Posted on 11/21/2013 8:10:13 AM PST by Kaslin
My parents voted for Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential election. I had not yet developed a political worldview, but as a freshman at American University in Washington, D.C., I stayed up late to watch the election returns slowly trickle in before going to bed at 2 a.m. with the outcome still undecided.
The following year I was hired as a copyboy at NBC News, delivering wire service "copy" to news reporters in the network's Washington bureau. White House correspondent Sander Vanocur invited me to accompany him to observe the swearing-in of Adlai Stevenson as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
President Kennedy was there. It was the first time I had seen a president in person. My mother had told me about visits she and her parents had made to the White House when Calvin Coolidge was president, but this was something new for me.
After the Eisenhower years, my impression of the man was similar to that of many others: Kennedy looked so young.
Two years later on the way to work, Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, I stopped at a traffic light on River Road in Bethesda, Md. It was 1:30 p.m. Eastern Time. A bulletin interrupted the music I was listening to on the car radio. President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. My first reaction was to roll down my car windows and shout to other motorists, "The president has been shot!" I then raced to the bureau where it was controlled chaos for the next four days.
The 1960s are often called the "Golden Age" of broadcast journalism. One reason is that the networks were composed mainly of men who were writers with experience at newspapers or wire services. Some had reported on World War II. They became my mentors. Working alongside them was my master class.
On that unforgettable day, as I was reviewing the Associated Press wire coverage, I saw something I had never seen before. "Flash," the bulletin read, "Kennedy seriously wounded, perhaps fatally, by assassin's bullet." Flash was a designation reserved for only the most catastrophic events. The time on the wire copy was 12:39 p.m. Central Time. Less than an hour later, there was another "Flash." "President Kennedy Dead."
I saved copies of the wire bulletins and tucked them neatly inside the book "Four Days," a historical record of President Kennedy's death. Re-reading UPI White House Correspondent Merriman Smith's reporting from Dallas with the limited technology of the time is a testament to what great journalism once looked like. His stories are in the book.
Also included in "Four Days" is an essay by the late historian Bruce Catton whose words written just weeks after the assassination cut through a lot of the analysis and gets to the true legacy of this personally flawed, but fascinating man: "What John F. Kennedy left us was most of all attitude," he wrote. "To put it in the simplest terms, he looked ahead. He knew no more than anyone else what the future was going to be like, but he did know that that was where we ought to be looking. Only to a certain extent are we prisoners of the past. The future sets us free. It is our escape hatch. We can shape it to our liking, and we had better start thinking about how we would like it."
Ronald Reagan would embrace a similar futuristic outlook.
What followed Kennedy's assassination was an era of growing and more expensive government, race riots, the divisive Vietnam War and social disintegration. It was not the hopeful future Kennedy envisioned, but Bruce Catton's words remind us we can always start over by using the future as an "escape hatch.
So.....so-called conservative columnist Cal Thomas bought the Camelot Cool-aid.....nothing but tripe and trumped up envisioned performance of a man killed by an assassin’s bullet. You can’t read anything in beyond that date in history. Coulda shoulda woulda...
blah, blah, blah
My Grandfather voted for Kennedy in Chicago. He died in 1959.
Gaffer, maybe you can enlighten us with your reading comprehension skills and point out where in the article that Thomas PERSONALLY praises Kennedy? Because he quoted a writer who wrote about Kennedy looking to the future? Conservatives don’t look to the future?
Thomas’ piece is far more about yearning for the days when journalism was rigorous, not ideological.
Not ‘’ideological’’? What do you call Edward R. Morrow?
Ronald Reagan would embrace a similar futuristic outlook.
Odd, seeing as how he was talking about the prior paragraph - his assessment of the meaning of the other writer's words. Basically, this sentence shows he subscribed to the ideas put forth in the prior paragraph.
To confirm this, he asserts the future intentions deemed by the writer as TRUE......
So...my reading indicates agreement and verification with IDEOLOGICAL asserts in Thomas' 'rigorous' review.
‘LBJ’ and precinct 13 in Tejas helped steal the 1960 election for ‘JFK.’
Any Kennedy worshippers, I got your conspiracy right here ...
Yeah...it is....just like all the JFK Anniversary stories and those strainingly connected with it.
I think the word a conservative would have used is expansive.
At the time, I did not realize the US only had one president at a time because the news also talked about President Eisenhower and President Truman and now President Johnson. I thought JFK, while young and glib, was just another government leader.
My two enduring memories of that weekend was the newspaper headline in the largest possible font, taking up 2/3rds of the front page which said simply:
PRESIDENT
SHOT; DEAD
I also remember that all my Saturday morning cartoons were cancelled on every tv station, pre-empted by wall-to-wall news coverage.
So, is RINO Cal suggesting that Kennedy getting plugged caused all of this?
And I've got your well-earned "My memory is crap" award right here.
The election LBJ stole was the 1948 race for Texas Senate. Texas was as blue a state in 1960 as it is red today. LBJ did not need to steal Texas. They won it handily.
What you *might* be thinking of is Illinois, where JFK eked past Nixon with the alleged help of the unions and the Mob (at least the Mob sure thought they won that election for JFK and expected him to back off investigating them).
I was 15 when it all went down and THIS Boston boy knew only another Boston guy had been elected President and now was murdered.
I couldn't and didn't digest it all for many years.
I was a kid living in New Orleans when a neighbor announced (to no one in particular) “Someone has gone and shot the SOB dead!”
This Georgia boy saw the same things as you. He, however, was able to listen, read, and find out the truth about the man without commiserating about being from the same city.
Yeah, that’s harsh, but being from the same locale is no reason for ignoring all the hereafter facts and revelations.
Not that I can see. He is saying that JFK projected an America full of hope and optimism, similar to Reagan although the details may have been far different.
What actually happened after the assassination for the rest of the decade reflected little about hope and optimism.
I think JFK would have been dismayed to see what America became in the 1960s the same way Reagan would have been dismayed had he been able to understand what America is like under Obama.
MY point is; I never analyzed ANYthing for years.
When did YOU do all your academic gymnastics ?
“Well, LRoggy, the following sentence perplexed me:
Ronald Reagan would embrace a similar futuristic outlook.
Odd, seeing as how he was talking about the prior paragraph - his assessment of the meaning of the other writer’s words. Basically, this sentence shows he subscribed to the ideas put forth in the prior paragraph.
To confirm this, he asserts the future intentions deemed by the writer as TRUE......
So...my reading indicates agreement and verification with IDEOLOGICAL asserts in Thomas’ ‘rigorous’ review.”
Since when does looking to the future end up being ideological?
We all bow down to you, our purity expert on how conservatism thinks! /sarc
I was eight at the time and playing marbles with friends when my 2nd grade teacher ran down, with tears in her eyes, said ‘They’ve killed the President’, she ran to groups of other kids and gave the same message. We continued our marble game.
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