J.F.K. and Dallas, 50 Years Later!
By RABBI ED PAUL COHN, Temple Sinai
Fifty years ago, November 22nd fell on a Friday. I had planned to attend Shabbat evening Services at Baltimore’s Har Sinai Temple which was to premiere a musical cantata called, “Let There Be Light.” But on that Shabbat, an overflow congregation entered the synagogue not for a musical celebration, but as a traumatized and grieving Jewish American citizenry in search of comfort and strength from our precious faith. Our President had been murdered in Dallas!
The unimaginable had happened. Our young and vital President had been slain that afternoon and we had all by then watched it over and over again on our television screens. Though we saw it in black and white, all the subsequent years have convinced us that it must have been in color because we can picture the First Lady in that blood stained pink suit as she escorted her husband’s casket back to the White House. Of course, it would be years before we saw the full horror of Abraham Zapruder’s film including the third bullet.
The next day, Saturday, November 23, 1963, Americans still sat before their televisions in numbed shock learning more of the details of the assassination. Do you recall how on that day the television network included our Jewish grief with a first time ever broadcast of a significant portion of the Sabbath morning Service from Boston’s Temple Israel? Rabbi Roland Gittleson, a friend of the Kennedy family, eloquently eulogized our martyred President on national television.
On Sunday, November 24th, my brother and I and two of our dear friends drove the 32 miles into Washington, and in the grey drizzling weather of that afternoon, we cried as we watched, along with hundreds of thousands of others, Mrs. Kennedy, in her black dress and widow’s veil, holding the hands of her two young children, and the President’s extended family walking up the steps of the Capital behind the flag-draped casket which was borne by uniform soldiers. The casket would lie in state on the very same bier which had held Lincoln’s coffin 98 years before.
I will never forget how in the mist of watching that sorrowful scene unfolding, word spread throughout the crowd that Oswald had been killed by Jack (Rubenstein) Ruby. We could not believe our ears, and to think, how on Friday we had been so grateful that the assassin of our President was not a Jew. Now, the assassin of the assassin was!
Rushing back to our home in Glen Burnie, we watched the rebroadcast of that first live murder any of us had ever witnessed in real life. Once again, we could not believe our eyes that this was real
Five days after the President’s funeral, we once again drove into Washington finding our way across the bridge to Arlington Cemetery there to pay our respects. There was the eternal flame which was still surrounded by the mountain of fading floral tributes which were sent by presidents, kings, prime ministers, queens, the world over and by every day American citizens.
Of course, we were all glued to our television screens on the Monday of the President’s funeral. I never imagined, in a million years, that someday I would meet and become a friend of the Washington priest who was conducting the service – Phillip Hannan!
I rarely find myself in agreement with columnist George Will, but perhaps he was onto something when he maintained that:
“What died in Dealy Plaza was political romanticism. It revolved around the idea of the President as vivifier of the nation.”
I think that President Kennedy was a vivifying personality who breathed new life and purpose into far more than our nation’s cultural and political life. As a student of our Reform Jewish history, I know that John F. Kennedy managed to exercise a profound impact upon our liberal Jewish ranks in those first years of the 1960’s. Inspired by his activism, Reform Judaism in America set out to revitalize and renew itself in a Kennedy-like image, with actions of strident social justice activism. Some of you may remember how some congregations of our Union, particularly those here in the South, were most unhappy with the statements and actions from our Reform Movement on the subject of race and desegregation which they regarded as both ill-advised, poorly timed, and intemperate.
These were the years when our Religious Action Center in Washington DC was dedicated, and on that occasion President Kennedy was presented with a Torah Scroll by Justice Goldberg and Maurice Eisendrath in a brief Rose Garden Ceremony. This historic picture of our handsome President, showing the beloved Torah of Judaism, remains indelibly etched in my mind as emblematic of Reform Judaism’s new-found birth of energy and optimism during precisely those years which were romanticized into “Camelot.”
Do you think that the election of the first Roman Catholic to the Presidency inspired so many in our Reform Jewish ranks to cast off some of our self-conscious aping of American Protestantism? Was John Kennedy’s election a factor in moving us to dig deeper into our own particular Jewish traditions, Zionism, ethical teachings, Hebrew language and ceremonials? Of course it was!
As this 50th anniversary of his death arrives, so too have the mountains of new books, editorials and learned essays – so many of which contradict one another – been published. A thousand days is not a lot of time during which to substantively influence a nation or to fashion one’s historic legacy. A good number of these respected historians and scholars of the presidency nevertheless remain impressed by the degree to which young President Kennedy’s mind and policies began to significantly change and clarify themselves even within so little time. It seems that here was a man who was just beginning to shed much of his Cold War Ideology with which he grew up following his service in WWII. But no one can disagree that his administration’s start was rocky indeed. It made the rollout of Obama Care look like a picnic.
We all know what happened and what subsequently became known as “The Bay of Pigs Fiasco.” Moreover, John Kennedy, against the counsel of some of his most trusted advisors such as Arthur Goldberg, insisted on meeting Soviet Premier, Nikita Khrushchev, at a Vienna Summit. Kennedy was unprepared and did not measure up in the way he would have a year later.
There are those who say that Khrushchev erroneously assumed that the Kennedy he met in 1961 at that Vienna Summit was the Kennedy of 1962. The Cuban missile crisis that October proved how very wrong the Soviet Premiere was.
As to Kennedy’s level of understanding of the complex nature of foreign affairs, Dean Acheson, years after President Kennedy’s death, observed:
“Roosevelt took many years and never got a real grasp. Mr. Truman caught hold pretty quick, perhaps in eighteen months. Ike never learned much of anything. Jack Kennedy was just catching on in 1963.”
I was fascinated to learn that in his last visit to Hyannis, President Kennedy said to his friend and neighbor, Larry Newman:
“This war in Vietnam – it’s never off my mind. It haunts me day and night.”
Kennedy told Newman that both General McArthur and General DeGaulle had used almost identical words in warning him not to commit the United States to a land war in Asia, and Kennedy resolved:
“The first thing I do when I’m re-elected, I’m going to get the Americans out of Vietnam. Exactly how I’m going to do it, right now, I don’t know. But that is my number one priority – get out of Southeast Asia.”
We also remember President Kennedy as an ardent advocate of desegregation. Examining the record more closely, we realize that he came aboard that human cause relatively late.
Jack Kennedy once asked his brother Bobby:
“What are Negroes really like? I’ve never spent any time with them.”
The fact remains, however, that injustice, and inequality, the lack of opportunity, and meanness shocked him to his core. And Kennedy decided, even before his brother Bobby that their administration was going to do something about it.
Following the infamous and deadly Birmingham Church Bombing in which four children were murdered, President Kennedy took to the television screen on Sunday night and said this:
“We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it. And we cherish our freedom here at home, but are we to say to the world, and more importantly to each other, that this is the land of the free, except for the Negroes; that we have no second class citizens, except Negroes? Who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?
Now what shall we say about John Kennedy, the womanizer? Now the White House press in that time had an unimaginable agreement that such behavior was beyond their parameters to note. We have difficulty conceiving of such a pass in this day and age, where anything, everything no matter how insignificant, is grist for the sordid mill. Kennedy’s sexual liaisons were simply too numerous to be cataloged, and they even extended to orgy-like gatherings in the very precincts of the White House. Such behavior, or lack thereof, cannot be excused. In this area of personal ethics and character, John F. Kennedy’s record must be found seriously flawed and wanting.
Here was a man, not a myth! And those who knew him best, and the subsequent scholars who have analyzed him from every imaginable angle, all agree that John F. Kennedy was a man full of contradictions, secrets, inadequacies and foibles. It is true, that a half century later, there is no consensus as to history’s verdict on his accomplishments and presidency.
This anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, which remains so large in my own personal memory and which, strikes so many all over the world as the end of our belief in unobstructed progress, causes me to think of the Patriarch Jacob about whom we are reading currently in our Torah. Jacob too was a man who refused to play by the rules at times, stealing and deceiving his way to the birth right in the blessing of his father. He was his mother’s favorite, and he had not the least bit of reluctance to employ craftiness in order to achieve his desired ends. And yet, don’t write Jacob off! Because he was the patriarch who dreamed the dream of a ladder linking earth to heaven; reality with possibility.
We will read tomorrow morning how it was Jacob who wrestled mightily with his dual nature; his penchant for chicanery and his openness to God’s call. But by waging battle with his weak side, Jacob’s strong side prevailed. Out of the darkness of uncertainty, Jacob will emerge triumphant, renamed Israel – the one who has striven with God and with man and has prevailed.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, for all of his human weaknesses, stood before the American people and dared to share a dream of hope and possibility and greater service with us all. He was the one you will remember who urged and challenged us to reach for the very moon and the stars. He was the president who summoned us to reach right next door and to redeem the promise represented by America’s children of every race and creed. John F. Kennedy spoke and we not only listened, but we came to believe more profoundly in our own capacity as a people and as a nation.
I still believe in heroes – flawed and human though they be – people with feet of clay, but champions nonetheless, of the best that is within us. The Heroes are those who summon selflessness and excellence, courage under attack, and inspired genius in times of dull-witted mediocrity or even worse.
I feel that it is essential for us to continue to salute the dreamers among us for they are truly our only resources of future greatness. Poet Edwin Markham might well have been speaking of John Kennedy when, in the preceeding century, he implored –
Give thanks, oh heart, for the high souls
that point us to the deathless goals;
brave souls that took the perilous trail
and felt the vision could not fail.
Such a leader then was President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. And you know, were we forced to choose between a person of flawed character who projects to all a noble vision or another person of reliable comportment who fails to inspire future victory with a vision of achievement, then which one would we choose? The former or the latter? As for me, I would take the person of flawed character but noble vision.
And so it is, that 50 years have passed now since Air Force One landed at Love Field and our handsome president and his elegant wife descended the stairs to meet their destiny. True, a man not perfect, but a national and world leader, this was our martyred, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who in 1961 on a cold, cold day in January, called his fellow citizens to awake once again to the precious knowledge and awareness that “God’s work must truly be our own.”
