JFK All The Way

Ma reminded me today what a fiend I was for John F. Kennedy when I wan elementary school aged kid. I referred to this on a recent blog post when discussing books that shaped my early thinking. One of them was indeed a very slim red covered book on Kennedy’s assassination.

Oddly, but I guess naturally, I’m now more concerned with the man. Whereas the childhood me was interested in figuring out the particulars of his assassination, and in the film JFK how it affected people who worked in and believed in the country. I read an article that Norman wrote about Kennedy before he made his big push to the presidency. At the time of this writing he was still a (junior?) senator: http://www.esquire.com/features/superman-supermarket

It’s long, but if you can get through it you start to see the particularities of Kennedy’s persona. he had an intense gaze that was the result of past injuries, a less than ideal health and a sureness of purpose and intention. These qualities made the Pres seem unreal. Also, he’s not a gifted speaker to Mailer. He’s a superman because he’s not a superman. Because he worked so hard to complete his function…This is contrary to the default midwestern/southern loathing of the Kennedy as a princely son of privilege, which in material ways he is…but not in the metaphysical ways.

He also was an equal opportunity appreciator. When he makes his entry to the Los Angeles democratic convention Mailer notices something that no one else was to put into print, at least not in such a photographic, symbolic way. Here he waves at the beggards and “losers” of Pershing square. This is the same Kennedy the poor Irish Americans latched onto like the green (the other Fitzgerald’s image) hope diamond of imagination:

The afternoon he arrived at the convention from the airport, there was of course a large crowd on the street outside the Biltmore, and the best way to get a view was to get up on an outdoor balcony of the Biltmore, two flights above the street, and look down on the event. One waited thirty minutes, and then a honking of horns as wild as the getaway after an Italian wedding sounded around the corner, and the Kennedy cortege came into sight, circled Pershing Square, the men in the open and leading convertibles sitting backwards to look at their leader, and finally came to a halt in a space cleared for them by the police in the crowd. The television cameras were out, and a Kennedy band was playing some circus music. One saw him immediately. He had the deep orange-brown suntan of a ski instructor, and when he smiled at the crowd his teeth were amazingly white and clearly visible at a distance of fifty yards. For one moment he saluted Pershing Square, and Pershing Square saluted him back, the prince and the beggars of glamour staring at one another across a city street, one of those very special moments in the underground history of the world, and then with a quick move he was out of his car and by choice headed into the crowd instead of the lane cleared for him into the hotel by the police, so that he made his way inside surrounded by a mob, and one expected at any moment to see him lifted to its shoulders like a matador being carried back to the city after a triumph in the plaza.

Mailer was good at nuance, also magnifying his sense for it. “The Underground History of the World.” I do get nostalgic for that kind of enthusiasm though.

In Denis Johnson’s “Tree of Smoke” the first sentence invokes the death of JFK and the reader is instinctively set to feel that the whole debacle of the war is about to happen to people. In American mythopoetics, and in this accomplished novel, the death of JFK is the beginning to the end of something. Maybe it’s selflessness. The famous JFK speech goes “ask not what your country can do for you/ ask what you can do for your country.” These words that reflect in a way that private intensity that Mailer noticed in Kennedy. In the navy JFK tested himself deeply by carrying a shipmate on his back to shore, despite a weak constitution that was riddled with back problems. Mailer wonders what this quality of determination meant when he considered the candidate’s mind. It goes back to a different time altogether. Writers like Mailer who were destined to always feel outside the brotherly circles of combat still signed up to go to war anyway. Just as interesting thinkers like Kennedy joined up. It was a time when many would sacrifice something for love of country. Today, the Germans have that mindset and they are the economic backbone of Europe.

These are all qualities that are hard to quanitfy, and hard to talk about in the news cycle. But they linger in some of the moments of history we remember vividly…the face of JFK always being one of those memories for me. A guy who was more than a guy for reasons we have to figure out why….

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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