JFK Remembered: What a Lucky Man He Was

John F. Kennedy’s assassination 50 years ago today seemed to bring the hopes of an aspiring generation crashing down. More assassination and war followed that fateful moment on a Dallas street on Nov. 21, 1963.

Kennedy’s life and legacy is perhaps more complex than most men’s. It was admirable and enviable, yet at times questionable, deplorable, reprehensible. He tried to reach for greatness, to inspire people to achieve greatness, and along the way he did some great things.

 

The Peace Corps comes to mind.

I was four years old when Kennedy was assassinated. What I remember is the aftermath, the arguments and debates and sorrows I heard from my parents and their friends over the years. There was a sense that something was lost, perhaps forever.

In 1988, on the 25^th anniversary of JFK’s assassination, I was listening to a rock radio station in Washington D.C. when the disc jockey noted the date, then played Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s 1970 song “Lucky Man."

 

A British progressive rock group, its singer and guitarist, Greg Lake, wrote the song in 1959, when he was 12, according to a 2012 Horizon Press interview with the singer.

 

“I did write “Lucky Man” when I was 12,” Lake said. “My mum bought me a guitar and I was very lucky in that sense, the answer was yes instead of no. There was the first bit of luck because had the answer been no, my life would have probably been totally different.”

To me, the song seemed to capture JFK’s life.
 

 Lucky Man

He had white horses
And ladies by the score
All dressed in satin
And waiting by the door

Ooooh, what a lucky man he was
Ooooh, what a lucky man he was

White lace and feathers
They made up his bed
A gold covered mattress
On which he was laid

Ooooh, what a lucky man he was
Ooooh, what a lucky man he was

He went to fight wars
For his country and his king
Of his honor and his glory
The people would sing

Ooooh, what a lucky man he was
Ooooh, what a lucky man he was

A bullet had found him
His blood ran as he cried
No money could save him
So he laid down and he died

Ooooh, what a lucky man he was
Ooooh, what a lucky man he was

 

Gettysburg Revisited

Seven score and ten years ago, our forefather stood before a divided nation to consecrate a battle ground, blood-soaked from an endeavor to re-unite a people, and to re-establish the proposition of our founders, necessary for a more perfect union, that all people are created equal, and that none are more equal than others.

             Today we are engaged in a great social fracturing, testing whether our nation can hold together that which it spent more than two centuries building, that which it once split apart, and that which it has been mending since war had once torn it asunder. 

            The world has long noted and never forgotten those words of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg on Nov. 19, 1863. Americans, for whom his speech was meant to heed and endure, have neither noted nor remembered in the spirit for which it was made.

            We often consecrate, dedicate and hallow grounds rather than find courage to sacrifice for the greater good that tolerates all, no matter race, creed, nationality, thought or sexual orientation. This nation cannot long endure in a house that ceaselessly divides for the cause of self-interest.

            A nation that produces greatness cannot continue to self-inflict wounds and think it will become stronger. Its boldness is not in the military venture. It can not hope to last without adapting to change, economic and political.

            We cannot become great without acknowledging our nation is a work in progress, that our work is always unfinished, that we must always devote the last full measure. A government by, for, and of the people must not perish from the earth.

           

War to End War

Nearly 100 years ago today, the guns of World War I went silent at the 11^th hour of the 11^th day of the 11 month in 1918.

It was believed to be "The War That Will End War," as British author H.G. Wells first described in a collection of newspaper articles that were published in a book at the outbreak of war in August 1914.

 

Three years later, President Woodrow Wilson, in arguing for America’s involvement in the war, and only months after getting re-elected on the promise not to go to war, stated it would be “the war to end war,” a term he only used once, according to Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s “Eloquence in an Electronic Age: The Transformation of Political Speechmaking.”

Next year we will observe the 100^th anniversary of the start of World War I, which lead to nine million combatants killed and another nearly eight million missing. In France, at the battlefield of Verdun, a battle that raged for 300 days and took an estimated 250,000 lives, there is a national cemetery containing the remains of 130,000 unknown soldiers.

World War I was the first conflict of the industrial age and with it came industrial horrors, machine-driven weapons – tanks and aerial bombardments – and chemical weapons, which, as recently seen in Syria, remain with us today.

As the last century has shown, it was not the war to end war. The peace negotiations in Paris that followed the armistice on Nov. 11, 1918 ensured there would be a Second World War by how the victors treated the vanquished.

The allies had little concern about the consequences of leaving a nation like German nearly destitute and little thought as to how a family of nations should behave toward one another. It would take World War II and the creation of the United Nations to begin dialogue on that concept.

In scope of nations involved and scale of destruction, World War I was unprecedented in history until World War II. Since those wars, America’s involvement in conflicts has become longer. The United States was in the First World War for 18 months before that war ended. It fought in the Second World War for three years and eight months.

The Vietnam War, 1955-1974, was 19 years and five months and our fighting in the Middle East, in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been going on nearly 13 years.

All of these wars and so many smaller ones not mentioned have links, directly and indirectly, to the outcomes of World War I. It wasn’t a war to end war; it was a war that spawned wars.

The More the Gun the More the Violence

Just the last month alone, the reports of gun violence, nationally, regionally and locally, from home to classroom to workplace, indicates gun violence is permeating our way of life.

Here are a few of the incidents:

* A school teacher is shot and killed in Nevada trying to protect students from a gunman. Two students are wounded.

* A coach at Missouri Southern State University is shot and killed coming out of a movie theater, prompting cancellation of the school’s homecoming weekend.  

* Shots were fired at North Carolina A&T State University’s homecoming and one of the bullets wound a 21-year-old man.

* A troubled man goes on a shooting rampage at Los Angeles International Airport and kills a Transportation Security Administration officer. The shooter wounds two others and is also wounded.

* Another troubled man kills his family and then himself in South Carolina, just one of many incidents recently of family murder suicides.

  
As this dispassionate blog on gun facts by The Guardian’s Simon Rogers’ shows, the United States ranks as having the highest rate of gun ownership with the second highest percentage of homicides by guns.

The social and economic impacts of gun violence are enormous, according to Small Arms Survey, another dispassionate collection of data from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland.

And FactCheck.org keeps a tally on whose providing accurate information and perspective on the issue in its “GunRhetoric vs. Gun Facts.”

As reported in local newspaper and national news media, gun violence is routine in society today. Joe Nocera of the New York Times offers a daily rundown on his blog GunReport, which just provides facts, nothing more.

Perhaps it’s time to decide whether gun violence is an acceptable way of life in a free, wealthy and democratic country. Before letting your knee jerk, either right or left, read the reports, check the facts, and study the data.

Why Kill Her?

            From what is known from news reports, Miriam Carey tied to ram a White House barricade and then fled police in a high-speed chase to the Unite States Capitol where they cornered her and shot her to death.

            Why?

            Carey had no weapon. She hit a Secret Service agent with her car at the White House, and then rammed a police car when she put her black Infiniti into reverse. A Capitol police officer was injured, but reports are unclear as to whether Carey was directly responsible for the injury.

            So why kill her? Was there no other way of stopping her from whatever she was trying to do?

According to one video clip, the police had managed to stop her car in front of the Capitol and surround it with guns drawn before she sped off. Couldn’t they have disabled the car by shooting out the tires? There must be other ways to stop a speeding vehicle.

Many questions remain about Carey. Why did the 34-year-old dental hygienist travel 275 miles from her Connecticut home with her 1-year-old daughter, who was not hurt during the incident, and ram a White House barrier?

News reports claim she had mental health issues related to postpartum depression, but again, why was it necessary to kill her?

As one expert on police use of force, Geoffrey Alpert of the University of South Carolina, told the Associated Press, “I think the question we have to ask is, ‘What threat did she cause? What threat was she to the officers, to the public, to the politicians?’”

From news reports and videos, it didn’t seem like a great threat, but without more facts it’s just second guessing. An investigation is planned, but that doesn’t guarantee we will get satisfactory answers. We hope we do.

The concern is this: Has our fear of terrorism become so great that we are seeing terrorists everywhere we look? Have we now decided to shoot first and ask questions later? Miriam Carey’s death seems so significant to these issues.                                                   

Atlas Shrunk

            The government shutdown brings to mind “Atlas Shrugged,” Ayn Rand’s mammoth 1957 novel about one man, John Galt, shutting down “the motor of the world” because government taxes and regulates too much, depriving men of realizing their full potential as individuals.

            “This is an epic tale about a man who said he would stop the motor of the world – and did,” is one of the blurbs on the “Atlas Shrugged” website. “A thrilling mystery about what might happen if the world’s producers disappeared,” is another, and a third: “A story that shows how ideas have the power to shape the world we live in.” 

            Anyone who has read the novel knows it’s long, 1,168pages, and about many things including romance and sex. Its plot and theme, though, are essentially vehicles to espouse, at least in my perspective, an ideology rather than philosophy. It’s called “objectivism.” This ideology essential states that individuals should be selfish and should never compromise – on anything.

            Rand described objectivism in 1962: “Man – every man – is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.”

            Sort of sounds familiar, doesn’t it? In fact, there are many, some of whom are in government, who believe this. Some politicians believe some issues are so sacrosanct that compromise is impossible. But there’s compromise, and then there’s selling your soul for ambition and avarice.

As is commonly understood, compromise is where parties, none of whom is entirely right or wrong on an issue or in a dispute, give up something they believe in and accept something they don’t (sacrificing?). They do this in order to move forward on finding a common ground that would benefit the whole rather than the individual.

Good things have come from compromise, like the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights – each filled with ideas from a lot of people who didn’t always agree but that have nonetheless shaped the world.

 

 

            In “Atlas Shrugged,” Rand’s hero, Galt, succeeds in bringing the world to a halt in order to broadcast, using his technologically advanced radio, the philosophy of objectivism. He is cheered by supporters who believe the world will see the wisdom, adopt the philosophy, and life will be good. People will go about doing what they want without interference or critical appraisal from anyone, particularly the government.

            That sounds well and good for fiction, but it doesn’t seem to be a realistic way to go about things like raising a family let alone running a government. But then, who am I to say? In the words of Graham Green’s foible-prone Holly Martins, the protagonist in “The Third Man,” I’m just a hack writer.

            America is the Atlas of the world, but when the nation’s democratically elected leaders allow the nation’s engine to stop because they can’t compromise, America then no longer looks like the Greek mythological figure that holds up the celestial sphere. It looks like a puny being unable to realize the folly in failing to compromise and the hard truth that everyone is replaceable – even John Galt.  

             

Fifty in Five: Will We Be Marching in Place?

This year’s 50^th anniversary of the civil rights March on Washington and the accompanying “I have a Dream” speech by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has been inspiring, but also reminds us of the next 50^th anniversary that the nation will mark in five years: King’s assassination in April 1968 and the assassination two months later, in June, of Robert F. Kennedy, who was running for president that year.

What these approaching anniversaries tell us is that some of the contentious issues of ‘68 continue to haunt us today: gun violence and economic inequality.

Both King and Kennedy were shot to death, King by sniper rifle in Memphis, Tenn. An escaped convict from Missouri, James Earl Ray, was convicted of the killing. Kennedy was killed at a campaign event in a California hotel by a handgun, a .22 caliber revolver fired by Sirhan Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian.  

Gun violence today is pervasive. In the last month alone there has been several mass shootings including 12 dead at the Washington Naval Yard, 13 injured including a 3-year-old in Chicago, followed by four gun deaths in that city a couple of nights later. In fact, hardly a month goes by when there isn’t some level of gun violence and mass death somewhere in the United States. No one seems to know of a solution other than to sell more guns.

Economically, the middle class, based on economic data including lagging wage growth and rising health care and food costs, is declining while the ranks of the very wealthy and the poor are increasing, creating, as many economists believe, an inequality of opportunity and outcome that could lead to a destructive divide in our society. Already, even discussion of this seeming imbalance draws cries of class warfare.

To address economic disparity in ’68, the Poor People’s Campaign, a march on Washington to essentially petition the government, was being organized by King before he was gunned down on April 4. Despite his death and the wrenching sorrow it caused, the campaign went on as planned, which is how King had wanted.

Resurrection City, 1968

 

In June, more than 3,000 marchersdescended on the nation’s capital, demanding “economic justice” for America’s poor, which included blacks, whites, Native Americans and Hispanics. They set up a tent encampment, which they named Resurrection City, on the Mall and endured heat, rain and mud for six weeks as campaign organizers sent out groups to various federal agencies to lobby for economic equality and jobs.

Kennedy’s wife, Ethel, attended the Mother’s Day opening of Resurrection City. Less than three weeks later, her husband, who had urged King to have the poor march on Washington, was assassinated, on June 5. His funeral procession traveled through Resurrection City on its way to Arlington Cemetery.   

The campaign was not as successful as the organizers had hoped, marred by lack of coordination, leadership conflicts and racial tension. The most it achieved was free surplus food distribution in about 200 counties, but it never reached its goals of giving low-income wage earners access to land and capital, unemployment assistance, and meaningful jobs at strong wages.

By late June, the federal Department of Interior closed down Resurrection City because the organizers’ National Park Service permit had expired. Some violence and arrests occurred, but the six-week campaign was largely peaceful. It continued in small groups meeting outside that year’s political conventions in Miami and Chicago.

The contemporary reflection of the Poor People’s Campaign of ’68 is the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011, which advocated for the same issues of social and economic equality, but also protested against perceived corporate influence, particularly by the finance industry, on government. They set up tents in Zuccotti Park in New York City’s financial district and after two months were forced to leave.

Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park, 2011

 

 

Occupy Wall Street spawned Occupy movements in cities, college campuses and outside corporate headquarters across the country. But like the Poor People’s Campaign, Occupy Wall Street had little effect on public policy other than to raise political awareness of the issues, the importance of which now registers in polls.

Let’s hope that five years from now we’re celebrating progress on the issues of gun violence and economic inequality instead of noting how little has changed in 50 years.