Phew! I find it hard to read all that white-hot emotion even now, all these years later. You can see the boy’s attempt to be honest, filtered through so many illusions about the world and about himself. He reaches naturally for the pen to relieve the intolerable pressure, and he has to fight to not fall into stylized reactions. He doesn’t want to be over-dramatic (“would be tempted to play holy martyr”) and he certainly doesn’t want anybody to see what had to be obvious to everybody. Always the intent to hide his true feelings, always the inability to express them, and afterward the difficulty in even knowing what they were.
Note, too, the harsh sweeping unfounded judgments. That was a tendency that continued to plague the boy years into manhood, as, in the absence of self-reflection, it took a long while for him to see how little grounded in reality some of his certainties were. In those days, there was no idea of sending grief counselors into schools. Only after a couple of decades’ worth of traumatic experiences would society begin doing that. But how we could have used it in 1963!
But why should this event have been such a dagger to the heart? Millions of people around the world – hundreds of millions of people – were deeply saddened by Kennedy’s death, and the cutting-off of so much promise. He had touched so many lives, so deeply, in so many ways, for so many reasons. But most people got over the shock. If not right away, then within months, or even years. But my life was haunted by this crime for twenty-five years!
The boy that I was couldn’t express what he felt in front of anyone, particularly his father, for fear of unspoken criticism. So when he wanted to cry, he wouldn’t, and then couldn’t. He pretended. And paid and paid and paid for it, because, as I would learn much later, unresolved feelings do not change with time. Or, as Carl Jung said somewhere, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it fate.” Repress your emotions, refuse to let them resolve, and see where that leaves you.
Perhaps I haven’t sufficiently stressed how alone I was. Fortunately, I had my family. My youngest brother and I were particularly close despite the seven years between us. But other than Paul, I had no friends. Then for a few years I had one friend, then no one again.
I was isolated by a combination of factors. First, I was so often sick; second, I spent so much time reading and daydreaming; third, most of my schoolmates in the Catholic school lived in town, a couple of miles (and a different world) away. But mostly I was isolated by – what shall I call it? — my almost autistic self-absorption. It wasn’t egotism, exactly; more that my inner world was so brightly lit that the external world was often merely an inexplicable annoying interruption.
I knew the stories from the biographies and histories I was reading. I knew the world as dishonestly portrayed by the boy’s books of my father’s and my generation; I knew the televised world of westerns and action shows; I knew the fantasy world I constructed out of all that. But I didn’t know much about real life.
And in considering the factors that led to my isolation, I must not omit the mixture of superiority and inferiority complexes that made me strange, and, I suppose, unapproachable.
I knew I was smart: I excelled in standardized tests designed to measure IQ; I read years above my grade level. I could see that I lived in a mental world far beyond most of my peers. The only academic subject that engaged me, history, I mastered easily. (In my Freshman year in high school, I took home the heavy world history text and read or skimmed it in a weekend, because I wanted to know what had happened.)
But emotionally and socially, I was light-years behind my age group, and despite my best efforts to not know it, I did know it. My everyday life was a string of humiliating or enraging incidents. And girls – even though I had two sisters – were unknown country. I knew them more as the lying boy’s novels had portrayed them than as I actually saw them around me in class. You may imagine how close reality came to those portrayals.
The rest of that 1963-64 school year is a blur of remembered misery. I did what I was required to do, in school, at home. I’m sure I did a lot of reading. But I was dead inside. I had competing strands pulling me different ways, rarely taking note of each other, let alone coordinating efforts. (This was long before I had any idea that we are as much communities as individuals.) With Jack Kennedy dead, the path I had imagined had vanished, and with it any ambitions I had had. No particular future attracted me, and I was not in the habit of taking my life into my own hands except at great intervals. I drifted through my unsatisfactory actual life.
My sister Margaret, four years older than me, had gone to college, but for some reason I can no longer remember, I had picked up a prejudice against doing that. (Maybe it seemed like more high school.)
My brother John, six years older than me, had enlisted in the service, immediately after high school. It seemed the natural thing to do. During the Kennedy years, I had formed an image of the life I would lead, the same kind of life I imagined Kenney or Churchill had led. They had gone to war as young men, and had made a name for themselves, and that had served as their entrance into politics. Maybe I would do the same. So I decided I would enlist in the Army, become a helicopter pilot, and come home a war hero.
In the Spring of 1964, nobody was expecting war in Vietnam. Indeed, Lyndon Johnson’s re-election campaign would portray him as the peace candidate. Yet I knew, months before the Gulf of Tonkin incident, that we would have a war there. My life has been the strangest mixture of impracticality and inspiration.
I told my father that I wanted to join the Army, and he, knowing the local Navy recruiter, arranged for me to take the preliminary test in my home, I doing the work downstairs in our library room while dad and he talked upstairs. (Looking back, I think dad was silently nudging me away from the Army.) I passed, and that was one step taken. Next step, the physical and mental exams.
So on Good Friday, 1964, I took a bus to Philadelphia, presented myself at AFEES (Armed Forces Examining and Entrance Station), and got a fast brief snapshot of Army life. All morning, I was processed as part of a herd, one of hundreds of enlistees and draftees standing in line after line, examined for this, examined for that. It wasn’t so different from Catholic school, other than being naked except for shoes. (A sign on the wall said yes, take off your socks.) And then at the end of the morning, at the last desk, when I thought all hurdles successfully jumped, the man at the desk looked at my papers, asked me to confirm that I had asthma, and casually said, “Of course you know…” and told me that this made me ineligible for recruitment. In the Spring of 1964, the services could afford to be picky. We had been more or less at peace since 1953.
And then, in a development Franz Kafka would have appreciated, even though I had just been told that I would not be accepted for enlistment because I had failed the physical exam, I was required to remain and take the mental and educational tests.
“Of course you know…” Of course I didn’t know! I had my heart set on getting into the service, because otherwise how could I become a war hero and run for office? What was I going to do? All the way home on the bus, I was asking myself what now.
At some point I went over to the county seat and asked the Army recruiter if I could talk to him off the record. (Immediately he said, “Trouble with the law?”) But when I told him why I had failed the AFEES admission process, and asked if I should lie about having asthma, his answer was immediate and definite. “Don’t do it.” He said if I got caught, I’d get a discharge for fraudulent enlistment, and if I didn’t get caught, “you’d be a hazard to yourself and to your buddies.”
So that was that. No military career, no war heroism, no obvious way to make a reputation. My 1-Y draft status and I would have to find a different path.
Jump forward to October, 1988. Being inspired by Robert Smith’s book Hugh Lynn Cayce: About My Father’s Business, I told myself that I wanted to open myself to the levels of life that had become blocked. I said, “God, your will, not mine. But if you will it, let me be whole: Remove the barriers that close me off from you, from me, from others. Let me be of service. Show me the way and keep me on the path.”
What you pray for, you will surely get.
On Saturday, November 19, 1988, I awakened half-remembering a dream prominently featuring a rendition of “Roll out the barrel, we’ll have a barrel of fun.” The previous week, on the occasion of the composer’s death, a National Public Radio piece had put it into my consciousness. But I awakened convinced that the dream was using the song in connection to the upcoming 25th anniversary of the murder of John F. Kennedy.
In 1988, the 25th anniversary year, I as editorial writer and occasionally columnist had said my say in the pages of the newspaper about his many excellences. Others too had poured out their hearts, reminding me that that political crime had done great psychological damage to many unknown individuals of all ages. And by then I had been seeing a psychologist, and with her help it finally came real to me (what my feelings had known only abstractly, theoretically) that 1963 had been a long time ago. In response to that dream, I wrote it all out, the whole ghastly weekend and the blank weeks that followed, and I knew that all things come to an end, even torture and deformation. “Roll out the barrel,” I wrote, “and we’ll have a barrel of fun. Finally.” But that was a long, long time after 1963.