The shock of the news of Kennedy and Nixon

15 August 2014

If you are of a certain age, you not only remember the assassination of President John Kennedy but also where you were at the time you heard the news. This doesn’t happen with every memory of course. But the Kennedy attack is different. Probably because it was so shocking, so utterly unthinkable. For my part, I was moving into a flat – my first experience of an actually liveable residence since leaving the parental home a few years before – and I was poised on the first floor balcony juggling boxes and suitcases when Miss Agnes Brown, let us call her, the elderly lady who lived across the corridor and who would become, to her ill-disguised dismay, my nearest neighbour, told me about the events in Dallas.

She had most of the details wrong as it turned out. Kennedy had been horse riding, she told me, and had been thrown from his horse. I don’t know how she got this idea though our subsequent rather rocky neighbourly relationship made it easier for me to understand that her take on some things might diverge so spectacularly from mine that I would question my grasp on reality. ‘Do I wake or sleep?’ I would quote to the mirror through shave-cream muffled lips after Miss Brown, having caught me picking up the morning paper, had poured forth with an obsessiveness compared to which the Ancient Mariner would have sounded casual, some arcane version of that day’s news or scandals.

But what started me on this track was a different though still presidential occasion. Last week, on her daily ABC Classic FM program, Margaret Throsby replayed her fascinating 2004 conversation with John Dean, who was White House Counsel for President Richard Nixon from July 1970 until April 1973 and deeply implicated therefore in the Watergate affair. She began the program with an excerpt from Richard Nixon’s resignation speech, made 40 years ago.

‘Throughout the long and difficult period of Watergate, I have felt it was my duty to persevere, to make every possible effort to complete the term of office to which you elected me. In the past few days, however, it has become evident to me that I no longer have a strong enough political base in the Congress to justify continuing that effort … with the disappearance of that base, I now believe that the constitutional purpose has been served, and there is

ARTS AND CULTURE

The shock of the news of Kennedy and Nixon

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