11/21/2003
Past Presidents
When The Editor speaks, I listen. Brian Trumbore suggested that I take a break from science and technology and write briefly about my recollections of John F. Kennedy’s death 40 years ago this week. I was listening to WOR on the radio this morning and someone said that about 40 percent of our population wasn’t even born 40 years ago. It occurs to me that a much smaller percentage were around in 1945, the year Franklin Roosevelt died. In 1945, I was 17 years old and in my junior year at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The way in which we experienced the two events was profoundly different due largely to a technology that came into widespread use in the intervening period. Of course, television was that technology.
FDR’s death was for me more like the death of a father. Roosevelt had been president for 12 of my 17 years and had led us through a depression and most of World War II. Kennedy, on the other hand, was not that much older than I was. He was young and energetic, the picture of good health and in his prime. At least that is what most of us perceived in those days. And he had led us through the Cuban missile crisis, a truly scary crisis that could have ended in a nuclear war.
It was some time after JFK’s death that his womanizing became widely known and only in recent years has the extent of his ever- present pain and his dependence on drugs been recognized. The recent History Channel program on Kennedy brought home to me the similarities of JFK and FDR in keeping their true physical limitations secret from the public. Even at 17, I had no idea of the fact that Roosevelt was wheelchair bound.
Shortly before his death, FDR made a very rare reference to his infirmity. Two days after his inauguration for his unprecedented fourth term, on February 11, 1945, he left to go to Yalta for his meeting with Churchill and Stalin. Pictures of that meeting show a haggard FDR sitting between the other two hale and hearty looking leaders. In a report to Congress on the meeting, he apologized for delivering his report sitting down, saying it was easier for him “not to have to carry about 10 pounds of steel around at the bottom of my legs.” (Quote taken from the 1962 World Book Encyclopedia.)
A few weeks later, on April 12 that year, that I was at home in Mechanicsburg (I commuted the 10 miles to Dickinson College) tossing a ball around with some friends when someone came out to say they had heard on the radio that Roosevelt had died. I remember distinctly my first reaction was to say, “Oh no, not Harry Truman!” I believe most shared my reaction, skeptical that this former haberdasher could fill the shoes of FDR. The plainspoken Truman, later one of my favorite presidents, was no match for the eloquent Roosevelt. Today, it’s hard to imagine that Truman, kept completely in the dark about the atom bomb, was left with the awesome responsibility of deciding to use it.
The process of grieving for a departed president was quite different in those days. I remember somber music on the radio interspersed with news reports and waiting for the best pictorial accounts of funeral and other ceremonies in Life magazine. We had to go to see whatever movie or double feature was playing at our local theater to see action pictures of the funeral and associated ceremonies. The chances were there would be a Fox Movietone News short with Lowell Thomas as the commentator and a brief film of the recent events. No color newsreels in those days – they were all black and white.
The voting age was 21, so I didn’t have a chance to cast my vote in the upset Truman-Dewey election. My first and second presidential ballots were both cast for Dwight Eisenhower but Kennedy was my choice in the 1960 election. His apparent youth and vigor and the arrival on the scene of TV, highlighted by the famous debate with Nixon, ill and lacking good makeup, certainly affected the outcome of that very close election.
Until I watched the History Channel program, I was not fully aware of the extent of Kennedy’s medical problems. An example was his highly overmedicated and debilitated state during his first meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna, which led to Khrushchev’s evaluation of JFK as a weakling. This feeling probably influenced the decision to place missiles in Cuba. After the History Channel program, I was much more appreciative of Kennedy’s handling of the missile crisis. The support for an immediate invasion of Cuba was quite strong in both the Cabinet and in Congress. I was not aware of the number of missiles in Cuba already targeted at any invasive forces and at East coast cities of the U.S. Kennedy’s naval blockade and his back door contacts with Khrushchev proved masterful strokes and I joined everyone else at the time in breathing a sigh of relief when the crisis was over.
In the late summer of 1963, my family spent some time on Cape Cod on vacation. My wife and older son went to attend church one Sunday while I stayed in our cottage with our 5-year old son. President Kennedy attended the same church service. My wife had trouble finding a parking space and ended up standing outside the church while our son went inside. Kennedy came out of the church, smiling, with Caroline and said hello to my wife, who totally froze. It was one of the few times in her life when she was at a loss for words, stunned by the tall, handsome Kennedy standing right in front of her.
About three months later, we were driving from New Jersey to western Pennsylvania to visit my wife’s relatives and to attend a football game between Pitt and archrival Penn State. After we picked up our toll ticket at the entrance to the Pennsylvania Turnpike in Carlisle, we noticed a flag at the tollbooth flying at half-mast. Wondering what had happened, we turned on our car radio and heard the news that Kennedy had been shot and had died. It was a somber drive to Greensburg and everyone was distraught when we arrived. The football game was canceled, as were most such events, and everyone was glued to the TV that day and the next. The next day was riveting and we were dumfounded when we saw Jack Ruby shoot Oswald. It was live TV! We returned to New Jersey early and, like virtually everyone else, did not stray far from the TV until the end of the funeral ceremonies, the salute by little John John stamped forever in our memories.
The contrast between our experiences of the deaths of FDR and that of JFK is clear. With Roosevelt, the initial grief and concern upon hearing the news were there but our participation in the grieving process was more as distant observers. With Kennedy, thanks to TV, we were all family, sharing the grieving and the transfer of power to Lyndon Johnson as though we were there in person. The TV close-ups let us share our pain with Jackie and the Kennedy family perhaps even more directly than if we had been present in person. As has been repeated many times in the media, it was a new world. Today, we expect to be present at any significant event, be it a battle in Iraq, the trial of an alleged murderer or an inaugural ball.
In closing, my wife reminded me that during the 1960 Kennedy- Nixon campaign, she and our older son also had a close-up experience with Richard Nixon. We lived in Plainfield, New Jersey at the time and Nixon and his wife Pat were there on a campaign appearance. My wife and son were among a handful of people at a street corner when the motorcade came through and stopped briefly, with the open car carrying Dick and Pat right at the corner. My wife waved and got a smile from Pat, who my wife thought was very pretty. My wife doesn’t seem to remember much about Nixon himself, perhaps an indication of Kennedy’s greater charisma and a harbinger of the outcome of that election.
Allen F. Bortrum
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