I was a junior at Harvard. It was around one-thirty in the afternoon, and I’d been awake for about five minutes. As usual, I’d been up nearly until dawn the night before, working on that day’s issue of the Crimson. I was taking a shower.
I heard something through the wall, faintly, very faintly—a radio in the room next door. Somebody, I gathered, had been shot—somebody important. Somehow, I misheard the identity of the target. I was sure it was Generalissimo Francisco Franco, the dictator of Spain and the last of Europe’s fascist monsters of the era of Hitler and Mussolini. “Good riddance,” I murmured to myself.
After I got dressed, just out of curiosity, I turned on the television set in the common room of our suite in Lowell House. That’s when I found out. That’s how I found out.
I crumpled to our battered couch and sat there numbly, watching the images on the twelve-inch black-and-white screen. Two hours later came the announcement that President Kennedy was dead. I looked out of the window. In the courtyard, people walked as if in a daze. A boy leaned against a tree, weeping.
At some point, I got a call to come to 14 Plympton Steet, the Crimson building. The plan was, we were going to put out an “extra,” like the ones we used to do for the Harvard-Yale game or the appointment of a new president of the university. The extra was duly printed and hawked that afternoon, but without my help. I hated the whole idea. I thought it was disgusting. I thought it was a schoolboy stunt. Everybody knew the President was dead. They didn’t need the Crimson to tell them. I didn’t want to play newspaperman. I wanted to grieve. I wanted to lean against a tree and weep.
I was wrong, of course. There are many ways to grieve, or at any rate, many ways to be numb. Journalism may be one of them. Maybe my reaction was a sign that I’d never be a real newspaperman after all. (A weekly magazine gives you time to collect yourself—to grieve, if the timing’s right.) Anyway, my callow indignation faded long ago. Fifty years on, when some undergraduate leafs through a yellowing bound volume of the Autumn 1963 Crimson to see how the student paper “covered” the assassination, maybe it’s all right that he or she finds that “extra.”
Three and a half years before that awful day, in the spring of 1960, I was a high-school junior going door to door in suburban Rockland County, New York, handing out leaflets for Stevenson. But this was largely out of deference to my Adlai-loving parents. I was delighted when the young and beautiful John F. Kennedy was nominated at the Los Angeles convention, on July 13, 1960. I spent the rest of the summer going door to door for him.
That September, along with hundreds of other high-school seniors, I boarded a Holland-America Line ship to spend the fall semester in Europe as an exchange student under the auspices of the American Field Service. In Toulouse, the “ville rose” in the Languedoc section of southern France, I lived with a French family and went to school every day at the Lycée Pierre-de-Fermat, housed in the cloister of a fourteenth-century monastery. I proudly wore my Kennedy button every day, and my black school portfolio was emblazoned with a KENNEDY FOR PRESIDENT bumper sticker.
My pals at our all-boys school were astounded at this open display. Such audacity was unthinkable in France at the time. Politics was too serious a business there. The entire country was in turmoil over the war in Algeria. I got my first whiff of tear gas at a demonstration against that war in downtown Toulouse. But there was safety in numbers. On an ordinary street on an ordinary day, to proclaim one’s political preference on one’s lapel was to invite a punch in the nose. When Kennedy won, my fellow élèves made me get up on a bench in the courtyard and give a victory speech. It wasn’t the best speech I’ve ever made, but it was the best I’ve ever made in French.
The ship that brought us back docked in New York on the morning of January 20, 1961. The Statue of Liberty loomed in the mist. We felt exalted. Buses took us to a big meeting room somewhere in Manhattan to await our parents or make our travel connections. A television set had been set up in the front of the room. We stood rapt, watching and listening as John F. Kennedy, in the first minutes of his Presidency, his hair ruffling in the breeze, his breath misting in the cold, delivered that indelible Inaugural address. Again we felt exalted. Everything was new.
At Harvard, in 1963, there was an added—though trivial, maybe unworthy—dimension to the loss. Kennedy was “our” President. A month before the assassination, he had come to Cambridge for a meeting of the university Board of Overseers, of which he was a member. While he was at it, he stayed around for the Saturday football game at Soldiers Field. (Columbia won.) For my class, the class of 1965, Kennedy was especially “ours.” He was a member of the class of 1940, which meant that our graduation would coincide with Kennedy’s twenty-fifth reunion. It was a foregone conclusion that he would be our commencement speaker.
Above: In 1961, John F. Kennedy is swarmed by students at Harvard. Photograph: AP. Photograph of newspaper extra: The Harvard Crimson.