Remembrance of President Kennedy in November – 50 Novembers
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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 Dallas, 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 Abraham Lincoln 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, Cuban Missile Crisis, 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.