Kennedy saw a better America
It’s been 40 years since I stood in my dress uniform at Ft. Benning, Ga., and saluted for the last time as a full-time grunt with the 11th Air Assault Division. I was told that I’d served with distinction and was awarded the Army Commendation Medal.
So, on the long bus ride back home, I mixed the memories of my fear as my platoon leader gave me live rounds and the priest gave me last rites as we sat all night waiting to invade Cuba, with the discomfort of suddenly being free, able to join in the adventure of living in America, a nation I dearly loved.
I came home to an ailing mother living in poverty and I decided to wait a week or so before looking for a job as a reporter.
Then the lightning came.
John F. Kennedy, a man I loved, admired and a leader I would have followed into Hell, shot dead in Dallas by hate and fear followed by a series of revolutions that would grip the nation for more than a decade. To come back into such national turbulence was breathtaking. For hour upon hour I sat and watched America mourn and cry, asking over and over again for the cause of such an act.
It’s important to remember, as I do this day, that many people hated the Kennedys in general and JFK in particular. Some hated his religion. Some hated him because he “talked funny” as if Southerners don’t “talk funny” too. Some hated him for his un-earned wealth.
Others believed in his humor, his brilliance, his public Camelot family life, his love of intellectuals, and his belief that America could be such a better place for all of the people.
It was so difficult to understand. I bought every newspaper I could find and read and re-read the dispatches and columns searching for the meaning of it all. None satisfied.
From there, violence would beget violence as America roiled with the sometimes violent attempts to change the old order, to take the power Jefferson spoke to of the demand on each generation to reinvent our democracy or to throw out the old order, which could have been corrupted beyond repair.
Civil rights, women’s rights, student rights, Nam, anti-war movements, riots, assassinations of Dr. King, Bobby Kennedy, Malcolm X, secret FBI files, the Chicago riots at the ’67 convention, Nixon’s betrayal of his solemn oath, and on and on it rolled.
There were days when it seemed the very fabric of the nation was being torn at its seams. But change did come. The democracy did become more inclusive. And not all of the dreams for America died.
But many have.
Greed and corruption stalk the halls of Congress, the best government money can buy, and Wall Street staggers under more and more revelations of criminal activity in the world of stocks and bonds and now mutual funds.
Most of our media are corporate owned or soon will be and our freedom of speech and press seem to be ever-more threatened by a supine press that cares not for the democracy, but for its stock values.
That’s the irony of this time of reflection on the death of John Kennedy. For all of excesses, his core values seemed to be so much of what we wanted America’s values to be. I miss you John Kennedy. I miss your smile, your gifted Irish humor, and most of all your hopes and dreams for this nation.
(Ed Kimbrell is a professor in MTSU’s School of Journalism.)