OT: King Death

JFK by Jacques Lowe, 1961

Like many Americans my age and older, I do remember where I was 50 years ago today. We were living in Boston while my father completed his MBA at the Harvard Business School. His graduate school education had been interrupted ten years earlier when he and his brothers, my uncles, formed a successful company in their native Indiana. We lived in a small apartment complex in Cambridge. My mother and brothers and I were returning home to our apartment after being out, and we found our housekeeper (who we called a "cleaning lady," a term I believe is now out of date) in the living room, sitting in an armchair that was normally unofficially reserved for my father. She was crying. I believe she took my mother aside somewhat, to spare us children the news, but I overheard: the President of the United States had been killed.

In the days that followed, my main memory was that the news and the funeral dominated television, and I was cross that most of the cartoons I liked were preempted. I did watch some of the coverage. My memories are, quite typically, visual: I saw John-John's salute, and the President's wife, mysteriously draped in black so that you couldn't see her face, and I was fascinated by the riderless horse with the backwards boots, which I thought was very curious. (I've always loved horses. The custom of the caparisoned horse representing a fallen noble dates back through the mists of time all the way to Genghis Khan.)

The riderless horse in JFK's funeral procession.
Photo courtesy Kennedy Library.

In some ways, I don't think America has ever really recovered from that event in Dallas. The country immediately split: Lyndon Johnson's Great Society was the most extensive flowering of Rawlsian liberalism in American history, and Barry Goldwater's trouncing by Johnson in 1964 planted the seeds of right-wing Movement Conservatism. We can't agree on what happened that day 50 years ago, or what its influence was on the decade that followed. About all we know is that the Sixties would have been very different had JFK been President until '68 and then lived on.

Various Kennedy documentaries have melded together in my mind, there are so many of them. The story is one of the great dramas of American history. I think the one that really affected me was the PBS American Experience episodes "The Father" and "The Sons" in 1992, but I have clearly conflated that in my mind with the later documentary narrated by historian and author David McCullough. I don't have enough patience with video to sort them out now. And all the television coverage (I have antenna TV, no cable) is reminding me of those days 50 years ago when, at six, I couldn't watch Mister Ed.

To bring this back on topic, consider that JFK's White House photographer, Jacques Lowe, probably artistically speaking the best pure shooter ever to occupy the post, was informed before he died that his 40,000-negative archive could not be insured, because it was priceless. So he put it in the most secure place he could imagine—a special safe in the vault of JP Morgan bank in the basement of a secure building in New York City: Tower 5 of the World Trade Center. Destruction heaped upon destruction.

Say what you will of saviors and eternal life: on this Earth, Death is King.

Mike

UPDATE: Our friend Errol Morris has produced a short film about the best evidence of what happened fifty years ago today—the photographic evidence.

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Jeff1000: "I was down the street from you, Mike, in the factory town known as Worcester. My third grade class at Rice Square Elementary school was sent home early, the entire school of course. I remember walking home in an army-like formation, as the school mandated, on my way to Plantation Street. When I arrived home my beautiful young mom was sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee. She appeared surprised to see me home so early and she just looked at me searchingly. I said, "Ma! Ma! The President’s been shot and he’s dead." Over the next few days I watched the gray and somber images being played over our black-and-white TV set."

Chuck Albertson: "Like most others who can remember it and are still around, I was in grade school (4th grade) in Las Vegas, out on the playground at recess. I noticed that one of the teachers keeping an eye on us had a transistor radio to her ear, and she said something to the teacher standing next to her, whose jaw hit the floor. A kid standing next to them heard what was said and relayed it to the next kid, and I watched the news sweep across the playground like a breeze blowing through tall grass."

Animesh Ray: "I was 9, in fourth grade, in India, in a small town near Calcutta. I remember the low winter sun that would slant down into the walkway between two rooms in our three-room flat, the light reflecting off the red cement floor casting a glow into my parents' bedroom that housed the radio. My mother sat there that afternoon in front of the radio and told me President Kennedy was dead--someone had killed him. Not even a year ago we had read in the newspaper of Mrs. Kennedy's visit, when she had dressed up in a sari; that was the reason I had heard of President Kennedy, that his wife, though an American, had worn a sari like an Indian woman. Yes, we cried too. It was because we had thought of him as a friend of India.

"Many, many years later I understood a bit more as to why we Indians were so moved by the news. It was the high point of relationship between India and the USA, with John Kenneth Galbraith as the US Ambassador in India having cultivated a profound regard for the US through his liberal stance, and the USA's help to India in the Sino-Indian war that occurred just a few years before. It was as if we lost a friend."

Comments

[Lance Evingson]

7th Grade. We were put on notice that the adults created a hell for us. We watched another murder live on TV in a couple more days. Viet Nam (which flowed from the same cauldron) upped the ante. I learned to read the body politik - sadly many of my generation did not. Past became prologue. We sit here today. Cash is King too.

[Shaun O'Boyle]

I remember that day and the following days through something like a fuzzy haze. I was 3 yo, and it must have been the traumatized response of my Mother and others around me that made the images on the TV register - the wagon bearing the coffin, the horses, the somber announcer measuring out the words, describing the procession.

[Chris Klug]

One of the great things about this site is: You are such a good writer that the wonderful information you deliver about the art of photography pales in comparison to your writing craft. Thank you for this post.

[jim r]

I'm about your age - I was dismissed from first grade at the news. I still remember the horses pulling the casket, and the drum sequence that accompanied it along the route as we watched on our black and white TV.

[Peter]

I was driving north on the West Side Highway in NYC and all of a sudden all the traffic slowed down and cars started pulling over onto the shoulder/grass. I had no idea what was happening, so switched the radio on and heard the news. I remember listening for about ten minutes before the import of what was happening sank in.

[Patrick Perez]

I was a week old, to the day, so I obviously have no memory (though one of my earliest memories that remains is the night that Bobby was killed.

I learned a few years ago, that I was named to honor the child born to Jack and Jackie on 8/7/63, who died two days later. Few people now remember that personal tragedy they experienced.

But solace I find in the event sort-of tied to my birth is that in response to the news of John''s murder, Mike Love and Brian Wilson went into the studio and wrote my second favorite Beach Boys song, The Warmth of the Sun. Their default emotion was hope, not despair.

Patrick

[Paul Richardson]

I was in grammar school - Catholic, like the president, and in Massachusetts, to boot. The Mother Superior came in, stood at the front of the room and whispered to our teacher, then told us all to stop what we were doing and pray, without telling us why. A while later she came back, and told us all to go home, that the president was dead. My first experience with the surreal.
Where have fifty years gone?

[Bryce Lee]

When the announcement over the school's public
address system was heard I was one of many grade 11 students moving desks into the gymnasium in preparation for mid-term examinations the following week. For us in a foreign country it was a shock, as it was for many others, and yet,
as an early rabble rouser who was against a certain foreign country and their destructive
so-called peace efforts, not a surprise.
My destiny lay in protesting war created for peace but in actual fact for energy sources.
This was the end of one era and the start of another,as much as the World Trade Centre
demolition was yet another era changing event.

[Roger Bartlett]

In 1963 I was in Primary school (Grade School) in NZ. The school had a special assembly and the national flag was ceremonially lowered - in NZ!

[William Schneider]

I recall being dismissed from school at the first news of Kennedy's assassination, but we didn't yet know if he had died. That news came later.

Being a couple years older than my brother, I was responsible for getting him home which was about a mile's walk from school. The day was gray and windy, and neither of us said much on the walk home.

Later that evening, I sold "Extras" of the local newspaper on a street corner to passing motorists. After dark, I returned home having sold all the copies that had been given to me.

I remember it very well.

[Chuck Holst]

I was a sophomore at the University of Minnesota. I walked into my dormitory after morning classes, and taped to the door was a note that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. My first reaction was confusion: Dallas? What was he doing in Dallas? I thought he was in Washington. I went to my dorm room, turned on the radio, hoping to hear he had only been wounded, and learned that he had died. I was shocked, saddened, and numbed; it hardly seemed real. For the next three days, local rock 'n roll stations WDGY and KBWB played nothing but classical music, and network radio was almost all news. If there was any discussion in the dorm about the nation or its future, I don't recall it; I think most of the students, like me, were just trying to wrap their brains around what had happened. I remember that a mostly silent group watched the funeral on the black and white TV in the student lounge. I believe it was the first time I ever heard "Hail to the Chief," and it was played like a dirge. Watching the anniversary coverage this past week, hearing that Jackie's scramble to the back of the car was to collect pieces of her husband's head and brains, I had to choke back the tears once again.

[MJFerron]

I was in Brockton,Mass Mike. Problem child that I was my teacher made me stay after school for something I don't recall. Well the shooting was reported and I was quickly released. Remember well the shock and tears of the adults. I was just young enough not to be able to really fathom what had happened.

[MartinB]

I was in elementary school in Montreal and I remember a hastily arranged school assembly where the principal announced the shooting to all the kids. I remember the shock and sadness that went through the assembled school, and having a feeling of the overall senselessness of it all. And in the days afterward, how the murder of an American president felt like a loss to us too, as if he were a Canadian leader. There were no borders, it was a global village.

[Rod S.]

I am a 57 year old Australian and the clear recollection of hearing the news broadcast that JFK had been assassinated is one that haunts my childhood memories. As usual, my family (just four of us) had gathered around the kitchen bench on stools to eat breakfast and the ABC news bulletin came on with the shocking news from overnight (3am or so, Sydney time). We were stunned and deeply saddened for days. That night the indelible image on the television news was a photograph of the School Book Depository Building with an arrow pointing to the upper right-hand window.

My real sadness over the event was tied up in my understanding, even at age seven, that previous US presidents had been (seemingly) old men, and that the torch had, indeed, been passed to a younger and more vigorous generation. The new dynamic president had brought hope for a better US society and for a safer world for us all. And now, that hope had been extinguished. That forward progression had been stopped dead. It still chills me.

In the last few days I've heard two interviews with JFK's biographer and have been pleased to learn that my childhood memories were not mis-placed, and that JFK was planning to pull 1,000 of the military advisors out of Vietnam within months.

Thanks, Mike, for your reflection.

[Edgardo Font]

JFK made a historic visit to Costa Rica in March 1963. His arrival caused the biggest gathering of people in my country's history; even greater than Pope John Paul II visit years later. People just fell in love with Kennedy. Everybody, young and old wanted to see him, to meet him, to cheer him. His speeches gave us great hope and filled our hearts with optimism and joy. We were sure his words were sincere and true.
That tragic day came only a few months later after his visit and memories and feelings were still fresh in most Costa Ricans.
When the terrible news broke everybody was petrified in amazement, many praying, and you could see people crying in the streets.
I was a twenty year old university student at the time. Now I am 70 and throughout all these years I have not been able to overcome the terrible nightmare.

[Jim Gamblin]

On November 22, 1963, I was in my 9th grade English class, when the principal came in annouced that the Presidient had been shot. An hour or so later he came to another class and made tha annoucement that JFK was dead.

That night watching the news with my parents, the photograph (which was burned into my brain that night) of LBJ being sworn-in on AF1, brought both anger and dread into me.

The rest of the decade was like the pendulum had swung as far the other way from what the beginning had been.

[Chris Y.]

After Eisenhower, HUAC, Berlin and the Rosenbergs, it was as if Bruce Springsteen and Angelina Jolie had suddenly come to live with us every day, and show us all how to be smart and powerful and fabulous. It's almost indescribable what they brought, and equally so what we lost on that horrifying day. We really have been like orphans since then - the older nations of the world must look at us and think "who raised this child?"

[Mike Giovinazzo]

I have two comments - where I was when Kennedy was assassinated, and a note about Jacques Lowe.

I was in Grade 12 in a town in Canada very near Buffalo, NY, and it was not too long after our lunch hour. I remember my home room teacher writing "President Kennedy shot in Dallas at (time)" on the blackboard. We were all stunned into near silence; there was little solid information to be had. We were not dismissed for the day, but went on with our classes. The next one was French, taught by a most disagreeable person, a junior football coach who made a stunningly tasteless joke, saying "It must have been Goldwater". That was followed by an English class, where the teacher, a nun, let us all sit quietly until school was dismissed.

As for Jacques Lowe, I agree he was a superior photographer of John Kennedy's. But I don't believe he was the official White House photographer when JFK was president. President Kennedy's photographer was a Navy officer named Cecil Stoughton. One of the recent JFK documentaries cleared up a mystery for me: it seems Joseph Kennedy hired Lowe to be JFK's campaign photographer in 1958, as the family was preparing to get him nominated at the 1960 Democratic Convention.

I believe Stoughton was not omnipresent, the way official White House photographers are now; he was called in from time to time to take pictures. The true, full-time White House photographer position began with Lyndon Johnson. He hired the very talented Yoichi Okamoto, who'd been with the U.S. Information Service, to be his full-time photographer. I think that is the true beginning of the modern White House Photography Department.

By the way, the Oval Office photo you posted is very similar to that of George Tames, the NY Times photographer, whose image is the most widely known. I never realized Lowe took a similar photo.

This obit of Lowe's adds some details about Lowe and how he came to be associated with the Kennedys.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/14/arts/jacques-lowe-71-who-etched-kennedys-camelot-on-film.html

[Ernie Van Veen]

I had a similar experience to you on that day in 1963, when I was six years old. I remember being confused as to my mother's grief about this stranger on TV.

Many years later, now a father myself, my two young sons came crying into our bedroom early one Saturday morning to tell us that "some princess" had died, and it was on all of the channels... instead of their usual fix of cartoons.