Friday, November 22, 1963: “Miz Nunez!” A sixth-grade girl rushes in. “Turn on your radio! The president has been shot!” Mrs. Nunez and her fourth graders were stunned. All classrooms had portraits of Washington, Lincoln, and the current president, John F. Kennedy – he was shot?
Fast forward, November 22, 2019. JFK and Martin Luther King are legends, revered as martyrs, quoted for their ringing words. We like to believe they were beloved in their own time, but it isn’t quite that simple. Kennedy was popular where I lived, in heavily Catholic south Louisiana, although elsewhere the fiction was spread that the pope would have a direct line from the Vatican to the White House if that son of a beep were elected.
In my school, and across the country, many children were afraid that their parent was the assassin, having often heard at home, “I’d like to kill that n****lover!”
Everyone watched tell-a-vision all weekend, nonstop coverage, with those famous photos: LBJ taking the oath of office on Air Force One with Jackie Kennedy looking on, her dead husband’s blood staining her pink suit; the suspect Lee Harvey Oswald grimacing as Jack Ruby rushed up to shoot him in the gut as cowboy-hatted Dallas deputies looked on helplessly.
In my house, we watched NBC, Huntley-Brinkley. Many Americans tuned into “Uncle” Walter Cronkite on CBS, and others to Howard K. Smith on ABC. That was it – there were no 17,000 satellite channels, no 24/7 cable news programming. The only late night TV comedian was Johnny Carson, just over a year on the job as host of The Tonight Show. Computers were as big as houses, fed punch cards to perform arithmetic, not pocket sized “phones” carried in the back pocket of most people over the age of eight. Phones were big clunky things with curlicue wires that sat on a table or perched on a wall.
Tell-a-vision matured that weekend, when its administrators decided that the president warranted full attention, so that Kennedy’s successors, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, the Bushes, etc., all became headlines when anything happened: speeches, press conferences, assassination attempts, travel, state dinners, Thanksgiving turkey pardons, and – ahem – impeachment proceedings.
The only other “mass media” at that time was the printed press. After Kennedy’s death, several weeklies (Life, Look, Saturday Evening Post, Time, Newsweek) printed special editions, with iconic photos from the Zapruder film of Kennedy clutching his throat, his son John-John saluting the flag-draped casket rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue. My mom kept a box of those magazines until she died.
This seems so quaint now. Like it or not, everyone learned the news from the same, somewhat identical, sources, the three TV networks and those glossy magazines. There were alternate sources – Jet and Ebony magazines aimed at African American audiences, and political journals with small circulation read by intellectuals or extremist groups. But even their readers would have been glued to the TV that November weekend, or radio for people who lived far away from a city large enough to host the three networks.
The idea that a US president could be gunned down, probably by a communist sympathizer with a Russian wife, was alien. (This gave birth to the “fake news” industry that spawned infinite conspiracy theories about the planned execution of the president.) JFK had detractors – he didn’t move fast enough on civil rights, or he should have committed more troops to Viet Nam, or pulled us out altogether. Some people despised him as a rich elitist, born with a silver spoon and sent to Harvard to be groomed for the Oval Office. His father bought the election.
Nothing new here – Lincoln was ridiculed as an ape, FDR as a dictator, Ike for spending too much time on the golf course.
Why do people say America has never been this polarized, when it isn’t true? What is true is that we reinforce our own viewpoints by committing to personalized news sources, which may not distinguish between fact and opinion. We divide ourselves into factions and drive our own bandwagons into despair.
Kirk Ashworth