DownWithTyranny!: The JFK assassination a half-century later -- marginal notes on an event that really did change everything, or nearly

Bosom buddies -- um, not hardly

by Ken

I don't know about you, but I'm mostly numbed by the prospect of enduring yet another JFK assassination anniversary. It's like we've been through this 50 times already.

Don't you hate it when a bunch of clichés and bromides turn out to be true? An event that changed everything. The day America lost its innocence. And so on and on. You can pick at them all. It didn't change quite everything, and the innocence of America probably wasn't more than a centimeter or two deep. Still . . . .

It is possible to find new takes on the event. The other day George F. Will immersed himself in his miasma of right-wing creepery and found a true buttwipe's way to celebrate the event, with a WaPo column that was blurbed: "For liberals, his fiscally conservative nature is an inconvenient truth." (No, I'm not offering a link. The other day I offered a link to an Alessandra Staley review, but I do have limits. If you want to read this piece of willhooey, you can find it yourself.)

A few weeks ago I was thinking I might mark the occasion by passing on the story CBS News's Bob Schieffer had shared in AARP The Magazine about his status as "a footnote of sorts to the awful events of that weekend in 1963" -- how as a young reporter on the Fort Worth Star-Telegram he gravitated automatically to the newspaper office after hearing news of the president's shooting and wound up answering a phone call that turned out to be from Lee Harvey Oswald's mother, wanting to know when someone was going to pick her up to take her to the Dallas police HQ to see her son, and Bob jumped into the breach, and when he arrived with Mrs. Oswald, because it was his habit to dress for work in a suit, he was presumed to be a law-enforcement person, and very nearly got into an interview room with the Oswalds, mother and son, before finally somebody asked the question he points out he should have been asked from the start, namely who he was. In that particular time and place, "a reporter" was definitely not a good answer.

I expect Bob has told this story upwards of 6 million times over these 50 years, but I don't remember ever hearing it before, and I think it's a heckuva story. Of course everyone is presumed to have a story about where they were when they heard the news, and everyone seems to be sharing those stories in the media. The best I've heard is now-retired 35-year Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, now 94, recalling that at the time he was U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York (that's the big NY USA job), and he was visiting Bobby and Ethel Kennedy at their home in Virginia when the attorney general, his boss, got word about the events in Dallas.

But my favorite story for this anniversary year comes from the Washington Post's Loop-master, Al Kamen, under the heading "Echoes Not So Distant (links onsite):

President Richard Nixon apparently thought the JFK assassination might quickly fade from the country's collective memory, newly transcribed audiotapes show.

Not exactly. All the events and reminiscence leading up to the 50th anniversary on Friday of the tragic event say otherwise. And though Nixon assumed that recollections had faded less than a decade after Kennedy's death, it still cast a shadow on the 37th president and his aides, according to our friends at the University of Virginia's Miller Center, who are transcribing the tapes of Nixon's White House years.

The subject came up in August 1971 when Nixon was discussing travel plans to Dallas and New York with his top aide, H.R. Haldeman, the tapes show. Kennedy had been gunned down in a motorcade in Dallas less than eight years earlier, but Nixon seemed to think a parade of his own wouldn't be a problem.

The assassination, Nixon told Haldeman, "was so far back in the public consciousness."

Though the conversation ended with Nixon assuming he would do a motorcade of only "three or four blocks," the president ultimately traveled across the city via helicopter.

In another transcribed conversation from just a few months later, Nixon and his secretary, Rose Mary Woods, realize that it is the anniversary of JFK's death. "You know, listen, I had not thought of it, but -- " Nixon says as Woods calls to the president's dog. "This is the day the -- "

"That Kennedy was -- " Woods says.

"Right," Nixon replies.

It's just another example of why Tricky Dick was always famous for his keen sense of history.