All Politics is Local
All Politics is Local
The first politician I have any real memory of is LBJ. Some folks (himself included) referred to the thirty-sixth president as Jumbo. The unimaginative may ponder any residual mystery the sobriquet holds for them while the rest of us move on with our tale...
I came to know America’s second Texan president in the days following the sad events in North Texas the year I turned six. You could say it was my political awakening. I say it.
And yeah, that’s right, Jumbo was the second Texan president. As Donald Trump might put it, “A lot of people don’t know this but Dwight Eisenhower was born in Texas.” Except that a lot of people actually don’t know that. You probably didn’t.
I took up rooms there on Elm Street years later, not too far from where it all happened. I had a daughter by then and she would fly up to Dallas all by herself to visit. She was a third grader, fearless and brilliant. After breakfast on Thursday we rode down the elevator and took a walk to the Grassy Knoll. I played Dealey Plaza docent and gave her the lay-of-the-land.
“But why did he kill him here?” She asked. My daughter knew of President Kennedy's death from school but had no idea Papa was living seven blocks down the road from where he was shot.
I hadn’t been aware of it either before I moved into that loft downtown. I rented the place over the phone. This was before you could rent places over the internet; just before. It was the year the computers were literally scheduled to kill us all at midnight on New Year’s Eve. That’s why I was in Dallas, picking up nice coin while working tirelessly to prevent the collapse of Western Civilization.
The idea was that we’d put in more computers to solve the computer problem. Y2K was largely a marketing scheme, a Sharpie drawing onto the dot com boom map. It’s the only conspiracy theory I believe in because it’s the only conspiracy I ever participated in. If only unwittingly. Of course isn’t that what everybody says when they get caught in a conspiracy?
“Your honor, I had no idea what they were doing.”
“Okay, in that case I’m giving you five years.”
“But you gave everyone else three!”
“The extra two are for being a dumb ass.”
The judge would say.
I answered Sloan’s question thoughtfully, attempting to draw a lesson about the wages of impulsive behavior – which I was inordinately qualified to speak about.
“I’m sure Lee felt he had some pretty good reasons for thinking that shooting the president in the head was a good idea. But it actually turned out to be the worst idea the poor dumb bastard ever came up with.”
“Why is that, Papa?”
“Because he took a fatal bullet himself less than forty-eight hours later.”
“Holy shit!” My eight-year-old daughter replied. I let her talk like that. But she was right of course. That weekend before Turkey Day in 1963 was definitely a Holy Shit occasion.
“Did the police shoot Lee, Papa? Are we related to him?”
“No. And, no.”
“Oh. I see. He killed himself over the guilt at what he’d done?”
“Not exactly, Sweet Pea. Lee was gunned down in the Dallas police headquarters by a Jewish titty-bar owner named Ruby.”
“That sounds awfully fishy. Ruby? A girl shot Lee? In a police station?”
“Ruby was guy. His name was actually Rubenstein, but he insisted folks call him Ruby. A lot of people don’t know that last part,” I told my kid, Trump-like.
“Is it because he was Jewish that he changed his name, Papa?”
“Maybe. But you have to think someone managing a titty-bar in Dallas in 1963 would have more pressing things to worry about than a Jewish surname.”
“What exactly is a titty-bar, Papa?”
“Ask your mother.” We had divorced five years earlier.
We had turkey and some remarkably tasty cranberry sauce at Luby’s Cafeteria later that day. Twenty years later, Sloan makes her own cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving and doesn’t buy pies from Safeway and slip them in Pyrex dishes; she makes them from scratch.
The zenith of the Lee Clan my daughter straps on PPE and helps doctors jam ventilator tubes into people’s necks in the COVID ward. A genuine bad ass.
***
I was a couple years younger than my daughter when Lee Radziwill's big sister bobby-pinned a Chanel pillbox atop her perfect hair that morning at the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth. Jackie would, happenstance, come to know another Lee later that day. We all would.
And before you ask, yes, of course. I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news.
After dropping out of kindergarten I was subjected to a harrowing matriculation the following September when coerced into joining the student body of The Trinity Lutheran School. Ironically, I would end up at a Catholic grammar school less than two years later. Children of insufficiently engaged parents tend to break either as religious fanatics or atheists. I chose the latter path.
Thank God.
As a coping mechanism I was developing a talent for making people laugh after I restarted my formal education with the Lutherans.
Six days before Thanksgiving, a couple hours before they developed that film from Abe Zapruder's Bell & Howell, the Lutherans dismissed us early to go home and get a head start watching the three day weekend Walter Cronkite marathon.
They buried the president that Monday but we didn't go back to school till a week later. Which was great until we discovered the Lutherans were going to gut our Christmas vacation to make up for our assassination vacation.
I have no idea how the Catholics handled their parochial school holiday the year El Jumbo took over. But I’m pretty sure they took the whole thing harder than the Lutherans did.
Speaking of Jumbos, here we are almost sixty years later with a scorching case of Repeating History on our hands, sans le Jumbeaux. For who was Marylin if not a more circumspect, less silicone-y Stormy? That old Commie got it pretty close. But on its second time around, a thing can play out both farcically and tragically.
Speaking further of Jumbos, here’s a tip: Old girlfriends are granted no special exemption from Marx’s maxim and so most of their appearances in your life tend to resemble the Trump presidency (viz. tragedy and farce rolled into one). Keep that in mind when you’re thinking about ringing old Karen up some evening.
So I had turned into quite a little comedian right around the time The Other Lee (not me, not Jackie’s little sister, but that Lee) bought a rifle and scope by mail order from Chicago. Lee paid $19.95 for the rig, including clip. By the Friday before Thanksgiving I was making just about everyone at Trinity Lutheran School laugh. Except the teachers.
As we waited in the parking lot for our parents to retrieve us, an older kid asked me, "So, what do you think about the president getting shot?"
"I don't really care." I replied.
I was playing him for a laugh – which I got – but I really didn’t much care about what had just happened. I looked at it like this: If I was to get my brains blown out, President Kennedy wouldn’t even hear about it, much less be required to ape paroxysms of grief. Why should I?
And besides, wasn't it Kennedy who almost blew up the world just a year earlier. The year my anxiety attacks started. The year my dog went to live on that farm upstate. Maybe it was even a good thing that the guy with three names, one of which he shared with me, had plugged Kennedy. I kept that part to myself, though.
The kid told one of the Lutherans what I’d said, leaving out the part about him laughing his ass off at it.
My father arrived to collect me a few minutes later, no doubt annoyed at this interruption of his day. The Lutheran lady who was terrorizing me for having expressed one of my earliest political opinions marched me out to my dad’s car and informed on me, like some time expatriated Stasi agent.
Daddy gave her a vaguely contemptuous look and said, “To tell you the truth, lady, I don’t particularly care about this guy either. How much do you actually know about Jack Kennedy?”
On the drive home, father told me about what went on at a huge petroleum coke ship loading facility in our hometown that was controlled by the Kennedy family.
“You mean the President’s a crook, dad?”
He ruffled my hair and grinned at me, “Of course he is, Marco Polo, how do you think he got to be the president, son?”
***
#happythanksgiving to you all. I hope this inspirational holiday tale about another dark Turkey Day brightens this one and somehow helps you get through this sad time. And remember, like the critical care nurses say,
“Better Thanksgiving at home than Christmas in the ICU!”
God bless,
Mark W. Lee
- Pilgrim