By George Seitts, Special Project Manager/Energy Consultant, Rose Law GroupI was a freshman at Scottsdale High School in Scottsdale, Arizona, in the cafeteria about to buy lunch. The news spread quickly that Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK. Everyone around me thought it was a bad joke. Such a joke that one student played on the jukebox what was then a hit song then, “Hit the Road Jack.” We all looked at each other and thought whoever put coins in and played that song was totally sick. The machine was quickly unplugged, and we all went off with heads hung low. School was dismissed. Sadness set in for America, and I’m not sure as a country we have ever fully recovered.
My family was Republican and big supporters of former Vice President Richard Nixon who was running against Senator John F. Kennedy. Political talk was everywhere in our family from morning to night. As kids we knew and heard a lot of politics; friends and family fought over the politics of the day usually at the dinner table. I was kicked off a public school bus for weeks after getting into a bloody fist fight on the way home with my neighbor pal whose parents were Democrats for Kennedy, and I and my people were Republicans for Nixon. No different than today. We were Western people, although my parents came from Old New York way back when. We heard and were taught not to like or accept easterners. And goodness if they came from Massachusetts they were not to be trusted. Period.
As a child my mother knew of old man Joe Kennedy, JFK’s father. He was a big bootlegger like several members of her own family on Long Island, New York and cutthroat and not to be trusted since he was competition and running illegal booze from the end of eastern Long Island. The fact he was from Massachusetts made the whole Irish Kennedy clan no good according the many at time time. Some of those same feelings exist today.
Along comes the big victory by Kennedy over Nixon, and my folks and their friends and all the children got behind President Kennedy. We were told that he was our president, he was damn good looking (my mother’s words), he was likable, he was articulate, he was a World War II veteran like my father, he was well-educated, he had a way of communicating like no one else at the time, he loved America and talked it up, and he was Catholic and we are Catholic. (To this day, no one has either that genuine charm nor that ability. Not sure why, other than maybe they don’t come like that anymore. No handlers or flaks can create this type of individual. They either are the real thing, or they’re not. Sadly, it’s mostly the latter nowadays.)
I can’t speak for anyone else, but when you are spoon fed politics, when it’s in your blood since childhood, you know real from imaginary. JFK was the real deal. A real president. A real human being who, like most of us had faults. We could relate then and we can relate now. Same for Lincoln but maybe in a much larger way. Reagan of course.
Finally, later in life ,I was blessed by having had the chance of working for a noted politician who knew and liked JFK very much. They were of different political stripes, came from very different parts of the country, and certainly had different ideas on how the country should be run as well what the future should look like. They were elected to the U.S. Senate at the same time. They agreed to run against each other in the presidential race of 1964 and would have traveled across the country together in the spirit of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
My boss was Senator Barry Goldwater, who like Kennedy represented his state and country most honorably. Sadly, Kennedy was assassinated. Goldwater went on to lose the presidential race to Lyndon Johnson, who tore the country even further apart. To this day I recall the many good things Senator Goldwater had to say about his friend JFK.
Here we are 50 years later. JFK, we miss you. We will always miss you. You were an American original, who left some tracks for many of us to follow.
