This day in history - August 2, 1943: Lt. John F. Kennedy's PT-109 is rammed by a Japanese destroyer

By Richard K. Barry

Working with a lot of younger people as I do, I no longer take it for granted that they will have a working knowledge of the historical events that I consider important. It would have been impossible to have grown up in the '60s, for example, without knowing the story of President John F. Kennedy's exploits as a young naval officer in the Pacific during WWII. They even made a movie about it, not to mention the book, both of which came out in 1963.

The short of it is that Kennedy commanded a small patrol boat that was rammed by the Japanese destroyer Amagiri. Although there were a couple of fatalities, the remaining crew managed to reach an island and were later rescued. Kennedy's leadership in helping to secure the crews' rescue was no doubt helpful in defining him in a way helpful to his political career.

If you are of a certain age, you knew all of that.

Interesting to note that Kennedy's exploits were more or less accepted at face value, though many decades later John Kerry's military record and reputation were all but destroyed by lies and innuendo. Makes you wonder what has changed.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

November 22, 1963

By Mustang Bobby

Friday, November 22, 1963. I was in the sixth grade in Toledo, Ohio. I had to skip phys. ed. because I was just getting over bronchitis, so I was in a study hall when a classmate came up from the locker room in the school basement to say, "Kennedy's dead." We had a boy in our class named Kennedy, and I wondered what had happened -- an errant fatal blow with a dodgeball? A few minutes later, though, it was made clear to us at a hastily-summoned assembly, and we were soon put on the buses and sent home. Girls were crying.

There was a newspaper strike at The Blade, so the only papers we could get were either from Detroit or Cleveland. (The union at The Blade, realizing they were missing the story of the century, agreed to immediately resume publication and settle their differences in other ways.) Television, though, was the medium of choice, and I remember the black-and-white images of the arrival of Air Force One at Andrews, the casket being lowered, President Johnson speaking on the tarmac, and the events of the weekend -- Oswald, Ruby, the long slow funeral parade, "Eternal Father, Strong to Save" -- merging into one long black-and-white flicker, finally closing on Monday night with the eternal flame guttering in the cold breeze.

I suspect that John F. Kennedy would be bitterly disappointed that the only thing remembered about his life was how he left it and how it colored everything he did leading up to it. The Bay of Pigs, the steel crisis, the Cuban missle crisis, the Test Ban Treaty, even the space program are dramatized by his death. They became the stuff of legend, not governing, and history should not be preserved as fable.

I never thought I'd be old enough to look back forty-seven years to that time. And according to NPR, sixty percent of Americans alive today were not yet born on that day. Today the question is not do you remember JFK, but what did his brief time leave behind. Speculation is rife as to what he did or did not accomplish. Would we have gone in deeper in Vietnam? Would he have pushed civil rights? Would the Cold War have lasted? We'll never know, and frankly, pursuing such questions is a waste of time. Had JFK never been assassinated, chances are he would have been re-elected in 1964, crushing Barry Goldwater, but leading an administration that was more style than substance, battling with his own party as much as with the Republicans, much like Clinton did in the 1990s. According to medical records, he would have been lucky to live into his sixties, dying from natural causes in the 1980s, and he would have been remembered fondly for his charm and wit -- and his beautiful wife -- more than what he accomplished in eight years of an average presidency.

But it was those six seconds in Dealy Plaza that defined him. Each generation has one of those moments. For my parents it was Pearl Harbor in 1941 or the flash from Warm Springs in April 1945. Today it is Challenger in 1986 and of course September 11, 2001. And in all cases, it is what the moment means to us. It is the play, not the players. We see things as they were, contrast to how they are, and measure the differences, and by that, we measure ourselves.

(Previously published, with minor edits, at Bark Bark Woof Woof on November 22, 2003.)

Oh, Lord

By Mustang Bobby

A lot of people are understandably upset that Barack Obama has invited Pastor Rick Warren to give the invocation at his Inauguration next month.

Barack Obama’s choice of a prominent evangelical minister to perform the invocation at his inauguration is a conciliatory gesture toward social conservatives who opposed him in November, but it is drawing fierce challenges from a gay rights movement that – in the wake of a gay marriage ban in California – is looking for a fight.

Rick Warren, the senior pastor of Saddleback Church in southern California, opposes abortion rights but has taken more liberal stances on the government role in fighting poverty, and backed away from other evangelicals’ staunch support for economic conservatism. But it’s his support for the California constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage that drew the most heated criticism from Democrats Wednesday.

“Your invitation to Reverend Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at your inauguration is a genuine blow to LGBT Americans,” the president of Human Rights Campaign, Joe Solomonese, wrote Obama Wednesday. “[W]e feel a deep level of disrespect when one of architects and promoters of an anti-gay agenda is given the prominence and the pulpit of your historic nomination.”

And this backlash has delighted the righties, who are chortling that the queers are all in a tizzy over Pastor Rick. That's their way of covering up the fact that there are probably a fair number of wingers who are not happy that Mr. Warren is giving the blessing to the enemy... or were hoping for the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

I'm not exactly sure why the inauguration of a president requires the inclusion of the clergy to conduct a ritual, but other than the obvious political posturing and pandering that is woven into the fabric of the moment, it is a tradition and it would have been a huge story if that part of the ceremony had been left out. I can't remember it ever being a big deal as to who it is who gives the invocation, although I can imagine that some people weren't happy when John F. Kennedy had Cardinal Cushing give the invocation at his inauguration.

As the article notes, Pastor Warren was outspoken in his support for the passage of Prop 8 in California, comparing same-sex marriage to polygamy and incest, which is, to me, the same as saying getting a driver's license leads to grand theft auto. So I hope that this one event is the last we'll be hearing from him in terms of public speaking on behalf of the Obama administration. Far be it from me to tell the president-elect who to choose as his spiritual counsel, but I hope that his actions speak louder than words, and I hope that what follows in the next four years will do more to piss off the Religious Right -- the end of DADT, repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act, and the passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act would be a start -- than it will to mollify them with a thirty-second appeal to a mythological being.

(Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Johnny, we hardly knew ye

By Carl

Imagine for a moment, a five-year-old boy. He is terribly skinny, has blonde hair cut short. He is in his first grade class. His teacher, Miss McCaffery, is a tall, willowy woman, fragile to even look at. In his eyes, a giant.

The class has just returned from lunch and is beginning preparation for art class. The ceilings are high in his room, which is in a schoolbuilding built just about thirty years earlier, in a time when education was considered holy, and schools looked like cathedrals. A place of training for a world about to change dramatically.

The boy puts on his apron, carefully tying the laces behind him since he still really hasn't mastered shoelaces even. The apron is blue, flecked with dots of tempra paints, the paint of choice for schools worldwide. One by one, in rows, the class is called to the back of the room to get a tray of paints and paintbrushes.

In another universe, on another earth, the boy will paint a masterpiece that will begin a long career in art.

In this universe, the PA system clicks on as the boy returns to his desk along the aisle by the coat rack.

"Teachers, students...we've learned that President John Kennedy has been shot today in Dallas. We have called your parents and are making arrangements to have them come pick you up, boys and girls. For those who's parents we cannot reach, we will remain open until 3."

The benumbed boy, the budding artist, drops his tray. His masterpiece lies on the floor in its component splatters. Miss McCaffery, who must have known something was up, slumped in her chair, releasing what she had been holding onto.

Next, the principal places the mic near the radio (or TV) to broadcast Walter Cronkite's voice to the school, describing what is happening.

The rest of the afternoon is a blur. He remembers finding his sister in the schoolyard. They come together and she hugs him, even if he is too young to fully comprehend what is happening. He remembers walking home past Sloan's Supermarket, his mom holding his hand for the first time since his daily trips to the skating rink in kindergarten. His sister's sobs still ring in his ears to this day. She never cried!

He spent that weekend and that Monday glued to the television set.

Little did I know how that event would twine and intersect my life in so many ways, but that's a different post.

I saw Oswald shot, live. But the most harrowing image of the weekend for me was the symbolic horse, Black Jack, the soldier's boots placed backwards in the stirrups.

Black Jack represented the fallen commander. There was a moment in the funeral procession when Black Jack bridled and in that moment, an electric horse could summon the feelings of a nation. His reluctance to move forward with the procession echoed our own disbelief that someone so young and vital could be cut down so summarily.

It was then, that moment, that I truly began to understand what was happening. And it terrified me.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

November 22, 1963

By Mustang Bobby

Friday, November 22, 1963. I was in the sixth grade in Toledo, Ohio. I had to skip Phys Ed because I was just getting over bronchitis, so I was in a study hall when a classmate came up from the locker room in the school basement to say, "Kennedy's dead." We had a boy in our class named Kennedy, and I wondered what had happened - an errant fatal blow with a dodgeball? A few minutes later, though, it was made clear to us at a hastily-summoned assembly, and we were soon put on the busses and sent home. Girls were crying.

There was a newspaper strike at The Blade, so the only papers we could get were either from Detroit or Cleveland. (The union at The Blade, realizing they were missing the story of the century, agreed to immediately resume publication and settle their differences in other ways.) Television, though, was the medium of choice, and I remember the black-and-white images of the arrival of Air Force One at Andrews, the casket being lowered, President Johnson speaking on the tarmac, and the events of the weekend - Oswald, Ruby, the long slow funeral parade, "Eternal Father, Strong to Save" - merging into one long black-and-white flicker, finally closing on Monday night with the eternal flame guttering in the cold breeze.

I suspect that John F. Kennedy would be bitterly disappointed that the only thing remembered about his life was how he left it and how it colored everything he did leading up to it. The Bay of Pigs, the steel crisis, the Cuban missle crisis, the Test Ban Treaty, even the space program are dramatized by his death. They became the stuff of legend, not governing, and history should not be preserved as fable.

I never thought I'd be old enough to look back forty-five years to that time. And according to NPR, sixty percent of Americans alive today were not yet born on that day. Today the question is not do you remember JFK, but what did his brief time leave behind. Speculation is rife as to what he did or did not accomplish - would we have gone in deeper in Viet Nam? Would he have pushed civil rights? Would the Cold War have lasted? We'll never know, and frankly, pursuing such questions is a waste of time. Had JFK never been assassinated, chances are he would have been re-elected in 1964, crushing Barry Goldwater, but leading an administration that was more style than substance, battling with his own party as much as with the Republicans, much like Clinton did in the 1990's. According to medical records, he would have been lucky to live into his sixties, dying from natural causes in the 1980's, and he would have been remembered fondly for his charm and wit - and his beautiful wife - more than what he accomplished in eight years of an average presidency.

But it was those six seconds in Dealy Plaza that defined him. Each generation has one of those moments. For my parents it was Pearl Harbor in 1941 or the flash from Warm Springs in April 1945. Today it is Challenger in 1986, and of course September 11, 2001. And in all cases, it is what the moment means to us. It is the play, not the players. We see things as they were, contrast to how they are, and measure the differences, and by that, we measure ourselves.

(Previously published, with minor edits, on November 22, 2003 at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Political history

By Mustang Bobby

One of the recent Questions of the Day at Shakesville was "What's your first memory of a political campaign?" or something in that vein. Mine was in 1956 when my older sister and brother taught me "Whistle while you work! Stevenson's a jerk!" I was four and I had no idea what it meant. Then when I was eight my Cub Scout troop was recruited to canvass for Richard Nixon's run in 1960 against John F. Kennedy. All of my Catholic friends were Kennedy supporters, so I came to the logical conclusion that Catholics were Democrats. I dutifully went along with my troop, and I remember being in a political parade down Louisiana Avenue in late October 1960 in Perrysburg. There was a big cardboard "X" plastered on my bike basket and I was in a row of riders that spelled out N-I-X-O-N. It would be another ten years or so before I found out that my parents, going against their friends and long family upbringing, voted for JFK in 1960.

I don't need to bore you with my entire political-junkie life story. Suffice it to say that I have followed politics more as an observer than a participant, even though I have worked on campaigns, national and local, since I was old enough to understand the difference between the political parties and the issues that matter to me both as a person and as a citizen. My first crush, so to speak, was Bobby Kennedy, and in many ways I have never really gotten over it. I have not been as excited or energized about a candidate since then, although it's fair to say that like all teenage crushes, the intensity is never the same as the first time. And now, forty years later, I find that my ardor has mellowed and tempered with age and experience. No candidate is perfect; they will disappoint you and show their flaws, and at some point you will seriously ponder what it was you saw in them that attracted you in the first place. But unlike the mercurial passions of youth, you know that compromise, tolerance, and forgiveness are a part of every relationship, even if it's with someone who doesn't know you exist and only appealed to you for their attention because they needed your vote. As long as you realize that, you can put it in perspective: you're only choosing the leader of the free world, not your prom date.

Every candidate says that "this election is the most important in our nation's history." Well, of course they're going to say that; otherwise, why should we pay attention to them? But in truth, this election of 2008 is very important, and not just for the prospect of either electing the first black man to be president or the first woman to be vice president. This election comes front-loaded with expectations above and beyond the events that will occur after January 20, 2009. And while there is no doubt that the next few years are going to be difficult in many ways, not the least of which will be recovering from the last eight, they will be anticipated as being important because of what this election brings with it. It wasn't always so. The election of 1980 was not foreseen as momentous; most of the conventional wisdom said that Jimmy Carter would be re-elected over Ronald Reagan and the 1980s would go on as before. No one really saw the tectonic shift in the Republican Party coming, either, at the hands of the evangelical Christians. Now, half my lifetime later, we are seeing what a lot of people consider to be the end of the aftershocks of that election, and the beginning tremors of another. That may easily be; only history will tell. But I have the feeling that no matter what happens tonight, this election really is one of the most important in our history. I can't help but feel a little more than amazed that I've been a participant and observer.

So, if you haven't already, participate in history and vote.

(Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.)