The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  The next afternoon, we telephoned Mrs. Peterson to ask her how the children had carried out their responsibilities. Barbara, she told us, reading from their reports, wrote, “The first thing we had was music. They took the President’s picture many times. The President has reddish hair and had on a suit. People enjoyed seeing President Kennedy.” Anthony reported that he had seen “lots of policemen,” and ended up, “I enjoyed seeing our President.” Ietta wrote, “We waited and waited and waited. At last we saw some airplanes and four helicopters. We saw a lot of people. John F. Kennedy finally came. He said a little speech.” Gregory wrote, “I was glad to go and see our President because this was my first time seeing him and I admire him and his speeches. I think Mr. Kennedy is the greatest man in the world!” William wrote, “He went on the helicopter. Crowds and crowds of people began to say goodbye as he flew away. The crowd of people began to yell louder and louder and it sounded like one thousand people saying goodbye.”

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  When we think of him, he is without a hat, standing in the wind and the weather. He was impatient of topcoats and hats, preferring to be exposed, and he was young enough and tough enough to confront and to enjoy the cold and the wind of these times, whether the winds of nature or the winds of political circumstance and national danger. He died of exposure, but in a way that he would have settled for—in the line of duty, and with his friends and enemies all around, supporting him and shooting at him. It can be said of him, as of few men in a like position, that he did not fear the weather, and did not trim his sails, but instead challenged the wind itself, to improve its direction and to cause it to blow more softly and more kindly over the world and its people.

  Jonathan Miller

  DECEMBER 28, 1963 (J.F.K.’S TELEVISED FUNERAL)

  ON NOVEMBER 22ND, when John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot in the back of the head, he experienced, in the agonizing incommunicado of sudden death, the most public private moment of his life. The objective image of that moment was seen by a thousand people who lined the route, and a few hours later, when the negatives and prints had been washed and dried, millions more had seen it on television, or at least they had seen a grainy hieroglyph representing it, but what they saw only suggested, and could never communicate, the excruciating pith of the victim’s own obliterating experience. Never was the rift between privacy and publicity so wide, and perhaps part of the shock of the event resulted from the paradox of this division. The publicity was total, and what it did was to conceal, in the very instant that it exposed, the inexorable solitude of dying.

  The President’s death forced television into a brief maturity. Death gagged the vulgar infant, and stifled its greedy squalling for a few days. As unvarnished metaphysical austerity flowed—undisturbed, for once—through the channels, the medium itself seemed to take on grandeur. Some of the active contributions made by the television people during this period were intelligent and restrained and technically brilliant, and some were simply drab and dutiful. There were few conspicuous lapses in taste, and there were few signs of creative inspiration. The reporting, for the most part, was direct, humane, ungaudy. There was far less false eloquence than one might have expected. Mainly, there was an unprecedented majesty about the whole affair, a harsh mesure that came with the endless, almost inadvertent accumulation of funereal imagery. The pure accidents of repetition and duplication proved valuable. A tic was turned to splendid advantage, allowing the instrument, as the hours wore on, to illustrate every twist and conundrum of mortality. Moreover, the repetition offered a new form of mourning and provided a crash program in grief. Unaided, the mind has a deliberate tempo in this matter, for mourning is some sort of spiritual labor, a lengthy moral exertion in which the outlets to the will are blocked as the feelings are slowly and painfully withdrawn from their familiar attachments. In the normal way of things, this ritual works to a natural andante. It is gracefully hesitant and has its own proper period. Television set a new pace. The whole process was concentrated and speeded up. The assassination, the cortege, the funeral, and the eulogies recurred in what seemed an infinite series of statements and recapitulations. Every channel was taken up with the dire scene, and even the ordinarily distracting atmospherics of television helped to create a dark new aesthetic. For instance, when a local station borrowed a transmission from one of the networks, the original picture and the reproduction, although they were essentially identical, reinforced each other’s psychic effect by means of their electronically determined differences. The borrowed picture was often a blurred, Pointillist version of the original, so that as one switched from channel to channel the fact of the President’s death was brutally confirmed by the electronic variations on the one, inescapable theme. It was as if, in the space of a few hours, there had been accumulated all those pictorial versions of a tragic event which usually gather in albums over the years, and which, through the myriad tiny differences within the common pattern, approach some comprehensible embodiment of the long-ago fatal incident. But the mystery of such an event can never really be embodied; it can only be approximately reconstructed, or circumscribed, by drawing innumerable pictorial tangents to the mysterious curve of the occasion. Like a computer flickering through a problem that would take a mathematician years, television did a lightning calculation and completed the spiritual algebra of grief in less than four days. As a result, the whole matter seemed to have been formulated and disposed of by the time the commercials came yapping back on Tuesday.

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  There were other metaphysical vignettes during that dark weekend. The display of time’s arrow, for example, and of the grinding, irreversible determinism in human affairs. Most touching of all, perhaps, were those unbearable playbacks of the events leading up to, but never quite reaching, the moment of the assassination: those happy, slightly lurching newsreel shots of the Kennedys arriving at the airport, the breakfast speech at Fort Worth—all now just innocent hindsights on the approaches to a death. It all seemed so orderly—possibly still reversible—giving way only at the last instant to the photographic topsy-turvy of tragedy.

  There was also that microscopic dissection of Oswald’s murder, played over and over, reduced by the slow-motion camera to the actual molecules of the murder’s own onward-moving process, each molecule of incident mysteriously linked to the next as they clicked, one by one, toward the detonation. And then, just as with the President’s last moment, everything flies apart—a sublime dehiscence—at the moment of death itself. Images blur; the eyes of the camera roll upward and the cement ceiling of the Dallas police station streaks past; a brim of a Stetson cuts in close to the screen; there is a dilated eye, and then blackness. An hour later, on another network, the clip is screened again: the same orderly staccato, the same upward roll of the eyes, the ceiling streaking by, the Stetson, the staring eye, blackness. And again and again, as if the camera were searching out but never quite reaching the marrow of the instant. It has been said that this was the first televised murder, but there was more to it than that, for in being so inquisitive television may have become an accomplice in the crime—may actually have joggled events in the direction they took. Perception may have contributed to the act and introduced the slippery risks of Heisenberg into the Dallas police garage. One could almost feel the lens urging Ruby out of the crowd. In fact, in the pictures, it looked as if he came out of the camera itself. In a word, television has become too effective. It gets in on too much. Like some nimble amoeba, it can poke its sensitive tendrils into the world’s minutest crannies, put a vast audience in touch with the world’s faintest twitch. The trouble is not so much that there will be no privacy any more as that there will be no inaccessibility. The imagination will be totally usurped.

  The funeral itself, the lying in state, the catafalque, provided some forceful images of death that had vanished from modern life—for, whatever else has happened, death has been bowdlerized out of the modern text. Yet suddenly, for three days, the domestic screen was almost c
ontinuously occupied with the fearful oblong simplicity of the casket. One saw, too, the dreadful heaviness of the dead as the eight enlisted men crouched and staggered under their load. One felt that not all the weight was in the bronze but that at the moment of dying some negative quantity, like phlogiston, goes out of the body, leaving it in a state of hideous density, the better to drag on the straining hawsers that lower the coffin into the grave.

  Jacob Brackman and Terrence Malick

  APRIL 13, 1968 (THE ASSASSINATION OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.)

  WE LAST SAW the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King early last August, at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta—a red brick building on the corner of Jackson Street and Auburn Avenue. His office, in the Sunday-school annex, to the left of the church, smelled of paraffin and linoleum glue. On the bulletin board, children’s prayer cards of Jesus pointing at his heart were pinned above Southern Christian Leadership Conference posters proclaiming the summer’s theme: “Black Is Beautiful.” A broken Crayola popped underfoot. In the course of our conversation, Dr. King told of a recent threat against his life, in Cleveland. “It has been given to me to die when the Lord calls me,” he said, digressing from his narrative. “The Lord called me into life and He will call me into death. I’ve known the fear of dying. Yes, I lived with that fear in Montgomery and in Birmingham, down in the State of Alabama, when brother fell upon brother in 1963.” His voice was rich as his sentences rolled inexorably toward their conclusions. It had a kind of patience that was hard to distinguish from fatigue. “Since then, I’ve stood on the banks of the Jordan and I’ve looked into the promised land,” he went on. “Maybe I won’t make the journey, but I know that my people are going to make the journey, because I’ve stood and looked. So it doesn’t particularly matter anymore. I’ve conquered the fear of dying, and a man that’s conquered the fear of dying has conquered everything. I don’t have to fear any man.” He reached for a leather-bound Bible, worn to a dull shine, like an old watch, and turned to the fourth chapter of II Timothy. “ ‘I have fought a good fight,’ ” he read. “ ‘I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.’ ” He paused, and closed the book. (When we returned to the passage later, we noticed that it continued, “Henceforth, there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness.”) Dr. King seemed embarrassed at ending the conversation there, but he had to catch a plane. As we stood with him on Auburn Avenue while he waited for his car, he mentioned that he was born “down the block.” Along the avenue, modern cinder-block offices, their windows smeared with palm prints, stood beside clapboard houses. Cast-iron washtubs and rusting automobile parts lay scattered in yards. We remember that a young black girl in a stiff organdie dress was spinning a hubcap on the hot pavement.

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  We find ourself now, as after any disaster, investing small things with an urgent, outsize relevance. The girl in the organdie dress keeps returning to our mind; somehow she must bear for us the meaning of Dr. King’s death. We haven’t looked to our memory of her for meaning; her picture simply appears to us, as if through some short circuit of our intelligence. One can no longer clearly grasp the relevance of new events. They involve us all, we talk about them all day, soon we find them squeezing everything else out of our lives, but we’re not sure how to weight them. This is not because one can’t foresee in detail where they’re leading; one never could. The frightening thing is that one can no longer imagine what forms the solutions to our problems will assume. One isn’t even sure what a solution would look like. Ordinarily, the news media might give us clues. But the relevances we seek now aren’t buried in news stories. Friday, the Times ran an eight-column headline on Dr. King’s death. It ran eight-column headlines Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, too. Tucked inside Friday’s paper were many stories about Dr. King’s career. Their assumption seemed to be that by reentering his past we might get a running start into our future without him.

  The pell-mell events of the previous weeks no doubt undermined our response to Dr. King’s death. Over the past several years, we have learned to accept the fact that our destiny is not entirely what we make of ourselves. But in these last weeks, perhaps for the first time since the Second World War, we’ve had a sense of being submerged in history, and of becoming inured to its stupefactions. About the time of the Tet offensive, one was close to despair. Then, with Eugene McCarthy’s victory in New Hampshire and Robert Kennedy’s announcement that he would run for the Presidency, with President Johnson’s announcement of a bombing halt and then his announcement that he would not run again, followed by a direct peace overture from North Vietnam, one began to feel that suddenly, just when things were darkest, America had found her way back to the path. Now Dr. King’s death comes to us as a reproach. We had let ourselves drift away from the reality of our trouble. Finding the path will not be so easy.

  Word of the assassination reached us while we were working late at our office, and we immediately switched on a television-network special report. Perhaps because we received each piece of news minutes after it happened, we came to feel that we were at the eye of a historical hurricane. Our national leaders appeared before us to guide our responses. “America is shocked and saddened by the brutal slaying tonight of Dr. Martin Luther King,” the President said, in measured tones. “I know that every American of good will joins me in mourning the death of this outstanding leader and in praying for peace and understanding throughout this land.” We sat, it seemed dumbly, in the gray haze of our television screen. Other notables—we can’t remember which—expressed dismay. Several, staring sternly into the camera, urged viewers to “keep their cool.” The argot, unfamiliar to their mouths, made it plain to whom the admonitions were addressed. Curiously, what gave us a stronger sense of tragedy than anything our leaders said was the disorder on the networks: the missed cues and fades, the A.B.C. technician who walked behind Bob Young reading a sheet of teletype paper, Keith McBee stuttering when he suddenly realized he was on camera. When our leaders did appear, their eyes glassy and focussed above the camera, we felt a strange sense of identification with the poverty of their response, and with the way they underscored one another. Too much had happened in the last week. They had been called upon too often. They could, with honor, fail to help us.

  After watching the news for more than an hour, we walked out into the office corridor. The cleaning woman, an elderly Negro woman in a green shift and stretch socks, was sitting in the broom closet weeping and muttering to herself, “They’re going to get him, and they’re going to get everybody.” We had nothing we could say to her, and, to judge by her reluctance to notice us, there was nothing she wanted to hear. When we returned to our office, Vice-President Humphrey was in the midst of dismissing predictions of violence, because, he said, no one could respond with anything but grief on this sad occasion. Even as he spoke, we could hear the wail of sirens rising through the long canyon of Sixth Avenue. Shortly afterward, we heard loud shouts and the splintering of glass. We walked onto a balcony outside our office, on the nineteenth floor, and, below, on Forty-fourth Street, saw a crowd of black youths ambling toward Times Square. One, holding a flap of his torn shirt, skipped ahead of the others and, from time to time, spun around to yell at them. We stared (we hadn’t yet heard reports of trouble in New York), and said to ourself, “Now it has happened.” We shut off the television set and sat in silence. The dreamy ululation of police cars racing toward Harlem continued into the night. After a while, we called a friend. If we could not define our feelings, we could at least share them, undefined. As we talked with our friend, we discovered that although in 1963 the mystery of who assassinated President Kennedy had fascinated us, there was nothing we cared to learn about the man who shot Dr. King. We knew who he was.

  John Kennedy’s death came like lightning from a clear sky. Dr. King’s was something that for a long time we’d been hoping wouldn’t happen. We would have been alarmed if Kennedy, or any President, had prophesied his own murder, yet we have grown
accustomed to such predictions from civil-rights leaders. Dr. King spoke reluctantly of what he suspected would be his destiny, and most often at the prompting of journalists. Dark premonitions can easily become obsessive, as they did for Malcolm X; they never preoccupied Dr. King. Yet he was the most important example of a new kind of political leader in America—one who cannot exercise leadership without first coming to terms with the probability of his own violent death. A speech that Dr. King delivered on Wednesday evening, scarcely twenty hours before his assassination, and that the networks televised on Thursday night was notable, then, but not surprising. He spoke of having (like Moses) “been to the mountaintop” and there become reconciled. “And then I got into Memphis, and some began to talk about the threats that were out,” Dr. King said. “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land.” Dr. King’s prophetic speech was striking only in retrospect, perhaps because we had not been duly conscious of one of his most urgent tasks: preparing his apostles, and his public, for their loss of him. On Tuesday night, his flight from Atlanta to Memphis was delayed by a baggage search that airline officials said resulted from threats on his life. But, as most of us have no room in our lives for much else, so Dr. King had no room for worry about himself.

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  Many of Dr. King’s people had lately grown discontented with him. They saw him standing in the doorway he had opened, an old champion become an obstruction. He wished to solidify old gains, they imagined, while they wanted to push through the doorway. Some ridiculed the basis of his work because it was ethical and religious rather than strategic. They referred to him as “De Lawd” and spoke mockingly of his “meetin’ body force with soul force.” Some others derided what they took for rigid, irrelevant platitudes and florid plagiarisms. The week after we saw Dr. King in his office, he returned to Atlanta to address a convention of the National Association of Radio Announcers at the Regency Hyatt House. Nearly every sentence of his conversation with us recurred somewhere in that speech. Like the politicians who lamented his death, Dr. King often gave the impression of having a kind of fixed inventory of responses. His speeches, with few exceptions, seemed repetitive; they drew their resonance from the occasion that prompted them. But the inventory was a necessity. It relieved him of the distracting obligation of responding freshly, uniquely, to every new situation. It was also a source of his enormous restraint, shielding him from the temptation to vent the hot and—he thought—unconsidered feelings that were aroused in him by the whites’ most dramatic outrages, such as the Birmingham bombings of 1963. Dr. King did not have to change his responses, because, from the Montgomery boycott of 1956 to the Detroit riots, the problems remained the same: hatred and fear—what he called, perhaps too abstractly, “sin.” The problems were not peculiar to the White Citizens Councils or the Ku Klux Klan, he said in a famous letter from the Birmingham prison; they also afflicted “the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace, which is the absence of tension, to a positive peace, which is the presence of justice.” The continuing irony of Dr. King’s life was that although his simplicity sprang from the very depth at which he confronted the problems, it alienated him from many of his brothers, black and white.