November 22, 1963 . . . and beyond

It’s the 50th anniversary of three notable deaths. Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, is often overlooked on the date of his passing because his fame is not as widespread as that of C. S. Lewis, the Christian apologist whose Chronicles of Narnia is read in classrooms. On November 22, 1963, the news that Huxley and Lewis would no longer put pen to paper was put on hold as television, radio, and newspapers (no one used the word “media” much back then) placed all of their focus on John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States who was assassinated in Dallas, Texas early in the afternoon.

I was six-years-old, a first grader at a parochial school where the principal announced the tragedy over the PA system. We stood next to our desks, said a prayer, probably a “Hail Mary” or something equally meaningless, and were dismissed early. Once home, I didn’t really grasp the reason for my mother’s tears. I knew JFK as an image on the black-and-white TV screen, someone not unlike Ben Casey, the doctor played by Vince Edwards on a series popular at the time. There were soon clues that Kennedy was more important than a TV doctor.

Once the news broke, there was no other news. Television covered the story around the clock for four days. There was the news of the assassination attempt, the confirmation that Kennedy was dead, interviews with tearful Americans, the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald, then Oswald's death at the hands of Jack Ruby, all culminating in Kennedy's funeral on Monday November 25 followed by burial in Arlington Cemetery. Kennedy's body was laid to rest, but his ghost has haunted the country ever since.

There are questions, not only about the possibility of a conspiracy in his death, but about his life and legacy. Was Kennedy a great president comparable to Lincoln and FDR? Or was he simply a great cultural icon, a political Elvis? One thing is certain: He was an inspirational figure to millions of people, including many who were not born in 1963.

Shortly after his father’s death, John Kennedy Jr was asked if he remembered him and where was he now?

"Heaven,” the little boy said.

In November 22, 1963: Reflections on the Life, Assassination, and Legacy of John F. Kennedy by Dean R. Owen, the author quotes Reverend Billy Graham who recalled visiting Kennedy only four days before his inauguration as president in January 1961. Kennedy asked Graham about the Bible and where he believed history was heading. Graham told the newly elected president that history would come to a dramatic end with the second coming of Jesus Christ.

Kennedy said, “I’m interested in that.”

Brian W. Fairbanks

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Lying Bastard Johnson

In summer 1964 during one of my family’s visits to Euclid Beach, an amusement park in Cleveland, Ohio, cotton candy and roller coasters had to compete with politics for the attention of the patrons. Senator Edward Kennedy was present to do his democratic duty by supporting Lyndon Johnson in that year’s presidential race. The uncouth Texan inherited the presidency the previous November after Edward’s brother, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated. On that day at Euclid Beach, Kennedy scribbled his indecipherable autograph for me, and I also got a white Stetson made of hard plastic with an LBJ campaign button attached to the headband. Setting the button aside, I often wore the hat in the years ahead, but I would imagine myself as John Wayne or Clint Eastwood when playing cowboy, not LBJ. Who would want to be him? Wayne and Eastwood did their own shooting even if they only used blanks on a movie set. LBJ used real bullets, but let others pull the trigger for him, not only in Vietnam, but, if a new book is to be believed, much closer to home.

“Lyndon and I both wanted to be president,” a tipsy Richard Nixon told political consultant Roger Stone, “but only he was willing to kill for it.” And he did kill for it, at least according to Stone whose book, The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ, was discussed one recent night on Coast to Coast with weekend host John B. Wells.

“Oh boy,” Wells repeatedly said as Stone shared one awful anecdote after another concerning the vile, despicable man who succeeded JFK as president. Johnson owed his political career to bribes, blackmail, threats, and murder, reaching the highest office in the land by engineering the assassination of the man he reluctantly served as vice president. You’ve seen the photo of LBJ being solemnly sworn in next to a shaken Jacqueline Kennedy. But have you seen the other picture, snapped seconds later, when a grinning LBJ winks conspiratorially at a friend in the rear, as if to say, “We pulled it off”?

Sure, he probably did more than any president in promoting civil rights, but, as Stone reports, Johnson was a nasty bully who abused his family, his friends, his associates, and even his dogs. A photo of LBJ picking his beagle off the ground by its ears made the rounds in the ‘60s and still alarms animal lovers. This is the man who painted his republican opponent, Barry Goldwater, as a right wing maniac itching to press the nuclear button while portraying himself as a man of peace who would bring the troops home from Vietnam. After his landslide victory in November 1964, Johnson continued and even accelerated the war.

Johnson and his policies were responsible for much of the violence that tore the country apart in 1968, including the riots that disrupted that summer’s democratic convention. By then, he was so despised even by his own party that he didn’t have a prayer at the ballot box. Rather than risk a humiliating defeat, he went on TV to announce he would not seek or accept his party’s nomination. You could say we have Johnson to thank for Richard Nixon.

It’s certainly no surprise to think that Johnson had a role in JFK’s assassination. Until Stone, however, few regarded him as the key figure that set the plot in motion with his Texas cronies. It was Johnson who insisted that JFK visit Dallas, a trip that Kennedy was dreading. And it was Johnson’s equally devious pal, Texas Governor John Connally, who insisted that JFK take the route he did. The assassins were lying in wait, and another Johnson chum, Jack Ruby, was waiting to silence the alleged assassin, the “patsy,” as Lee Harvey Oswald described himself, two days later.

You won’t hear any of this on television during the week leading up to the 50th anniversary of that awful day in Dallas. Television is doing its part to drown out all conspiracy theories and to continue promoting the lie. On Nova, George Clooney lovingly narrated an account of television’s coverage of the tragedy, even depicting Walter Cronkite as some kind of hero. Bill O’ Reilly, the chinless twit of Fox News, has already done his part for the cover-up by putting his name on Killing Kennedy, a book that is the basis for a movie on the National Geographic channel that resurrects the long discredited lone gunman theory. All the other familiar talking heads will also serve their corporate masters by concealing and even mocking the truth. We’ll hear the standard line trotted out to address and quickly dismiss the conspiracy theories: “People just can’t accept that a nobody like Oswald could change the course of history and take out a president, especially one as glamorous as Kennedy.”

No, people just can’t accept a story that is contradicted, and quite dramatically at that, by the evidence. The Zapruder film, unseen by the public until 12 years after the fact, completely demolishes the lone assassin story. To accept the Warren Commission Report as the truth requires even more imagination than I had when pretending to be a cowboy in that stupid LBJ hat.

Brian W. Fairbanks

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Haunting Memories

“Scream . . . no one will hear you! Run . . . and the silent footsteps will follow! . . . for at Hill House the dead are restless!”
Poster copy for The Haunting (1963)

Halloween is right around the corner, and we’re sure to see the predictable lists containing the most frightening movies of all time. In most cases, the titles will also be predictable – The Shining, The Exorcist, Jaws. Less likely to be included, though probably as predictable as the others, is my own choice for the scariest movie: The Haunting, the 1963 original (a more gruesome and less imaginative remake appeared in 1999) based on Shirley Jackson’s novel. Movies about things that go bump in the night rarely remain scary on repeat viewings since you can anticipate where those bumps will be, but though The Haunting holds few surprises for me now, it remains the best ghost story ever put on film. From a journal entry dated July 17, 1990, here are some rather persoanl memories of that film:

When paging through Stephen King’s Dance Macabre, I was pleased to find so much space devoted to Shirley Jackson’s novel, The Haunting of Hill House. Jackson also wrote “The Lottery,” the classic short story that has probably been anthologized more than any other horror tale. The Haunting of Hill House is a great book, and few films are as frightening as the 1963 black-and-white classic released under the abbreviated title, The Haunting.

Directed by Robert Wise following his Oscar win for 1961's West Side Story, this adaptation of Jackson’s story puts most subsequent ghost stories to shame. There are no white sheets floating through the hallways, no monsters, and no rotting corpses rising from the floorboards as there were in 1982's Poltergeist, but that later film can’t hold a candle to The Haunting which relies on subtlety and suggestion for its horror and does so more effectively than any other film I’ve seen.

Director Wise, best known for putting the Jets and Sharks through their paces and for bringing the hills alive to The Sound of Music, was no newcomer to the horror genre. His debut as a director came with Val Lewton’s 1944 production, The Curse of the Cat People. A year later, he led Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi through the mayhem of The Body Snatcher. In 1951, he directed the science-fiction classic, The Day the Earth Stood Still.

The Haunting concerns a group of people, all of whom have had a brush with the supernatural, meeting in a brooding century’s old house that is said to be haunted. At least one of the guests, Eleanor, played by Julie Harris, may be haunted herself. There are strange occurrences, including loud noises in the night and a crashing chandelier, and no one is sure whether these events have to do with the house or the sensitive, neurotic Eleanor. After all, both are a little strange. Still, the mansion in which the story unfolds is a frightening, unusual place where “whatever walked there, walked alone.”

I first saw The Haunting in its entirety in the mid-‘60s when it aired on ABC-TV, but I saw the first ten minutes on Sunday November 24, 1963 at the now demolished Garden Theater, a second run movie house on West 25th Street in Cleveland, Ohio where it played on a double bill with Hammer’s Kiss of the Vampire. My mother had promised to take me on Friday night (the Garden was only open on weekends), but President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated earlier in the day, and the theater, like the whole country, was closed for business. I was disappointed that our Commander-In-Chief’s death interfered with my movie going plans (I was only six years old, and the death of a president was beyond my intellectual grasp at the time), but my cousin agreed to be my escort the following Sunday afternoon. Since I was mainly interested in seeing the full color vampire film, we didn’t stay to see all of The Haunting. That was fine with me. Based on those first ten minutes, The Haunting looked a bit too scary, even a little depressing. At the time, I preferred decidedly more ghoulish thrills, the kind that a colorful Hammer horror could provide.

When I finally caught up with The Haunting on television, I realized my original hunch was correct. This movie was too scary. It remains scary now. It’s the rare film that can truly give me goose bumps and make me turn around to see if a ghost is lurking over my shoulder when I watch it.

All these years later, The Haunting haunts me still. Whereas Poltergeist leaves me repulsed, The Haunting continues to work on my imagination. It is, after all, a film that one experiences in one’s own mind. Director Wise doesn’t show us the horrors. Instead, he does something much more frightening: he lets you imagine them yourself.

July 17, 1990

© 2012 Brian W. Fairbanks

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