“My favorite poet was Aeschylus.” So said Senator Robert F. Kennedy, speaking to a traumatized crowd in April of 1968. Kennedy had come to a poor black neighborhood in Indianapolis to make a routine campaign speech, but learned en route that Martin Luther King, Jr., had been assassinated; it fell to the New York senator to announce the dreadful news. As he struggled to find appropriate language for the day’s carnage—which, of course, would inevitably have recalled to his mind, and the minds of his audience, the assassination of his brother John five years earlier—it was to Aeschylus’ “Oresteia” that Kennedy turned, the grand trilogy about the search for justice in a world filled with metastasizing violence. In the verse he quoted, the Chorus of city elders ponders the meaning of violence and suffering:> Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
Kennedy concluded his remarks with an exhortation to heed the wisdom of the ancient classics: “Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.” That the savageness could not be tamed was demonstrated, with a dreadful Greek irony, three months later, when Kennedy himself was murdered. The lines he cited on the night of King’s death were used as the epitaph on his own tombstone.
R.F.K.’s allusion to the Greeks turned out to be prophetic. However Jacqueline Kennedy may have labored to make Camelot the official myth of the Kennedy Administration, when we have tried to make sense of the Kennedys and their story—to try to find the larger, “mythic” structure beneath the details—we have turned to the Greeks; to Greek tragedy, in particular. It’s not hard to see why. Athenian drama returns obsessively—as we do, every November 22nd—to the shocking and yet seemingly inevitable spectacle of the fallen king, of power and beauty and privilege violently laid low. Many tragic plots, moreover, revolve around the ramifications of family curses, of “original sins” committed by a patriarch that come back to haunt later, innocent generations. Both of these narratives, in their different ways, haunt the story of the Kennedy family and of the assassination in particular.
The family-curse theme, especially, is one we like to invoke in thinking about the Kennedys. The motif is nowhere stronger than in the “Oresteia” itself, the text that Robert Kennedy quoted that April evening forty-five years ago. When the Chorus speaks of suffering and pain, it looks as if they’re referring to current events: the queen Clytemnestra’s plot to murder her husband, Agamemnon, in revenge for his decision to sacrifice their virgin daughter Iphigenia to win from the gods favorable winds for his fleet to sail to Troy. But this act, it turns out, is merely a grim continuation of a cycle of carnage that goes back generations, as the Chorus knows only too well: to Agamemnon’s father, Atreus, who murdered his brother’s children; to Atreus’s father, Pelops, who won his bride by violence and betrayal, and was cursed by the man he betrayed; to Pelops’ father, Tantalus, a king so favored by the gods that he used to dine with them, until he murdered his own son and fed his flesh to his divine hosts to test whether they were, in fact, all-knowing.
In many tragedies—certainly in the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles—the gods are indeed all-knowing, are pulling the strings unbeknownst to the mortals whose lives they control: works like the “Oresteia” or the “Oedipus” (whose hero learns, to his horror, that he cannot escape the “plot” the gods have written for him) seem to confirm an invisible but palpable order in things. We, too, often seek to discern a kind of order—to find a plot—in the hodgepodge of events we call history. When people talk about the harrowing catalogue of sorrow and violent death in the Kennedy family—not only the uncannily twinned assassinations but the wartime mid-air explosion that killed J.F.K.’s older brother, Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr.; the two airplane crashes, his sister Kathleen and his son, J.F.K., Jr.; the lobotomy and institutionalization of a sister; Chappaquiddick; the murder scandal involving a nephew of Ethel Kennedy; the drug addictions and early deaths of some of R.F.K.’s children—they often mention, in the same breath, the alleged crimes of the family patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy. (The bootlegging, the election-fixing, the Mob connections, Gloria Swanson.) In referring to a “Kennedy Curse,” they are, essentially, thinking “tragically”: thinking the way Aeschylus thought, assuming that there is a dark pattern in the way things happen, a connection between the sins of the fathers and the sufferings of the children and their children afterward.
The tragic conviction that there are long-hidden reasons for the fall of kings finds its most extreme expression, today, in the obsessive desire to find “plots” of another kind in the Kennedy story: here you can’t help thinking of the conspiracy theories. With their Rube Goldberg-esque ingenuity, their elaborateness directly proportional to their preposterousness, these can end up looking suspiciously like madness. (That other favorite tragic subject.) But the impulse to expose, to bring secret crimes to light, to present evidence of deeds done in the past to an audience in the present, is one that itself lies at the heart of Greek drama. You could say that all tragedy is about the process of discovery, of learning that the present has a surprising and often devastating relationship to the past: King Oedipus, faced with a plague on his city, is told by an oracle that he must find the killer of the previous king, only to learn, as the play unfolds, that it was he. Another way of saying this is that all tragedy is about the way that we live: slowly uncovering the deeper meanings of things, often long after we can do anything about them. However extreme its manifestations over the years, the tragic yearning to go back, to get it right this time, to use our present knowledge to understand what we couldn’t understand then, is a vital part of our response to the Kennedy drama—another reason why it remains so insistently alive.
But if the Kennedy backstory reminds us irresistibly of tragedy and its gloomy theodicies, J.F.K. himself powerfully recalls a key character from epic—from Homer’s Iliad, the grandest of epics and the source for so many tragic plots. But the character he reincarnated isn’t the one so many people think of.
The linchpin of the poem is the semi-divine Achilles, a marvellously gifted young warrior; an insult to his honor in Book 1 sets in motion a train of events that, two-thirds of the way through, results in the death of his bosom friend, Patroclus, at the hands of the Trojan prince Hector. Achilles subsequently takes revenge, slaying Hector in combat and desecrating his unburied body—knowing all along that his own death is fated to follow Hector’s. Many readers are familiar with the poignant choice that Achilles has made—to die young and gloriously rather than live a long, uneventful life—and to a large extent that choice has, since Homer, defined our understanding of what heroism is. As a result, the temptation to identify J.F.K. as an Achilles figure is great. One reason we return obsessively to his story is, indeed, that it feels like a real-life affirmation of the primitive wisdom we recognize in Achilles’ famous choice: that human life is a zero-sum equation, that glory comes at the high price of a short life.
And, yet, if J.F.K.’s story resonates strongly for us, it’s because he reminds us of a slightly less glamorous—but equally powerful—character: Hector. Achilles is a free agent, a loner—an only child whose aged father is back home in Greece, far from the action, a warrior who thinks first and foremost of, about, and for himself. (Obsessed with his honor and reputation, he shows no great esprit de corps.) Hector, by contrast, is characterized from the start as bound up in a web of political, social, and family relationships: he is the prince of the city, on whose shoulders its defense depends (“Hector” means something like “the one who holds things together”), the dutiful son of the aged king and queen, Priam and Hecuba, the responsible older brother to numerous siblings (not least the playboy Paris) whom he must often whip into shape, and, above all, the husband of a beautiful young wife, Andromache, and the father of an enchanting child, Astyanax.
So while Achilles has the glamor of extremity, it is Hector, more than any other character, who feels real to us, bound by competing obligations, anchored to his world and its claims. Homer poignantly dramatizes this conflict between the warrior’s public and private selves in a famous scene in Book 6. Here, Hector comes off the battlefield to seek out his wife and infant son, but the baby recoils in terror from his father, who, still in armor, is unrecognizable to the child. It’s only when Hector removes his helmet that the family unit can cohere once more.
For this reason, when Hector dies, he dies not only as a warrior and a prince but also as a husband and a father. Whatever we now know about his personal life (and however reckless his foreign policy may now seem), at the time of his death J.F.K. was very much a Hector figure: the battle-tested hero of the PT-109 incident, the defender of his “city”—and also, as thousands of photographs and television clips seemed to demonstrate, the charming family man with the perfect wife and the enchanting children. The loss of such a person afflicts us both as citizens and as individuals: his death is a trauma both to the nation and to his family. Because it is a trauma, we constantly revisit it, as much to convince ourselves that such a thing could happen as to hope, each time we go back, that it might turn out differently.
There is another, larger, culturally more vital narrative that the events surrounding J.F.K.’s death share with the Iliad. When we talk about November, 1963, we are referring not just to the assassination but to the entire weekend: the brutal red murder, the roses lying abandoned and drenched in gore, the blood-stained stockings, the shocked absorption of the news, the grim business of handling the body, conveying it and preparing it for burial; and then, gradually, amidst the horror and confusion, the reassertion of order and ritual, the lying-in-state, the military guard, the procession of heads of state, the black-clad widow, the children in their Sunday best, the tiny salute, the religious ceremony, the cemetery, the bugle, the shots, the folded flag. (John-John’s iconic salute is poignant for the same reasons that Astyanax’s recoil from his helmeted father is: in both cases, the intrusion of the military and its symbols into what ought to be the cocooned realm of the domestic sphere—of childhood itself—strikes us as unbearable.)
The arc from harrowing carnage to high ceremony structures the final third of the Iliad, too. After Achilles slays Hector, the hero, maddened by grief for his lost comrade, drags the body back and forth before the walls of Troy (where the dead man’s family and countrymen watch in anguished horror, like the audience of a tragedy) and around the tomb of Patroclus. The desecration of the dead body, the refusal to obey religious convention and give it back to the family for burial, is a mark of Achilles’ inability to let go of—to “bury”—his own grief. In the end, the gods themselves insist on what we might call “closure,” pointing out that even a man who loses a brother or a son “grieves, weeps, and then his tears are done.” In the final book of the poem, the aged king of Troy, Priam, ransoms his dead son’s body from Achilles, takes it home to the walled city, and there gives it a proper funeral.
After the trauma of Hector’s death and the ongoing degradation of his body, there is an odd courtliness about the exchange between Priam and the man who killed his son, a sudden, wrenching flowering of civilized behavior. (A truce is called so that the Trojans can leave their walled city and go into the surrounding forests to cut wood for Hector’s funeral pyre.) As if to remind us of that other world far from the mayhem of battle, the funeral itself is dominated by the women in Hector’s life, who are the only eulogists. His mother speaks, his wife speaks, and even Helen, whose actions precipitated the war in which he died, speaks. Then the body is burned, the bones are gathered and buried. The last line of the entire epic, with its mad quarrels and awful carnage and odd moments of privacy and tenderness, its battles and sex and scheming, emphasizes the importance of the ceremonial closure: “This was the funeral of Hector, breaker of horses.”
The end of the Iliad is, in other words, a narrative about grief yielding to mourning, about the way in which civilization responds to violence and horror. This dark solace is one that only culture can provide. Our endless need to replay the events of November, 1963—by which I mean all of the events, from Friday to Monday—is not only about a perverse, almost infantile need to revisit a scene of primal horror (although our own refusal to let go of Kennedy’s body—expressed most strongly in our endless looping of the Zapruder film, which, like a tragedy, turns the death of the king into a kind of entertainment—certainly shows an Achilles-like unwillingness to bury the past). It also bears witness to our desire to hear, once again, a very old tale that is not only the story of a fallen warrior and how he died but the story of what we did after he fell, of how the bloodied body was washed and anointed and clothed and grandly entombed and eulogized. (All of these activities presided over, in 1963 as in antiquity, by the attentive widow, alert to the symbolic power of ritual details.) It is a story, in the end, that only civilization can tell, one in which, however miraculously, calamity is alchemized into a kind of beauty.
Epic itself, a poem that we listen to (or, now, that we read), a beautiful work about often ugly things, war and madness and violence, is an example of that alchemy. So is tragedy, which often takes the stories we know from epic and turns them into something we watch—into spectacles of suffering and death that, through the mystery of art, become both ennobled and ennobling. Many commentators over the years have remarked on the special role that television played in our absorption of the news of that weekend, from the first blurry bulletins on Friday afternoon to the meticulously directed images of the funeral. But what’s telling is that, fifty years later, we watch—with a fascination apparently undimmed by the passage of five decades—the same news bulletins, the same footage, the same “news,” although, of course, it is no longer new.
This suggests that the conclusion to be drawn is not about “the role of the media”—about news and how we get it—but about drama: about our need, as ancient as the Greeks, to see certain elemental plots reënacted before our eyes, at once familiar but always fresh. As superficially shocking as their outcomes may be, these plots tell us things about the world that we know (or at least suspect) to be true: that nature can avenge herself brutally on culture (“Bacchae”), that hidden sins of generations past visit suffering on the next generation (“Oresteia”), that rulers and heroes who are remarkably brilliant and gifted are often crippled by secret flaws (“Oedipus”), that innocent young girls will be sacrificed to the ambitions of greedy men (“Iphigenia”).
And, of course—the oldest tragic plot point of all, the plot that some believe to be at the root of tragedy as a genre, the reason why drama exists in the first place—that the king, the beautiful, powerful, élite, and talented figure on whose glittering figure all eyes are happy to rest, in whom we seek a model ruler, warrior, husband, and father, is, by virtue of those very excellences, conspicuous, marked out as a sacrificial victim. Hero and victim: our ambiguous relationship to the great—our need to idolize and idealize them, inextricable from our impulse to degrade and destroy them—is, in the end, the motor of tragedy, which first elevates and then topples its heroes; not coincidentally, it has characterized our half-century-long response to the Kennedy story, oscillating dizzyingly, as it has done almost from the start, between idealization and demystification.
And so the present keeps replaying the past, repeating those old stories, the narratives that lurk behind the plays and myths, tales and characters so hard-wired into our cultural circuitry that we can forget why we knew them in the first place. But when they reappear, we recognize them. This is why, when certain real-life calamities do occur—the sinking of the Titanic, the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the murder, in broad daylight during a civic spectacle, of John Fitzgerald Kennedy on this day half a century ago—they feel less like aberrations than like fulfillments. Millennia before they played out in real life, we were writing the scripts, waiting for them to come true. The question isn’t why we keep going back, after so many years, but how we could do anything else.
Daniel Mendelsohn is the author, most recently, of “Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture,” a collection of his essays for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, which was runner-up for the 2013 PEN Art of the Essay Award and a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books include two memoirs, “The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million” and “The Elusive Embrace,” a translation of the complete works of C. P. Cavafy, and a study of Greek tragedy. He teaches at Bard College.
