“Trump World” is approaching 500 Essays since February of 2017. I’m sure it’s clear where I stand now, but I wanted to let you see the “development of a political mind.” Here’s Part One, I hope you enjoy.
A Personal Kennedy Story
I became aware of politics when I was really, really young. Perhaps the earliest thing I remember is about political campaigns. It had to be when I was three, the summer of 1960. We were in Canada for our annual summer vacation. Politics must have been in the air, with the US Presidential election coming up in November. I’m not sure how it started, I’m sure I said something political. I remember one of my parent’s friends, Jerry Ransohoff, singing: “…vote, vote, vote, for Martin Dahlman, throw old ‘Ikey’ down the sink…”referring to then President, Dwight Eisenhower. They were ready to run me for President. There was more, but I can’t remember the rest of the song.
In 1960 the youthful Senator from Massachusetts John Kennedy was the Democrat running for President, against the Republican Vice President, Richard Nixon. My Mom, a citizen of the United Kingdom and unable to vote in US elections, had a personal connection to the Kennedy’s. One of her schoolmates in Queen’s College in London was Kennedy’s sister, Kathleen.
Kathleen’s story is another tragic part of the Kennedy family saga. Her father, Joseph Kennedy, was the US ambassador to the United Kingdom in the years before World War II, and brought his family with him. Kathleen went to British school, Queens College, and ultimately married William Cavendish, the Marquess of Hartington in 1944. Her oldest brother Joe, stationed in England with the US Army Air Corps, was the only family member to attend the wedding.
Joe was killed in combat three months later. Cavendish himself was shot and killed by a German sniper in Belgium a month after that. Kathleen remained in England after the war, and was big on the London social scene. She fell in love with the 8thEarl Fitzwilliam, and was with him on a small airplane when they flew into a storm going to vacation on the French Riviera. Both were killed in 1948.
So it was no surprise that Mom was a huge Kennedy supporter. At four, I wasn’t real sure what everything was about, but I was proud to wear a Kennedy button on my shirt. One of my father’s best friends before World War II was Buddy Shriver, son of Dr. Howard Shriver and his wife, Leah. Buddy served in the Navy during the war, and contracted tuberculosis somewhere in his duties. The disease ultimately killed him after the war, but Mom and Dad stayed close to the Shriver’s, and they were “Aunt Leah and Uncle Howard” to us kids.
Howard Shriver was one of the Cincinnati’s founding doctors in Blue Cross/Blue Shield, and not surprisingly, the Shriver’s were very Republican. When I showed up at the doorstep (they had an apartment in the Vernon Manor Hotel in Cincinnati) with a Kennedy button on, it definitely was a problem. I wasn’t allowed in the door, and sat in the hall outside with my button on. Eventually, Aunt Leah came out to get me, bringing a small iron elephant as a gift. I didn’t know the elephant’s significance then, but I must have liked it. I still have the elephant; it now represents the battle for my young political mind. There was a wooden donkey too from that era, but I’m not sure where that came from.
My next political memory was one that my entire generation shares; the assassination of President Kennedy. I was in second grade at Clifton School in Cincinnati. Mrs. Meyer, our teacher, wouldn’t tell us what happened when we were released from school early on November 22nd, but we knew it was bad. We heard it was in Texas, and as second graders, we talked about monsters smashing towns.
As I walked home, a third grader came up to me and said the President was shot. I knew that couldn’t be true, I was a Kennedy supporter, and we argued. After heated discussion, he pushed me, and I punched him in the nose. It wasn’t until I got home, and Mom opened the front door with tears in her eyes and a shocked look in her face, that I knew it was real.
We spent the next few days at home, watching the small black and white TV in my room (it took several minutes to “warm-up” once you turned it on.) I remember the funeral march, the caisson carrying the flag draped coffin, young John-John saluting as it went by. I vaguely remember the shock of the purported assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, being shot and killed in the Dallas police garage, but I don’t remember actually seeing it.
We must have gone to Washington for a trip fairly soon after. I remember seeing Kennedy’s grave, the eternal flame lit, and the hats of the military units surrounding the gravesite. It was temporary, not the “National Monument” of the Kennedy grave today. There was still new upturned dirt, freshly dug from the ground, and in our minds. Another chapter ended in the tragic Kennedy tale.
