The Riderless Horse: Reflecting on JFK … by gimleteye

I was nine years old and in the fourth grade when President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated.

Precisely, I was on the playground at Moses Brown School in Providence RI. More precisely, I was on the monkey bars at our all-boys school, light and with a strength to body ratio that, fifty years later, is pure memory.

We were called from recess, back into Mrs. Bachmann's classroom. She, stern historian of all things Providence and gatekeeper of our moral development, who was also relatedly tasked with protecting us against a nuclear bomb by having us crouch under our wooden desks during periodic drills.

With Mrs. Bachmann, we were judged for learning. At recess, our imaginations ruled. I flew on the monkey bars. So --  annoyed at a recess cut short -- side by side peers also annoyed for their own reasons I scarcely understood, Mrs. Bachmann told the fourth grade in an extra somber voice (she was alway somber unless enlivened by some piece of historical trivia) that our president was dead. Really?

In the days that followed my family watched the JFK funeral procession in the nation's capitol on black and white television. Here is what I remember. Not the funeral images or even re-runs of Lee Harvey Oswald's murder. It was the riderless horse in the funeral cortege.

I had never seen a riderless horse. Or heard of one. 

In those days TV serials were filled with horses. There were horses everywhere. Gunsmoke. Zorro. The Lone Ranger. Everyone had a horse. No one had a riderless horse. But there is was.

It wasn't until fifth grade we were taught, in Mrs. Hatch's English class (a big step up), about metaphor. But as a fourth grader watching that riderless horse, metaphor revealed. Our nation was without a leader the same way that horse was without its rider.

The other point about metaphor is that it propels forward thinking. It is not just the horse. It is what happens, afterwards. That went off like a tiny bomb.

I peer backwards with more history under my belt. For example, I moved with my family to Miami more than twenty years ago. 1963,  in comparison, was less than twenty years since the end of World War II. 

In 1961, as a seven year old, the Bay of Pigs crisis, the one that triggered nuclear bomb mitigation drills in school, skipped by me like a mote of dust. What I didn't miss -- and what really shaped my life -- was the Cold War that JFK and the nation inherited. Its losses and sorrows simmered at the surface of our family life.

Four years after JFK's death, I saw my first president in person. A nine year old boy doesn't know much. A thirteen year old knows everything. 

It was 1967, just outside the gates of that same school, not a hundred yards from those vanished monkey bars. On an early spring day, President Lyndon Johnson was planning a route on Lloyd Avenue. The school had lined up. We fidgeted for an hour, waiting. 

On the one hand, we were grateful for skipping our classes. I was hopeful for a glimpse of girls from Wheeler School. 

On that day there were no girls. It wasn't entirely a bust. The president was no friend of this thirteen year old. I knew all about the Vietnam War or thought so. The older brothers of fellow students had been drafted and were serving. One had died.

Nearly fifty years later, I still see exactly the weight in the heavy lines on Lyndon Johnson's face as his motorcade sped by.

I would soon have my first experience as a political activist. I volunteered to organize high schools students in Rhode Island for Eugene McCarthy (where I learned about carbon paper and mimeograph machines). A year later, in 1968, Johnson announced his decision to abandon his run for the White House. Richard Nixon won the election in a landslide. 

Seven years later as a college senior, I had my only chance to enter the United States government at a privileged level. I didn't know it was a job interview at the time. At Yale, my meeting with William Bundy, one of the nation's security advisors in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, did not go well. I triggered a very terse and very brief argument over the Vietnam War. Bundy and his brother, McGeorge played key roles escalating that war.

Since the 1960's, I have always -- well, more or less -- supported dark horse candidates for public office. Why? Among the reasons: that riderless horse.