Todd Gitlin’s account of how the JFK assassination affected the New Left
The Sixties, pages 311 ff.
"To think about the
enormous repercussions of the assassination of 1968, we need to backtrack to the
imagery and mood of a more general Armageddon, for which the triggering moment
is the assassination of 1963. Kennedy, King, Kennedy: they sometimes felt like
stations in one protracted murder of hope.
"There are times when an entire culture takes the shape of a single
event, like rows of iron filings lined up by the force of a magnet. What is
assassination, after all, if not the ultimate reminder of the citizen’s
helplessness—or even repressed murderousness? Instantly the killing creates an
abrupt contest between Good and Evil, albeit with the wrong ending. The country
had weathered the assassination of a president three times before, but every
assassination is special in its own way; it must be for good and profound reason
that virtually every person can remember exactly where and when he or she heard
the dread news of November 22, 1963. John F. Kennedy had been relatively young,
his death untimely in the extreme.
"This was, after all, the first assassination in the age of television,
even the first to be captured on film—the home movie of an instantly famous
furrier named Abraham Zapruder, some frames destined to appear in Life,
others to be brandished by assassination researchers. Thanks to the wonders of
instant replay, television drove the event, and its grotesque sequel—Jack
Ruby’s live on-camera assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald—like a nail into
the collective brain. Mysteries multiplied. John F. Kennedy’s murder was
untimely and shocking, yes, but also peculiarly hard to comprehend (who was
Oswald? What did he want? Who, if anyone, did he work for?); hence it begged for
symbolic deciphering. American culture struggled to make sense of the apparently
senseless. Fatalism flourished; the power of the will to prod history in the
right direction was blunted. One common conclusion was that even the steadiest
of institutions, the august presidency, was fragile indeed. The Camelot legend
was recycled; moments of grace and glory don’t last. Some would-be
rationalists resolved to cling to President Johnson in the storm, to find a
compensatory good in the horror; others cringed from the graceless successor,
who could never measure up to the dead Kennedy.
"From the national mélange of rational optimism and free-floating
paranoia, and in the face of widely cited mysteries drifting foglike from cracks
in the official accounts of the assassination, there emerged conspiracy theories
galore. The Warren Commission Report, released on September 27, 1964, was shoddy
enough, but something else was operating to discredit it: a huge cultural
disbelief that an event so traumatic and vast in its consequence could be
accounted for by a petty assassin. Popular books, starting with Mark Lane’s
1966 best-selling Rush to Judgment,
punched holes in the Warren Commission’s finding that Oswald was the lone
assassin. Serious journals like The New
Republic, The New York Review of Books,
and Ramparts, not to mention the more
sensationalist underground papers, regaled their readers with tale after tale
about exit wounds, gunshots from the grassy knoll, missing frames of the
Zapruder film, the accuracy of Mannlicher-Carcano rifles, exotic Cuban émigrés,
mysteriously murdered witnesses, double agents, double Oswalds. Many objections
to the official line were convincing, but one had to become a full-time
assassination obsessive to keep up with the intricacies. Not to be outdone, the
far Right looked to Oswald’s Russian period and his ostentatious Fair Play for
Cuba connection, covering up its hatred of the living Kennedy by clambering onto
the side of the dead one.
"There was trauma for young radicals, too. In the months and years after
November 22, 1963, Tom Hayden, Dick Flacks, and I were given to playing with the
concept of Oswald as “lurker.” History, which we
aspired to make, was now being made behind our (and virtually everyone’s)
backs; we were fascinated by the conspiracy theories, impressed by their
critiques of the Warren Commission, doubtful of the single-assassin idea though
unconvinced of any single conspiracy. For years thereafter, late at night, amid
our sage analyses of political forces, the thought of lurkers would leap up, and
we would must about the havoc these apparently marginal men had wrought. We who
were proud of having shed every last illusion about John F. Kennedy shared in
the national trauma; up to the last possible moment we held on, white-knuckled,
to the scraps of hope for legitimate heroes. Our intuition knew better than our
passions that radicalism and liberalism were joined in a symbiosis.
"Then the Kennedy trauma was compounded by the assassination of Malcolm X
in February 1965. In the official version, it was a simple case of loyal Black
Muslims shooting down the apostate; but movement people duly noted that Malcolm
on his recent trip to Africa and the Middle East was departing from his racial
purism and pulling closer to the white Left. A number of white New Leftists who
had met Malcolm had been impressed with his thoughtfulness, his apparent freedom
from personal prejudice. Although there had been rumblings of danger, Malcolm
had been left unprotected by the police; how could we fail to wonder whether
there was a government claw in his back?
"Some black activists adopted Malcolm as a martyr to black separatism,
others to world revolution. His death fueled both. By the time Martin Luther
King was shot down., there was no way to resurrect the nonviolence he had stood
and died for."
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