My visit to President Kennedy's gravesite

It moved me, as it always does.

On November 22, 1963, I was 3 years old. Oddly, I have a rather facile memory, and remember the bulletin on CBS.

I can remember a few things before that, confirmed by my parents as fact, that were clear memories prior to November 22.

Some were in 1962, and why I recall these things doesn't matter, but I do have something of an intriguing memory. It has served me over the years, as a substitute for, you know, being able to do math. I’m likely ADHD. I handle it through a lot of tricks, but I am heavily reliant on my iPhone now.

What’s odd is that I can remember the weather on that day.

It was really warm, for Marquette, Michigan in late November . It was a cloudy day. If any of you are from the Great Lakes states, you’d say high 50s is warm that time of year. I didn’t know that was the temperature, nor did I know what temperature was, but I knew I could go outside without a coat that day.

Children remember oddities more than anything. In my case, on that day, my mother never cried in front of me, and my dad never came home in the middle of the day. That broke the proportion.

We were all watching the CBS soap opera “As the World Turns,” a very popular show of the moment. You can see the moment the news broke on CBS News here. Thomas Vinceguerra, a freelance writer for The New York Times, wrote a great piece about the soap on that dreadful day. I drew a cartoon about that, which, of course, I can’t find now.

One of the things I remember is saying, “Kenny dead,” which I know is reminiscent of South Park, but I said it. I didn’t know who Kenny was, either. I didn’t know who John Fitzgerald Kennedy was, either. As noted previously, I remember the disruption in the house.

We were sitting with our dear neighbor, Rosemary Arnold, who was a fun, effervescent personality, gone too soon at age 39. I am still friends with her daughter Robin, a wonderful person who I am still in contact with. Robin had to remind me she was there, and she also remembers it. I have a good memory, but it’s not perfect.

I have wracked my brain a thousand times over this, and I still come up with the same download.

My other memory was my dad saying, as he saw Oswald brought out, “Someone’s going to shoot that guy!”

I know. Wild.

I also recall going up to Thanksgiving a few days later at my dad’s graduate advisor’s house, and his name was Dick Durbin. They had a real bearskin rug, and that made a huge impression on me, too. This is why I believe my recollection is accurate.

One day, not long after the assassination, my mom and I were in a little J.C. Penney catalog store. Marquette couldn’t have full store, but you could look at things like drapes there. The salesman said his name was Kennedy.

I said, “No, it’s not”.

To put this in perspective, I am almost exactly the same age as John F. Kennedy, Jr., and he said things like, “a bad man shot my daddy with a gun” immediately after the assassination. So he was able, in his own way, to conceptualize what had happened as well. We all have known hyper-verbal children. I had three of them.

The first time I went to President Kennedy’s grave was in 1967. We lived in DC for a month in September, and I know we went then. I have a faint memory of it. I remember the trees and words inscribed on the marble. This part of the gravesite was then new. The grave itself was designed by an architect named John Carl Warnecke, whose son later used smack with Robert F. Kennedy. Jr..

John Carl Warnecke’s beautiful design has faded dramatically over the years, and when my great friend Matt Wuerker took me up to the grave today, he mentioned the deterioration. I noticed that it was definitely yellowed and the letters didn’t pop anymore.

Interestingly, there weren’t a lot of visitors there, considering it was right before Memorial Day, and, as Matt noted, the tour bus had just departed. So maybe there were 20 people or so. I think Matt and I were virtually alone as we quietly stood by the striking gravesite, which is covered with granite slabs from Cape Cod, interlaced with moss of some kind.

This is the first time I could actually hear the eternal flame. It made a quiet popping sound. The round rock surrounding it has a crack running right through the center, and Matt remarked that it looked like a millstone. It did. I am not sure if that was deliberate or not. I told Matt that the last time I was there a few years ago, many people were standing in front of the grave with a dozen selfie sticks.

Today, there were no selfie sticks. Neither of us took any photos.

One time I was there, the light was beautiful, I was virtually alone, and there was a shaft of light filtering through the trees. I picked up an acorn and planted it my yard in Sacramento. I haven’t remembered that since I did it, and I am not sure it sprouted or not. Doesn’t matter.

Matt and I then walked down to Bobby Kennedy’s grave.

This is the first time I had seen the very small marble marker with Ethel Skakel Kennedy’s name inscribed on it. Above that is a simple wooden cross. Behind is a small reflecting pool.

The last time I saw the marker, people had put any number of coins on it.

This appalled me. I get the gesture, but this isn’t Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris, which is covered with all sorts of junk.

This time, there were no coins.

A few visits back, I heard some moron make a dumb observation, which I will not repeat, but it was tasteless, and the guy kind of looked like a skinhead.

As Matt is my good friend, he knew what visiting the grave means to me, and we had a sensitive, interesting conversation about it after we paused for a moment at Ted Kennedy’s grave. I was stunned that he died in 2009 , and thought it was sooner than that. I told Matt the first time I went into the Senate chamber, my mother said, “Look, it’s Teddy Kennedy, President Kennedy’s brother.” I remember the soft orange lighting in the chamber, but not his body or face.

I told Matt that a lovely friend of mine from Portland now gone, Sara Perry, met RFK as a child when visiting the Senate in 1964. He wasn’t yet a senator, but was still attorney general. RFK gave her a JFK half dollar, which Sara gave to me about 20 years ago. Sadly, I didn’t put in a coin holder, and I am sorry to say I cannot differentiate between that one and the half dozen other 1964 half dollars I already had. I’ve tried. I do remember when it came out, though.

We also discussed my friendship with Robert McNamara’s son, Craig, a great guy who lives in Winters, California. He’s a walnut farmer, and his dad was a partner in the operation. He was with JFK in the White House theater, seeing the screening of “PT-109”. After the assassination of the president, he helped babysit Caroline and John.

Can you imagine that? I can’t.

Craig has written an important, compelling, and very personal memoir about his relationship with his father entitled, “Because Our Fathers Lied”.

There is a cenotaph for Sec. McNamara close to the Kennedy graves, and Sen. Frank Lautenberg is two spaces over.

The first time I met Craig was in the courtyard of The Bee building, now demolished. I told him I went to the burial of Sen. Kennedy.

A few days after the assassination, our family drove to Arlington National Cemetery, parked at the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Island, and walked through the gates, along with what must have been tens of thousands of people. It was very hot and muggy, as it usually is in early June in Northern Virginia. We stationed ourselves close to the gravesite. The television lights were on, and they were extraordinarily bright in the brown twilight.

A line of limousines wound toward us. President Lyndon Johnson passed very slowly three feet before me. My mother cried out, “My God! It’s President Johnson!” Johnson was staring straight ahead, silent.

A Black woman was sitting on a cooler next to us. It seemed like everyone had a cooler. She said, matter-of-factly, not loudly, “I don’t give a shit about LBJ. I just want to see Bobby.”

I told Craig about this moment.

Then RFK’s hearse crept by, and I remember seeing the flag-draped coffin, the colors lit up by the exploding flashbulbs. I saw Ethel Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy.

Craig wanted to give a copy of a cartoon I had done on Gov. Jerry Brown’s new ranch house in Colusa County, and we decided to meet. I asked Craig if he had gone to RFK’s burial, and he told me that he had. Craig was a teenager at a fancy prep school, and he went to his headmaster and asked to go to the burial at Arlington. The headmaster said no, so Craig quit on the spot, and came down to DC.

We determined we were standing about 50 feet from each other.

Whenever I stand at JFK’s grave, I go into a fugue state. I don’t know what I am thinking about. There are so many wonderful and terrible things to think about Kennedy, and I suspect that’s why I shut it down. Every time I go, I think about it afterwards for a few days, draw some sort of insight, and move on.

When I won the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, I spoke to Ethel on the phone. She was very gracious, and told me that I honored Bobby with my work.

I was so moved, I told her about Arlington, somewhat apologetically. She said, “Don’t worry, it helps keep his memory alive.”

This is why I go up there.

I haven’t gone to Arlington every time I’m in DC, which is less and less frequent. As an older person, this was the first time it occurred to me that might be my final visit. I’m not trying to be morbid. I am not.

Seeing my heroes there is inspiring as well. I was inspired to keep doing what I do, even if it’s a small thing.

Going to the graves gives me some resolve that decent people will run this country again, and that I have some tiny role to play in that.

We all do.

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Hey, YBs! : That’l be it for a day or so. I will post the Herblock remarks from Tuesday, and I may even do a Substack Live if I can figure it out. Please stand by! Have a great day tomorrow. I have interview with Steve Hilton tomorrow, and then I’ll just chew on my speech and bop around the sites. —J.