A4 Friday, November 22, 2013
The Hutchinson News
JFK
John F. Kennedy’s presidential legacy: 1961-1963 April 17-19: An invasion designed to overthrow Fidel Castro’s regime ends in failure. More than 1,100 Bay of Pigs fighters are eventually released.
Jan. 20: Kennedy is inaugurated; challenges Americans to: “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”
March 1: The Peace Corps is established. May 25: Kennedy challenges the country to make sending a man to the moon a priority.
1963
1962
1961
Nov. 22: Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas while on a two-day tour through Texas. Police arrest and hold Lee Harvey Oswald for the shooting.
June: Kennedy pledges to support West Berlin in his famed “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech amid concerns that the U.S. might abandon the Cold War outpost.
October: The detection of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba leads to a tense 13-day standoff after the U.S.sets up a blockade around the island nation.
June: Kennedy and the Soviet premier meet in Vienna to discuss Cold War issues. No agreements are reached. The Berlin Wall is erected shortly thereafter.
July: U.S. and the Soviet Union sign a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, signaling a dawn for arms control between the two nations.
Sept 10: Kennedy orders the National Guard to help enforce desegregation in Birmingham, Ala., schools.
SOURCES: John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Associated Press
AP
Impact
The assassination of John F. Kennedy
President Kennedy was killed Nov. 22, 1963, during a motorcade on a trip to Dallas. Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for the shooting, but was shot before he could stand trial.
●From Page A1
MOORE
SCHOLLENBERGER
HOWELL
1
3 2
EL
M
ST .
Grassy knoll
Dealey Plaza
S MAIN
T.
rcade Moto route
STON ST.
*** 1:38 p.m. Friday, Nov. 22: On CBS, Walter Cronkite reports that Kennedy died at 1 p.m. Cronkite briefly takes off his glasses and dabs at the corner of one eye before continuing.
MOSER
Texas School Book Depository
HOU
English class and announced that Kennedy had been shot. He remembers thinking, “That’s not the kind of thing that happens here anymore. This is a 19th century kind of thing.” At age 43 in 1960, Kennedy had been the youngest person ever elected president, and he had replaced a man who was then the oldest-ever elected president, Dwight Eisenhower. “One thing really struck me at the time: My father was a good Republican, but he liked Kennedy. I thought, ‘Why is that?’ And he said it was about time a young man took the reins, and they would have been about the same age,” Moser said. “I think there was a feeling at the time that there needed to be change, and Kennedy was definitely a change agent. He gave us a whole new way of thinking about things, really.” The assassination, he said, “turned everything upside down and we realized we were still in unsettled times.” He also recalls that, at the time, everyone was worried about the Russians. The Cuban Missile Crisis from October 1962 was still fresh in his mind, and he read later that Kennedy’s administration had done a good job resolving the crisis and getting the Soviet Union to agree to remove its missiles from Cuba. It wasn’t until the spring that Moser really began to reflect on what had happened. He wondered whether the Russians had somehow been involved in the assassination. He thought about how energetic and forward-thinking Kennedy had been. “JFK’s assassination certainly seemed to be a tragedy, but I guess I thought that was something that would never happen again,” Moser said. But it did – in 1968, when Martin Luther King Jr. and then Robert Kennedy were shot to death. Moser said he was “a fine Republican in those days.” He didn’t become a Democrat until later, when he was working for the Kansas Department of Transportation in the administration of Gov. John Carlin, a Democrat. Moser saw things in Carlin’s administration that were “more people-oriented and made sense,” and it reminded him, in a way, of Kennedy’s administration.
200 ft 50 m 1
7:50 a.m.
Oswald enters the book depository with a package he tells everyone holds curtain rods. He assembles his rifle shortly before noon.
2
12:27 p.m.
Over 150,000 people assemble to greet Kennedy, Texas Gov. John Connally and their wives as they travel down Main St.
SOURCES: Associated Press reports, Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza
from journalism, Schollenberger ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for a U.S. Senate seat from Kansas in 2010.
Sandra J. Milburn/The Hutchinson News
Nolan Howell searches through his large collection of newspapers about Kennedy's assassination that he has collected through the years. *** Like Moser, Charles Schollenberger, who now lives in Prairie Village, grew up in a Republican family in Ohio. He remembers watching the Kennedy-Nixon debates in 1960 and thinking he probably leaned toward Richard Nixon in that election. In November 1963, he was a sixth-grader in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, a strong interest in history and government only then awakening inside him, when Kennedy was assassinated. “It struck me. ‘Wow. We’re living through history like what happened to Lincoln,’ ” Schollenberger recalled. After coming home from school that day, Schollenberger rode his bicycle to a drugstore to buy a copy of the Akron Beacon-Journal’s extra edition. His grandfather had given him an American flag earlier, and Schollenberger flew it at half-mast outside his home. It became his Kennedy flag. Less than five years later, he would fly the same flag at half-staff after the assassination of President Kennedy’s brother Robert during the 1968 campaign. And four decades after that, he would again fly that same flag at half-mast after
the death of Sen. Ted Kennedy. “I got interested in politics in large part because of Kennedy,” Schollenberger said of JFK. Schollenberger’s interest in politics and government grew throughout his teenage years. He was elected president of his senior class in high school. He campaigned to lower the voting age from 21 to 18, and he campaigned for the election of John Seiberling Jr., an anti-war Democrat who upset a 20-year Republican incumbent congressman from Ohio in 1970. In 1972 his conversion to the Democratic Party was complete. It was during the height of the Vietnam War, after the slayings of four students during an anti-war protest at Kent State University, not far from Schollenberger’s home, and amid the Watergate scandal. Schollenberger, feeling betrayed by then President Nixon’s empty promise that he had a “secret plan” to end the war, cast his first presidential vote for Democrat George McGovern. He largely stayed out of politics during a career in journalism that brought him to Kansas, including a stint at The Hutchinson News in 1981 and 1982. Then, after retiring
*** 5 p.m. Friday, Nov. 22: Air Force One, carrying the body of Kennedy as well as the new president, Lyndon Johnson, lands in Washington. Kennedy’s casket is taken away in an ambulance. Jackie Kennedy, still wearing her blood-stained pink outfit, rides in the ambulance. President Johnson briefly addresses the nation: “We have suffered a loss that cannot be weighed. For me, it is a deep personal tragedy. I know that the world shares the sorrow that Mrs. Kennedy and her family bear. I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your help – and God’s.” *** A few years ago, Schollenberger stumbled across an eBay auction of a collection of photos from Kennedy’s 1960 campaign stop for a speech and banquet at Shawnee Mission East High School in Prairie Village and a copy of the event program signed by Kennedy. He eventually won the auction and in turn sold the items to the school for its archives. Those pictures were shown at the school last Saturday during a re-enactment of the 1960 event, organized by Schollenberger and others and attended by more than 400 people. Afterward, the local actor who portrayed Kennedy and the principal of the school unveiled a plaque commemorating the future president’s visit to Shawnee Mission East. After Schollenberger grad-
uated from high school in Ohio, he went to the College of Wooster and also spent a “Washington semester” studying government in Washington at American University, just as the Watergate crisis was brewing in 1973. While there, Schollenberger made a pilgrimage to the site at American University where Kennedy, in June 1963, announced an agreement to begin negotiations with the Soviet Union on what would become the nuclear test ban treaty later that year. Schollenberger was inspired by Kennedy’s rhetoric, especially his 1961 inaugural address, calling on all Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” Schollenberger has a framed copy of that speech, signed by Ted Sorensen, Kennedy’s speechwriter. “Kennedy ... revolutionized my outlook toward politics, which to that point had been dominated by old men and not particularly idealistic men,” Schollenberger said. *** 6:30 p.m. Friday, Nov. 22: TV viewers get their first look at Lee Harvey Oswald. In a hallway choked with reporters and photographers at Dallas police headquarters, an officer works his way through the crowd, holding over his head the rifle Oswald had used to kill Kennedy. Then Oswald is led past the crowd and through a doorway. His face appears swollen and there is an abrasion over one eye. *** Nolan Howell, a retired newspaper reporter and editor in McPherson, has a vast collection of newspapers,
3
12:30 p.m.
Kennedy and Connally are hit by gunfire after the car enters Dealey Plaza. The limousine races toward Parkland Memorial Hospital. AP
magazines and books from historic events in his lifetime, including the assassination. Howell, who was a McPherson College junior when Kennedy died, has copies of the Warren Commission’s report of its investigation into the assassination and scores of other books. He has about a dozen copies of “The Torch is Passed,” a memorial book published by The Associated Press and made available through newspapers across the U.S. Howell’s favorites are two copies sold by the Kansas City Star with a white book jacket depicting the Statue of Liberty weeping in grief, its torch lowered to its side. Howell thinks that if Kennedy had lived, the U.S. involvement in Vietnam would not have escalated into the war that took more than 58,000 American lives. But he also thinks that Kennedy’s ambivalence about Vietnam leads to some of the many and varied conspiracy theories about his death. However, Howell said, he doesn’t really subscribe to those theories. He is convinced by recent scientific analysis and re-creations of the assassination that Oswald was the lone assassin and that the so-called “magic bullet” did indeed pass through Kennedy’s neck and also cause all the extensive wounds to Texas Gov. John Connally, who was seated in front of Kennedy. *** 3:30 a.m. Saturday, Nov. 23: Preceded by a Marine honor guard, an ambulance rolls slowly along the White House’s curved driveway. The casket bearing Kennedy’s body is placed in the East Room.
Associated Press photos
Left: President John F. Kennedy slumps down in the backseat of a car after being fatally shot in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy leans over the president as Secret Service agent Clinton Hill rides on the back of the car. Center left: In this photo from the White House via the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library in Boston, Lyndon B. Johnson is sworn in as president Nov. 22, 1963, as Jacqueline Kennedy stands at his side in the cabin of the presidential plane on the ground in Dallas. Judge Sarah T. Hughes, left, administers the oath. In background, from left are, Associate Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff, holding microphone; Jack Valenti, administrative assistant to Johnson; Rep. Albert Thomas, D-Texas.; Lady Bird Johnson; and Rep. Jack Brooks, D-Texas. Center right: Lee Harvey Oswald, suspected assassin of Kennedy, holds up his manacled hands Nov. 22, 1963, at police headquarters in Dallas. Right: John F. Kennedy Jr., 3, salutes his father’s casket Nov. 25, 1963, in Washington. Widow Jacqueline Kennedy, center, and daughter Caroline Kennedy are accompanied by the late president’s brothers Sen. Edward Kennedy, left, and Attorney General Robert Kennedy.