And then there was the long shadow of John F. Kennedy. I’ve never known anything like it. Not before, and certainly not since.
Hero-worship is one thing. It wasn’t that. By age 13, I had already had heroes, not only fictional heroes but real ones, like Abraham Lincoln. What is a hero, anyway, but maybe someone you place your ideals on, someone you fall in love with, confusing a flesh-and-blood person with an idealized image in your mind.
I don’t think this was that. Once I was fully fixed on John F. Kennedy, my attention never wavered. I admired Bobby and, gradually, others of the family as I read about them. I came to love Bob after 1963, because he had loved Jack, and because he so obviously suffered the way I did. But nobody ever took front and center the way Jack did. Kennedys were glamorous, but only Jack was Jack.
It must have been hard on my father, to know he was being compared with JFK. Fathers find it hard enough to hold the respect of their adolescent children. Try competing with someone rich, handsome, talented and famous, and an idealized version, at that. But it wasn’t exactly hero-worship. Really it was that Jack and I were parts of one thing. It is the only explanation that will make sense of my early life. When he was killed, I was shattered.
What did he and I have in common? A quick sense of humor, voracious reading, an intense continuing interest in history, a childhood plagued by illness. Catholicism. That was all. Everything else – all the essentials – couldn’t have been more different. Not only the externals such as the worlds he inhabited as he grew, but elements of character such as my flaming temper. (If Jack had such a temper, I never heard of it, and I’m sure we would have read of it as we read of his father’s.) Didn’t matter. I absolutely identified with him.
The physical life I lived was a pale shadow of the events I read about. History and current events were the world my mind lived in, and I assumed that it was only a matter of time before they were where I would live my life. I took it for granted that I was destined to do great things on the world stage. I suppose it was like kids feeling the difference between themselves and their family, and imagining themselves as changelings. And then –
Why is it that my world was shaped and shattered before I was 18 years old by a man I would never meet? I ask, and the answer that I get is: Relate my experience as I experienced it, and let the meaning emerge.
.2.
In the Fall of 1963, I was in my Senior year at Vineland High School, having transferred from Sacred Heart High at the end of my Junior year. I had asked my parents to let me transfer, and I probably would have done it two years earlier, if it had occurred to me that it was in my power to change anything. Grade school had been okay, but I had experienced Catholic high school as jail. It was many a decade before I began to understand my own part in my failure to fit into a closed system.
But in the Fall of 1963, there I was in a vastly larger school, happily lost in the crowd. I still didn’t fit in, but none of the boys around me cared enough to make it an issue. The pecking order had been established years before I arrived, and I was scarcely affected by it. I didn’t have any real friends, but I had a few joking acquaintances, and the contrast was startling and enjoyable. I had three months of this happiness. September, October, November.
On the Friday before the weekend before Thanksgiving, I was sitting in Miss Ostrander’s social studies class, in the back of the room, near the right-hand corner. It was the next-to-last class period, with only a study hall to follow. Miss Ostrander had been called to the door, and I was joking with a couple of guys (In three months, I had already become known for telling jokes). When she returned to the room, she told us, soberly, that President Kennedy had been assassinated.
I felt the blood drain from my face. Months later, Miss Ostrander talked to us about the reactions she had observed that day and said that some of us were scared. I knew she meant me, for I had seen her see me. But I wasn’t scared. My world had been shattered between one moment and the next. It was as unnatural as if the sun had risen in the west. In a way, I had been killed, and that 17-year-old had no way to process any of it.
I don’t remember the rest of that class period. I do remember sitting in study hall next period and finding that the only way to deal with that awful pressure was to write, write, write. I remember Leo Darmstadter looking over at me, quizzically, as I filled the pages furiously. I kept those page, and they will form the next entry.