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Howard ZinnON NOV. 22, 1963, my wife and I were in our living room when the phone rang. It was a friend, speaking excitedly: "Turn on your TV! President Kennedy has been shot!" We turned it on in time to hear that last rites were being administered. My immediate feelings of shock and sadness, always a reaction to a sudden, unexpected death of someone you have come to know, were followed by thoughts about violence and fanaticism.
We had just moved to the Boston area after seven years in the South, teaching and living in a black community in Atlanta, becoming involved in the movement against racial segregation. Countless acts of violence had taken place against black people in the South, with which every national administration since the Civil War, including that of John F. Kennedy, had failed to interfere. Kennedy was young, good-looking, with a fine sense of humor. Some of his speeches suggested a great vision of, yes, a new frontier, a world at peace. But his policies, increasing drastically the number of US soldiers in Vietnam and maintaining a huge nuclear arsenal (far more than required to deter any possible Soviet attack) did not break from the emphasis on military force that seemed central to government policy since the World War II. I wondered, still shaken by the assassination, if such acts of fanatic violence would ever stop so long as the nation itself did not turn away from the idea that brute force could solve fundamental problems. I wondered whether the tragic death of John F. Kennedy would cause a rethinking of what we should be as a nation. Historian Howard Zinn is professor emeritus at Boston University. © Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.
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