a day of days

If you’ve logged as many revolutions of earth as I have, about 29,000 so far, you will have experienced what my parents called “a day of days”. That would include the attack on Pearl Harbour for them and 9/11 for most everyone still drawing breath. Today marks the 62nd anniversary of my first day of days: the assassination of JFK.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy succeeded Dwight Eisenhower as U.S. president in 1961. Though both of them made their political bones in World War II — JFK as commander of patrol torpedo boats, Ike as General of the Army — Kennedy was a young, charismatic leader taking on pressing issues like civil rights, while Ike was a steady-as-you-go type.

JFK’s concern for the mistreatment of black people made him highly unpopular in the white south. I was waiting for my first afternoon class at Fair Park High School in Shreveport, Louisiana, when a classmate came in and said “They got that son-of-a-bitch in Dallas!” (In all fairness, that classmate went on to become one of the few liberals in our class of 400.)

I knew immediately that all the action would be in the newsroom of the Shreveport Times, where I worked part-time as a copy boy. I pulled my girlfriend out of her home-ec class and told her I was going there but would be back for our date. The newsroom was bustling as theories flew through the air, growing or shrinking as facts came in over the teletypes. The bustle stopped abruptly when someone yelled out that Kennedy had died, then roared back more intensely.

I left the newsroom a few hours later, checked in with my parents and picked up my girlfriend. We went to see an evening showing of McClintock, a John Wayne movie. As we left the theatre in downtown Shreveport, there were actually newsboys on the streets yelling “Extra! Extra! Read all about it!”

Coincidentally, that day was set for a test screening of Doctor Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick’s nonpareil satire. The assassination moved the release date to January 1964. That gave the filmmakers time to change a line. As Slim Pickens’ character is reading the contents of a survival kit to his crew on a bomber flying over Russia, he says “Shoot. A fella could have a pretty good time in Dallas with all this stuff.” Kubrick re-recorded the line with Pickens saying “Vegas” instead of “Dallas” and it was dubbed in, but since the scene wasn’t reshot, you can still make out Pickens mouthing “Dallas”.

JFK’s killing may have also contributed to the exclusion of a scene in the film where a massive pie fight erupts in the war room. After President Muffley takes one in the face, General Turgidson yells “Gentlemen! Our gallant young president has been struck down in his prime!” The film’s editor, Anthony Harvey, said the scene “would have stayed, except that Colombia Pictures were horrified, and thought that it would offend the president’s family.” Kubrick said that the scene had already been cut because it was “a disaster of Homeric proportions”.