by Neil Stout
I was teaching in the history department at Texas A&M. I emerged from the university library stacks to find the reading room deserted.
The attendants told me that the president, the vice president, and the governor had been shot in Dallas. I rushed to my office in Nagel Hall, where
I listened to my radio with a colleague and a couple of students and learned that President Kennedy was dead and Vice President Johnson was unhurt. We were shocked, but not completely surprised–the anti JFK feeling in Texas was poisonous then. The students in my office were fairly right wing; they certainly didn’t gloat, but, like the rest of us, assumed that the shooter was somebody from the right. (I did hear a horn honk, but can’t say if it
was in celebration.) Most of the Aggies behaved completely appropriately.
The administration, led by President Earl Rudder, did not: the Thanksgiving Game with the University of Texas went on as scheduled, and the Aggies were given the next day off in celebration of their almost upsetting No. 1 Texas.
I moved to Vermont.
Meanwhile, In Leningrad
by Mikhail Iossel
Even though I had been grounded for a week’s worth of after-school time, due to having come home with a torn shirt and bloodied nose and raw scrape across the face the day before (as a result, in turn, of my and two of my new elementary-school classmates’ desperate attempt to bar three burly free-roving city cat-catchers with vodka and garlic on their breath from entering the stray cat-filled basement of our apartment building), I was nevertheless able to tiptoe out of my room and sneak past the kitchen (where my parents sat at the oilcloth-covered formica table in tense silence, as though still listening to the wall-mounted radio and expecting it to elaborate further on that, presumably extremely important and apparently quite upsetting breaking news it had just finished delivering) and slide out the unlocked front door and hurtle down the three flights of tall concrete stairs and then switch on my pocket flashlight and slink into the gaping black hole of the basement (it was cold in a lukewarm way in there, and the waterlogged air smelled of chlorine and urine and propane and dirty wet rags and blood) and almost immediately hear the weak plaintive meowing somewhere to my left and right away commence to prick and probe that irredeemable darkness with the sharp rapier of my flashlight and before too long (my heart jumped for joy painfully) locate that miraculous sole survivor of the brutal cat-hunt, and then take the pitiful creature into my arms (it was tiny and still-blind and probably sick and flea-ridden and weighed nothing at all) and hurry out and back up the stairs (my heart was beating wildly) and steal back into the apartment with the kitten tucked inside my shirt, through the quiet front door left ajar, and tiptoe quickly across the hall and past the kitchen and into my room, completing the journey – unnoticed for all this time by my parents, who still were sitting there, in the kitchen bathed in intensely yellow light, in silence (although a short while later my mother asked my father, in a fearful voice loud enough for me to hear, if he thought this could mean war now, in case of some truly terrible scenario, were it to develop that we, god forbid, had anything remotely to do with it; and after a pause he said he hoped not) and gazing through vacant eyes out the already-winterized kitchen window and into the pitch-dark, wind-swept lunar nothingness of our Khrushchevean “micro-district” on Leningrad’s far southwestern edge where we had moved four months earlier, into the “cooperative” three-room, thirty-seven square-meter apartment of our own (it was, of course, owned by the state, like everything else in the country), from the cramped and happily noisy communal apartment in the angry roiling heart of the city; into the moonless and altogether desolate late-fall Friday evening — the evening of the day in the eighth year of my life when John Kennedy (who, as everyone in our future-bound world knew, was not a good person, to put it mildly, merely by dint of his being the leader of the pernicious and historically doomed world of international imperialism — so what was the big deal then and why the long faces?) was shot to death by someone who was not one of us light years away, in America
A Late Autumn Day in Dallas
By Virginia Garrard-Burnett.
On November 22, 1963, I was coloring, the tip of my new red Crayola, irritatingly, already worn down to a nub. A neighbor—the first adult I had ever seen weep–came to the back door. “Go get your mother,” she screamed, “the President’s been shot.”
The horror of that day seared itself on everyone who lived through it, but the assassination of John F. Kennedy resonated especially in the bright, late autumn light of our house that morning. Texas was a blue state in those days, and although the President had many enemies in Dallas, he was dearly beloved in our small town by my parents and their many friends. We had, in fact, considered going to Dallas that day to see him and his smiling, pretty wife. At the age of just-turned-six, I fancied that the Kennedys resembled my own dark-haired parents, and their daughter, Caroline, was my own age exactly. Like us, the Kennedys had also had a baby in the late summer of that year, but unlike my new little sister, their child had not lived. My mother had ultimately decided to stay home that day, daunted by the prospect of a long wait in the Dallas sun with an infant and a small child. Her best friend, Betty, however– a housewife and activist in county Democratic politics– planned to attend the luncheon for Democratic party leaders at the Dallas Apparel Mart that was the fateful motorcade’s destination. But as was so often the case for women back then, family obligations also kept her at home at the last minute. It was only at the end of that dreadful day that Betty realized that she was still wearing the Kennedy for President button (above) that she had put on that morning to wear to the luncheon in Dallas.
My memories of then are those of a child—the red-eyed adults, their shame, the steady drum-beat of news on a grainy black-and-white TV, the weight of sadness on everyone’s heart, and, perhaps most of all, the loss of a father who was—in my mind—so like my own. The Kennedy assassination was the first time in my life that I understood that not every story has a happy ending; that evil and hatred can cast such dark shadows that even adults—good people—cannot always provide shelter from them. My parents were devout, religious people, and our tradition is one that emphasizes hope and redemption; to this we clung, as I continue to today. But ever since that bright November morning, I have always known in the back of my mind that a shot can ring out at any time, right out of nowhere.
November 19, 2013
Fathers & Sons
by J Neuberger.
My father fought in North Africa and Italy during the Second World War. He didn’t like much of anything about being a soldier but he was proud to have helped to defeat Hitler.
This photograph hung in our house and a painting of it hung in my grandmother’s apartment in New York City. It is the picture of my father that I carry around in my head.
To my eye he looks old enough here to be my father, but yesterday, when I was scanning the photo and trying to figure out what year it was taken and how old he must have been, I realized that in this picture he is almost exactly the same age as my older son is now.