It was a chilly, overcast Friday in November. Already a liberal arts graduate, I had decided to change direction radically, and earn a degree in physics from the University of Washington. I was living in Lander Hall, a dormitory torn down this past year and rebuilt in a more modern vernacular for the more demanding students of today.
I noted vaguely that a lot of kids seemed to have their radios turned on as I left the dorm and headed out for my 11:30 chemistry class in Bagley Hall. I became more alert out on the street where I saw other students holding transister radios up to their ears. Finally, I asked someone what was going on. The president had been shot, his condition unknown, was the reply. Stunned, I continued to class, sat down in the large lecture hall, and waited for the professor. A student walked up to the blackboard and wrote the incredible message that President Kennedy was dead. Moments later, the professor walked in, saw the message, and asked the class if it was true.
"I don't feel like talking about chemistry today," he said. He walked out of the classroom. Everyone filed silently out of the room. As I turned north from Bagley, I saw the flagpole across from the Administration Building. The flag was already at half-mast.
The next couple of days -- the swearing in of LBJ, the flight back to Washington, the unbelievable assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald, the funeral mass -- were spent in front of small black and white television sets, all over campus living groups and apartment houses.
Looking back, Kennedy now seems but one president in a group -- Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and even Nixon to a degree -- who reflected a general bipartisan consensus regarding foreign policy, and whose differences with respect to domestic policy were ones of degree and emphasis, not of basic principle. As Milton Friedman said -- and as was later sometimes attributed to President Nixon -- "We are all Keynsians, now."
At the time, however -- for young people at least, with our shorter memories -- Kennedy represented a breath of fresh air after what seemed to us eight stuffy years of life in a musty neo-Victorian town house. The Eisenhower era -- which in retrospect appears to represent the apogee of American success and affluence -- felt at the time intellectually stultifying, an era of enforced conformity, of McCarthy paranoia, of a fear of the unfettered intellect itself. The "ticky-tack" houses of Levittown seemed to sum up the American dream. The black and white morality of the TV Western represented the black and white certainties of the American myth. To become a member of "middle management" for some corporation was a most praise-worthy ambition for an ambitious young man.
Kennedy and his wife displayed for many of us a formerly unsuspected plane of American life -- aristocratic in taste and behavior, but with a concern, at least professed, for those at the bottom of the heap. Although Kennedy had accomplished little yet to advance civil rights, we knew ending a century of segregation, formal or otherwise, was his administration's goal. His plan for a "Peace Corps," proposed during the 1960 campaign, electrified young people -- a government program that advocated public service as a first step for college graduates, rather than jumping into a corporate management training program.
I remember learning that Robert Frost was speaking, and Pablo Casals was playing, at Kennedy's inauguration events. Today, such participation by cultural icons would be unremarkable. Then, it represented an unprecedented acceptance of talent previously ignored -- often contemptuously -- into the mainstream of American society and government.
As many writers are commenting, it wasn't so much what Kennedy did as president that made his death so devastating. It was what we felt he had represented.
Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.
His death signaled, we feared, the nipping in the bud of America's new-found spirit of adventure, courage, curiosity, and intellectual openness.
As one friend told me, a few years later, he felt that the world for which he'd been educated, and the world he understood, seemed to collapse in upon itself on November 22, 1963.
Our fears weren't entirely unfounded, and my friend's reaction to Kennedy's death has proved prophetic.
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