Excerpt
from Boom!: Voices of the Sixties
by Tom Brokaw
In 1962, I had an entry-level reporter's job at an Omaha
television station. I had bargained to get a salary of one hundred
dollars a week, because I didn't feel I could tell Meredith's doctor
father I was making less. Meredith, who had a superior college record,
couldn't find any work because, as one personnel director after another
told her, "You're a young bride. If we hire you, you'll just get
pregnant before long and want maternity leave."
In retrospect, the political and cultural climate in the early Sixties
seems both a time of innocence and also like a sultry, still summer day
in the Midwest: an unsettling calm before a ferocious storm over
Vietnam, which was not yet an American war. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
was confronting racism in the South and getting a good deal of exposure
on The Huntley-Brinkley Report
on NBC and The CBS Evening News with
Walter Cronkite, the two primary network newscasts, each just
fifteen minutes long.
In the fall of 1963, first CBS and then, shortly after, NBC expanded
those signature news broadcasts to a half hour. As a sign of the
importance of the expansion, Cronkite and Huntley and Brinkley were
granted lengthy exclusive interviews with President Kennedy. ABC
wouldn't be a player in the news major leagues until the 1970s, when
Roone Arledge brought to ABC News the energy and programming approach
he had applied to ABC Sports. Kennedy, America's first truly telegenic
president, was a master of the medium, fully appreciating its power to
reach into the living rooms of America from sea to shining sea.
During our time in Omaha, John F. Kennedy was not a local favorite. The
city's deeply conservative culture remained immune to Kennedy's charms
and to his arguments for social changes, such as civil rights and the
introduction of government-subsidized medical care for the elderly. I'm
sure many of my conservative friends at the time thought I was a card
short of being a member of the Communist Party because I regularly
championed the need for enforced racial equality and Medicare.
One of the most popular speakers to come through Omaha in those days
was a familiar figure from my childhood, when kids in small towns on
the Great Plains spent Saturday afternoons in movie theaters watching
westerns. Ronald Reagan looked just like he did on the big screen. He
was kind of a local boy who had made good, starting out as a radio star
next door in Iowa and moving on to Hollywood, before becoming a
television fixture as host of General
Electric Theater.
Reagan's Omaha appearances were part of his arrangement with GE, which
allowed him to be an old-fashioned circuit-riding preacher, warning
against the evils of big government and Communism, while praising the
virtues of big business and the free market. He was every inch a star,
impeccably dressed and groomed. But those of us who shared his
Midwestern roots were a bit surprised to find that although he was
completely cordial, he was not noticeably warm. That part of his
personality remained an enigma even to his closest friends and advisers
throughout his historically successful political career.
In Omaha the only time he lightened up in my presence was when I
noticed he was wearing contact lenses and I asked him about them. He
got genuinely excited as he described how they were a new soft model,
not like the hard ones that could irritate the eyes. He even wrote down
the name of his California optometrist so Meredith could order a pair
for herself. (Later, when he became president, I often thought, "He's
not only a great politician, he's a helluva contact lens salesman.")
President Kennedy also passed through Omaha, but only for a brief stop
at the Strategic Air Command headquarters there. In those days, SAC was
an instantly recognized acronym because the bombers it comprised --
some of which we could see because they were always in the air ready to
respond in case of an attack -- were a central component of America's
Cold War military strategy.
More memorable for me was a visit to SAC by the president's brother
Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. The younger Kennedy was a striking
contrast to the president, who had been smiling and chatty with the
local press and even more impressive in person than on television.
Unlike the president, who was always meticulously and elegantly
dressed, the attorney general was wearing a rumpled suit, and the
collar on his blue button-down shirt was frayed. He was plainly
impatient, and his mood did not improve when I asked for a reaction to
Alabama governor George Wallace's demand that JFK resign the presidency
because of his stance on school desegregation. Bobby fixed those icy
blue eyes on me and said, as if I were to blame for the governor's
statement, "I have no comment on anything Governor Wallace has to say."
I was on duty in the newsroom a few weeks later when the United Press
International wire-service machine began to sound its bulletin bells. I
walked over casually and began to read a series of sentences breaking
in staccato fashion down the page:
Three shots were fired at president
Kennedy's motorcade in downtown Dallas . . . Flash -- Kennedy seriously
wounded, perhaps fatally by assassin's bullet . . . President John F.
Kennedy died at approximately 1:00 pm (CST).
John F. Kennedy, the man I had thought would define the political ideal
for the rest of my days, was suddenly gone in the senseless violence of
a single moment. In ways we could not have known then, the gunshots in
Dealey Plaza triggered a series of historic changes: the quagmire of
Vietnam that led to the fall of Lyndon Johnson as president; the death
of Robert Kennedy in pursuit of the presidency; and the comeback,
presidency, and subsequent disgrace of Richard Nixon.
On that beautiful late autumn November morning, however, my immediate
concern was to get this story on the air. I rushed the news onto our
noon broadcast, and as I was running back to the newsroom, one of the
station's Kennedy haters said, "What's up?"
I responded, "Kennedy's been shot."
He said, "It's about time someone got the son of a bitch."
Given the gauzy shades of popular memory, the invocations of Camelot
and JFK as our nation's prince, it may be surprising to younger
Americans to know that President Kennedy was not universally beloved.
Now Kennedy was gone, and this man was glad. I lunged toward him, but
another co-worker pulled me away.
Copyright
© 2007 Tom Brokaw