Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 28, 1993 TAG: 9311280179
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ROBERT FREIS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
To others, it's merely another milestone in the history books.
Unless you lived through it, it's difficult to comprehend the searing horror of that day and the dreadful impact the killing of a young president had on America.
Certainly the trauma has endured long after the echo of gunfire in Dealey Plaza faded away.
Baby boomers and their parents assiduously relive the emotion with each five-year anniversary of John F. Kennedy's death, as if confronting the ghostly videotape of the event might purge the painful memories.
Meanwhile, the obsession with Kennedy and his murder is little more than a curiosity to more than half of the nation's population, those under 35 who were either too young to remember the day or not yet born.
By the time they came of age, many of Nov. 22, 1963's negative ripple effects had become incorporated in the darker side of national attitudes - cynicism, violence, governmental conspiracy, corrupt leadership, fatal glamour. The day's events seem unexceptional by comparison, just the fuse of a tragic, explosive string of events.
Yet the romantic glow of his era and the smoldering enigma of Kennedy's death continue to burn as persistently as the eternal flame atop his grave at Arlington National Cemetery.
"JFK: The Memory and the Meaning" is the title of a soon-to-be published book by Dan Fleming of Blacksburg that seeks to explain the Kennedy mystique.
The author, a retired Virginia Tech professor, has assembled a trove of vivid memories from the famous and the obscure, people who knew JFK personally or merely by reputation.
Among the contributors are the minister at the Dallas hospital where both Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald died, a military pallbearer during the Kennedy funeral, a Secret Service agent only yards away from Kennedy when the fatal shots were fired, former President Gerald Ford, author James A. Michener and others, including ordinary people from around the world.
Fleming, 61, a lanky, energetic man, describes his research as a combination of objective inquiry and "personal pilgrimage."
He, too, drew hope and inspiration from Kennedy's regime. Like many other Americans, his resilient reverence toward JFK has withstood time and revelations about the 35th president's seamy personal life and disguised health problems.
"He was a mythological figure. I don't think that will ever be brought down. It's the image of Kennedy, regardless of the actuality, that represents the best of things."
Perhaps, he suggests, those who continue to revere Kennedy and mourn his death are pining for their own youth and the possibilities in their lives that have been extinguished by time.
"I hope this isn't true, but it seems like we reached our zenith," he said. "We could do anything."
"Over and over people said their lives haven't been the same since."
"I asked people to tell me what was it about John F. Kennedy that thirty years after his death still gripped their imagination," Fleming writes in the foreword of "JFK: The Memory and the Meaning."
In response he heard a variety of stories bound by a common thread of wistful, heart-felt emotion.
"For Barry Goldwater, Kennedy was a `hell of a good man.' For Rhode Island welder James Nightingale, Kennedy `uplifted the spirit of the country.' For Nicholas Furlong of Ireland, `his promise will never be calculated' and for Mrs. Medgar Evers, he was `our young bright hope, our star for the future of a better life for all Americans.' For 1963 high school student Yvonne Farley . . . his death was a `loss of innocence' that she never recaptured."
Fleming's own story began when as a young government teacher in Ohio he was "hooked as a Kennedy admirer."
He met the future president at the Hyannis, Mass., airport in 1958 while Kennedy was angrily and profanely complaining about a late flight to Washington, D.C.
Having just read Kennedy's book "Profiles in Courage," Fleming summoned his resolve and introduced himself. "He rallied from his bad mood and was quite gracious," he recalled of Kennedy.
Fleming would later serve as a county chairman during Kennedy's pivotal victory in the 1960 West Virginia primary and work on Capitol Hill during the Kennedy administration.
JFK's time in office was a turbulent period. There were nuclear confrontations with the Soviet Union, the botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, volatile civil rights struggles in the South and the early stages of war in Vietnam.
Throughout, Kennedy was the nation's first "Teflon" president, able to shed culpability because of his charm, Fleming said. "He had the press in his hip pocket."
"It was a breathtaking change from the old generation. Washington had been run by old men, and here was this good-looking young father with a glamorous wife. He was charismatic, for good or bad."
More substantively, by initiating the Peace Corps Kennedy "made public service a good thing - he motivated people," Fleming said.
He also raised the United States' esteem globally, in West Berlin, in Ireland, in India and Africa. Fleming said his research for the book illustrated "people in remote villages around the world honored the United States in those days."
The fact that Kennedy "raised expectations tremendously" made his death more difficult to absorb, he said.
On the final of Kennedy's thousand days in office, Fleming was in downtown Columbus, Ohio, when he heard the murmur of a crowd gathered around a television set in a department store window.
There, along with the rest of America, they learned the president was dead, shot during a motorcade in Dallas. "I was devastated," Fleming recalled.
Galvanized by shock, the nation spent the weekend watching indelible black-and-white images flicker on their television screens: chaos at Parkland Memorial Hospital, Jacqueline Kennedy's blood-stained dress, Jack Ruby's ambush and shooting of Oswald, the drums of the funeral procession and the childishly unaware salutes of Kennedy's 3-year-old son.
Today, Fleming says of the footage, "I can hardly watch it."
Kennedy's death was also keenly felt around the world, as Fleming discovered several years ago when casually discussing the event with a colleague who in 1963 announced the American president's assassination to a sorrowful class of students in Africa.
Touched by that story, Fleming decided to gather other accounts of the day he calls a "hinge of history."
Several stand out among the 200 letters and telephone or personal interviews that will comprise his book.
Virginia Tech professor and noted historian James Robertson, then executive director of the national Civil War Centennial commission, spent the night of Nov. 22, 1963, in the basement of the Library of Congress, peering at historical records with a flashlight.
Jackie Kennedy had requested that her husband's state funeral be conducted similarly to that of Abraham Lincoln, and it fell to Robertson and others to quickly research the details of the ceremony for Lincoln nearly a century before.
Former President Ford, the last surviving member of the Warren Commission, insisted the finding that Oswald acted alone in murdering Kennedy was accurate, conspiracy theories to the contrary.
"All of the critics, including Oliver Stone, director of the movie "JFK," have not come up with one scintilla of new, credible evidence," Ford told Fleming.
Ford also talked of the days when he, JFK and Lloyd Bentsen were young congressmen and friendly colleagues. Presumably, Fleming said, that's what influenced Bentsen during the 1988 campaign to tell Dan Quayle he was no JFK.
Merlie Evers, widow of Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader slain in Mississippi prior to Kennedy's death, offered one of the most telling comments on the Kennedy legend.
"She told me that Kennedy, like her husband, achieved more with his death than when he was alive." As martyrs, they accelerated the pace of change, he said.
When published, Fleming's book will join a library of works on Kennedy's life and death. Getting the book out was complicated by the belief among publishing houses that the market is already saturated by Kennedy retrospectives, he said.
"I'm sure the critics will hammer it as being too positive," he added.
All the recently televised documentaries leading up to the assassination's 30th anniversary Monday illustrate that John F. Kennedy has yet to be fully laid to rest. One scheduled to appear Monday night at 8 on A&E titled, "Dear Jackie: Letters to Mrs. Kennedy," features an interview with Fleming.
"For whatever the reason, it's real and it's out there," said Fleming. "It's high drama, and it's still going on."
by CNB