January 2011

Rush to Judgment

May’s Esquire offered a review of twenty-five alternative theories grown up around the assassination of President Kennedy since the Warren Commission’s report, bringing the total to sixty scenarios in all.

The review ranged from the Warren Commission member Arlen Specter’s suggestion that original autopsy pictures had been destroyed to arguments over alleged puffs of smoke, ricocheted bullet fragments, and differing numbers of shots fired on that terrible afternoon (the historian William Manchester, the late President’s biographer, claimed there had been two shots despite some hundred witnesses in Dallas who heard three).

Home Front

By May the American war effort was thriving at home, if not yet overseas. Farmers in Brooks County, Georgia, worked their fields by electric light once the sun had gone down, while the city of Atlanta tore up six thousand tons of neglected trolley track for its steel. Across the country people were volunteering as air-raid wardens for their blocks; twenty-three thousand block captains were sworn in at one time in the Chicago Coliseum.

The First Grand Wizard

In May, while officially still in the insurance business, the ex-Confederate general and guerrilla leader Nathan Bedford Forrest took his place as the first Grand Wizard in the recently formed “KuKlux Klan.”

Columbia’s River

Sailing on behalf of a Boston trading company, Capt. Robert Gray came upon the headwaters of the Great River of the West on May 11 and then did what earlier explorers had not: he entered.

1792 1867 1942 1967

It is hard for a journalist to admit that he didn’t know a story when he spent an evening with it. I had that experience, sad to say, because the story was no less than the imminent honeymoon of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.

On a July evening in 1939, my wife and I gave one of our frequent Saturday get-togethers—big on talk and drink, given our finances, less lavish on food. The guests were mostly newsmen and their spouses, and the talk mostly about where Hitler would strike next, weekends being high on his calendar for that activity. “The Fuhrer takes a country in the weekend,” it was being said, “while the English take a weekend in the country.”

The year was 1932; the country, like most of the world, was in the depths of the Depression. I was seven years old. My brush with history began one day when I heard my dad call my name as he burst through the back door. I thought: What have I done now? But when I saw his face, I knew he was not angry, but very excited and even happy. My dad had not been happy in a long time.

We were living then in a big, rundown Victorian house near an old racetrack in Louisville, Kentucky. The track was no longer used for racing, but was maintained for training, and its barns were kept for horses from Churchill Downs. My dad had lost his factory job a year before and had finally found a job doing odd jobs at the track. He would clean stalls or walk the horses after their morning workouts.

“Come quick,” he yelled. “I want you to go with me up to the track.” This was surely something special; he never allowed me near the barn area with its rough men and rough talk.

By October 30, 1958, Nikita Khrushchev’s assumption of power over the Soviet Union had already produced a slight, if uneven, warming of the Cold War. On that mild autumn day, however, a real thaw took place in New York City, where more than one hundred musicians and technicians gathered at Manhattan Center for an RCA Victor recording session whose guest star was the Soviet Union’s hottest new export, maestro Kiril Kondrashin.

Kondrashin had swept into Western consciousness that April by conducting Van Cliburn’s stunning victory in the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. As a trusted Soviet citizen and twice winner of the Stalin Prize, Kondrashin had been granted leave, albeit grudgingly, to be the first Soviet conductor to tour and record in the United States.

As a further sign of post-Stalinist warming, Kondrashin had chosen to record light classics by Soviet composers who only a decade before had been accused of “anti-popular formalist perversions” with “antidemocratic tendencies.”

It was 1956, and Adlai Stevenson was running against Dwight Elsenhower for president. People who supported Stevenson tended to feel an almost personal emotion for him, and I felt as if a beloved relative were running.

Sometime during the summer, I heard that he was making a swing through the state and would give a speech in a hotel in Vancouver, Washington. His itinerary would take him from Spokane in the far east over to the Columbia River, and then many miles west along a winding road that was outstandingly beautiful but narrow, not a road good for anyone in a hurry.

On the day that Mr. Stevenson and his party wended their way to Vancouver, I happened to be driving into the next county on the same Evergreen Highway. My children and I watched like hawks all the way up the river.

As a college sophomore in 1960, I had little interest in politics, except that the woman I was dating was a member of the Young Democrats on campus. Democrats at Oregon State College in those days were a rare commodity, so, when the presidential campaign got under way, our little group didn’t expect to be much involved.

Imagine our surprise, then, when we were asked by the State Central Committee to help play host to Senator John F. Kennedy when he made a campaign speech in Corvallis. I knew nothing about campaigns or electioneering, so I was given grunt work: nailing up posters, running errands, and stuffing envelopes.