Msnbc News Time Again Jfk Assassination

Like a lot of Americans, I remember November 22, 1963, but non November 21. If, as I was, you were very young—I was 2 months shy of my sixth birthday—there's very little of your life before that appointment that you can think. Of John F. Kennedy, I knew only 2 things when our kindergarten teacher told us, on the playground of Theodore Roosevelt Unproblematic Schoolhouse in New Rochelle, New York, that he'd been killed. He was the president, and his chore was to send John Glenn into outer space. Now he wouldn't.

If you were older, information technology's still doubtful that whatever occupied you on the 24-hour interval before, or the day before that, was anywhere well-nigh so memorable every bit Nov. 22. And nigh people alive today have no memory of the run-up to Kennedy's assassination in Dallas, for an even simpler reason: they had non yet been born.

What was America like in 1963, before Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby became household names?

• The price of a postage, at five cents, was lower, after inflation, than it is today; the minimum wage, at $1.25 an hr, was higher.

•  Median family income was about $6,200, merely for "nonwhite" (mainly black) families, it was $3,465. The black-white income gap is narrower today, just only by near six percentage points.

• Martin Luther King had given his "I Take A Dream" speech communication three months before; all the major civil rights laws had all the same to be enacted.

• New York City still had vi daily newspapers. A seventh, the Hearst-owned Daily Mirror, had died the calendar month before, the victim of a lengthy newspaper strike whose aftereffects would, over the next four years, kill off 3 more.

• Diane Sawyer, age 17, was America'south reigning Inferior Miss--a competition since renamed "Distinguished Young Women," probably in deference to the social movement that Betty Friedan helped create that same year by publishing "The Feminine Mystique."

• Ronald Reagan--having recently ended an eight-year stint with Full general Electric, for whom he'd been a Goggle box host and speechmaker—accustomed his terminal film office, that of mob dominate Jack Browning in "The Killers." It would exist the only movie Reagan made after switching his registration from Democrat to Republican, and (coincidentally) the only i in which he played the bad guy.

• The U.South. media was starting to take note of the Beatles phenomenon in Britain, though mainly to sneer. "The London Times has carried the sobering report that the Beatles may bring their Mersey sound to the U.s.," Edwin Newman reported November 18 on NBC's Huntley-Brinkley Report, "to which it may be rejoined, 'Testify u.s. no Mersey.'"

• Also on November. xviii, AT&T introduced the touch-tone phone. Goose egg ("Zone Comeback Programme") codes were introduced the previous summer. Other products introduced that yr included Kodak'southward Instamatic camera and Hasbro's Easy Broil Oven. The trip the light fantastic toe craze of the moment was the Monkey ("Lam di lam di la").

Chronologically, 1963 marked a rough midpoint betwixt the death of the last surviving veteran of the Ceremonious War (1956) and the first moon landing (1969); between Hitler's defeat (1945) and the start clinical recognition of the AIDS epidemic (1981); and between the Paris premiere of Stravinsky'southward "Rite of Spring" (1913) and the final episode of "Breaking Bad" (2013).

On November 21, 1963, Robert Stroud, the "Birdman of Alcatraz" whose life was romanticized in a 1962 movie starring Burt Lancaster—Stroud's ornithological enthusiasms did non, in fact, gentle his violent impulses—died at 73. (Stroud was never permitted to encounter the film.) That same twenty-four hour period saw the births of the actress Nicollette Sheridan ("The Sure Affair," "Drastic Housewives"), the playwright-director Moises Kaufman ("The Laramie Project"), and Tony McConkey, a conservative Republican member of Maryland'due south House of Delegates.

Information technology's Nov 21, and you desire to become to the movies. What's playing? "Under The Yum Yum Tree," "The Incredible Journey," "Information technology'south A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Globe," John Wayne in "McClintock!," Vincent Price in "Twice-Told Tales," and James Stewart and Sandra Dee in "Take Her, She's Mine" (remembered today solely because the Dee grapheme was loosely based on the teenage Nora Ephron; her parents wrote information technology).

Hmm. Peradventure you'll stay in.

It's Thursday, right? ABC's got "Donna Reed" and "My Three Sons," CBS has "Rawhide," and NBC has something called "Temple Houston" (Perry Bricklayer-goes-west drama starring Jeffrey Hunter; lasted but one season).

Or maybe you'll just catch up on your reading. Mary McCarthy's racy "The Group" tops The New York Times best-seller list for fiction. The non-fiction list is headed by "JFK: The Human and the Myth," a hatchet job past Victor Lasky, followed (somewhat ominously) by "The American Way of Decease," Jessica Mitford's betrayal of the funeral manufacture, at number two.

Kennedy was on his fashion to Dallas, but on November 21 Richard Nixon was already in that location, to nourish a meeting of the American Bottlers of Carbonated Beverages. Later losing the 1960 presidential race to Kennedy, Nixon had lost the 1962 California gubernatorial race to Pat Brown. Now he was a partner in the New York law house of Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie, Alexander, & Mitchell, where Nixon'south friend Donald Kendall, president of Pepsi, was a client. Also in omnipresence at the bottlers meeting was the actress Joan Crawford, widow of Pepsi'south former chairman.

On the forenoon of November 21, Nixon met with reporters at the Baker Hotel in downtown Dallas. He noted that Kennedy had lost support in Texas, which was true; indeed, that was Kennedy'south chief reason for visiting the state with his Texan vice-president, Lyndon Johnson.

"We were going to practice something about Castro in Cuba," Nixon told the reporters. "We were going to practise something about American prestige away, and also well-nigh sort-of-permanent unemployment" (and so 5.7%). "We find that on all of these issues there's been no action." Nixon added that Johnson's "stock is not as loftier in Texas, at to the lowest degree from what I've seen, as it was. In 1960, Lyndon was a assistance. In 1964 he might not be." A Dallas News headline the side by side day blared, "Nixon Predicts JFK May Drib Johnson."

There was, in fact, much gossip about whether Kennedy might dump Johnson from the 1964 ticket, and Kennedy's secretarial assistant, Evelyn Lincoln, later recalled that before he left for Dallas Kennedy told her he might replace Johnson with North Carolina Governor Terry Sanford. Of particular business concern was the ethics investigation of Bobby Bakery, Secretary of the Senate and a Johnson protégé when Johnson was Senate majority leader. Outrageous stories alleging that Baker paid bribes and hosted debauched parties in which naked young prostitutes poured champagne over each other were embarrassing the Kennedy administration, and the investigation was starting to suggest Johnson knew about them.

An article published in Life magazine on Nov. 18 quoted 1 anonymous source calling Bakery (who eventually did jail fourth dimension for larceny, fraud and tax evasion) "Lyndon'due south bluntest instrument in running the show." Two former Life mag editors later on told Johnson biographer Robert Caro that the magazine was preparing a more ambitious investigation into Johnson's ain extensive history of ethically questionable financial dealings. Life would scrub the projection later Nov 22, first because the assassination was the only story, and afterwards because it wanted to give the new president a risk to succeed.

Some other journalistic casualty of the assassination was a special CIA issue of the brusque-lived satirical magazine Monocle, edited by Victor Navasky and dated November 19, 1963. Because of the assassination, Navasky would recall in his 2005 memoir, "A Thing of Stance," "most of the 75,000 copies never left the warehouse." The determination not to distribute was a costly i, and within a couple of years Monocle was no more than.

During a Nov. 21 stopover with Kennedy in San Antonio, Johnson suffered another setback. Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough, a Democrat, was feuding with Texas Governor (and beau Democrat) John Connally. Kennedy wanted Johnson to put an end to it; winning Texas in 1964 would exist hard enough without a Democratic party riven past conflict. To resolve the matter, Johnson had to talk to Yarborough. But Yarborough refused--in full view of reporters--to ride in a motorcade with Johnson. A headline in the adjacent morning'southward Dallas News would read, "Yarborough Snubs LBJ." Connally, Johnson felt, was also treating him disrespectfully, and afterwards, in a Houston hotel room, Caro writes in "The Passage of Ability," "there were, peradventure for the showtime time since Kennedy had been elected, loud, angry words directly between the president and the vice president."

All of this—the investigations, the slights, Johnson'southward fears about his political future—would evaporate on Nov. 22.

In San Antonio, Air Force Ane landed in Lackland Air Force Base, where the futurity playwright John Guare ("Vi Degrees of Separation") had reported the previous calendar month for bones training. Nov 21 marked the commencement suspension Guare recalls from "the endless calisthenics, aimless marching, learning to burn down a rifle, kitchen duty, learning to accept orders." Guare's platoon stood at attention and saluted the president, vice president, and their wives on a distant landing strip. Then it was fourth dimension for a fume. According to Guare (whose monologue near that day was included in a contempo multimedia event at New York's Symphony Space and reprinted in the Huffington Post) his "fellow airmen basics" used this precious costless time to mutter ane hateful thing afterwards another about the visiting party: "Nosotros got to stand in this hot sun for a n----- lover?" "He don't belong in Texas." "He ain't my president." "I'd similar to show that wife of his what a man is." And then on. When discussion came the next day that Kennedy was dead, Guare writes, "a cheer went upward…. I accept never felt so isolated in my life every bit I did that day."

Kennedy'due south own experience of November 21 is, like Kennedy himself, a bit of a cipher. His aide Kenny O'Donnell recalled him saying that morning, in the White House, "I feel great. My back feels improve than it's felt in years." The historian William Manchester reported in his book "Death of A President" that Kennedy told Jackie he looked forward to riding that weekend at the Johnson ranch. But he was wearing a back brace, and at a speech after that day in Houston, Johnson adjutant Jack Valenti told Manchester, he observed Kennedy's hands "vibrating and so violently at times that they seemed palsied," a symptom of Kennedy's Addison's disease.

A helicopter flew the Kennedys to Andrew Air Force Base of operations at 10:45 a.m.; on the flight to San Antonio, the president asked aides nigh his brother Bobby's 38th birthday party the dark before, which he hadn't attended. (Bobby himself spent nearly of Nov. 21st in a Justice section meeting near targeting organized crime.) None of Kennedy'due south public comments that day is particularly memorable. Kennedy spent much of the 24-hour interval trying to get aides to twist Yarborough'due south arm into talking to Johnson. He and Jackie spent the night at Fort Worth's Texas Hotel, in a suite decorated with paintings past Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, and others, lent by local collectors. The splendor was lost on them, because they didn't arrive at their hotel until afterwards midnight and went straight to bed.

Non quite ane month before, on Oct 24, United nations Ambassador Adlai Stevenson had given a oral communication in Dallas and been jeered by an aroused right wing crowd shouting "Communist!" and "Traitor!" and "Kennedy will get his advantage in hell." Stevenson said to one heckler: "Surely, my dear friend, I don't take to come here from Illinois to teach Texas manners, exercise I?" The protesters, egged on by a rally staged the night before past retired Army Major Full general Edwin Walker, a prominent, mentally unstable, and ultraconservative Dallas activist, had spat upon Stevenson and whacked him in the head with a placard that said "If You lot Seek Peace, Enquire Jesus." The bearer was Cora Lacey Frederickson, wife of a Dallas insurance executive; Dallas' haters were drawn not from social club's fringes merely from its pathologically angry haute suburbia.

This was well known to the balance of the state. James McAuley argued in a recent New York Times essay on Dallas before the assassination that it was parodied by Carol Burnett and Julie Andrews in a (retrospectively creepy) Tv set production number of the song "Big D" that ended with Burnett pulling a gun on Andrews and maxim, "What are ya, some kinda nut?"

The Stevenson incident left Dallas's hard right feeling more aggrieved than aback. On the morning of November 22, an advert in the Dallas News read: "Welcome Mr. Kennedy to Dallas. A city so disgraced by a recent Liberal smear attempt that its citizens have simply elected two more Conservative Americans to public office." The advertisement, taken out by a group that called itself The American Fact-Finding Commission, connected: "A metropolis that volition go along to grow and prosper despite efforts by you and your administration to penalize it for its nonconformity to 'New Frontierism.'"

Kennedy laughed information technology off, merely the hatred in Dallas was real. A "Wanted For Treason" leaflet distributed in Dallas in the days earlier Kennedy'due south visit accused Kennedy of (amongst other crimes) giving "support and encouragement to the Communist inspired racial riots" and appointing "anti-Christians to Federal role."

Before long afterwards the Stevenson incident, a woman named Nelle Doyle had written White House Press Secretarial assistant Pierre Salinger to urge him not to ship the president there because of "this 'hoodlum mob' here in Dallas… information technology is a dreadful thought, but all remember the fate of President McKinley."

Strangely, though, it wasn't a right-wing extremist who would stop Kennedy'south life, simply a confused and angry Marxist—one who, seven months earlier, fired a shot not at Kennedy, nor Connolly, nor Johnson, nor Yarborough, simply at Walker, whom he considered a fascist.

That fourth dimension, Oswald missed.

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Source: https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/america-the-day-msna216146

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