JFK 4

Fifty years ago today at about this time, I was in last-period gym class showering up and rushing to make the school bus. Some of the kids had heard a rumor that something had happened to President Kennedy.

As we were immature white students in a segregated school system in the Jim Crow South, we had little love or respect for that n****r lovin’ Yankee, so joking was taking place.

Then Coach Young, he of the piercing light-blue eyes who could see right through you (who also gave me my first baseball glove years earlier, as he and my father were friends) came into the locker room. His look stilled the room . . . .

I remember watching the funeral and the cortège on television.

I’m not sure, but I think school was closed for a couple of days.

He was not perfect and he was not a very effective president in terms of getting legislation passed, but he was a good and decent man, though, by all reports, a libidinous one, a creature of those “Mad Men” times. Leave the politics to Johnson, who, were it not for the folly of Viet Nam, would be remembered as one of the greatest presidents, a man who chose, when he had the seat of power, to turn his back on his Southern heritage, on a career of catering to Southern bigotry, to seek justice and liberty for the oppressed.

But, honestly, it was a long time ago. It’s time to learn from it and let it go.

Kennedy’s goodness and decency and Johnson’s dedication to the oppressed would be best honored by fostering a good and decent polity, by treating all persons with goodness and decency, by being Democrats, good liberal Democrats who fight for justice and for the well-being of the citizenry, not by wallowing in the past and spinning myths about a Camelot that never was.