Three weeks before that rainy day when I heard John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas, November 22, 1963, I had turned 32 years of age. My son was two years old and was with our usual sitter for the afternoon. His mother was at work in downtown Berkeley, at Shattuck Square. I was on U. C. Campus, taking an early afternoon break in a coffee lounge in, I believe, the still new Dwinelle Hall, seated by chance with the young wife of a poetry-class friend of mine. All three of us had served on the editorial staff of the U. C. OCCIDENT, Cal’s literary magazine, 1956 through 1958. She told me her husband had grown taciturn. Like a lot of young couples, they had crazy hours and not enough time for themselves. I had married in December ’58 and gone to work for the Union Oil Company of California, at the Richmond Terminal, a job I later quit to return to school.
Tears streamed down my face. I was in shock. I felt as if a member of my family had unexpectedly died. JFK’s election had lifted my hopes for the country immeasurably. I deeply sensed the loss of his gifted, eloquent life. Time seemed to lose meaning and dimension for several days thereafter. As time passed, I gradually became aware that we were in good hands. Lyndon Baines Johnson was a more persuasive politician than JFK had been, in no small part due to the national guilt generated by the assassination and the good work John had already accomplished with Congress before he died.
Of course, LBJ came eventually to carry the albatross of Viet Nam around his neck. The country split over the war, much to the detriment of Johnson’s otherwise fine legacy. No one could dream, then, that in a few short years, Sirhan Sirhan would shoot down his noble brother, Robert Kennedy, in San Francisco, or that a criminal in Memphis would put a rifle bullet into Martin Luther King, Jr. These blows hammered the national spirit. I believe they helped open the way for the rise of inequality, an emboldened right, and financial iniquity. Bad deeds of a few can lower the quality of life for the many. It seems to me that they did. Where are the good deeds that will counter all this negation? So as to do no harm to the world, I spent my life in the study of all things human, and in effort to write lastingly beneficial poetry. Perhaps I have failed. One never knows, but still I nurture the hope.
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