January 7, 2024

In 1963, I was an intern in a Department of  Defense program that trained qualified applicants for jobs in the surging new technology then called “automatic data processing.” During the training, held at Rock Island, Illinois, I rented a room at a hotel in Davenport, across the river from Rock Island, which made me a resident of Iowa for a while.

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On the Friday afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963, at coffee break in the school snack bar, the interns suddenly cut their chit-chat when some important news interrupted the program on a radio at the serving counter. What they heard was hard to believe: President Kennedy had been shot.

It happened during his car escort through Dallas, Texas. While Dallas police scrambled to nab the suspected sniper, Lee Harvey Oswald, Americans learned that the president’s wound in the back of the head proved fatal. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the maverick who launched a mission to put a man on the moon, the daredevil who stood up to Nikita Khrushchev over the Soviet missile build-up in Cuba, a commander-in-chief who faced the communist takeover of Vietnam, was snuffed out by an assassin’s bullet.

Next morning, Saturday, as I watched the live T.V. coverage of Oswald being escorted by police along a corridor, a man emerged from the lower right corner of the screen, aimed a gun at Oswald and fired. Oswald slumped in the arms of the police, dead.

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“I can’t believe what I’m seeing,” I muttered to myself, “this isn’t happening.” It was a scene from TV crime fiction. The story of an assassin being assassinated on live T.V. in front of the entire nation was, in this case, brutal reality. The gunman, identified as Jack Ruby, was quickly squirreled away.

Rumors began to fly. Was it the work of the Right – the Left? Was it the act of a deranged individual or of a conspiracy? If it was a conspiracy, was this not the senseless and malicious removal of a president who had been especially effective on the world stage and at home?

I was not prepared for the second shock I got. That weekend, wherever I looked and however carefully I listened – up and down the streets of Davenport, in store windows, on people’s faces – there was not a sign or hint that the president of the United States had been killed. The silence and atmosphere of business-as-usual enveloping the town, on the heels of this disturbing chain of events and solemn moment in history struck me as being news that Davenport was glad to be rid of this president.

It really should not have surprised me. Hadn’t the headlamps in my car been removed, sockets and all, while I slept? The New York license plates on my car had evidently marked me as one of those damn liberals from the Northeast. “You’re lucky they didn’t take out the seats,” said the mechanic who replaced the lights. And one day, while I was at school, hadn’t the hotel cleaning woman used my toothbrush to clean the bathroom sink?

To some in town, I was evidently a political pariah, not wanted in these parts. This was not, however, the attitude of the many in Davenport whom I met and associated with. And it was not the attitude of my classmates, who came from all parts of the country, a friendly lot who enjoyed one another’s differences in manner of speech and outlook.

It became a lesson for me on how easily it is to lose sight of common ground via politics and, what is more troubling, how ready people can be to fight each other instead of the evil possible when forgetting that we are all human. Mohandas Gandhi made this clear in India when, in his efforts to halt the violence planned by his associates against British oppression, he said “I want to change their minds, not kill them for weaknesses we all possess.”