It's strange what one remembers after nearly 40 years. Only this week did I recall that in my senior year of high school I brought a rifle into class. Today, that would have led to all sorts of repercussions – newspaper headlines, jail time – but for my efforts in 1964, what I received was an "A" in a social science course. I wasn't bowling for Columbine, but rather taking part in what I suspect must have been a relatively common occurrence that spring, a mock trial of Lee Harvey Oswald. I had volunteered to be the lead "attorney" for the defense. Our strategy, such as it was, was simply to point out the logistical improbabilities of three successful shots in such a short time from the height, distance & angle of the Texas Schoolbook Depository, something we had taken more or less whole from an article that appeared in The Nation relatively soon after JFK's assassination. And since I knew that another teacher at Albany High happened to have a Mannlicher-Carcano of the same model allegedly used by Oswald, I asked him if he would bring it in one day so that I could use it in class. And he agreed. An index of how much life has changed in the ensuing four decades.

 

Actually, that event did evoke some response. The Albany City Council of that generation was composed mostly of owners of the small businesses that operated on its two commercial streets, Solano & San Pablo. Defining itself very much as the anti-Berkeley, there were active John Birch Society and Minutemen chapters in Albany, supporters of which – including one cousin of mine –were represented on the council. They asked the school board how a senior soc class could have managed to find Oswald not guilty. There was an air of something vaguely un-American, apparently, in demonstrating the possibility of a reasonable doubt. I think they were told that a student had razzle-dazzled the class. And maybe I had.

 

Nobody under the age of 40 remembers the Kennedy assassination & much of the little that is remembered by those under 50 is as heavily colored by second-hand sources – how their parents reacted, for example – as it is by their own. I certainly have my own recollections of that morning – that entire day, actually, from the initial announcement of a shooting over the school loudspeakers to the realization that Kennedy was dead – followed in my case by a considerable (tho misplaced) sense of dread that the first Southerner since the Civil War was now to lead the nation – to heading over to my best friend’s house where we simply watched TV all afternoon before I headed home, only to be upbraided by my mother & grandparents for not letting them know where I had been. It was only then that I realized that my grandfather, lifelong VFW member that he was, had entertained the idea that the U.S. was being attacked by the Communists & had been waiting for World War III to break out all day. It was an index, one of many I was collecting at that point in my life, of a gap I could see between his worldview and my own.

 

Because I was a part of the school’s stage crew – a group of a half dozen seniors, all very much proto-geeks, who set up the auditorium for assemblies, ran the lights & curtains at school plays & the like (a detail that had minimal responsibilities & enabled us to get out of class more or less as often as we wanted) – I’d been called down to the principal’s office at the first announcement of the shooting & it was there I heard that Kennedy had died. I & my fellow crew mates headed across the miniscule quad to convert the gym for an impromptu assembly &, while we were setting up roughly one thousand folding chairs, a girl whom I’d known slightly for years came up, as her phys ed class headed in for showers, to ask how Kennedy was doing. When I told her that the president was dead, her face literally crumpled in horror & grief. That was the moment when I think I really understood that everything would be different now.

 

In the ensuing 40 years, only September 11 comes close to capturing for me the feeling tone of that day, the sense that everyone – sans exception – is in shock, filled with horror, deeply depressed. Maybe if I’d been a red diaper baby with a better understanding of history at the age of seventeen in 1963, I would have had a more skeptical view of government & the people who participated in public power than I did. And thus would have experienced the entire event with a more ambivalent or at least complex reaction. But I was not and did not. Even though I was already reading the short-lived west coast daily edition of the New York Times,* I was not yet any sort of critical thinker. I was rather a receptacle for whatever mass media was projecting.

 

Mass media itself changed that weekend.** For the first time in history a murder was broadcast live & the relationship of the medium to the event shifted palpably. It was only one of a number of major institutional relationships that did so. In actuality, I suspect that many of these relationships had already transformed – the most profound one, between the state & the individual, the so-called trustworthiness of the state, already had. The executions of the Rosenbergs & whole McCarthy era, to pick just one example, was itself an enormous act of institutional bad faith, but like so many Americans of that era I was largely unaware of the implications of events that had only dimly entered my consciousness. During the Eisenhower administration, I had even imagined that Republicans – whom I already sensed to be wrong on such fundamental issues as class & race, tho I wouldn’t voiced it in those terms – to be for the common good, merely confused as to what that was. The current gangster class of Republican, always already corrupt, was frankly unimaginable then.

 

Rather, for myself & apparently millions of others, the assassination instantly unhinged a lot of comfortable presumptions as to how the world worked – again the parallel to September 11 seems unmistakable. & into that gap flooded a pent-up mass of new realities, already for the most part in play – everything from the Vietnam war to the arrival of youth culture as a social force – but not yet recognized. & it was only when these effects became recognized, one after another, that they could begin to fully interact, creating further effects. Everything from Bob Dylan going electric to Stonewall & second wave feminism. Which is why, in part, the 1960s felt like such a period of concentrated & accelerated change. And why that decade didn’t begin until November 22,1963.

 

 

 

 

 

* It was researching the assassination that first brought me to The Nation.

 

** TV’s ever-self-congratulatory pundit class loves to talk of how television “came of age” in its coverage of the Kennedy assassination, but that has always struck me as bunk. Rather, it moved from infancy into an adolescence from which it has yet to emerge. Becoming immersed in the event itself rather than separate from it, television gave up forever the promise of being a critical force, choosing instead to feed an ever harder to please adrenalin addiction. With the coming convergence of the Web & television, I will be surprised if television even survives in a recognizable form 30 years hence. The same, however, might be said of the web.