Where were you when you heard about JFK being assassinated?
I remember being in the hallway at Hedrick Junior High School having just left a class in algebra. I was 13.
My other strong memory from the Kennedy era was from the year prior, October 1962, and the Cuban missile crisis. I remember feeling at risk of being cheated. It was unfair that adults were going to blow up the world before I even got a chance to kiss a girl.
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| Gunsmoke |
I saw adults doing brinksmanship, like the gunfight duels I saw on the TV westerns or like teenagers in a late-night hot-rod game of chicken. Most of the TV gunfights pitted a conscientious sheriff good guy against a bad guy. Those were reassuring. The sheriff always won. But sometimes the showdown pitted reluctant fighters who got into fatal fights to save face. A real man must not be "chicken." I had seen real-life fights between classmates at junior high. Boys fought for reasons of pride, to retain credibility with their friends.
I saw the Cuban missile crisis through that lens. Kennedy feared being called "soft on communism." I figured Soviet leaders didn't dare look "soft" either. I recognized that this could escalate. An accidental push becomes a retaliatory shove, becomes a slap, becomes a punch, and in this case an exchange of nuclear warheads. We could all die. I would never get a chance to kiss anyone.
I worry about a president who got elected by being Mr. Dominant, but the American public seemed to like it. Win, win, win. Never surrender. A crowd showed up to watch James Dean. He was a rebel. A rule breaker. He had long hair and he fussed with it. He had charisma. Trump is widely hated, but he is admired, too. Trump doesn't have good character, but he wins fights.
Donald Trump seems incautious to me, a dangerous trait to combine with bellicosity. But Americans see something they like and made their choice. I am stuck in the back seat of the car he drives.
Larry Slessler wrote me a bit of personal history that demonstrates the hazards of international brinksmanship. Mistakes happen. Mis-communication happens. Slessler witnessed it firsthand. The Cuban missile crisis could have ended very badly.
Larry grew up in Medford, Oregon. He is a decade older than I am. He graduated from the University of Oregon and then entered the U.S. Army. That brought him to Florida and then to Vietnam.
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| Slessler |
Guest Post by Larry Slessler
During Oct 1962, I was up to my ears with Cuban Crisis Intelligence Collection efforts. The center of my life was a War Room in Florida. In that room on one wall was a huge map of Cuba with all the potential targets if we went to war with the Soviet Union. Most of you don't know how close we came to WWIII and the mutual destruction of the United States and the Soviet Union.
Many mind-numbing days into the crisis; we got a message from Washington D.C. that the next day members of the United Nations would be present for a briefing in the War Room, followed by U.N. overflight of Cuba.
My CO called me in along with a Sgt. Luther. The CO gave us the task to take all the targeting information off the top secret map of Cuba and replace it with phony target data. The brass did not want to expose the real targeting data to the U.N. I had already put in a 12-hour shift, and this new project was going to take most of the night to complete. My norm was 17-18 hour days. I was exhausted every minute of every day.Luther and I got started about 1800 hours. Taking only short coffee breaks and restroom visits we finished around 0400 hours. Luther and I said goodnight and headed off to our bunks for much-needed sleep.About 90 minutes after our departure, orders from Washington D.C. came in canceling the U.N. visit and laying on photo recon missions. The primary aircraft were RF-101's. This aircraft would fly at 500-feet at around 500 miles per hour and take beautiful clear pictures for intelligence analysis. Flying low and fast were the only protection these recon pilots had.The FAILURE! Pilots were called in and given target data. They launched multiple flight missions. But nobody knew that Sgt. Luther and I had falsified the targeting master map of Cuba. The net result was that every aircraft launched photographed targets that were not there.That day's missions were all failures. Millions of dollars were wasted. Pilots lives were in danger. There was 100% mission failure.Luther and I never did find out whose military career ended with this SNAFU. We were just happy it wasn't ours.
9 comments:
So now we have international brinksmanship over Ukraine, but Trump is going to fix it by kissing Putin’s ass. We saw him do it already in Helsinki on live television during his first term. Funny how so many Americans perceive that as strength. I perceive it as sucking up to his role model.
Scary story--echoes of "Dr. Strangelove".
Trump's busy signing garish guitars, for sale at a big markup.
After reading "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes (greatest book ever), all should read his follow-on book, "Dark Sun" (about the hydrogen bomb era). Rhodes recounts a number of supremely close calls, where a single individual made the difference between launch or no launch of nuclear weapons. Sometimes, the Soviets were the better behaved and more cautious actors. The scene of the U. S. Air Force officer standing on a runway, waving his arms to keep a strategic bomber from taking off is both comic (in Strangelove fashion) and harrowing. We have been so lucky so far, but it's definitely getting dangerous out there.
The Berlin blockade and airlift are not discussed much these days. Harry Truman kept his cool. Let us remember that close call along with the others.
Speaking of JFK's assassination: we should not forget that he was hated by a good portion of American voters.
We will soon see what the US is like when it's under Russian control.
When fusion weapons, commonly known as hydrogen bombs, are detonated, they cause complete destruction and death across several square miles. The bold attitude that DJT displayed during his first administration prompts a reconsideration of either the use of these weapons or, perhaps, the establishment of more reliable protocols for their deployment.
I remember November 22nd like it was yesterday. I was 17. A teacher walked through the last class of the day to tell us that Kennedy had been shot. Afterwards, we all stayed in the parking lot listening to the car radios, not knowing if he was still alive or not. The football coach said we were still practicing. The Superintendent said we're not. The coach was an ass. That weekend everyone was glued to their TV sets for news of anything. Then Oswald was shot. What next? The funeral. The sound of the drums still echo in my head. The Eternal Flame. Gut-wrenching. Walking to school when it opened again, I realized the world had changed. And not for the better. I still feel it today.
In 1963, I was 14 and living in Germany, attending a military dependents' high school. Our family headed off from Bremerhaven, on the North Sea, for the drive to Paris for a week's vacation over the Thanksgiving holiday. We were driving at night near Aachen, Germany, the 7 of us (parents, siblings and maternal grandma visiting from New York) in Dad's Mercedes 300, listening to classical music on BBC radio. The music was interrupted by the announcement that Kennedy had been shot while riding in a motorcade in Dallas; his condition was not known. I still remember the image I had in my head, of a lone pistol-carrying gunman lunging on foot near the car and firing; obviously inspired by etchings of the killings of Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley (I was a history freak). Late that night, we checked into a small hotel in Belgium, and it was the proprietor who informed us that JFK was dead. My mother, distressed, said, "You know what this means? It means Lyndon Johnson is president," and it was clear that she felt that was a bad thing. We arrived in Paris the next day, Saturday. On Sunday, we went to the American embassy to sign a book of condolences; I've since learned that book resides in the JFK Library in Massachusetts. Perhaps I'll ask to see it someday. Our school yearbook that year featured the portrait of the fallen president; I believe every single yearbook in 1964 did the same. In 1961, we had traveled from Ohio to see Kennedy's inauguration; still have my Hawkeye photo of him and Jackie in their limo that freezing morning. Because of our background, Kennedy was all about his Catholic faith; that's why we drove all the way to D.C. to celebrate. His killing felt brutal. That said, I believe I've outgrown that and, today, I am profoundly grateful that people no longer ALWAYS quote "as John Kennedy said" when looking for unquestioned agreement. Endlessly quoting JFK was part of the culture for almost 25 years!
I was coming home from Brooklyn College. I got off the bus and started walking down the street to my house, and every single house had an American flag flying.
It was really weird, and I had no idea what was happening until I got home and they told me.
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