Remembering JFK

Me in November 1963.

I can still see that elementary school foyer. The water fountain under the enormous portraits of Blue Boy and Pink Girl. The swinging double doors leading to the cafeteria where the smell of vegetable soup permeated the wood-planked floor.

My class was lined up at that water fountain, waiting our turn to eat lunch. We had just lost our favorite teacher Mrs. T. She simply disappeared, no goodbyes. Her replacement was no Mrs. T. Miss R could not teach her way out of a paper bag. Where Mrs. T genuinely loved us silly third-graders, Miss R had no patience for us. Lunch was our half-hour escape from her dismal classroom.

Unexpectedly, the PA system crackled in all its 1960s glory. We didn’t pay much attention until we saw teachers sobbing. The announcement did not affect us, but our teachers’ tears? We knew something was dreadfully wrong.

After lunch, Miss R explained as best she could that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. No one knew if he would live or die.

I don’t remember much about the rest of that day. My family was one of the few in our neighborhood that wasn’t first-gen American. Our little school was filled with immigrants’ children who spoke Italian, Greek, Spanish, Mandarin, even Yiddish.

I do remember how greatly my classmates grieved that day, and the days that followed. President Kennedy was an American they idolized, an American they wanted to be. His vision of an America bigger than each of us, with room for all those languages and cuisines and customs, an America that offered them and their parents hope in a hopeless world, that vision inspired them. They grieved at the news of the shooting same as if President Kennedy were their favorite uncle. He may have been bigger than life, but he seemed approachable, welcoming.

It was therefore a shock to my third-grade self to hear some of my parents’ friends crowing with utter joy about that assassination. To this day, I cannot understand how my mom and dad, the same two people who raised us to be open, and tolerant, and caring, how they could at the same time continue to be friends with people whose values directly contradicted their own. Sure, they had known the bigoted friends since their own school days, but…?

Because these friends were by and large John Birchers, people who hated Kennedy. I remember one of them saying, out loud, that the Kennedy child who died in August 1963, two days after his birth, would be the only Kennedy in heaven, because he was too young for God to send him to hell with the rest of his family.

I may have been an elementary school child in 1963, but even I knew that it was not right to be happy that one man murdered another. No matter his politics.

I was reminded of these John Birchers this week as we see racism, misogyny, and all-around hate grow stronger and stronger. We like to kid ourselves and think that this is a new thing.

But it is not a new thing. It is a continuation of the hate – fear-mongering hate — that has been preached in the name of evangelicalism ever since Southern Baptists broke away from their more liberal fellow Baptists in 1845 – the split occurring over the issue of slavery. Southern Baptists insisted on justifying ownership of and cruelty towards Black slaves, basing their politics on a sick and perverted interpretation of their holy scriptures. It is the same religion-fueled hate that joined forces with John Birchers, preparing the way for Kennedy’s assassination. [Both Tim LaHaye and Phyllis Shafly identified with Bircher ideology. Fred Koch of the Koch Brothers was a founding member of JBS.]

Thursday, November 21, 1963, The Monitor, McAllen, Texas: “Wanted: Dead! Crime? For America, against Communism. The John Birch Society. Write [Address], McAllen.”

Friday, November 22, 1963, Star-Telegram, Fort Worth, Texas: [Describing Rockefeller’s presidential bid] “Frequently as he [Rockefeller] moves around the country there is a John Birch plant. He, or she, reads a question, usually about the divorce and remarriage, that is in effect a studied insult.”

Friday, November 22, 1963, Globe-Times, Amarillo, Texas: [On Goldwater’s demand that commanders in the field be given authority to employ nuclear weapons] “Kennedy hit out not only at Goldwater but at other Republicans and at some Democrats as well. He also paid his respects to the John Birch Society members without naming them.

“‘There will always be dissident voices heard in the land, expressing opposition without alternatives, finding fault but never favor, perceiving gloom on every side and seeking influence without responsibility,’ he said.

“‘Their voices are inevitable,’ he said.

“Kennedy said that these voices were preaching doctrines and that they ‘apparently assume that words will suffice without weapons, that vituperation is as good as victory, and that peace is a sign of weakness.’”

And yet on Saturday, November 23, 1963, Robert Welch – founder of the John Birch Society – sent a telegram of condolence to Jackie Kennedy.

Saturday, November 23, 1963, Tribune-Herald, Waco, Texas: In a long series of tributes by private citizens and Baylor students, Tom Moore (former McLennan County District Attorney) stated, “One of the biggest thing (sic) this points out, over and above the tragedy, is many people in Texas and the United States share a great amount of guilt who have subscribed to and encouraged the practices and beliefs of extreme right-wing groups. I’m speaking of the John Birchers, America Firsters … [ellipses in original] those who fostered hatred and mistrust between groups and races in the country.”

Tuesday, November 26, 1963, Star-Telegram, Fort Worth, Texas: Published a poll showing that if Rockefeller would issue a statement challenging the Republican Party to repudiate John Birch Society and right-wing influences, he would see a bump in his ratings. 82% of Republicans in 1963 wanted a public repudiation of right-wing influences!

Tuesday, November 26, 1963, Caller-Times, Corpus Christi, Texas, letter to the editor from C.G. Zey of McAllen: “The killing of the President demonstrates again that the actions of the John Birch society and the Communists have the same effects and so apparently the same purpose. I hope that these Texas bumpkins will realize now, too late, that they have been playing with fire. They created the atmosphere, they aroused the hatreds, they encouraged the irrationality.”

Friday, November 29, 1963, Herald-Post, El Paso, Texas, letter to the editor by John Kerr, El Paso: “…[T]he John Birch Society is not the victim of any persecution by the national press. Quite the contrary. The press, to my knowledge, has never really publicized the sinister, frightening content of the Blue Book. This is, as I understand it, the basic guide for this sick group, written by its founder, Mr. Robert Welch. It says, among other things, that ‘democracy … [ellipses in original] is a perpetual fraud.’”

Saturday, November 30, 1963, Times Record, Wichita Falls, Texas: Associated Press report of an FBI investigation into a full-page ad taken out in the Dallas Morning News the morning of November 22, 1963. The ad was entitled, “Welcome Mr. Kennedy” and contained twelve questions the “committee” [American Fact-Finding Committee] demanded answers to. Among other things, the ad accused President Kennedy and his brother Bobby1 of persecuting loyal Americans. The signatory on behalf of the “committee” was a member of the John Birch Society.

Of course, as soon as the FBI started asking questions, Robert Welch said he had never heard of the man who signed his name to the ad, nor was he familiar with the “committee” in question. The Associated Press reporter apparently did not believe Welch’s denials.

This AP report was also carried by the Abilene Reporter-News, El Paso Times, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Corpus Christi Caller-Times, San Angelo Standard Times, and the Victoria Advocate.

Of course, after Kennedy’s assassination, mainstream religion – like John Birchers themselves – publicly backed off from extremist statements. There are many silences, non-statements from prominent pastors. Public-facing statements tended to express condolences for Jacquelyn Kennedy and the Kennedy family, without repudiation of the hate-filled speech that had laid the groundwork.

I was also disappointed as I dug through old newspaper archives to find that no reporter called out the silences. No one point blank asked pastors who had affiliated themselves with John Birch Society – or America First or organizations even further to the right – for a statement following Kennedy’s assassination.

The Southern Baptist Convention posted highly-selective excerpts from the sermons of its most liberal pastors. Suddenly “the liberals” were in demand. Similarly, an essay a few years later about religious reactions to Kennedy’s assassination focused solely on Methodists, Presbyterians, ELCA Lutherans, Episcopals, Disciples, and other denominations known for tolerance and compassion.

I know what I heard in those days, weeks, and months following that day in November 1963. Yes, at school I saw the grief, the desolation experienced by friends and teachers who admired Kennedy, from those teachers who had voted for him, or even “normal” Republicans not associated with John Birch Society extremism. My first-gen American friends expressed the sorrow they witnessed at home.

I also remember my own parents’ grief, how upset they were. “Don’t listen to what Mr. Kerr or Mr. Lopez says,” they urged me. “It really is a tragedy.”

Now, sixty-one years later, older than my grandparents were in 1963, I can grasp just how awful that John Birch-evangelical milieu in Texas and the South was. How damaging Welch’s philosophy was to our growth as a nation, to the civil rights and women’s movement that took place despite Birchers’ best efforts.

Most of all, how our utter failure to deal with John Birch and America First politics in 1963 set the scene for what we are now living through. How hand-waving the laughter and derision over the death of a two-day-old child, how ignoring the privately-pleased-and-ecstatic response to Kennedy’s assassination, the use of that dark day to further a poisonous agenda – how that got us to November 5, 2024.

What will it take to strip away the veneer of respectability and expose those who see democracy as a “perpetual fraud” as frauds themselves? As traitors? As adversaries of everything this country stands for and wishes to be or become?

Because as long as we continue the hand-waving and pretense, we’ll repeat this cycle ad infinitum.

Please make it stop.

Note: Robert Kennedy, JFK’s brother, would be aghast at RFK Junior’s politics. Among other things, John Birch Society claimed that fluoride in water was a Communist plot to control the minds of American youth. Which, of course, the Kennedy brothers disputed. RFK Junior’s embrace of the ideology that sowed hate of his father and uncle is mind-blowing.

COMMENT WORTH KEEPING

William Manchester wrote in his magisterial book on the assassination, "The Death of A President," about the people who maintained their hatred of John F. Kennedy after his death.

He also wrote about how Americans suddenly became massive fans...post-assassination polls suggested that he won in a landslide in 1960, as Americans told the poll-takers, "Oh, yes, I voted for him in 1960." Yeah, right.

The book is both an accounting of the assassination and a meditation of a nation and world in mourning. It's one of the two best books I've read on the subject.

--Kiwiwriter47, November 22, 2024.

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© 2024 Denise Elaine Heap. Please contact me for permission to quote.

Image credits: Top photograph--Me in November 1963. Photo © 1963 John Heap. Please contact me for permission to use. Image of John Birch Society ad, 11/21/1963, public domain. Bottom photograph: Official White House portrait of President Kennedy, July 1963. Photographer: Cecil W. Stoughton. Public domain, because official government photograph.

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