Jean Shepherd's elegy to JFK

For nearly sixty years, there have been widespread suspicions that JFK died at the hands of a conspiracy, as did his brother Robert Kennedy a few years later. Although these “conspiracy theories” have been ignored or dismissed by nearly our entire mainstream media, they have inspired hundreds or thousands of books and films along with countless articles, and have been widely believed by large portions of the American public. The resulting loss of faith in our major institutions has been dramatic, leading to today’s intense popular skepticism on so many other issues, whether justified or unjustified. Our government has still never released all of its official records on the death of our 35th President, but after almost six decades that monumental cover-up may finally be starting to collapse.

Tucker Carlson has the most popular cable news show, and late last week he aired an explosive segment in which he declared that the JFK assassination had been the work of a conspiracy, with our own CIA heavily involved. His nightly broadcast audience is over 3 million and just one copy of his Youtube video has already been watched 1.6 million times. So these shocking claims from a major media outlet have now reached many millions of ordinary Americans, probably more than anything else on this topic in the thirty years since Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning film JFK was playing in the theaters. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is a prominent public figure and best-selling author, nephew of the slain President and son of his murdered brother. He praised Carlson’s show as “the most courageous newscast in 60 years,” and declared: “The CIA’s murder of my uncle was a successful coup d’etat from which our democracy has never recovered.” Source: unz.com

The tape of what appears to be Jean Shepherd’s first broadcast after Kennedy’s assassination shows he did not talk about the assassination the way others did—he spoke soberly, seriously, about what he saw and had long seen and talked about—indications in the United States of serious problems. Some years later, he commented that he still had a tape of this show. Surely, he recognized that it constituted an extraordinary elegy: "Well, tonight we’re going to talk about Mr. Kennedy and a lot of other associated problems and facts of American life, if we can. If you’re expecting any great revelations, I don’t think you’ll get it. I remember the first time I heard about John Kennedy. I’ve always been a Kennedy man. The one thing that I have always noticed about Kennedy, that appealed to me specifically, was that Kennedy was a realist. And being a realist in today’s world is very dangerous. Because realism is not a thing that is easily accepted by Americans in the 1960s. And I always felt sorry for Kennedy because I recognized the fact that Kennedy did not give people a soft pap that most of them somehow wanted–on both sides of the political fence..." 

[Shepherd talked about Kennedy’s intelligence, humor, zest—all of which made people nervous.] "I have a feeling inside of me—there is a great sense of—apprehension, of fear. It’s a kind of free-floating thing—a strange unreasonableness—a fanaticism that is slowly beginning to grow in this land. About a year or so ago I began to be aware-of a growing belief in violence in America—a growing impatience with the processes that are slow and painful, the processes of democracy—shall we say. More and more people see themselves as solitary, beautiful, sensitive individuals—arrayed against an unseen, unthinking, grinding, totally an—insensitive society. You might say it’s the Holden Caulfield syndrome beginning to grow. Today, more and more, we are beginning to believe in passion as a substitute for reason." 

[Shepherd talked about the television broadcast from Arlington Cemetery.] "Here was just this little, simple grave—and—it was just a hole in the ground—there was this little, simple bronze coffin. And there was a quick shot, which they cut away from. I don’t know whether you saw this or not—but it was one of the most poignant shots of all. It was a little moment after the funeral party had left Arlington and—the cars were winding back up the drive over the bridge, back over the river to Washington. And the four soldiers were still standing guard over the grave. You saw, coming down from the lower left hand corner, two workmen. Did you see them? Dressed in overalls? Just two workmen with baseball caps, and they were coming to do the inevitable. There was a brief shot of them. They walked up, and one of them sort of kneeled down, and he started to pick things up around the grave. And they cut away from it very quickly. Maybe this was too much. I saw how small we are. Maybe this was one of the things that so profoundly moved me, and frightening about it, and at the same time, vaguely reassuring—it gave us all a sense of unbelievable loneliness... Maybe this is why people rushed off to football games—although that’s probably being kind to them. Because I wonder whether the British would consider having a professional soccer game in London—the day after the king died. I doubt it. We’re a different kind of people. This is not to say good, bad, or indifferent. Just very different. Sometimes you wonder just what kind we are. It was a terrible weekend. And I’m not so sure that we’re not in for a few more in the next hundred years."

As with Walt Whitman’s elegy to Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed,” the death of a president gave Jean Shepherd the opportunity to express sorrow in a form that encompassed some of his recurring themes. And the workmen seen fleetingly in a corner of the TV screen was a fine example of what Shepherd had frequently insisted—that the nearly unnoticed “cracks in the sidewalk” could reveal a truth. Shepherd’s style that week was atypical. Instead of giving the feeling of an informal dialogue with listeners, he spoke at them, in serious essays on subjects connected to the American temperament. He had indeed complained in broadcasts before about what he felt were naively unjust criticisms of his country by his countrymen. This must be understood in the context of the 1960s ferment—student unrest, civil rights struggle, civil disobedience, demonstrations, and riots in the streets. And the relentless America-bashing by Americans. Indeed, many Americans were criticizing America for not living up to its ideals. Shepherd admitted the problems, that America indeed needed to work to improve itself—but commented that other countries had even more problems, and those problems were inherent in humanity. He seemed to feel that the criticism had created a climate that resulted in violence and assassination, and in part, he implicated the popular “seriously funny” comic satirists and intellectual commentators of the day. On his next broadcast after the JFK assassination, he ruminated:

"I imagine right now there must be at least thirty-five thousand writers who earn a living on one principle—proving to all the other Americans that America has the worst way of life in the world. The dishonesty, the hypocrisy, blah, blah, blah—I think it must be based on an unbelievable lack of knowledge of the rest of the world. Mr. Kennedy—I think in so many ways—almost embodied America. He was the embodiment of us. His attitudes, the way he talked, the way he moved. The look in the eyes. And I think one of the great feelings of shock that all of us have is when he went, somehow a bit of our life went too. Because, you know, life is contagious. And I think a lot us caught it from Mr. Kennedy. Kids, are you listening? There is a limit, kid, to what you can do. Now you don’t know it—and maybe you’ll never find it out—but there is a limit in almost every direction you care to choose." —The Art and Enigma of Jean Shepherd (2005) by Eugene B. Bergmann