What We Really Mourn When We Mourn JFK's Death
[Bob Dylan’s “Murder Most Foul” is maybe the only piece of popular culture about JFK’s assassination that gets at the deeper meaning of the event.]
Today marks the 60th anniversary of JFK’s assassination, one of the few events in American life so momentous that it could be noted with real emotion 60 years later.
As a Gen Xer I’ve lived my whole life in the shadow of this event. I first learned about it on a family vacation in Dallas at the age of seven, when we stopped at Dealy Plaza. My mother’s tears there made me realize that this event meant something important, even if I didn’t quite understand it. During my teen years, Oliver Stone’s JFK came out, along with the elevation of the neverending assassination conspiracy discourse. Normal, well-adjusted kids at my high school would debate the Warren Report with each other.
Around that time, I started getting a deeper understanding of US history and a contrarian chip on my shoulder. Knowing more about his presidency I determined that the halo around Kennedy’s head had to do with his untimely death and not his abilities as president, which seemed pretty middling to me. Learning about his personal scandals intensified these feelings. When his son died tragically in the late 90s I was kind of a jerk about it, telling people I was sick of the Kennedy mythos. When I’ve taught US history I’ve mostly dealt with the assassination in class by giving it minimal attention.
In recent years, I’ve realized this event does matter, but not in the ways we traditionally assume. When we mourn JFK’s death we are not mourning a real flesh and blood person, but an avatar of the myth of consensus.
He was already a different kind of myth before his death. A man with debilitating health problems was portrayed as a robust youth. A serial philanderer was portrayed as a family man. A president who dragged his feet on civil rights and fought the Cold War with gusto was portrayed as a progressive leader. In death, he stood for what was perceived to be lost in the years after 11-22-1963.
As we all know, “the Sixties” did not begin in 1960, and JFK’s death is as good a marker of any as their true beginning. In the years following his demise came Vietnam, urban uprisings from Watts to Newark, the assassinations of other leaders, Watergate, the end of the postwar economic boom, and a general tear in the fabric of national identity. His death thus came to stand in for a supposed “loss of innocence” that was not real but deeply felt in the minds of millions, which pretty much makes it real.
Looking backward, older generations could mourn this loss of consensus by embodying it in the loss of one man. Of course, there are darker forces afoot here. The Cold War consensus being mourned was not a true consensus. It rested on racism and sexism and millions having their voices muted so that white middle America could feel good about itself. “The Sixties” were, if anything, about breaking that myth and forcing American society and national identity to bend so that all people could be included in it.
That is perhaps why when a Trump supporter was asked when America stopped being great they said “1965.” Not coincidentally, that was the year of the Voting Rights Act. At that moment, the United States, for the first time in its history, actually became a democracy. Liberals can mourn JFK’s death as the end of progressive social change that did not require social division. Conservatives can mourn it as the end of an America where straight, white, native-born Christians were absolutely secure in their status. (As a sidenote, this might explain the QAnon obsession with JFK Jr.’s death.)
While I have been skeptical of the Kennedy cult since my teen years, I actually do feel something every November 22nd. I feel the sadness of living in a country still trapped by its inability to find consensus around being a real democracy where all voices are heard. In that way, “the 60s” never ended, and I am not sure they ever will.