It's been almost five decades since John F. Kennedy was hit in his head and throat when three shots were fired at his car. The presidential convoy
was passing through the main commercial district of Dallas, driving from the airport to the city centre. A bystander alleged that shots were fired from the casement of a construction across the road. The President buckled into Jackie Kennedy’s arms, who was heard crying out “Oh no”. The President’s limousine was immediately driven at speed to the Parklands Hospital. He died 35 minutes after being shot. Within hours of the shooting, a cop approached Lee Harvey Oswald, believing he matched the description of the killer. The cop was shot dead. Oswald was arrested straightaway, suspected of being the assassin. Shortly afterwards, he was charged. The suspect was never tried as he was shot dead two days later.
So it’s over: the Kennedy epoch in which the political realisation of the majority of my American cohort was born. It was John and Robert Kennedy whose lives actually thrilled American political principles and whose murders surely catalysed, as Norman Mailer previously asserted, a “general nervous breakdown”. It was that disastrous psychic rage that gave birth to the “youth culture” of the Hippie era, with its blend of lofty romanticism and self-absorbed bliss – which, as it happens, was a predominantly fitting cenotaph for the Kennedy dream. As I spent much of that period at Berkeley, where we made up what became the international student revolution; this is what I can analyse in retrospect.
It is nearly unfeasible to overrate the impact that the presidential campaign, the poll triumph, and then the assassination of President Kennedy had on a suggestible fresh legion of Americans who were rising from the Eisenhower years and a phase of conventional stagnation. Experts had termed our direct predecessors “the silent generation”.
All that optimism, all that pledge, the Peace Corps, the initial official acknowledgment of the objectives of the civil rights movement, the splendid oratory of Kennedy's speeches were doused in what was then an “unimaginable act”.
The jolt was literally astounding. I can still, to this very day, evoke it in all its intuitive passion, as can, I am sure, approximately every American who had been conscious then. When Bobby Kennedy, too, was killed, there was a philosophical sense of ineffectuality. Possibly it was at that instant that the movements entered properly into their nihilistic stage. For, there was still a faith then that the Kennedys were two typically good men who personified the most excellent aims of America. That was, obviously, before we learned the reality about their personal lives. But strangely, even after we came to know of the inconsistency between the personal and public ethics of the Kennedys – in John Kennedy’s case, a sexual promiscuity bordering on the pathological – and of the squalid arrangements that were made to obtain women for JFK by his kin, the legacy was not entirely shattered.
On the other hand, you simply cannot listen to the name Martin Luther King, Jr and not imagine death. You may heed the words “I have a dream,” but they will undoubtedly only dole out to emphasise a picture of a plain motel terrace, a large man made small, a pool of blood. Although King was among the most famous figures of his era, when he was alive, it was death that eventually defined him.
He ate, drank, and slept death. He bopped with it, he lectured it, he dreaded it and he stared it down. He looked for avenues to lay it sideways, this weight of his own transience, but eventually recognised that his steadfast resolve on a non-violent end to the ill-treatment of his folks could just end violently.
Since the age he started speaking in public, King was preoccupied by death – assaulted by the pledge of obliteration for seeking an end to humiliation to African Americans and the commencement of parity with whites. He dishevelled the feathers of white chauvinists who grew further resolute to bring him down. There were outstanding physical threats to King.
In an illustration of bare hostility, two white cops tried to wedge his entry into a Montgomery courtroom for the trial of a fellow who assaulted one of his comrades. Regardless of a caution from the cops, King jabbed his head in the courtroom looking for his solicitor to help him get in. His behaviour put a match to cops’ rage. The cop twisted his arm behind his back and shoved him into detention. A photographer happened to click the picture.
The shot of Dr King, clad in a natty tan outfit, fashionable gold watch and a cool snap-brim fedora, flinching as he is shoved to imprisonment, is an iconic civil rights image
was passing through the main commercial district of Dallas, driving from the airport to the city centre. A bystander alleged that shots were fired from the casement of a construction across the road. The President buckled into Jackie Kennedy’s arms, who was heard crying out “Oh no”. The President’s limousine was immediately driven at speed to the Parklands Hospital. He died 35 minutes after being shot. Within hours of the shooting, a cop approached Lee Harvey Oswald, believing he matched the description of the killer. The cop was shot dead. Oswald was arrested straightaway, suspected of being the assassin. Shortly afterwards, he was charged. The suspect was never tried as he was shot dead two days later.So it’s over: the Kennedy epoch in which the political realisation of the majority of my American cohort was born. It was John and Robert Kennedy whose lives actually thrilled American political principles and whose murders surely catalysed, as Norman Mailer previously asserted, a “general nervous breakdown”. It was that disastrous psychic rage that gave birth to the “youth culture” of the Hippie era, with its blend of lofty romanticism and self-absorbed bliss – which, as it happens, was a predominantly fitting cenotaph for the Kennedy dream. As I spent much of that period at Berkeley, where we made up what became the international student revolution; this is what I can analyse in retrospect.
It is nearly unfeasible to overrate the impact that the presidential campaign, the poll triumph, and then the assassination of President Kennedy had on a suggestible fresh legion of Americans who were rising from the Eisenhower years and a phase of conventional stagnation. Experts had termed our direct predecessors “the silent generation”.
All that optimism, all that pledge, the Peace Corps, the initial official acknowledgment of the objectives of the civil rights movement, the splendid oratory of Kennedy's speeches were doused in what was then an “unimaginable act”.
The jolt was literally astounding. I can still, to this very day, evoke it in all its intuitive passion, as can, I am sure, approximately every American who had been conscious then. When Bobby Kennedy, too, was killed, there was a philosophical sense of ineffectuality. Possibly it was at that instant that the movements entered properly into their nihilistic stage. For, there was still a faith then that the Kennedys were two typically good men who personified the most excellent aims of America. That was, obviously, before we learned the reality about their personal lives. But strangely, even after we came to know of the inconsistency between the personal and public ethics of the Kennedys – in John Kennedy’s case, a sexual promiscuity bordering on the pathological – and of the squalid arrangements that were made to obtain women for JFK by his kin, the legacy was not entirely shattered.
On the other hand, you simply cannot listen to the name Martin Luther King, Jr and not imagine death. You may heed the words “I have a dream,” but they will undoubtedly only dole out to emphasise a picture of a plain motel terrace, a large man made small, a pool of blood. Although King was among the most famous figures of his era, when he was alive, it was death that eventually defined him.
He ate, drank, and slept death. He bopped with it, he lectured it, he dreaded it and he stared it down. He looked for avenues to lay it sideways, this weight of his own transience, but eventually recognised that his steadfast resolve on a non-violent end to the ill-treatment of his folks could just end violently.
Since the age he started speaking in public, King was preoccupied by death – assaulted by the pledge of obliteration for seeking an end to humiliation to African Americans and the commencement of parity with whites. He dishevelled the feathers of white chauvinists who grew further resolute to bring him down. There were outstanding physical threats to King.
In an illustration of bare hostility, two white cops tried to wedge his entry into a Montgomery courtroom for the trial of a fellow who assaulted one of his comrades. Regardless of a caution from the cops, King jabbed his head in the courtroom looking for his solicitor to help him get in. His behaviour put a match to cops’ rage. The cop twisted his arm behind his back and shoved him into detention. A photographer happened to click the picture.
The shot of Dr King, clad in a natty tan outfit, fashionable gold watch and a cool snap-brim fedora, flinching as he is shoved to imprisonment, is an iconic civil rights image
