Coming of Age and Current Events

“So, where’s your brother?”, demanded several of my little playmates all shouting at once.

Proudly I responded, “My brother DeDe is in Korea.” 

I was about 4 years of age when American armed forces were leading a United Nations coalition in a “police action” on the Korean peninsula.  I, then as now, was an only child.  But, I wanted to have an older brother.  So I made him up.  And I explained his obvious absense to anyone by saying he was “in Korea”. 

Now, one would think I was quite sensitive to current events at such a tender age. However, rest assured I had no idea about “Korea” other than it seemed something far enough away that inquiring minds were well satisfied and pestered me no more about where he was.  A maturity of mind makes a difference to an ability to perceive what is happening in space way outside one’s immediate experiences.  And, at the age, I was not yet mature enough to have grasped the real meaning of “Korea.”

I bring this up on the occasion of a conversation with a colleague which brought together the subjects of mourning and of Chris Mathew’s book, Jack Kennedy:  Elusive Hero.

To my scholarly associate I had voiced in our conversation a wrong-headed assessment of JFK’s political and governing policy and a hard-hearted feeling toward the first Irish-American Catholic elected President of the United States. 

He said I was out-right wrong and unsympathetic in saying I thought this President someone who was a man with great skill and insight, but captured by a time, a cold warrior well satisfied with exploiting the fear of Communism still pretty raw then for personal political gain and with further Americanizing the counter-insurgency in Viet Nam, with fully understanding the history of discrimination of groups in the US, especially Irish and Catholic, yet, fully understanding the need to appease those forces in the American South so he could get his legislative agenda enacted.

He said I had a stone for a heart when I asserted:  There seems to me, for those who then needed the hope of JFK, a continued deep need to believe in the promise he was thought to embody. Indeed, the sad events in Dallas, I continued, cut down the prospect of being disillusioned, as it appears always is the case when the real politique of American governing hits the image.

Well, we can argue policy another time, for I am willing to accept that I might be wrong, although I sense not.  What was striking to me was my scholarly associates umbrage over what he construed as my feelings toward this President, as he assumed I, as an American Catholic of Irish decent, which I proudly say I am, brought up through the ethnic-religious piety of the 1950’s, which I surely was, should be as identity bound with our beloved JFK as Irish Catholics were then and remain today.  But truth be told, for me, I had as much associative correspondence between this man and me as I've had with other presidential figures of the days of my young youth, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, that is, none at all.  As the word “Korea” had only a vague meaning of a place far away, so too these names held a vagueness:  They were this thing called “President”, whatever that meant.  Neither the title President nor the identities holding the individual human names did I feel correspond to who I felt, or thought, I was or wanted to be when I was the ages they were running for or actually holding the office of President.

As I explained, between 1960 and 1963 my world was a kid's world, a sheltered existence in late grammar school and very early high school. My Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, neighborhood had its occasional violence, but it was far removed from my experience. The folks on my block-I was third generation on that particular block-were blue collar, but were all working and emotionally, and financially, stable. I got into the usual school yard scraps, you know, the name calling, the pushing-shoving and the rare fist to stomach or mouth. I was an average student: I had the smarts to overachieve, but not the interest in so doing, nor did I have the cause to rebel either.  During that time my world was occupied with attracting girls, trying to be serious about my homework, which more often I wasn’t, and engaging in sports with friends-those whose fists usually found my mouth and stomach.  I had yet to discover drugs, but rock’n’roll was key-I had the beginnings of one heck of a 45 rpm collection.  Oh, and I loved to dance.  In fact,  my partner and I came close to wining the Twist contest in our eighth grade graduation dance.

Yes, I know exactly where I was when I heard the dreadful news:  coming from my Manhattan high school walking from the

69^th St.

subway station to my home on

72^nd St.

As I came along Fourth Avenue walking closer to Ovington Avenue, I kept hearing hushed voices in small crowds talking about the death of the President, some crying, most just standing in shocked silence.  Cars continued to move along the avenue and the side-streets, but I was one of the only ones moving on the sidewalks.  But the meaning of it all truly escaped me as I had no personal connection to either the political office called President or to the person everyone so affectionately called "JFK".  I vaguely understood it as a piece of "History" but, again a history removed from personal experience as almost all of history in books are so removed.

As I had only a vague notion of History with his death, I was even more clueless over the events in his Presidential life.  So, the Bay of Pigs didn't register and in the same way didn't it register when the world first learned about the Soviet missiles in Cuba, about the embargo, about when it come toe to toe and the Soviet’s blinked taking the missiles away.  I was a sheltered kid and oblivious to all these things.

Since coming of age, emotionally, intellectually and politically, I haven't studied JFK as there was, is, no affinity either drawing me to the man or to his role in the civic events of his time. It may be interesting to note that when I began to look at the role of the Irish in American politics during my “Irish period”-from Bloody Sunday through the second Hunger Strike to the Good Friday Peace Accords-I felt a kinship to the images of James Michael Curley of Boston and Al Smith of my home state of New York and not to the remembrance of JFK.

To be honest, my American presidential education began in earnest with LBJ as I came to maturity after he committed the country to Viet Nam  as JFK had not.  I was coming up to draft age under LBJ’s direction of the War; so, I learned much from necessity at that point. Ten years after the Paris Peace Accords were signed, I undertook a study of Viet Nam concentrating from the period of 1965 onward, only noting JFK's contribution to how we got so much involved, as I did not have a strong attraction to a time before my personal concern.
 
I also was coming of age when Martin Luther King, Jr., was stirring crowds. But, it was only when he was killed did I hear and read his "I have a Dream" Speech and it was only at that time was I aware enough of what was going down to understand its meaning within the broader social context of slavery, Jim Crow and institutional discrimination.
 
No, it isn't that I am hard-hearted, I said to my friend, it is just that coming of age brings with it affinities for those things which register, which resonate with an awareness of the world outside of self.  And, for me such sensitivity was not present until I was two years a collegian.