Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [42]
We like to believe our institutions can survive great trials, but in the hours after a cataclysmic event like the assassination of a president, it was difficult to shake doubt. The fact that our young president—just forty-six years old—was suddenly gone left Americans feeling that time had stopped. Shops and banks closed. Trading on the stock market was halted. People were crying openly on the streets. Schools were let out with children walking out of their classrooms weeping. Special memorial services were planned for churches and synagogues across the country.
In sorrow, anger, and confusion, citizens started blaming right-wing hate groups, segregationists, and the South for the murder, even though the assassin proved to be an avowed leftist. I watched with grief as the scenes from the assassination played over and over on the television screen: the President slumping forward in the open-top car, clutching his neck; Mrs. Kennedy, in a pink dress, inexplicably climbing onto the back of the moving limousine, only to have the Secret Service jump onto the car and prod her back into the seat; Lyndon Johnson sworn in aboard Air Force One, with a shocked Mrs. Kennedy and my friend, Congressman Thomas, behind him. One scene after another took place as if in slow motion, as Americans came to terms with the reality that this had happened.
Along with other members of Congress, I attended the memorial service for the late President in the Capitol Rotunda on Sunday, November 24. That afternoon in the standing group of members of the House, Senate, cabinet, Supreme Court, and diplomatic corps, I watched as people walked by the President’s casket to pay their respects. There was a solemnity to the moment, a peaceful quiet.
I was standing toward the back of the group when I heard static coming from a radio being held by a Capitol policeman.
I eased over to him and asked, “What’s happening?”
“Oswald’s been shot,” he whispered. A Dallas nightclub owner, Jack Ruby, had gunned down Kennedy’s alleged assassin, twenty-four-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald, in an underground parking area as Oswald was being moved from his holding cell to another facility. The shooting took place on live television before millions of viewers, another shock for a country already on edge.
Kennedy’s death soon gave way to the birth of the Kennedy legend, more powerful and more lasting than his presidency. It started with a deeply moving memorial service, modeled after Abraham Lincoln’s. So well crafted, it was almost like watching a movie, except, of course, that it was painfully real. It all added to a sense that something magical—Camelot—had been lost.
For all John Kennedy’s personal charm, however, little had been accomplished in his all too short presidency. On the foreign policy front, the administration’s record was thin. There were the talks with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna, where Khrushchev came away with the impression that Kennedy was young and inexperienced. There was the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba that added to the impression of American weakness. Then followed the construction of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis, both of which seemed to have been at least in part a result of an emboldened Khrushchev deciding to test America’s new young leader.
On the domestic side, few legislative initiatives linger on in history. Kennedy wasn’t in office long enough to build a substantive legacy, and he had been hampered by the powerful Southern, pro-segregation oligarchs