SEPTEMBER 15, 2020 – . . . “Let’s put Kennedy in the garbage can.” That’s what my older sisters and I sassed around our house in the run-up to the 1960 general election. Our parents were Republicans, as were our maternal grandparents. (Our paternal grandparents were in question; in 1965, Grandpa Nilsson expressed approval when Hubert Humphrey, Minnesota’s Democratic hero, visited areas devastated by tornadoes.)
Our New Jersey grandpa, we were told, was a “big Republican,” and an “alternate delegate” to the 1960 presidential nominating convention. He sent us Nixon buttons, and when I pinned one on, I unwittingly initiated myself into the realm of partisan politics. Grandpa, though, was very civilized. I couldn’t imagine him saying anything explicit about putting Kennedy in a garbage can. Likewise, my parents. That left my sisters. But from whom did they get the idea that Kennedy belonged with the trash? Social media, rightwing radio, and cable news were far beyond the horizon.
The assassination was a head-on collision between our national train and a locomotive of evil. We didn’t have a TV, so my parents listened intently to the wall-to-wall radio coverage of the aftermath. They were not cheering. They were respectfully glum; in shock, really.
On the day of the funeral, neighbors invited us to watch televised coverage. However much a Republican, my dad was a grieving American as he watched the cortege. However much I’d followed my sisters around the house shouting, “Nixon, Nixon, he’s our man . . .” I too was very sad. Assassination is what happened to Lincoln after the Civil War nearly a century before, not what should happen to a modern-day president, Republican or Democrat, amidst prosperity. I felt double grief for Jackie and the two kids. When I saw her in the black veil, holding onto the hand of Caroline on one side, and John-John saluting on the other, I couldn’t bear it. I got up to leave the neighbor’s house.
“Where’re you going?” Dad asked, disapprovingly.
“Outside,” I said.
“Stay here,” he said.
“Uh uh,” I grunted. “It’s too sad.”
Dad rose from his chair and stepped in my direction, then hesitated. I could tell he didn’t know what to say or do. Neither did I, except that I needed to get outside where the sun was shining.
As I kicked a stone down the street back to our house, I felt ashamed. Ashamed that I’d ever said, “Let’s put Kennedy in the garbage can.” Now he was dead by an assassin’s bullet. No one deserved that.
A little over a decade later, Nixon would put Nixon in the garbage can. No one in my Republican family wept or protested. They knew he had to go.
Today? Around half of us Americans don’t know a garbage can from a can of caviar; a fib from a fact; “all” from “nothing”; science from sci-fi; critical thinking from conspiracy theory. I worry that amidst recycled vitriol . . . democracy will be thoroughly trashed come November 3 and its litigious aftermath.
Time to clean up before hope is cleaned out.
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
