era’s top reporters, among them David Halberstam (The Best and the Brightest) and James Reston, as well as many esteemed scholars.

It was the occasion of the twentieth anniversary, in 1983, that was perhaps the most monumental remembrance up to that date. The newly hatched national newspaper USA Today led in promoting the anniversary as a form of pop culture. JFK documentaries were ubiquitous on television, the most singular of them perhaps Being with John F. Kennedy presented by Robert Drew Associates and introduced by Nancy Dickerson. Drew resurrected four documentaries, three made during the president’s lifetime with his cooperation. The grainy black-and-white footage gave the series a ghostly effect. This past November Turner Classic Movies gave us another opportunity to view these rare records of John F. Kennedy in action. The series comprised Primary, Adventures on the New Frontier, Kennedy vs. Wallace: A Crisis Up Close, and Faces of November. The syndicated documentary America Remembers John F. Kennedy was hosted and narrated by actor Hal Holbrook, famous for his portrayal of . ABC-TV anchorman Peter Jennings narrated JFK Remembered, a twenty-year retrospective that takes an unprecedented look at Kennedy’s thousand days in office. It assesses the realities of the Kennedy presidency, what he achieved, where he failed, how close he came to meeting the goals he set for himself and the nation. The evocative original music score was a collaboration of Michael J. Shapiro, today a conductor of the Chappaqua Orchestra, and Gershon Kingsley, known for his hit “Popcorn.” The sharp narrative had the benefit of senior historical consultant James Macgregor Burns. After watching it, one was left with the belief that not only did we lose a great leader for America but for the world as well.

Fourteen years later Peter Jennings presented executive producer Mark Obenhaus’s Dangerous World: The Kennedy Years, a two-hour special based in part on the reporting of Seymour Hirsch – who famously revealed to the world the My Lai massacres. Joseph Kraft editorialized in syndication that the omission of a public ceremony on November 22, 1984, marking the twenty-first anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, indicated that the national wound had been healed. On succeeding anniversaries, Mr. Kraft would find out that his diagnosis was premature.

In 2003, Mark Obenhaus was executive producer, director, and writer of a two-hour co-production between ABC and the BBC, Peter Jennings Reporting: The Kennedy Assassination – Beyond Conspiracy. Obenhaus had first worked on a Kennedy documentary for the PBS series The American Experience. In 1988, on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary, he narrated JFK: A Time Remembered. This heart- wrenching documentary expressed personal remembrances by a cross section of Americans including, among others, Dan Rather, Tom Wicker, Tip O’Neill, and McGeorge Bundy with their reflections intermixed with footage of the funeral procession. The emotional impact of this fifty-five minute film was heightened by its music, including compositions by Aaron Copland from and Charles Ives. Copland’s orchestration was recently used as well in the PBS documentary The Roosevelts – An Intimate History. In particular, Ives’ The Unanswered Question was a dirge appropriate to the occasion. The Ives original from 1908 (he died in 1954) was reworked by him in the mid-nineteen- thirties but did not premiere until March 1984 when the American Composers Orchestra performed it in . The “question motif” evokes “The Perennial Question of Existence,” to which a woodwind quartet of “Fighting Answerers” tries vainly to provide an answer, and the frustration is signaled by the increasing dissonance of the music. Violinist Isaac Stern concluded the documentary with a powerful, moving, artistic interpretation of what we lost on that day in November.

James Earl Jones as narrator examined the legacy of President Kennedy in 1988 in The Day the Nation Cried. In October 1988 The Men Who Killed Kennedy aired. It was a two-part documentary produced by the United Kingdom, and later expanded in 1993 as a six-part speculation about the assassination. The film created controversy.

In the same year the Disney Channel showcased numerous films on the subject over a week in November and broadcast over three evenings the Disney original contribution, John Fitzgerald Kennedy: A Celebration of His Life and Times. A CEL Communications Property, it examined the years and life of the president in segments, concluding with The Presidency and Legacy. HBO joined in with JFK: In His Own Words.

During the thirtieth anniversary in 1993, ABC presented Nigel Hamilton’s JFK: Reckless Youth, a two-part adaptation drama refuted by the Kennedy family. CBS’s offering was a two-hour special documentary by filmmaker Peter Davis (Hearts and Minds 1974) on the life and times of John Kennedy simply titled Jack. Intimate and a revealing portrait, Jack is told in Kennedy’s own words and in reminiscences by those who knew him best.

To rebut Kennedy conspiracy theorists, CBS Reports broadcast Who Killed JFK: The Final Chapter. This was an attempt to project and put to rest the varied conspiracy theories and to persuade people to settle for the findings of the Warren Commission Report. Dan Rather lent his credibility to this quixotic goal by narrating the documentary. On Cable, commentator Larry King produced Where Were You? He asked viewers where they were when they heard the news of the assassination.

During the fortieth anniversary in 2003, Cable’s History Channel devoted an entire week to documentary films in memory of President Kennedy, with its major premier JFK: A Presidency Revealed. A three-part series, the film is an all-inclusive study of the Kennedy White House years, presenting both positive and negative, with never-before-released source material. The documentary was made available to public schools for classroom use, along with display boards.

Other major contributions included CNN’s President Kennedy Has Been Shot and PBS’s JFK: Breaking the News. The latter tracked Kennedy’s killing, and then, two days later, the killing of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby on live TV. presented JFK: Case Not Closed, and offered evidence of a possible second shooter.

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews contributed JFK: The Day That Changed America, interviewing luminaries about where they were when Kennedy was shot. On the Bravo Channel The Kennedy Tapes Revealed featured audio tapes of Attorney General Robert Kennedy assessing his brother’s presidency.

Of course, alongside all of these documentary accounts, the movie and TV industries delivered endless biopics and docudramas. Here is a roster of some of the actors who have interpreted the role of John F. Kennedy. William Devane was Kennedy in (1974), Paul Rudd in Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye (1977), in Kennedy (1983), Steven Weber in The Kennedys of Massachusetts (1990), Patrick Dempsey in Reckless Youth (1993), Bruce Greenwood in Thirteen Days (2000), and Rob Lowe in Killing Kennedy (2013).

The first actor to play Kennedy on celluloid was , and President Kennedy actually was consulted and approved of the casting. He was still alive when a film was made based on his World War II experience, PT – 109. The film was released in the year of Kennedy’s death. Fifty years forward and the most recent actor to play Kennedy, to my thinking, has surpassed all others. He is James Marsden who portrayed the president in the recent film, The Butler. (2013). In October and November 2013, there was an outpouring of new documentaries remembering the assassination and commemorating what came to be known as the Camelot era, so christened by First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. Shows tracked the hour-by-hour movements of alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald on PBS Frontline’s Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald? The History Channel followed with Lee Oswald: 48 Hours to Live. American Experience on PBS continued its fascination with Kennedy with its distinguished presidential series. JFK: Meet the Real Jack Kennedy was presented over two evenings in November 2013. It was a fresh and riveting look at the enigmatic president. A decade earlier, American Experience had produced the portrait, The Kennedys.

PBS took a fresh approach when it presented JFK: One PM Central Standard Time on November 13, 2013, with narration by actor George Clooney. It told, in detail, how Walter Cronkite’s iconic report of the young president’s death aired on live television.

Perhaps the most ambitious JFK project in some time is The Kennedy Half Century, five years in the making, both celluloid and an accompanying text. The book is the work of University of Virginia’s Professor of Politics Larry Sabito and the historian explores the overwhelming influence President Kennedy has had for five decades on the media, on the general public and especially on each one of his nine presidential successors. “The legacy of John F. Kennedy has proven durable and popular,” the professor writes, and his book does an exceptional job of explaining how and why. Larry Sabito’s Crystal Ball is an excellent source for political happenings on the internet.

And demonstrating further that the case is still not closed, in 2013 National Geographic presented their assessment on the assassination, The Final Hours and The Lost Bullet. The History Channel chimed in with JFK Assassination: The Definitive Guide. REELZ Channel entered the conversation with thought provoking documentaries The Smoking Gun, Killing Kennedy: 50 Questions Answered, and Inside the Evidence, with Bill Curtis reporting. The Discovery Channel hosted The Lost Tapes – using Dallas-TV archival live footage.

CNN developed an entire series on the tumultuous time - The Sixties, from the perspective of nearly fifty years later. CBS veteran insightful correspondent Bob Schieffer offered As It Happened: John F. Kennedy – 50 Years. NBC signed the dependable to a special asking, once again Where Were You?

These November anniversary remembrances of President Kennedy’s passing serve to enlighten new generations of the significance of the Kennedy years and of the man who came to define “being president.” President Kennedy’s standard has been used to measure the presidency of all of his successors. “JFK 50,” as the 2013 commemoration was christened by CBS, added yet another layer to the understanding of America’s Camelot era while Americans continue to long for and remember the martyred president. But Adlai Stevenson, JFK’s United Nations Ambassador, may have summed it best. “And so we shall never know how different the world might have been had fate permitted this blazing talent to live and labor longer at man’s unfinished agenda for peace and progress for all.”

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September 30, 2014 for THE POLITICAL BANDWAGON November issue 2014