My favorite reaction to JFKs assassination comes from (surprise!) Dwight Eisenhower. Heres why... with a link to the clip at the end. (Can you imagine any political leader today being able to reel off American history from 1865 on without any preparation?) Eisenhower Speaks About America on the Occasion of JFK’s Assassination For most Americans today, John F. Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963 represents a dramatic break from what came before. Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullets hacked a chasm between an idyllic Camelot and the chaos and division of the modern era. But at the time, Americans were eager to see not a break, but continuity. And no one recognized this more viscerally than the two presidents who served on either side of President Kennedy-- Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson and Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower—although their goals were very different. One of the first people to whom Johnson turned upon his sudden elevation to the presidency was former president Eisenhower. After all, Eisenhower had stepped down from the leadership of the free world less than three years before, and Johnson understood that having Ike’s stamp of approval on his own presidency would give it stability and enable him to move his policies forward. Johnson hoped to get Eisenhower to tell the press that he would stand behind the new president. For his part, Eisenhower disliked Johnson and distrusted his familiarity, and was too smart to let Johnson box him in. A transcript of the telephone call Johnson placed to Eisenhower on the evening of November 22 reveals Johnson cooing: “You know how much I have admired you through the years.” Eisenhower replied: “The country is far more important than any of us.” Although Eisenhower publicly and repeatedly pledged his support to the government, he declined to issue a joint statement in which the Republican leader declared political support for the Democrat Johnson. But, like the new president, Eisenhower saw the need to emphasize to Americans that the country would survive the first murder of a president since Czolgosz had killed President William McKinley in 1901. Pulled out of a meeting at the United Nations, Eisenhower spoke to reporters off the cuff to insist that Americans were too solid and faithful to let crazy men derail their government. “I’m sure the entire citizenry of this nation will join as one man in expressing not only their grief but their indignation at this act, and will stand faithfully behind the government,” Eisenhower said. Relying on the lessons of history, he went on to detail how the nation had responded to every other presidential murder or assassination attempt in American history: attacks on Lincoln, Garfield, Theodore Roosevelt, Truman, and FDR. In each case, regardless of the partisan affiliations of either the president or the assassin, Americans had rallied behind the government and the nation had moved on. For Eisenhower, the American government stood above the president and above party. “These things have happened,” he said, “and it seems inexplicable to me, because Americans are loyal, and it just this occasional psychopathic sort of accident that occurs and I don’t know what we can do about it…. In civilized countries of the world this doesn’t happen….”
Posted on: Sat, 22 Nov 2014 21:46:17 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015