I originally wrote this story in June of 2019. On this 60th Remembrance of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and with a little editing, I thought it might be good to see it again.
Politically Aware
I became aware of politics when I was really, really young. One of my earliest memories is about politics and campaigning. It was the summer I was three, the summer of 1960. We were in Canada for our annual vacation on the lake. Politics must have been in the air, with the US Presidential election coming up in November. I’m not sure how it started, but I remember one of my parent’s friends, Jerry Ransohoff, singing: “Vote, vote, vote, for Martin Dahlman, throw old ‘Ikey’ down the sink…”. He was referring to then President, Dwight Eisenhower. They were ready to run me for President. There was more, but I don’t remember the rest of the song.
In 1960 the youthful Senator from Massachusetts John Kennedy was the Democrat running for President. He was against the 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 though. One of her schoolmates in Queen’s College in London was Kennedy’s sister, Kathleen.
A Kennedy Tragedy
Kathleen’s story is another tragic part of the Kennedy family saga. Her father, Joseph, 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. Kathleen’s oldest brother Joe, was stationed in England with the US Army Air Corps,. He 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 again, this time with the 8th Earl Fitzwilliam, and was with him on a small airplane in 1948, flying to the French Riviera for vacation. They flew into a storm, crashed, and died.
Political Controversy
So it was no surprise that Mom was a huge Kennedy supporter. At four (my birthday was in September), I wasn’t really sure what it was all about, but I was proud to wear a Kennedy button on my sweater. 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, 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 founding doctors of Blue Cross/Blue Shield Insurance, and not surprisingly, they were very Republican. When I showed up at the doorstep of their apartment in the Vernon Manor Hotel with a Kennedy button on, it definitely was a problem. I wasn’t allowed in the door, so I sat in the hall outside with my button still on my sweater. Eventually, Aunt Leah came out to get me, with a small iron elephant as a gift. I didn’t know the elephant’s significance then, but I liked it (I still have it). The elephant 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.
November 22nd
My next political memory is shared by my entire generation; the assassination of President Kennedy. I was a second grader 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 a shocked look in her face and tears in her eyes, that I knew it was real.
We spent the next few days at home, watching the small black and white TV in my room that 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; 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 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 upturned dirt, freshly dug from the ground, and upheaval in our minds. Another chapter of the tragic Kennedy tale ended.
Then It Got Real
I was nine in 1965 when we moved from Cincinnati to Dayton, Ohio. Dad became the General Manager of a TV station, WLW-D (now WDTN) Channel 2. It was one of the two stations in Dayton along WHIO Channel 7. One of the advantages of being the “manager’s kid” was we got into exciting things, like when President Lyndon Johnson came and spoke at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds. It was 1966 and I was now ten. Vietnam was just becoming an issue.
We had pretty good seats in the stands, but Johnson was still far away, a large figure with a Southern accent. But I was shocked to see young protestors in black turtlenecks from Antioch College in nearby Yellow Springs, standing below the podium and chanting against the War as he spoke. They were quite “tame” but today’s standards, but at the time I was amazed that someone would dare to interrupt the President.
Smothers Brothers
We were exposed to a lot of politics in those years. Dad had started a news/talk show at the station, with Phil Donahue as the host. Phil brought the most controversial people to Dayton, and often they ended up at our house the night before the show. Most memorably was Tommy Smothers of the Smothers Brothers comedy duo. I was thirteen, on my last year as the “house bartender” (Dad thought I would sample the “goods” as I got older) and Tommy came in late one night before the Donahue show. Mom woke me up, and said to get the bar ready.
I remember Tommy as a guy who told dirty jokes to kids. Perhaps most memorable was his girlfriend, with a dress that was slashed to her navel. Dad’s sales manager, Chuck McFadden and I marveled at how the sides managed to stay up and covered, well, what needed to be covered. Sticky pads I guessed. Some things kids just need to figure out.
Tommy and his brother Dick were soon cancelled from their successful TV show on CBS. They had great ratings, but the network thought they were too controversial. Their casual comedy songs were often critical of the War, and their guests invariably had an undercurrent of anti-war conversation.
My Kennedy
Another Kennedy, Senator Robert Kennedy, entered the Presidential race. He wasn’t the first candidate opposed to the Vietnam War; but he was my candidate. He favored Civil Rights and Martin Luther King, and Workers Rights and Cesar Chavez, and making the United States a fairer and better place. And he was a Kennedy, the inheritor of the mantle of his brother’s leadership.
That spring, I had my radio alarm clock set for 7 am to get me up for school. I had to catch the bus at 7:45 a couple blocks away, but if I cut through the neighbor’s yard and jumped over the wall, it only took a minute. I always woke up to the latest news headlines.
On April 5th, the alarm clock clicked, and the announcer read that Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. Riots broke out in Dayton; we watched the buildings burn on Dad’s station. Mayor Dave Hall “read the riot act” and the National Guard moved in to protect the streets.
Lost Hero
Two months later, the alarm clicked again, and I found that my hero, Bobby Kennedy, running for President and against the Vietnam War, was dead. He was shot and killed by an assassin after winning the California primary. His candidacy was gaining momentum and might well have won the convention. But he was gone, a long funeral train procession, another heartfelt speech, this time by Ted Kennedy, and a final burial next to his brother in Arlington. His, and our, dream of changing the world ended. Bobby said; “…some men see things as they are and ask why, I see things that never were and ask, why not.”
We all were asking why.
But my ultimate political “moment” of that year started out with a mistake. I had a flat tire on my bike, and Dad helped me fix it. One of us (I blamed him at the time) didn’t manage to tighten the front fork bolts, and when I hit a bump in the neighbor’s driveway, the front wheel flew off. I flipped over the handlebars, and when I finally landed, my right wrist had an odd bump. I quickly diagnosed it as a broken arm.
That wrecked my chance to be the twelve-year old “swim star” in the next day’s championships, and the doctor ordered me to lay low with my cast elevated for the next week.
Democrats
It was August of 1968, and as I sat on the couch in the family room with my cast perched up on the green beer box I painted to hold my clothes at summer camp. I watched in “living color” the Democratic convention in Chicago. It was the riot convention; the party leaders, “Johnson Democrats” supported the war and Vice President Hubert Humphrey. The anti-war Democrats, led by Gene McCarthy and George McGovern as Bobby’s replacement, protested on the floor of the convention and in the streets. Mayor Dick Daley of Chicago was firmly in the Johnson camp, and wasn’t going to let protests mar “his” convention. He sent the police to clear the streets.
I watched amazed as protestors were tear gassed and beaten. Reporters were chased into their hotels, and pummeled with nightsticks in the halls. I listened to the politicians on the stage say that the attacks were necessary for “law and order,” and I heard the opposition rail against the violence. “The whole world is watching” the protestors chanted, and later, “the whole world is…” well, doing something else.
Against the War
That experience put me firmly in the anti-war camp. Despite the fact that we got to meet Humphrey, the nominee and candidate of “my” Party at the Dayton airport, I was never a big fan. It was years later in college, when I had the chance to study the liberalism that Humphrey espoused, and I changed my mind about him. He was in an impossible position though, the Vice President, unable to “buck” his President Johnson, and prevented from reaching out to the anti-war vote.
The election was close enough it took until Wednesday to decide who won. They announced Nixon’s victory over the PA at Van Buren Junior High School in Kettering, Ohio. The school burst out in cheers and applause, and I put my head down on the desk. How could we live with four years of Richard Nixon?
We survived, six years actually, and the Watergate era ended Nixon’s Presidency in shame. Nixon’s second Vice President, Gerald Ford, took over, and then ran for the Presidency himself. By then I was a “seasoned” young politician, working for the Carter/Mondale campaign. But that’s a whole different story.
