I was twenty-four years old and had only just returned to the U.S. five days before after making my first (and solo) trip to Europe at a time when that book, Europe on $5 a Day, was quite appropriate. I had quit my New York publishing job but had found myself homesick for friends and the Manhattan life, so I returned--though I'd thought I might wander, find work in France, Spain, Greece picking grapes, teaching English, cataloging someone's private library. So I was only just back in New York City ... and found myself that Friday in the Upper East Side's Convent of the Sacred Heart school with its high-beamed ceilings and intimate court yards--the same that Caroline Kennedy attended some years later. A college friend of mine had a job there teaching twenty uniformed fifth graders. She and I had just had lunch in the cafeteria and were back in her classroom as she was reading aloud from The Wind in the Willows. Soon enough, we heard the click-click of a habit-frocked sister's shoes as she made her way along the corridor going from room to room.
It was 1:25 p.m. "President Kennedy has been shot in the head," she said, as soon as she entered the room. "He's been taken to the hospital, but they don't know if he's dead or alive." A Catholic school, everyone was to go down to the chapel to pray for him, a fellow Catholic. My friend closed her book and led us downstairs where people knelt amid murmured prayers and sobs. When we came out, we heard he had died. We walked as if in slow motion passing the Austrian Consulate at the moment someone was putting their flag at half-mast. The streets were empty. "You can see the city mourn," a cab driver said later that evening. You could also hear it in the silence--no horns, no traffic, only bewilderment and grief. My dinner hosts opened champagne to toast my return. We drank it as we watched President Johnson address the nation.
Kennedy's death changed things for us more than we may appreciate. This summer, I read a fine, detailed, and excellently researched book by James W. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, Why He Died and Why It Matters. It seems he would not have escalated the Vietnam War but brought troops home. He was already making private peace overtures to Castro and Khrushchev. Though his generals and others (including our hawkish ambassador to Vietnam) urged him to win the Cold War by following a belligerent policy, he knew that could lead to a nuclear confrontation. He knew about war--he was, after all, a World War II war hero--and because he did know about it, he decided not to try to win the war (which turned out to be an unpopular stance) but to work to win the peace. Of course, with his death, we got the war and we got it in spades.
As well, it changed things because many of us felt--and still feel--that we were not told the truth about what happened in Dallas ... that we could no longer trust our government either to do right by us or to level with us. When Kennedy died, I felt, too, that we'd lost what I would call the marriage of elegance, promise, and intelligence. With his death, it was back to confusion, gloom, and mis-truths. The hope we'd all had for something better--a hope that sprang up with his inauguration--was destroyed that afternoon. The spark, the optimism that we could finally become the nation we wanted to become, died with him. It marked a definite change for me in my attitude toward our government.
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