That November Day, Sixty Years Later
“Camelot,” the First Kennedy Assassination & the Course of the Sixties
Every American who was sentient at the time remembers where they were sixty years ago today. I was taking a test in a U.S. history class when the word came over the high school intercom that President Kennedy had been assassinated.
Here are some of my thoughts six decades later, excerpted from my most recent book, The Times They Were a-Changin’: 1964 - The Year “The Sixties” Arrived and the Battle Lines of Today Were Drawn:
“We’re heading into nut country today,” President John F. Kennedy said to his wife on the morning of November 22, 1963, as he showed her an ad, bordered in black like a funeral announcement, that a right-wing extremist group, the John Birch Society, had placed in the Dallas Morning News, indicating that the Kennedys were pro-communist. “But, Jackie, if somebody wants to shoot me from a window with a rifle, nobody can stop it, so why worry about it?”[i] Death “didn’t really concern him,” an aide later said of JFK.[ii] Jack Kennedy had long been a fatalist and remained so on this, his fatal day.
Dallas had much in its resumé to support its application for membership in “nut country.” “There’s something rotten in Dallas,” leading psychologist Charles G. Osgood wrote to Robert Kennedy a few months after the assassination.[iii] The city was the home of retired Gen. Edwin Walker, who had been charged with insurrection against the United States during the riot over the integration of the University of Mississippi more than a year before. “Kennedy is a liability to the free world,” Walker said not long before the President’s scheduled trip to his city.[iv] As far back as the 1960 campaign, a “mink coat mob” of right-wing high-society Dallas women joined with Congressman Bruce Alger, then the only Republican in the Texas delegation, to give native Texan Lady Bird Johnson a similar treatment in and outside the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas. Alger led the mob holding a sign reading “LBJ Sold Out to Yankee Socialists,” swinging it close to Mrs. Johnson’s head. One of the “ladies” pulled Lady Bird’s white gloves out of her hands and threw them into a gutter. Then the well-heeled and high-heeled thugs encircled the vice-presidential candidate and his wife, jeering and cursing. One of these ladies of the right hit Mrs. Johnson over the head with a sign reading, “LET’S GROUND LADY BIRD” and then spit toward her face. Primal rage was unmistakable on the faces of these Dallas matrons.[v] Nut country, indeed. The actions of those Dallas nuts in 1960, though, backfired. Their disgraceful behavior occurred just four days before the election, and the consensus among political analysts is that it turned a substantial number of embarrassed Texans away from the Republican ticket, making it possible for Kennedy and Johnson to carry the state and thereby the national election.[vi]
Early on the afternoon of November 22, 1963, as the presidential motorcade moved through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, gunshots rang out and John Kennedy, who was riding in an open car, was hit by two bullets, the second of which tore off part of his head. His car rushed to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead. At least some of the gunfire came from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, where a shadowy character named Lee Harvey Oswald shot a rifle from an open window above the street as the President’s car was passing. Oswald fled the building, later shot a Dallas policeman, and was apprehended as the prime suspect in the murder of the President. Two days later, while in police custody and being taken to a court hearing, Oswald was shot and killed by a local nightclub owner, Jack Ruby, as a national television audience watched in stunned disbelief. A week after Kennedy’s murder, the new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, established a commission, headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren, to investigate the assassination. In September 1964, the Warren Commission announced its findings, the key one of which was that Oswald had acted alone in killing Kennedy.
In a 1993 book, Case Closed, Gerald Posner attempted to accomplish what his title indicated: refute all conspiracy theories and prove that Oswald acted alone.[vii] Posner made a strong argument, and in 2007 Vincent Bugliosi completed a monumental examination, Reclaiming History, based on twenty years of research, in which he, too, concluded that it is beyond a reasonable doubt that Oswald acted alone.[viii] But the nature of this “case” makes it highly doubtful that it will ever be fully closed.
There are many reasons why a majority of the American people has never, at least since 1967, accepted the Warren Commission’s lone gunman conclusion. Those reasons begin with the fact that that conclusion was preordained by Johnson. The commission’s purpose was not to find the truth, but to put down rumors of a conspiracy that might involve the Cuban or Soviet government.
Lyndon Johnson, who was personally adept at shaping events in secret, backroom meetings, was a man given to seeing conspiracies behind any negative event.[ix] He believed that his predecessor’s death had been the result of a conspiracy involving Fidel Castro, in retribution for CIA attempts to assassinate the Cuban leader. “President Kennedy tried to get Castro,” Johnson told his aide Joe Califano, “but Castro got Kennedy first.”[x] “We had been operating a damned Murder, Inc. in the Caribbean,” Johnson told CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite in 1969. LBJ knew that it was actually JFK’s brother who had been pushing anti-Castro activities and surely Johnson’s eagerness to believe this scenario was enhanced by his loathing for Bobby Kennedy. But the target of Johnson’s abhorrence shared his view that the plots to kill Castro had led to the Cuban dictator turning the tables and having JFK killed. “Though [Robert] Kennedy gave lip service to the single-gunman explanation, he never quieted his own doubts,” biographer Evan Thomas points out.[xi]
Though Lyndon Johnson strongly suspected from the start that there was a conspiracy behind his predecessor’s assassination, the new President saw it as imperative to convince the American people that Oswald had acted alone. When he talked to Earl Warren about heading the commission to investigate the assassination, Johnson told the Chief Justice that, “because it involved both Khrushchev and Castro,” the rumor of a conspiracy “might even catapult us into a nuclear war.” “I was afraid of war,” Johnson later recalled having told Warren, “The nation cannot afford to have any doubt this time. You can imagine what the reaction of the country would have been if this information came out.”[i] He made clear to Warren that the commission’s conclusion must be that Oswald acted alone.
This action may not have been Lyndon Johnson’s first presidential lie—he had, after all, already been in the office for a week—and it was thousands of lies from his last, but it may have been one of those with the best motivation. If, as seems clearly to have been the case, Kennedy had avoided nuclear annihilation by restraining the shoot-first-ask-questions-later proclivities of his military and civilian advisers during the missile crisis thirteen months before, Johnson sought to avoid nuclear annihilation by not allowing the American populace to see a possible reason to unleash their similar proclivities.
That the Warren Commission’s finding that Oswald acted alone was preordained does not mean that that finding was wrong, but Johnson’s directing of that outcome led to an investigation and report that ultimately increased, rather than calmed, suspicions of a conspiracy. The rapid decline in the public’s trust of the government as the American War in Vietnam simultaneously escalated and deteriorated also contributed to skepticism concerning the official story of the assassination.
By 1967, two-thirds of the respondents to a nationwide poll said they believed the murder was the result of a conspiracy.[xiii] Twenty-five years after the assassination, in 1988, a New York Times/CBS News poll found that the same portion of Americans (66 percent) believed that there was a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy as had held that view in 1967, and only 13 percent thought that Oswald acted alone.[xiv]
“An Incalculable Loss of the Future”
“9/11 changed everything,” Vice President Dick Cheney and other members of the administration of the second George Bush repeated as a mantra through most of their time in office.[i] Regardless of whether the government and the American people should have let 9/11 change everything, the related and important question about the Sixties is: Did 11/22 change everything?
The answer, I believe, is that it changed a great deal about the trajectory of the ensuing year and the decade, but far from everything. In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, the American people gathered around television sets for four days, experiencing the same events as if they were all one family in one immense national living room.[ii] At that time, Ben Bradlee captured the more moderate view that 11/22 changed us, even if it didn’t change everything. “John F. Kennedy is dead,” Bradlee wrote in Newsweek, “and for that we are a lesser people in a lesser land.”[iii]
What was lost was what Kennedy had seemed to provide: an “electrifying sense of hope and possibility.”[iv] One of the principal ways in which 11/22 changed the Sixties was by taking on the requisite role of “the Fall” needed to establish and perpetuate the myth of an Eden before everything collapsed.
Kennedy was nearly mythological while alive; his death, particularly in the way it occurred, removed the nearly. The Thousand Days of JFK became the Paradise Lost of 1964 and the Sixties. In the week after its Fall, this mythical Paradise was given another name, one that stuck and influenced the remainder of the decade by setting an imagined standard that could not be duplicated. It was just after the assassination (not, as is often assumed, during the time JFK was in the White House), that the term “Camelot” was associated with the Kennedy presidency. In an interview with Theodore White a week after her husband’s death, Jacqueline Kennedy referred to his time in office as “Camelot,” because of JFK’s liking for the play about King Arthur and the idea that President Kennedy had now become the “fallen king.”[v] White used the term publicly in reference to the Kennedy presidency in an article in Life magazine for the next week.[vi]
The coupled ideas that the Kennedy presidency had been “one brief shining moment” and “there’ll never be another Camelot again” became very widespread and influential and played a major part in the shaping of the long year that followed and the rest of the Sixties. In retrospect, it seemed that all things had been possible during that shining moment while the fallen king had been alive. Had it not been possible then, in the words of the signature song from another Broadway musical, 1964’s Man of La Mancha, “to dream the impossible dream”?[vii]
Initially, though, those impossible dreams still seemed possible despite—and even in part because of—Kennedy’s murder. None of the major reforms JFK had proposed was passed while he was alive. Civil rights, antipoverty programs, and federal aid to education, among others, were enacted only after his death. Their passage was facilitated by the feeling (forcefully emphasized by his successor) that they should be passed as a tribute to the fallen leader, and they were pushed through by Johnson’s abilities to get things through Congress, an area in which he was unquestionably far more effective than Kennedy.[viii]
In death, JFK became a much greater reformer and idealist than he had ever been in life.
But as time passed and everything, it seemed, started to deteriorate, “Camelot” came more and more to be seen as a Paradise in which none of those bad things would have happened. To the millions who came to think in this way, 11/22 had indeed changed everything. It was the modern equivalent of the November date nearly 6000 years before that biblical literalists believed had changed EVERYTHING. 11/22/1963 took on the role seventeenth-century Anglican Archbishop James Ussher had assigned to 11/10/ –4004, the date on which he calculated Adam and Eve had been banished from the Garden of Eden. As the Sixties progressed (or regressed), November 22, 1963, came to be seen by many as the date on which Americans had been banished from the Garden of Kennedy and would have to go forth and live in a world of sin, where impossible dreams really were impossible. In his 2020 song, “Murder Most Foul,” Bob Dylan went so far as to say that it was the day when “the age of the Antichrist” began.[ix]
This view almost requires its adherents to believe in a massive conspiracy. Oswald isn’t a satisfactory Lucifer; Lyndon Johnson combined with the Military-Industrial-Intelligence Complex is. Or perhaps Johnson’s role in this telling of the Sixties Genesis is more that of Cain.
The Cuban Missile Crisis had taken a toll on the innocence and optimism of young people of the era, but the death of the nation’s young president was a much greater blow to those feelings. So many of the young had identified with Kennedy; he was different from what had gone before. He was part of a new generation, even though it wasn’t their generation; he didn’t seem like the old politicians and government leaders. Like the other products of the youth culture, from Davy Crockett coonskin caps and hula hoops to commercialized rock ’n’ roll, Kennedy was made for the young, rather than being their own creation—but they considered him theirs, nonetheless. He was their friend and their future.
Barack Obama (who was born the year after Kennedy was elected) captured the importance of JFK to the Sixties and to the American memory when he wrote in 1995 of “a spirit that would grip the nation for that fleeting period between Kennedy’s election and the passage of the Voting Rights Act: the seeming triumph of universalism over parochialism and narrow-mindedness, a bright new world where differences of race or culture would instruct and amuse and perhaps even ennoble. A useful fiction, one that haunts me no less than it haunted my family, evoking as it does some lost Eden that extends beyond mere childhood.”[x]
“A useful fiction.” That’s exactly the way Lyndon Johnson saw the Kennedy myth. He believed it to be largely fiction—and a fiction that was galling to him. But he made remarkable use of it during the two years that followed it.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an Assistant Secretary of Labor in the Kennedy Administration, may have put it best on the day of the assassination. When journalist Mary McGrory said to him, “We’ll never laugh again,” Moynihan responded, “No, Mary, we’ll laugh again, but we’ll never be young again.”[xi]
Nor, it seemed, would the 1960s ever be young again—but the young in 1964 managed, with the help of music, to restore youth, albeit with less innocence than had been the norm before the assassination. Prior to John Kennedy’s assassination, the experience with tragic, early death for most young Americans of the post-World War II generation had been fictional, in films, such as Rebel Without a Cause, and particularly in a spate of teen tragedy songs that were popular at the beginning of the 1960s, including most famously Mark Dinning’s “Teen Angel.”
Now the young had to face a tragic early death that was real. “The Leader of the Pack” himself dies in the Shangri-Las’ 1964 classic:
I’ll never forget him (the leader of the pack)
The leader of the pack—now he’s gone[xii]
“Countless individuals have noted that the President’s death affected them even more deeply than the death of their own parents,” Kennedy confidante Ted Sorensen remarked the month after JFK’s assassination. “The reason, I believe, is that the latter situation most often represented a loss of the past—while the assassination of President Kennedy represented an incalculable loss of the future.”[xiii]
[i] Dick Cheney, interviewed on Meet the Press, NBC, September 14, 2003. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3080244/.
[ii] Caro, Passage to Power, p. 342,
[iii] Ben Bradlee, A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 261.
[iv] Ken Ringle, “The Day a Generation’s Spirit Died,” Washington Post, November 22, 2003.
[v] Jacqueline Kennedy, speaking with Theodore White, November 29, 1963, “Camelot Documents,” Theodore H. White Papers, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library; Theodore H. White, In Search of History: A Personal Adventure (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), p. 523.
[vi] Theodore H. White, “For President Kennedy: An Epilogue,” Life, December 6, 1963.
[vii] “The Impossible Dream” (1964, lyrics by Joe Darion, music by Mitch Leigh).
[viii] Dallek, Unfinished Life, p. 708.
[ix] “Murder Most Foul” (lyrics and music by Bob Dylan, © Special Rider Music, 2020).
[x] Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995; New York: Crown, 2007), pp. 25-26.
[xi] Daniel Patrick Moynihan, November 22, 1963, as quoted in Godfrey Hodgson, The Gentleman from New York: Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), p. 85.
[xii] “Leader of the Pack” (1964, George “Shadow” Morton, Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich).
[xiii] Theodore Sorensen, as quoted in Dallek, Unfinished Life, p. 631.
[i] John F. Kennedy, November 22, 1963, as quoted in Kenneth P. O’Donnell and David F. Powers, “Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye” (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), p. 11.
[ii] Gus Russo, Live by the Sword: The Secret War against Castro and the Death of JFK (Baltimore: Bancroft Press, 1998), p. 276.
[iii] David Talbot, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), p. 260.
[iv] Edwin Walker, as quoted in Dallek, Unfinished Life, p. 693.
[v] Jan Jarboe Russell, Lady Bird: A Biography of Mrs. Johnson (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999; Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), pp. 207-208.
[vi] Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage to Power (New York: Knopf, 2012), pp. 149-156.
[vii] Gerald L. Posner, Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK (New York: Random House, 1993).
[viii] Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy (New York: Norton, 2007).
[ix] Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961-1973 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 52.
[x] LBJ, as quoted in Joseph A. Califano, The Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), p. 295.
[xi] Evan Thomas, Robert Kennedy: His Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), p. 284.
[xii] “The effectiveness of Public Law 102-526, the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992: Hearing before the Legislation and National Security Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations, House of Representatives, One Hundred Third Congress, first session, November 17, 1993.” http://www.archive.org/stream/effectivenessofp00unit/effectivenessofp00unit_djvu.txt.
[xiii] Harris Poll, reported in “66% in Poll Accept Plot View,” New York Times, May 30, 1967.
[xiv] Philip Shenon, “Who Killed John Kennedy? After 25 Years, More Theories than Certainty,” New York Times, November 18, 1988.
Probably trying to score political points, but reading the beginning of this piece, it's almost implied that shadowy Oswald was animated by some far right-wing atmosphere, swept up in the times. The fact is that he was a Communist sympathizer who had lived in the USSR. Moreover, I'm pretty sure he had to tried to shoot Edwin Walker a few months earlier.