Volume : SIRS 1991 History, Article 02                                
Subject: Keyword(s) : KENNEDY and ASSASSINATION
Title  : A Remembrance of Kennedy                                              
Author : Jim Henderson                                                         
Source : Dallas Times Herald (Dallas, Texas)                                   
Publication Date : Nov. 20, 1983       
Page Number(s) : Special Sec. 1+

. . . Reprinted with permission from                                                                                                       
      DALLAS TIMES HERALD                                                                                                                  
      (Dallas, Texas)                                                                                                                      
      Nov. 20, 1983, Special Section, pp. 1+                                                                                               
                                                                        
                    A REMEMBRANCE OF KENNEDY                       
                        by Jim Henderson                           
                          Staff Writer                             
                                                                   
`Let the word go forth from this time and place...that the torch   
has been passed to a new generation of Americans--born in this     
century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace,  
proud of our ancient heritage.'                                    
                                                                   
     After 20 years, the events seem as compressed as a leanly     
edited videotape.                                                  
                                                                   
     A sunny day, a dark convertible, a steady din rebounding      
from the canyon walls above a crowded street, three cracks from a  
rifle in a sniper's nest, a scramble below, engines racing, a      
sobbing black woman outside Parkland Memorial Hospital, a          
policeman shot across town, a pronouncement of death, a scrawny,   
handcuffed suspect in a corridor with Jack Ruby's .38 exploding    
in his belly.                                                      
                                                                   
     The nation was stunned by the images that were transmitted    
from Dallas--hard images formed in terse, teletype prose and more  
vivid ones fashioned from bits and pieces of celluloid.            
                                                                   
     America paused to watch the newsreel.                         
                                                                   
     A new President quickly sworn in and airlifted into command,  
a bloodstained widow never far from the coffin, a change to        
black, a bewildered daughter kneeling before a flag-draped box in  
the Capitol rotunda, the wintry streets of the capital, a dark     
riderless horse with empty boots facing backward in the stirrups,  
a slow-moving caisson, a young boy saluting the honor guard        
carrying his father to Arlington National Cemetery, the lighting   
of the eternal flame.                                              
                                                                   
     On the day John F. Kennedy was buried, Alistair Cooke wrote:  
"He was snuffed out. In that moment, all the decent grief of a     
nation was taunted and outraged. So along with the sorrow, there   
is a desperate and howling note from over the land. We may pray    
on our knees, but when we get up from them, we cry with the poet:  
Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the      
dying of the light."                                               
                                                                   
     It is only in memory that the howling note from those four    
days flits past. Behind the newsreel, the hours were agonizing     
and interminable. For many, particularly in Dallas, time moved as  
slowly as a motorcade or a horse-drawn caisson.                    
                                                                   
     Erik Jonsson, then-president of the Dallas Citizens Council,  
would recall the anxiety he felt when the President did not show   
up on schedule for a luncheon at the Trade Mart. What's going on?  
he asked himself over and over as the wait, only a few moments in  
duration, seemed endless.                                          
                                                                   
     After 12:33 p.m. Nov. 22, 1963, the time the first news       
bulletin notified the republic that its President had been shot    
in Dallas, the city stood motionless and helpless, waiting for     
the firestorm of scorn. It came in searing, overlapping bursts.    
"Are these human beings or are these animals?" Adlai Stevenson     
had asked moments after he escaped from a violent crowd in Dallas  
a month earlier.                                                   
                                                                   
     The world looked again at Dallas with the same question. It   
would seem, in the slow-motion drift of events, that the answer    
would never come. Dallas mourned the assassination as the rest of  
the nation mourned it, as a deeply personal tragedy.               
Schoolteachers wept as they broke the news to their classes. Men   
cried in public. Rage and shame and guilt and dread melted into    
one great immobilizing glob of emotional turmoil.                  
                                                                   
     An eternity, two hours and 20 minutes, passed before the      
truth would be known. Kennedy's assassin was not of Dallas, was    
far removed from the nation's perception of the city and the       
city's own worst fears of itself.                                  
                                                                   
     In time, the world, as well as Dallas, would believe the      
city was merely caught in one of history's inscrutable warps,      
that it was only by chance that the light passing through the      
long prism of that era intersected in Dealey Plaza.                
                                                                   
     The howl that was heard through the dark night of those       
times had the tone of a primal scream, a victim raging against a   
felon. In truth, it was a cry of national doubt, of the sense      
that America would not be the same. More than mere innocence was   
lost that day in Dallas. With it went the cable that anchored the  
nation to its sense of order.                                      
                                                                   
     To the historians who define eras in terms of events rather   
than years, the decade of the '60s was born in Dallas.             
                                                                   
     In a great, shuddering spasm, the fragile floodgates that     
had held back the reservoir of a restless social movement was      
punctured by the bullets that rained down from the Texas School    
Book Depository.                                                   
                                                                   
     Within months, America would experience the first of her      
long hot summers, just the beginning of another newsreel: the      
dogs and fire hoses of Birmingham, the first smiling Marines       
marching into Vietnam and returning in body bags, campus radicals  
occupying the administration building at Columbia University,      
rioting outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago,     
the fires of Watts and Newark and Detroit, Dr. Strangelove,        
Apollo 11, Woodstock, Charles Manson, the cultural revolution,     
the counterculture revolution, the sexual revolution, the          
yippies, the hippies, the peaceniks and the crazies.               
                                                                   
     In 1968, Stuart Udall, secretary of interior for both         
Kennedy and Johnson, was asked his opinion of the times, which     
seemed to be reeling out of control. He offered a sober, but       
startling, observation.                                            
                                                                   
     "This may be remembered," he said, "as the most creative      
time in our history."                                              
                                                                   
     It did not seem such an outrageous judgment when the          
hurricane had passed. A sorting out had occurred in the storm.     
Not many years would pass before a black preacher from Chicago     
would run for the presidency. Women would flood the work place     
and supervise staffs of men. Men with an eye on the White House    
could talk of a female running mate without risking ridicule.      
Wars would be harder to make, nuclear waste harder to conceal,     
books harder to burn, air harder to pollute, justice harder to     
deny.                                                              
                                                                   
     America was starkly different. Kennedy's presidency and his   
assassination may have been essential to unlocking the passions    
of the time, but what the land became was neither his legacy, nor  
Oswald's nor Dallas.'                                              
                                                                   
     After the trauma and shame and guilt were gone, the judgment  
of history would be that Kennedy and Oswald, Edwin Walker and      
Martin Luther King, George Wallace and Stokely Carmichael, Angela  
Davis and George Lincoln Rockwell, Dallas and Los Angeles,         
Memphis and Birmingham, Detroit and Da Nang were fragments of the  
American character, slivers of the dream and the nightmare.        
                                                                   
     The legacy of that sunlit moment in Dallas was a nation's     
fretful and all-consuming search for itself, a long and howling    
rage against the dying of the light.                               
                                                                   
