Nov 18 2013 05:56 PM
Alive but too young to have truly lived through the trauma of the assassination of the president 50 years ago this Friday, I recall, for the Purple Clover web site, what it was like growing up in the shadow of the Camelot myth.
| As I was becoming fully conscious of the world around me, I understood John F. Kennedy to be many things: the airport where our family trips to Florida and California began; the cape from which countdowns to moon launches were televised; the occasional half-dollar that popped up in my father’s bedside pile of change; the plaza fronting our town’s city hall; the high school a few districts over; and, when I was in third grade, the sacred bust in my principal’s office, the one that signified John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963, was a mythic American figure right up there with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Somewhere along the way, I also figured out John F. Kennedy had been president of the United States at the dawn of my lifetime, which was almost surprising, considering that a person of such elevated stature couldn’t have possibly been part of the same world I was. The first president I knew as a going entity was Richard Nixon. Even as he was steaming toward re-election, the spring I stared in quiet admiration at my principal’s JFK bust, there seemed nothing mythic or elevated about “President Nixon.” Rather, he was a regular fount of material for comedians and impressionists. Everybody made fun of Tricky Dick. Yet John F. Kennedy, with whom I briefly overlapped on this Earth, loomed as an ethereal figure beyond reproach, perhaps because I never knew him as “President Kennedy.” Sure I could delve into the World Book Encyclopedia and get a handle on what did and didn’t go well during his administration (Bay of Pigs: not great; Cuban Missile Crisis: ultimately, much better), but it was still tough to grasp that someone who was treated with such institutional reverence held the same job as Nixon — let alone once ran against him — and was, in his day, subject to the same kinds of constant criticisms that befall every chief executive. “President Kennedy” still sounds dissonant to my ears. |
| After a fashion, it was even OK to have a laugh at his accent, his shall we say extracurricular activities and the whole Camelot milieu. “Tragedy plus time equals comedy” wasn’t an equation I would bump into until I was much older, but once I was in junior high, I noticed joking about John F. Kennedy was no longer off-limits. Staring out at me from the magazine rack at the Cozy Nook luncheonette, where I perused my periodicals and occasionally anted up to take one home, was the February 1977 issue of National Lampoon, its cover featuring a gray-haired Kennedy and promising a retrospective of “JFK’s First 6,000 Days” on the eve of this, the reigning president’s FIFTH inauguration. Well before Jeff Greenfield created his cottage “what if?” industry, National Lampoon decided, in its decidedly irreverent manner, that the bullet in Dallas missed JFK (though it tragically took out the First Lady), the 22nd Amendment was eventually repealed and Kennedy just kept on being re-elected. The results it pretended to look back on weren’t meant to be taken seriously — we withdrew our military from Southeast Asia but sent it to fight in Northern Island in JFK’s imagined future — but the idea that President Kennedy had lived was jarring in any context. That it could be considered funny was almost shocking. |
