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Fact chronicled well in novel, 'Nov. 22, 1963' |
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Sunday, 16 November 2008 |
President John F. Kennedy was assassinated 45 years ago next Saturday.
For us baby boomers who like to convince ourselves that we are still in full flower of youth, that is a sobering — and, let’s face it, disheartening — fact. That defining moment of many of our youths is becoming a long, long time ago.
Kennedy’s assassination has already been eclipsed as the principal earth-shaking, life-altering, you-remember-where-you-were-when-you-heard-about-it event in American society by 9/11.
For schoolchildren learning history today, JFK is not the young, vibrant, inspirational political leader their elders remember (we have a new one of those now, too). He is a remote figure in history, just one more (if you will forgive the unfortunate phrase) dead white guy to study about.
For kids in 7th or 8th grade now, I imagine JFK is to them what Franklin Roosevelt was to me when I was in junior high school about 1970. Yes, more recent and less ancient than Abe Lincoln or George Washington, but not enough so to be relevant to their lives now. (BTW, the last remember-where-you-were event before Kennedy’s assassination for a lot of people was the death of FDR.)
I am moved to these musings by an excellent new book by Adam Braver, an associate professor at Roger Williams University, titled “Nov. 22, 1963”.
It is a novel, but like several of Braver’s other work, there is a great amount of fact and reality mixed with the fiction.
Braver uses the factual material as a foundation for, and a buttress to, his imagining about what happened on what a pretentious documentary would call “that fateful day.”
I hate to disappoint conspiracy theorists, but this book is not about any of that stuff. That should be said right off the bat because so much else of what is written about the 35th president is obsessed with such things. (Although there is one tidbit: in a scene where Jacqueline Kennedy is giving instructions to be transmitted to the White House family nanny, telling her how to inform Caroline and John Jr. about what happened to their father, an aide asks: “What would you like her to say?” the answer comes back, “Tell her to them that Johnson did it … Or God.”)
Nov. 22, 1963 does not deal with the Big Picture. It is concerned instead with the intensely, intimately, painfully personal. It takes us inside Mrs. Kennedy’s head as she prepares to start a day of campaign events, then, sitting in the back of a convertible, seeing a bullet take off the back of her husband’s head, his blood and brains splashing over the pink suit she would defiantly keep on for the rest of the day. “I want the world to see what they’ve done to Jack,” the book describes her telling Lady Bird Johnson on the airplane back from Dallas, when Mrs. Johnson suggests she change her clothes. We follow her thoughts into Parkland Hospital and stay with them on the long flight home sitting with her husband’s casket, after being dragged out to be a prop at Lyndon Johnson’s impromptu swearing-in on the airport tarmac.
But psychological speculation about Jackie’s thoughts, and fears and insecurity and anger and grief are just one part of Braver’s book.
I saw the book as sort of a picture mosaic. While a regular mosaic is made up of bits of color or light or texture, in a picture mosaic, each of those individual little bits, called tiles or cells (they are also called tesserae; once you start Googling, you get knee-deep in all kinds of minutia), is a distinct and independent image of its own, creatively and artfully placed together to produce a larger, different image.
That’s what Braver does in his narrative. He takes bits — not slices, just bits — of the lives of those who played their own small part in the day: the ambulance driver; the motorcycle cop; the photographer taking official pictures of the autopsy; the White House ushers pulling out the catafalque that held Lincoln’s casket, scrambling to prepare for the state funeral of their boss; Abraham Zapruder’s secretary, convincing her boss to go back home and get his movie camera before the motorcade came down the street where their dress store was located, and the White House motor pool guy in charge of the presidential limousine, plucking from its floor the rose petals dropped from the bouquet Jackie was holding as the shots rang out and piling them as carefully as though they were priceless historical artifacts. He then pastes each of those images carefully together to make a vivid and compelling picture of that horrible history-making day.
Braver calls his book “pretty close to non-fiction” and says most of the things presented as facts really are, the fiction comes in relating the thoughts of Mrs. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and other of the more famous names inevitably attached to the story.
“I’ve always been fascinated by that plane ride back,” Braver said in a telephone interview last week while on a book tour stop in North Carolina. “What would Jackie Kennedy have been thinking, feeling and doing?”
Braver says he believes it was during that plane ride that Mrs. Kennedy changed from the demure, soft-spoken debutante who always did what she was told to the strong-willed woman who took control of her own destiny in those moments when she fought to determine how her husband’s funeral and burial would be conducted, before he became the property of History.
“When I was researching for that,” he recalled, “I started coming across all these stories and it became interesting to me, about how this affected other people who had a relationship to the assassination that may have only been fleeting, but it stayed with them forever. Many of them, you don’t even know who they are, but for some of them it is all of who they are, so to speak.”
Reading Braver’s novel is one way we can try at least briefly to think differently about a moment in time that has perhaps become fixed too rigidly in our memory. It is a worthwhile way to mark next Saturday’s anniversary. |
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 09 December 2008 )
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