Posts Tagged ‘Walter Cronkite’

November 22, 1963 was a Friday.

I was a typical shallow, self-possessed, care-free teenage male in the first couple months of my first year in high school at Mount Pleasant High in Providence, Rhode Island.

On Friday’s, my last class of the day was gym. In 1963, gym class for males was an active, athletic program to prepare young men for military service and which required students to develop skills on the parallel bars, pommel horse, horizontal high bar, still rings and for rope climbing. The gymnasium also served as the school’s basketball court, so the space was cavernous and the class was noisy. Consequently, we couldn’t hear messages being transmitted over the school’s loudspeaker system.

So, on that Friday, after I’d showered and walked along the typically noisy corridor to my locker, I was in a good mood and oblivious to what was going on around me.

I  was in a good mood because that night was scheduled to be opening night for the Mount Pleasant High School Dionysiac Player’s production of Thornton Wilder’s classic play, “Our Town” and my theater debut as a member of the stage crew manning the main spotlight.

My original plan had been to try out for the football team but, at the last moment, I wisely changed my mind. The football coach was also my Geometry teacher and, for some reason, there was an unsettling level of antipathy between us.

So, instead, I decided to join the theater group at the urging of my friend, Mike Grace. It was a decision that, to this day, I’m glad I made.

Arriving at my locker and fetching my things for the bus ride home to Smithfield, I was blithely mocking the sweet young woman I’d befriended whose locker was to my right. She was emotional and, because I couldn’t hear what she was saying, my initial thoughts were that she was laughing. But then I realized that it wasn’t the sound of laughter but of grief that I was hearing.

When I asked her what was wrong, I presumed that she was reacting to a misunderstanding or breakup with her boyfriend. The usual stuff of adolescent drama.  So, when she told me that the President was dead, it didn’t register. I laughed thinking that she was telling me some sort of sick joke. Then, I looked at her face…and I knew.

John F. Kennedy was a mythic figure in Southern New England. In 1963, Rhode Island’s population was heavily Roman Catholic Italian and, although JFK was Irish, he was one of our own.  His was like a death in the family.

The first reaction I can recall was wondering how this tragic event might affect the play.

Our theater group had worked hard, rehearsed and devoted much of our lives for the previous two months in order to be ready for this moment. The school wouldn’t cancel opening night, would it?

Other than the moment when I was told about the assassination and the overarching sense of loss and sadness which enveloped the school, there are two incidents that I most vividly remember about that afternoon. The first involved one of the wise guys who, like me, was bused in from Smithfield and with whom I’d shared classes since elementary school. He started laughing and making jokes about Kennedy’s assassination. I was appalled and, frankly, embarrassed for him.  Over the years, I’ve wondered if he sometimes stopped to consider how he’d reacted and, if he did, how that affected his life.

The second incident occurred when we discovered that the school administration had, indeed, canceled opening night for our production of “Our Town”. Of course, it was the appropriate decision under the circumstances. But, we were emotionally invested in our work and had difficulty accepting the decision. What shocked me was when the student who played George Webb, one of the play’s primary characters, lay down on the stage and while pounding his fist sobbed “Why did he have to go get killed on opening night?”  I understood the kid’s angst but found his self-absorbed attitude embarrassing.

The Mount Pleasant High School Dionysiac Players production of “Our Town” did go on as scheduled on Saturday night. And, as I recall, the show was well-received by an audience which was probably affected more than usual by the play’s story of day-to-day life, youthful love, premature death, sorrow and grief. That play continues to touch me to this day.

On Sunday afternoon, while continuing wall-to-wall commercial-free live coverage of the weekend’s sad events were being broadcast on the existing three television networks (ABC, NBC, CBS), Mike Grace and I were doing a project for Mike’s aunt and uncle in the living room of their home when I happened to glance over at a TV and noticed the Dallas police escorting Lee Harvey Oswald down a corridor. It all seemed pretty mundane until, all of a sudden, a man in a black hat stepped out from the crowd, shoved his hand towards Oswald’s stomach and shot him. The black-and-white photo we’ve all seen over the intervening decades of Oswald crumbling in pain is still shocking. But, to see an actual murder occur live on a national TV broadcast as it happened was stunning. At first, it seemed unreal. And, thinking that I might be imagining it, I asked Mike if he’d just seen what I saw.

The 48 hours from the moment  when JFK was killed on Dealey Plaza until the moment when Jack Ruby’s bullets ended Lee Harvey Oswald’s life,  were surreal and shook America’s sense of order and complacency to its core.  This was a time in American life when we lived daily on the brink of nuclear holocaust in our conflict with the Soviet Union. We were all subconsciously concerned that, at any moment, we might get word that the missiles were coming in.

Leading up to this anniversary, journalists have been focusing on how coverage of the events of that weekend changed news because it was on TV. I would argue that it changed America.

For the first time, we were able to not only hear but to see events as they happened. Radio had provided us with theater of the mind. With TV, we were there…watching Jackie grieve at her husband’s coffin, watching little John-John salute the passing caisson, seeing Lee Harvey Oswald murdered in cold blood.

On that weekend leading into Thanksgiving and the Christmas holidays, we were shaken to the core.

When World War I began, we got our news on time delay via newspapers.

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, we learned the news from radio.

John F. Kennedy’s assassination was the first calamitous event which we Americans shared communally through television.

It remained the most significant historical event of my lifetime through the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy in the late 1960s, the Kent State Massacre, the murder of John Lennon and other tragic events which we experienced through the years.

For me, a change began to occur when I watched the Challenger disintegrate as Dan Rather was covering its launch live in 1986. It became obvious to me that I was going to continue to witness these occasional tragedies through my remaining days.

Then, of course, came September 11^th.

In mid-October, 1962 I was a teenager living in the house where I’d spent all my life in Rhode Island. As a New Englander, I was proud that one of our native songs, John F. Kennedy, was president of the United States and pleased that he and his family seemed to be at the forefront of my Baby Boomer generation in leading America forward to a predestined shining and promising future.

In 1962, World War II was still a major factor in the American zeitgeist.  Our parents all had vivid memories of the war years, how they had survived those years, and how their standard of living had improved since the war. The Korean Conflict was not something that was top-of-mind for my friends or me. We were more influenced by being the children of the victors.

Although we didn’t realize, we had been propagandized about American courage, valor, ingenuity, and competence with a deluge of World War II-themed movies. Based on what we knew, American soldiers were unpretentious, sometimes shy, sometimes ingenious, but always fair-minded and brave in the face of the enemy. The message that rang loud and clear was: America always wins.

In 1962, the Cold War between the Soviet Union and USA was at full tilt. Nikita Khrushchev was the delusional, frumpy looking, Russian bad guy who pounded his shoe on the table at the UN and who had threatened that Russia would bury us. It was obvious to us that he was a bully. But the Russians had missiles with nuclear weapons aimed at us as we did at them. In grammar school, we had practiced hiding under our desks in case an atomic bomb were dropped on us. (It didn’t seem silly at the time.) It’s safe to say that most Americans in 1962 lived daily with a subconscious dread of nuclear annihilation similar to the subconscious reactions that Americans had following the 9/11 attacks.  But we didn’t dwell too much on those fears. Instead, we sought diversions.

As a result, in 1962 we had “The Twist” dance craze, America’s introduction to surfing and the California sound of the Beach Boys, and the premiers of TV shows  that Fall like “The Jetsons”, “The Beverly Hillbillies”, “McHale’s Navy”, and Johnny Carson’s debut as Jack Paar’s replacement on “The Tonight Show”.   The movie, “Animal House” is set during the Fall of 1962 and captures many of the values and attitudes of that time.

Of course, there was also more serious news during the first ten months of the year.  We were proud when John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth, when Jackie Robinson was inducted into Baseball’s Hall of Fame, and when the Telstar communications satellite was launched.  The journalist who was to become “The Most Trusted Man In Television”, Walter Cronkite took over the anchor desk for the CBS Evening News.  In May, Cronkite showed us America’s sex kitten, Marilyn Monroe singing “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” to Jack Kennedy and the shocked us with the news of Marilyn’s apparent suicide in August.  In early October, there was big news about Pope John XXIII and the implications of Vatican II.

I can remember sitting in front of our black & white TV set fifty years this month and watching President Kennedy’s address to the nation about the crisis. As I recall, JFK seemed concerned but not frightened. My attitude was that America always won, that Khruschev was a bully, and that the Russians would back down.  In the 1970s, Richard Benjamin starred in a movie called “The Steagle”, a comedy  about a Long Island college professor who figures that he’s going to die in the inevitable nuclear holocaust which would result from the Cuban Missile Crisis confrontation,  decides abandon his real life, try on personas unlike his own,  and travel across the country to LA.  Watching the movie, I couldn’t understand why anyone would have panicked and reacted this way to the missile crisis. It seemed obvious to me that JFK would control the situation, would face down Russia, and America would be victorious again. Apparently, I was being quite naïve.

In his latest book about Lyndon Johnson, Robert Caro describes how frightened JFK was that the situation would get out of hand, that he wouldn’t be able to stop the Russians, and that we would be forced into a nuclear war. Difficult as it is to believe today, hawks in the Pentagon and in Congress were all for the US making the first strike.  Recordings recently released by the John F. Kennedy Library reveal just how much peril the country was in 50 years ago this week. Fortunately, most of us went blythely along with our lives, oblivious to the danger we were in.

Guess there’s something to be said for ignorance.