Fifty years ago a skinny high-school sophomore, wet from his after-gym shower, stood naked on a locker room bench, drying his body. He stood on the bench because he did not like to have his bare wet feet on the locker room floor. I remember that moment because, as I stood drying, the school’s public address system announced that the President of the United States had been shot in Dallas, Texas.
I was an 8th grader when John F. Kennedy was inaugurated; I sat in class with others and stared at a small television screen as a poet, in a trembling voice, read his work. Though this was the first inauguration broadcast in color, we viewed it on a snowy black and white screen with poor reception; the day appeared to be cold, and I hunched forward in my seat, straining to hear the poem. I know now that the poem was “The Gift Outright.”
I was not a follower of politics when I was young; the child learns from those close to him and I cannot remember hearing any voice raised in either praise or anger about Kennedy. Metal campaign buttons with “I Like Ike” imprinted on them may have impressed me because of the slogan’s euphonic qualities. Camelot blossomed on the cover of “Life” and “Look,” the newsmagazines, but I do not remember seeing much of the Kennedys on the covers of “Ebony,” and “Jet,” the magazines most likely to be found in my house. Five months after Kennedy’s inauguration, the first “Freedom Riders” (including David Myers, from Noblesville, Indiana) bused into the Deep South, and the nation saw the brutalities administered to those passive protesters.
I shared in the national fear of nuclear annihilation in October 1962. In the closed stacks of the University Of Pittsburgh where I worked, I listened to college students and professors debate the wisdom of the president’s course. The end of the missile crisis brought that emotional celebration that James Dickey described in his essay, “Delights of the Edge,” as he and his wife watched in helpless fear as his son leapt across a cavern, slipped toward death, recovered and danced. We were, as he had, “dancing with the void, and loving what had just happened to (us), and had not.” We had not blinked.
A college professor told my class that revolutions occur not when conditions are hopeless, but when they improve. The impoverished or oppressed see the better possibilities and demand that they be made real. This was beginning to happen during the time of Camelot and I remember some of those things. But the “turning gyre” has whirled us 50 years from that crash of Camelot, and those hands, neither dead nor cold, that gripped that rifle in the window of the Texas Schoolbook Depository.
A young senator from Illinois declared his candidacy for the presidency; a friend told me that she was reluctant to vote for him. “They’ll kill him,” she said. I told her that his opponents were probably encouraging that fear. “He and his family have made the commitment to run; they want people to vote for him. He is willing to take the risk, and all we have to do is vote.”
Frost wrote, and read fifty years ago, “Such as we were we gave ourselves outright/ (The deed of gift was many deeds of war).” Fifty years after Kennedy joined Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley as an assassinated American president, after the crash of Camelot, we still rise to confront the great freedoms and those great fears. But as Maya Angelou might have said, “And still: we rise.”