The JFK Blog Post

The Virgin Missile Crisis, bonus excerpt.

Marty had explained his missing earlobe to his parents by saying that a rat had attacked him in his sleep. He knew that his mother’s reaction would be sheer hysterics, followed by the reconversion of his room into an attic space. He accepted that because he knew it was the price he had to pay for never telling the real story of his missing earlobe. He also knew that sharing a room with his little brothers again would be of mercifully short duration since he would soon be moving off to college.
It was at college, sitting in a freshman Poli Sci class listening to a lecture titled “The End of Irrationalism” slightly more than a year after Earle Graham had shot him in the ear that he heard that Lee Harvey Oswald had shot John F. Kennedy. Marty’s immediate thought was that JFK’s wound, like his own, would be of the flesh wound variety.
But it was not. And neither Marty nor America would ever be the same again; although Marty, having only his own mental health to tend to, handled it better than America did. 
The country at first could not do enough to express its grief over the loss of its young President and went into a paroxysm of worship that bordered on necrophilia. Marty’s hometown of Hazard was typical. Before the ghostly riderless horse had made its way through the streets of Washington D.C. for JFK’s funeral, the Hazard Board of Education had met to change the name of Hazard High to John F. Kennedy High. And even the town’s Polish population went along without complaint (though board member Bradkowski wondered aloud--and in vain--if it might not be a good opportunity to change George Bernard Shaw Elementary to Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz Elementary). The Town Council quickly followed suit, and before the late President’s eternal flame had even burned a week, Hazard had renamed Main Street John F. Kennedy Street and added a John F. Kennedy Way, a John F. Kennedy Ave., a John F. Kennedy Drive, a John F. Kennedy Circle...Square...Bridge, and Tunnel, which was in reality a short underpass beneath I-91 on School House Road where Marty had first laid eyes on his hero.
And what went on in Hazard was duplicated throughout most of the country, except for Texas where the President had been shot and JFK Wanted for Treasonposters had been passed out on the streets of Dallas the day before. That Texan resistance to sentimentality--indeed that Texan hatred of JFK--would be emblematic of the swing in emotions that would sweep the nation in subsequent years when the jackals came out to gnaw over the corpse of the President’s legacy. Soon no villainy was too heinous to nail to Kennedy: murder...abortion...drug and spousal abuse...negligence...fraud...cowardice. Treason seemed the least of it as Camelot morphed into Babylon. It was indicative of how the cold-blooded killing of the charismatic young leader had unhinged the nation. 
The portrait of America from November 22, 1963 forward was that of a nation, to put it kindly, disoriented and dysfunctional: assassinations, school shootings, open carry, stand your ground; Mai Lai massacre, Manson Family, Jonestown; arms for hostages, Neocons, mission accomplished; Love Story, The Love Boat, Love Canal; "I am not a crook;" "Mistakes were made," “I did not have sex with that woman;” AIDS, anthrax, assault rifles; Beanie Babies, Black Fridays, junk bonds, too big to fail; World Series Game 6 1986, pubic hair in the Coke can 1991, 9/11; Patriot Act, drones, NSA; Krispy Kremes, cheese stuffed pizza, double bacon cheeseburgers; going postal, road rage, fair and balanced; War on Drugs, benign neglect, gerrymandering, voter suppression; OJ Simpson, Rush Limbaugh, Octomom.

Even the Jesus of Marty’s youth got sucked into the swirling, murky vortex of self-loathing and self-delusion. The one-time champion of the meek and poor and outspoken advocate for loving thy enemies was hijacked by religious zealots and political con artists who totally perverted him. The holy figure Marty had prayed to nightly as a boy for help in becoming a better human being got turned into a partisan shill for greed, militarism, and bigotry. One day when his mother asked why he stopped going to church, he bitterly answered, “Why bother? You just pick a Republican politician and pray to him.”       
Although Marty’s despair at the country’s direction was not a mortal wound to his lofty ambitions, it did cripple them considerably and for many years he had to content himself with a small-is-beautiful approach to life. He finished his schooling, launched a law career, rooted for the JFK High football team coached by his brother Tony, and watched brother Mickey play MacArthur Park on the Mike Douglas Show with Uncle Carlo’s world famous "Four Accordions of the Apocalypse."
As part of his personal therapy for dealing with the great trauma of his youth, Marty tried to keep his surviving shreds of idealism alive by revisiting Camelot periodically. In 1997 he virtually got invited behind its closed doors when the Kennedy Tapes were released containing hundreds of hours of transcripts of what exactly JFK was saying and doing during those heart-stopping days in October 1962 when the world was on the brink of nuclear disaster and Marty was frantically trying to bed Lisa Graham. 

Marty immersed himself in the tapes--in both their written and audio form--and was struck by how very much his hero JFK had been exactly as Marty would have wanted him to be: open; reflective; slow to anger; receptive to humor-- even under the worst of circumstances; charitable to his adversaries; demanding of his advisors; humble in the face of the test history had given him, but confident that history had chosen the right man for the test. Far from being the reckless fatalist of revisionist history, he appeared to be the most restrained man on the planet.