The Miracle of '64

There was so much hype for so long about the 50th anniversary of the Beatles first trip to America and first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show, that I missed the actual anniversary days. The first Sullivan show was February 9, 1964.

 Though I saw that Sullivan show and liked them well enough, I personally didn't have my Beatles satori moment until 1965, when I sat in a near-empty movie theater in Manhattan (behind either Bob Dylan or one of many lookalikes) and watched their second film, Help! Now I still score pretty high on the Beatles quizzes that were floating around this month.

 But from the January Rolling Stone cover story I learned that I wasn't alone in initially missing the Beatles significance--neither did his record company. (Of course, I was in high school and this was supposedly their professional expertise.)

 Here's a few key graphs from that story (this is the link but not all of it is online.)

 The story quotes Jonathan Gould in the book Can't Buy Me Love concerning the clueless executives of Capitol Records, who owned the U.S. rights to release Beatles records but didn't think it was worth their while. Then one of their executives read an article in Variety:

 "...Variety reported that the Beatles' most recent single, "I Want To Hold Your Hand," had become the first British record to sell a million copies before its release. The band's previous single, "She Loves You"--which had been rejected by Dexter on behalf of Capitol--had also surpassed a million sales, and the group's second album, With the Beatles, sold 500,000 copies a week after its release.

 'This meant,' writes Gould, 'that in a market one-third the size of the United States, the Beatles had released as many million-selling singles in 1963 as the entire American recording industry.'" 

 So Capitol decided to release some Beatles tunes, but in due time. But people took matters into their own hands. From the RS story (by Mikal Gilmore):

 "On December 10th, Marsha Albert, a 15-year-old in Silver Spring, Maryland, saw a rebroadcast of the CBS Morning News report from November 22nd disparaging the Beatles and the frenzy they inspired in England. Albert wanted to hear more of the music. She wrote to a local station, WWDC; the disc jockey there, Carroll James, located a flight attendant for a British airline, who brought a copy of the 45 rpm "I Want to Hold Your Hand" on her flight to Washington, D.C.

 After the record arrived, James invited Albert to WWDC's studio. In the early evening of December 17th, Albert announced, "Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time in America, here are the Beat­les, singing 'I Want to Hold Your Hand.' " "The switchboard just went totally wild," James later told Bob Spitz in The Beat­les: The Biography. Callers – apparently not all of them teenagers, since WWDC was an MOR station – wanted to hear the song again, and again."

 And 50 years later, again and again.

The Beatles were a phenomenon throughout 1963 in the UK but America discovered them just over two months after the unspeakable trauma of the assassination of President Kennedy, who symbolized hope and the future.  The Beatles did not replace that exactly.  But they did offer another kind of hope for a future with a different kind of joy in it.  Especially for those who were young then--the early and middle boomers--it was a Way.

The Day Everything Changed

When President John F. Kennedy was murdered on November 23, 1963, the course of the future changed in the U.S. and around the world. Fifty years later, that's clearer than ever. On that day I felt that the course of my life would change, and fifty years later, with that course nearly run, it is a certainty. It was the day that everything changed for me. My life would perhaps not even resemble what it is today had President Kennedy lived and completed his second term. Not just because of him but because of what he would have done and not done, as opposed to what others did and did not do.

 I've avoided nearly everything on the Internet about this anniversary, and absolutely everything on TV (since I don't have it to watch.) I have video from that past, but I haven't watched that either. I've confined myself to two new books--two of the many published this year, and the tens of thousands published over the years about JFK.

 JFK's Last Hundred Days by Thurston Clarke ( Penguin Press) is a day by day review of those 100 days in 1963, with lots of background from earlier years. Clarke makes good and careful use of what's been published over the years, by historians, journalists and a lot of participants in the Kennedy administration. He's used the archival material that's been gradually released by the Kennedy Library. He integrates the most credible of the revelations about JFK's dalliances and his medical history. So for someone who hasn't trusted much or read much about JFK since the first generation of biographies, this book turned out to be the right book to read.

 The second book is If Kennedy Lived by Jeff Greenfield (Putnam), an alternate history built on the premise that President Kennedy did not die on this day fifty years ago. However it is basically built on historical fact, and much of it is about pre-11/22/63. These parts of the book match Clarke's book almost exactly. There are a few pages based on recorded conversations that are nearly identical.

 Clarke's premises is that,even though JFK's own excesses always threatened to catch up with him, 1963 was the height of Kennedy's presidency, and probably the best year of his marriage and fatherhood. He was looked forward to running for his second term, and had found his main themes. On a speaking tour in the west ostensibly about conservation, he found that whenever he mentioned the nuclear test ban treaty and the need to end the arms race, he got a huge response. The pursuit of peace was going to be one major theme.

 The second was a national effort to address the problem of poverty. He'd proposed a tax cut and other measures to help the middle class and the economy in general, he was committed to civil rights (especially the voting rights act) but poverty was going to be a new focus.

 Clarke chronicles the painful dance that Vietnam policy had become, but he is certain--as most in the position to know were certain--that in his second term Kennedy intended to end American military involvement in Vietnam.

 None of this surprises me, nor would any of it had surprised me on November 23, 1963. I learned that he'd been shot by a p.a. announcement from our high school principal. Then I had gym class outside. I learned that he was dead from a boy coming down the stairs to the locker room as I walked up. Hours later I was walking home with three friends, two of whom remain just about my only friends from high school. Clayton and I usually walked across the fields from Central to Carbon Road, where he would go down towards his grandmother's house and I would go up and across to my house. Johnny V. was with us that day--he lived on the street above mine. And as it happened, my debate partner Mike and I had previously arranged to work on our debate case, so he was coming home with me rather than taking a school bus to Latrobe where he lived.

 As we walked and talked we could not believe it was even possible that Lyndon Johnson could be President of the United States. That turns out to be the Kennedys' view as well. JFK is quoted in both of these books as believing LBJ would be a disaster. In our shock, and forgetting all constitutional provisions, we speculated on how Bobby Kennedy could take over for his brother. Surely that's what voters wanted.

 Everything changed in America because of the assassination itself. For me, it was the first significant death I had experienced. There hadn't yet been one in my family. But beyond the losses that arguably changed the psyche of the country, I saw a major focus of my life begin to fade.

 In my own very small way I had organized classmates and worked on the Kennedy campaign in the 1960 election. I got myself to Washington for the Inaugural and through luck and pluck managed to be one of the first ordinary citizens to shake President Kennedy's hand, two days after he became President. By 1963 I had already participated in another campaign and had very interested contacts in the local Democratic party and the still powerful unions. I was writing on world affairs (and from a very Kennedy perspective) for the school newspaper. I followed every scrap of news in print and on TV I could about the administration, wrote letters to officials and generally felt I was practically part of the Kennedy administration.

Though I tried to continue the Kennedy legacy and remain involved in politics, even working for LBJ's campaign against Goldwater in 1964, that first impulse on November 22, 1963 gradually came true. Without JFK's judgment, without his ability to communicate, without his style, things fell apart. And everything else began to change.

On the morning of November 22, 1963 in Dallas, it rained. But by the time President Kennedy got in his car for his motorcade, the sun was shining.

 Greenfield's story begins with one small change: the rain continues. Because of the rain, the plexiglass bubble top is attached to the presidential limo, so it is no longer an open car. So when the motorcade slows down to make a turn off Dealy Plaza, a gunshot shatters the plexiglass and wounds the President. But he survives.

 In this story, President Kennedy is re-elected, and much of what Clarke's book suggests would happen does happen. The voting rights act, medical care for the aged (Medicare) pass, JFK makes further agreements on nuclear arms with the Soviets as well as selling grain to them (and in the process keeps Khrushchev in power), he begins the process of resuming relations with Cuba, and relations with (Red) China. And above all, he does not commit ground troops to Vietnam. There is no Vietnam war.

 But where Greenfield's book is best is in suggesting the ramifications of these policies, and of the difference it would have made with Kennedy in office when various cultural changes occur (as represented by the Beatles, Tom Hayden, Gloria Steinem, etc.) There would be an Students for a Democratic Society, campus protests, etc. But they would not be so violent in any sense. Young people would join SDS and go South for Freedom Summer. But they would also join JFK's domestic Peace Corps, in droves. Politics and government as public service was a Kennedy tenet, and one he wanted to emphasize in his second term. But LBJ destroyed that, temporarily for some, pretty much permanently for me.

 The Vietnam war, more than any single factor, deformed my life and in various ways and to various extents changed the lives of my friends and contemporaries. Vietnam plus LBJ plus the draft gave the 60s the edge of anger, desperation, despair.

 There were right wing crazies in the early 60s, saying about JFK pretty much what they say about Obama. But they were marginal. There were dangerous currents in the U.S. reacting to racial issues, but JFK was a quick study, and in 1963 he was aware of the new realities of the inner cities and suburbia. There was press horseshit then as now, but despite political dangers (JFK knew the South was lost for a long time because of his support of Civil Rights) the arc of history was strongly progressive. With a different 60s, there very well might have been a very different 70s, 80s and 90s. And a quite different 21st century so far.

 There's so much about why JFK could have been especially effective in a second term (while neither Clarke nor Greenfield expect he would have piled up the electoral votes that LBJ did against Goldwater in 1964, they agree that JFK would have won comfortably against Goldwater, and brought with him a Democratic congressional majority) that is hard to explain without knowing how different a time it was (though Clarke's book does a pretty good job of this.) But that's precisely the point: he was right for the times.

 As things turn out, I find myself in no position to be heard even if I tried to explain this. But I was there, and I know it. It was the turning point of my times and of my life.

When the Trumpet Summoned Us

President John F. Kennedy delivered his famous Inaugural Address fifty years ago today. Here are some excerpts that usually don't get quoted but should:

"The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.

To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required -- not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

So let us begin anew -- remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof.

Now the trumpet summons us again -- not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need -- not as a call to battle, though embattled we are -- but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope; patient in tribulation," a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself."

Ted Sorensen

Ted Sorensen died last week. He was the primary speechwriter for John F. Kennedy before and after he became President, and a White House advisor. His words and rhythms are in the best Inaugural Address of the 20th century. When I was a starry-eyed teenager watching every detail of the Kennedy administration, Sorensen was an exceptional example of what writing could bring to shaping the destiny of the country and the world. But his words came from conviction, as he showed in his first solo book, Decision-Making in the White House. I was in college when probably the first book review I published was of his book called simply Kennedy. There it was scholarship and succinct writing that impressed, rather than rhetoric eloquence.

He probably did not get enough credit while in the White House, but those who later maintained that JFK's eloquence was all his were equally mistaken. It wasn't just loyalty that led Sorensen himself to point this out. Though Sorensen wrote more books, he did not achieve the heights of expression or influence that he had as a partner to JFK.

Sorensen reemerged in 2008 as an early advocate for Barack Obama, and was instrumental in convincing Caroline Kennedy to endorse him. The support of much of the Kennedy clan was crucial to Obama's standing. The Obama campaign took advantage of Sorensen's own identification with the Kennedy era as well as his eloquence and speaking ability, when it sent him out campaigning.

The circle was closed when the college student he recruited to help him complete his last big book (Adam Frankel) became Barack Obama's speechwriter. Through the remaining decades of the 20th century and into the 21st, Sorensen appeared all but ageless. But in recent years he was beset by a bewildering number of illnesses--visual agnosia leading to near-blindness, a mini-stroke, prostate cancer, melanoma, a leaky heart valve and Lyme disease. Yet through all that he worked to complete his magnum opus, Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History.

The Quiet Crisis

Between last Earth Day and today--in fact, in March, during the final healthcare votes--Stewart Udall died. He was appointed by President Kennedy to serve as Secretary of Interior in 1961, and stayed under President Johnson until 1969, just before the first Earth Day. He was an environmental pioneer, part of the transition from conservation to environmental activism. The first environmental laws were passed, or were proposed (and passed soon after the first Earth Day, in the Nixon administration) on his watch.

Udall also wrote one of the pioneer books on the environment, though The Quiet Crisis is not much remembered. It followed by a year the first environmental classic and best-seller, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Udall's book took a more historical view, chronicling American conservation efforts. But crucially it also took a wider view, beyond chemical pollution to the total environmental effects of the growth-at-any-cost economy: "In a great surge toward 'progress,' our congestion increasingly has befouled water and air and growth has created new problems on every hand. Schools, housing, and roads are inadequate and ill-planned; noise and confusion have mounted with the rising tempo of technology; and as our cities have sprawled outward, new forms of abundance and new forms of blight have oftentimes marched hand in hand."

Although it preserves sign of hasty writing, The Quiet Crisis remains remarkable in the appropriate breadth of its content. He dealt not only with facts but the underlying and overarching philosophy. He elevated the work of Aldo Leopold and his "land ethic", now acknowledged as a central figure in even contemporary environmentalism, into public policy discussion. He went after examples of air, water and soil pollution--and assembled the first official endangered species list--but he also looked to the historical and spiritual sources that support and sustain attention to the natural world. He could be eloquent on this topic. "To pursue his vision more intently, Emerson steeped himself in Plato, Goethe, and fresh air. The easiest wayh to develop Olympian insights was to turn the mind into an aeolian harp and attune it to the winds and sounds and rhythms of nature."

In this book, he also dealt with urban environments as well as wilderness, with needed legislation and individual action. That the book has an introduction by President Kennedy shows that the environment was on the agenda almost a decade before Earth Day.

Stewart Udall was also one of the voices heard throughout this year's American Experience documentary, Earth Days. He was part of the mass movement before and just after Earth Day in 1970 that led to the laws that saved the United States--from erasing more wilderness, from poisoning more water, earth and air and therefore poisoning itself. But as this documentary notes, expanding effective environmental change to the world, and applying it to the most deadly threat human civilization has ever faced, climate change (which, the documentary documents, was talked about in a national news broadcast on the first Earth Day) has failed.

Udall called it the Quiet Crisis in 1963. It became pretty noisy on Earth Day 1970, when 2 million Americans participated, and soon after, when the fledgling movement targeted and defeated anti-environment legislators. But on its 40th anniversary, it has gone quiet again. There is still is no collective, focused action by environmentalists. Too much separate noise can also add up to a quiet crisis.

Unfinished

The photo is of Senator Ted Kennedy's grave, where his son, Rep. Patrick Kennedy, left a note after the health insurance reform bill passed, saying that the "unfinished business" was now finished. Ted Kennedy used those words, unfinished business, in his last letter to President Obama, and those words were used often by President Kennedy to describe what needed to be done--the unfinished business of America.

The health insurance reform law does cap the long struggle for reform that provides a fairer health care system for most Americans, that Ted Kennedy called his life's work. So President Obama made sure that his widow and his niece Caroline as well as his son Patrick were present when he signed the bill into law. Others also recognized his long championing of this cause. Today the Senate honored Ted Kennedy's contribution with a moment of silence.

This was the most significant step in health care since Medicare was passed in 1965. This had been proposed and advocated by President Kennedy. I was in high school during the Kennedy administration, and "medical care for the aged" (as it was called) was a debate topic one year. So I spent months researching it, and became familiar with the arguments, including many similar to those heard this year, although "socialized medicine" was as far as the right would go--"socialism" would have been scandalous, or laughed away. So much about the debate hasn't changed, including the blinders worn by the opposition. (One significant change, though: a major opponent of Medicare was the American Medical Association, the largest doctors group. The AMA announced its support of the Obama plan days before the House vote.)

That we've progressed so little in our politics is discouraging. But there is always unfinished business, in a country trying to be better. This new law may well do more than anything since the 60s to reverse trends that damage a lot of non-rich Americans, and not only their health. But there is still so much left to finish.

The Kennedy Generation

Ted Kennedy last year, leaving a Boston hospital, with Caroline Kennedy looking on. See post below: the Kennedy Generation. Photo: Boston Globe.

Even after I knew that Ted Kennedy was terminally ill, and for most of a day after I learned he had died (which apparently was unexpected, as his children were away), I was not prepared for the effect it would have on me. I could feel it coming on during the day Wednesday, until I realized I had to recognize it, and I retreated to the television to watch the retrospectives and listen to the talk.

The reason this death was so important, of course, was that for my generation, Ted Kennedy--and his older brothers--were prominent in our hopes and dreams, tragedies and political disappointments, for most of our lives.

Some of the talk told me things I didn't know about Ted Kennedy himself, while other comments confirmed impressions I had. Ted Kennedy's maternal grandfather, "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, was a quintessential Irish politician, and the Mayor of Boston who threw out the first pitch in the first baseball game played at Fenway Park. Last spring, Ted threw out the first pitch at Fenway to begin this Red Sox season. More than John or Robert Kennedy, Ted was a throwback in style to his grandfather. I thought this when I watched him during his 1980 presidential nomination campaign, in particular when he came to Pennsylvania for our primary (which he won.) He had an old-fashioned braying oratorical style on the stump, and he clearly delighted in it.

But if he hadn't learned a lot about rhetoric from his brothers, he absorbed their most important political insights. He even continued to quote Arnold Toynbee and his theory that the civilizations that prosper do so by responding to challenges--an idea central to JFK's campaign, but rarely heard since.

He saw the poverty JFK saw in West Virginia, and RFK saw in New York, the deep South, among the migrant workers and on Indian reservations in the West. He knew what RFK knew about Vietnam, and he helped end the military draft and he voted against the Iraq war. But my theory is that he was less comfortable in foreign affairs, and that might be why he wasn't really enthusiastic about the presidency. His achievements--which are so many and so profound that they have, as eulogists point out, touched the lives of everyone in America--are mostly in domestic policies--everything from mental and physical health to education, worker pay and safety, to equal rights for immigrants, gays and women as well as African Americans.

Ted Kennedy was in the Senate to help pass Medicare. To help pass the Voting Rights Act. He helped bring the United States out of the nineteenth century essentially, to where it is now, which is in crucial ways still several decades behind other democracies.

I saw him for the first time in Washington during JFK's Inaugural weekend, when I was 15. I heard him speak for McGovern in 1972 in Boston, and there for a few minutes I found myself in an anteroom where he was standing, talking to someone. I was covering the event for the Boston Phoenix, and I knew I should jump on this opportunity to interview him. I looked steadily at him, trying to think of something to ask him beyond handicapping the race, while with one hand I tried to fish my notebook out of my coat pocket, where it was stuck. This went on for a few minutes when a man came up to me and started a friendly conversation, pretending to mistake my newspaper's name on my nametag for the city of Phoenix. I glanced at him and knew immediately--from having been an usher at a JFK event, where I was told how to identify them so as to report any suspicious activity--that the friendly guy was Secret Service. If my mind had been a bit boggled before, it was completely blown at that point.

I heard Ted Kennedy speak several times after that, and even shook his hand. I worked on his presidential primary campaign in Pennsylvania in 1980. But I never got past the feelings about the assassinations of his brothers when I saw him, and then over the years the rumors and revelations and revisionisms about the Kennedys took their toll: Kennedy fatigue.

But seeing parts of some of the retrospectives--some good, some bad, but with film and "fact" new to me, the former Kennedy scholar--I was forced to see again how much the Kennedys had influenced me, my life and times. So I especially note a memorial piece by Tom Hayden. Hayden was a founder of SDS and a cerebral radical when I first heard him speak in the '60s. Back when I first read Jack Newfield's book after RFK's murder, I was very interested to see a small reference to Tom Hayden standing in the back of the church at RFK's funeral, weeping. Real radicals weren't supposed to admit that establishment politicians like RFK made a difference.

But today Hayden says forthrightly what I have believed since JFK's murder: "If either of the earlier Kennedy brothers had not been murdered, the likelihood is that American would have evolved steadily in a progressive direction, without Vietnam, without the black uprisings and repressions, without Nixon and Watergate, because that was the trajectory where Ted Kennedy believed his brothers' legacy would be honored. That is why, as Jack Newfield wrote in 1968, we would become not a generation of has-beens, but a generation of might-have-beens, while we were very young."

That in a nutshell is the chief tragedy of my generation, my country and my life.

This is not to excuse us for what we didn't do, and certainly not to diminish Ted Kennedy's achievements. Indeed, he had a hand in almost every positive change of the past 45 years, to a staggeringly degree. Which of course makes his passing all the more frightening. Others will achieve important things, including other Kennedys. But it's not likely to be to the extent or at least in the way that he did. And in so many ways, he did the work his brothers set forth, and got little glory doing it, until he came to the end of his service.

His last major service was, of course, to help in a crucial way to make Barack Obama President. Exactly a year before he died, Ted Kennedy placed the entire Kennedy legacy behind Obama's candidacy. He overcame pain and illness to address the Democratic convention, and in his 8 minute speech, made specific references to RFK ("the belief that we are called to a better country and a newer world") and JFK ("This November, the torch will be passed again to a new generation of Americans") and by concluding with a variation on his own famous words that concluded his 1980 convention speech. And these would be his last words to a national audience: "The work begins anew, the hope rises again, and the dream lives on."

That's the Way It Was

Cable news is eulogizing Walter Cronkite, who died Friday at the age of 92. Cable news is seldom anything Cronkite would have recognized as news, and in hearing Dan Rather and others talk about him as "an honest broker of information," a surrogate for the public who felt his responsibility was to educate the audience, I realize how many of my ideas about journalism came as much from Cronkite (and Huntley-Brinkley) as any newspaper or certainly any class in school.

Show biz was always the temptation of TV, and even in his early heyday, while Cronkite was doing hard news series like See It Now, he was also hosting the supremely silly You Are There, where he pretended to interview historical figures like Joan of Arc on her way to the stake. (Although, to be truthful, I was thrilled by those shows as a child. With this strange medium of television, it seemed possible he was actually there.) But Cronkite resisted the incursion of tabloid journalism and infotainment that dominates television now. He set a standard of fact and knowledge. His background in print reporting was typical for his era, and sadly missing now.

Yes, Cronkite was so influential partly because there were only three networks then, and news came on a couple of times a day at the same time every day, so one anchor could command the simultaneous attention of 25 million viewers. But the standards were the same across major journalism, and and many others could have upheld them no matter how many competitors. The current state of news is as much a failure of intelligence and character as any of the excuses, legitimate or not.

For my set of early boomers, Cronkite was a little late in concluding the Vietnam War was a waste, or in exposing Watergate, but as an establishment figure, he shook the establishment when he did so. He did steer small town, working class, Middle America and his own generation through the tumultuous 60s and 70s, as well as providing some parental or grandparental solidity to my generation.
I didn't see the celebrated moment when he announced that President Kennedy was dead--I was in school at the time--but I do remember that his presence and those of other trusted news figures were essential in getting through that weekend, when the news seemed literally unbelievable, and news that we did not want to accept.

Cronkite was himself one year older than JFK. He didn't quite live to see the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing, with which he remained identified as the most enthusiastic and apparently knowledgeable reporter covering it. I remember when he was more or less forced out of his anchor chair at CBS, which marked for me as the end of legitimate television news. Not that it was always truthful, but it was always serious, and it always paid attention to important matters in detail. I suppose some of my sadness at his passing, which I would not have expected, is that with his death, that era and that kind of news is definitely and definitively over.

August 28, 1963/2008

Reflections on the August 28, 1963 March on Washington and the nomination of Barack Obama on August 28, 2008--with photos.

Living the Dream

I've been hearing and seeing the media and the blogs repeat that today is the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech. It is certainly that, and it is an historic speech. It is also a speech that King substantially repeated from earlier events, and what made it so historic was the occasion.

For it is the 45th anniversary of something larger: the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, when more than a quarter of a million people demanded justice.

I have two buttons to wear today. One you may have seen conventioneers wearing in Denver: in two shades of blue, it says” HOPE is in the air/Barack Obama/Invesco Field at Mile High/ Aug 28 2008.” The other is stark black on white. It says: March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom/August 28, 1963.”

In August 1963, Barack Obama was two years old. I was 17, and I marched that day. I’ll never forget it. Today I’ll be watching on TV as Barack Obama becomes the first African American to accept the nomination of a major party for President. In a way, it’s not something Martin Luther King even dared to dream.

[This narrative continues after photos below]

JFK talking about his Civil Rights bill
on national TV: June 11, 1963.

In June 1963, President Kennedy introduced a Civil Rights bill, which not only covered voting rights but mandated an end to segregation in public places, gave the federal government new tools to desegregate public education, and created new job training and vocational education programs. Civil rights leaders decided to organize a March on Washington to support this bill. (JFK was afraid it would hurt the bill's chances and tried to dissuade them.)

In his televised address announcing the bill, President Kennedy said “We are confronted with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. Now the time has come for this nation to fulfill its promise.”

That’s what it was to me and many others: a moral issue. For the past several years, but especially in 1962 and ’63, our TV screens had shown opposition and violence in Mississippi and Alabama to African Americans trying to exercise fundamental rights, including young men and women, just a few years older than me, who wanted what I wanted: a college education.

Because it was a moral issue, many churches got involved in the March, including Catholic clergy (the Archbishop of Washington gave the invocation, and the program included Protestant and Jewish clergy.)

I lived just outside a small town in western Pennsylvania, with an Italian mother, a father of mixed and only partially known Eastern European background, and I attended a Catholic high school. I was inspired by JFK, Martin Luther King, the essays of James Baldwin, “To Kill A Mockingbird,” etc., but it was reading about a local organization called the Catholic Interracial Council that gave me the idea I could actually be part of the March.

I contacted the priest who was named as the Council’s director. He helped secure my parents’ permission, and I was accepted as part of the group that would take one of the special trains to the March. As it turned out, I was the group. In the entire diocese, I was the only one to sign up. Our delegation was two priests and me.

If you’ve seen some of the black and white film of that day, you’ve probably seen people getting off trains. There were something like 21 special trains that rolled into Washington. There was an amazing mood that day, which began on the train ride down. I guess I was on that train eight hours or more. I walked through the cars, and everyone was very subdued, cautiously friendly, and probably a little surprised to see a white, blue-eyed 17 year old boy. Most of the people were black, but the figure I've seen of 80% seems high.

Update 2013: Near the 50th anniversary of the March, I found some newly posted footage on YouTube, and was utterly amazed to see my 17 year old self in just that kind of black and white film--just off the train, walking down the platform of Union Station in Washington.  It's just a few frames--between 11:31-11:33--but it's me on the right of the picture, in my dark suit, white shirt and tie, looking serious until just before I walk out of frame, when I start to smile at the camera.

I’d grown up next door to a black family—oddly enough, they were the Robinsons (none was named Michelle, alas.) The oldest son was one of my three best friends until they went to public high school and I went to the Catholic high, and we drifted apart. I knew his family--I remember his father with particular affection-- and I had gone to an event or two at their church, so even though I didn’t relate Civil Rights issues to them directly, I’d had more contact than most of my Catholic school classmates.

Still, that didn't completely prepare me for seeing and being among so many black people. Then again, not even the black people there had ever seen so many black people together. But I think the basic feeling we had was the same, if for somewhat different reasons: awe.

But that was still to come. There was another special experience on the train--when suddenly and without any warning, I pushed open those heavy train car doors and entered an entirely different world: it was a car filled literally to the rafters with young people, college students, white and black. And they were singing. Folk songs, spirituals, Woody Guthrie and other political songs... A wave of happy, defiant sound hit me, and changed everything.

At home I listened to Peter, Paul and Mary and other popular folk singers on the radio, and I took out records from the library by Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. But it hadn’t occurred to me that playing and singing was something I could do, until I stood at the end of that train car. The thrill of that moment led to nearly another half century of misspent youth. And it was a true spiritual experience.

When we reached Washington and got off that train, the reaction of everybody seemed to be the same as mine: utter amazement. There were so many people. I seem to recall that organizers hoped for 50,000 people. Soon I was hearing 100,000. By the end of the day most were saying 300,000 at least. By tradition as much as any real count, the number given is usually 250,000—a quarter of a million people.

I remember it was bright and hot on the march route, and it was not simply peaceful—it was as close to a definition of peace as I’ve ever experienced. An intense peace. Wonder. Awe. Gratitude for each other. Love. It was an altered state of consciousness for the entire march.

Before the March, people had been afraid that there would be violence. But from the time I got off the train, it was clear that violence was not a possibility. (And in fact, even though there were troops ready to come into Washington at a moment’s notice, there were fewer than 6,000 police for this quarter of a million people.)

I’m sure there was singing, chanting, clapping, but somehow I remember it as a sweet quiet, a walking joy. Only later did I realize that I was marching with Rosa Parks and Josephine Baker, Paul Newman and Charlton Heston, Harry Belafonte and James Garner, Lena Horne and James Baldwin.

Then we gathered around the Reflecting Pool for the program. In the photos of the crowd taken from the stage, I’m on the left, about halfway up. Although I'm a little hard to make out.

The sound wasn’t all that great as I recall, and the speeches were sometimes hard to hear. And they were, after all, speeches. We had walked a ways, and it was hot—-really hot, sitting still in the sun. I was more interested in the music: Dylan, Baez, Odetta, Lena Horne, Peter, Paul & Mary. Marian Anderson had sung earlier. I wound up wandering around a bit, looking at the signs, looking at people.

There was a young firebrand named John Lewis who spoke, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Famed labor leader Walter Reuther spoke: labor unions were an organizing force for the March, which was billed (as my button says) as a march for JOBS and Freedom. It was about the economy then, too—economic justice, equal opportunity.

Mahalia Jackson sang, and then Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke. Even dulled by the heat, I remember hearing those words, feeling that crowd. King’s speech was about the fierce urgency of now.

“Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God’s children. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.”
King told the country that these rights could no longer be denied, and that efforts to secure these rights was only beginning. He said that half measures won’t be enough.

“We can never be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

Then he spoke to those who had suffered for their protests, to give them hope.

“Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama...go back to the slums and ghettos of our Northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. At the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream."

That’s how the most famous passages of that speech begins. And even if it now survives mostly as a mini-soundbite (“I have a dream”), it’s worth recalling their purpose as well as their resonance.