Left at the Bay of Pigs and Other Sorrows: The Roots and Branches of the Kennedy Assassination

By Paul Reidinger

An American writer considers the historical forces that flowed into Dealey Plaza and those that flowed from it, and reaches a conclusion about the truth of the event and its enduring meaning.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul Reidinger
• Release date: Nov 22, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370652303

Paul Reidinger

Paul Reidinger is the author of several novels, including The Best Man, Good Boys, The City Kid, and The Bad American. His other books include a memoir, Lions in the Garden, a collection of essays and criticism Patchwork, and The Federalist Regained, an essay on the Constitution. He grew up in Wisconsin, was educated at Stanford University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and lives in San Francisco.

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Left at the Bay of Pigs

And Other Sorrows: The Roots and Branches of the Kennedy Assassination

An essay by

Paul Reidinger

Smashwords edition

Copyright 2017 by Paul Reidinger

Cover image: Dealey Plaza, Dallas Texas, November 2017. Courtesy of Eric Mendeloff, M.D.

When I was a little boy, in the early 1960s, television was black and white. To watch television was to enter a realm of living shadows cast in varying degrees of black and white – in shades of gray, that is, and often of startling clarity. The very colorlessness of the images made them clearer. Black-and-white television was a window to another country populated by familiar figures, present yet remote, and sharply etched, as if in glass.

At the time I thought nothing of the slight irreality of black-and-white television, its separateness from the world of full color I lived in, because like all small children I took the world as I found it. I simply accepted it as the natural and perpetual order of things. It was part of that order. I did not miss color television because I had never seen it.

I knew that Vince Lombardi was the coach of the Green Bay Packers, and that his Packers almost always won, because I watched them play. They played in black and white, but I knew they wore green and gold. I knew, too, that John F. Kennedy was president, because I saw him on TV. I watched his TV show. He and Lombardi were friends after a fashion, apparently, though I did not learn this until much later.

President Kennedy was a more real television character for me than was Coach Lombardi. The latter appeared on the screen most every Sunday in autumn, of course, pacing the sidelines in his fedora and camel-hair greatcoat, waving his arms, shouting. But despite all the carrying-on, his voice was seldom heard. He was like a toy soldier come to furious but distant life. Meanwhile his two great backs, Paul Hornung and Jim Taylor, ran the Packers' famed power sweep in each other's company, like a pair of thoroughbred race horses kicking up clots of mud and turf on a weather-slicked track.

The president was no toy soldier waving his arms. He stood much closer to me. He peered right back at me from the television. He talked a great deal and smiled a great deal. He was a talking head, a smiling head with bushy hair. His head and smile filled the screen, and his talk seemed often to bring laughter from whomever it was he was talking to.

Of all the television characters I loved and faithfully watched in those days – among them the Lone Ranger, Sergeant Friday, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Mighty Mouse and Mr. Ed – President Kennedy was the most vivid. He seemed to command the camera in a way the others did not, though I could never have expressed such a thought at the time, and he was not interrupted by commercials.

Lombardi went on coaching the Packers until January 1968, when he resigned to become the club's general manager. The team, which had concluded its two previous seasons by winning the first two Super Bowls, promptly declined to mediocrity. A year later, Lombardi left Green Bay altogether to coach the Washington Redskins. The Packers continued to cough and sputter. A year after that, Lombardi died of intestinal cancer. By then President Kennedy, having much sooner met a quite different fate, was nearly seven years in his grave.

When the president died in a hail of bullets, on a Friday afternoon late in November of 1963, I was but four years old, not yet in school and too young to feel the emotional currents coursing through the adults and the country around me. It was for me as if a familiar television show had been canceled.

The President Kennedy show had indeed been unceremoniously yanked from the air. For several dramatic days it was replaced by another television show that seemed to run without interruption – a show peopled by men talking into microphones under wet gray skies, large dark sedans full of dignified people in hats and long coats making their way into the White House, a flag-draped box, a horse-drawn cart with spoked wheels and the endless, exact, hypnotic beating of military drums. The American people, including me, watched all this rapt. The adults of my small world watched in somber fascination, and I watched with them.

I have no memory of that grim Friday. I am told that my father came home from work at about 1 o'clock in tears. He had a strong feeling for Jack Kennedy, his fellow Irish Catholic, and had once assured me that President Kennedy was the smartest man in