Teaching J.F.K. : In a World Removed From the One in Which He Fell, Teachers Try to Define a President’s Legacy

It remains more real to us than even fragments of our own lives.

Year passes year; everything else can fade from memory--your first car, your first date, old jobs and old addresses. Entire people slip beyond recall.

But if you were alive then, and sentient, there it is, acid-etched, and as green in memory as the grassy knoll: A flutter of rose petals in the back-seat abattoir of a Lincoln convertible. The face of a gunman become victim himself, his yawp of pain detailed in phosphor dots on a television screen. The bier, and the flag, and the girl, and the woman in black. New words, made abruptly as familiar as your own name: a rifle called Mannlicher Carcano. A hospital named Parkland.

The news reports remarked thereafter at each turn of the calendar: it was a year ago today that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Five years. Ten years ago, then 20.

Now it is 25 years, an eon in the Microchip Age. More than a third of the nation’s population has been born since a death in Dallas notched Americans into those who remember and those who do not.

It has become history, and thus it has been given to teachers to transmit:

To help students realize why, when special effects and high-resolution video have rendered fantasy more engrossing than reality, their elders should still be transfixed by a joggly 17 seconds from an indistinct home movie of a presidential motorcade, and brought to tears by drab black-and-white reruns of funerary ceremonials.

To bring to teen-agers--born into a presidency that fell because of cover-up and conspiracy--a comprehension of a time when a man who occupied high public office could be as esteemed as the office itself.

To convey to kids--who, by the age of 18 may have been benumbed by 15,000 make-believe TV murders--why it is that this single, real killing should have left their elders bereft, feeling that each had had stolen away some bedazzling spring of promise. That America, the America before Nov. 22, 1963, was a prideful, hopeful place, above the sordid brutishness of lesser nations. Not here, we had told ourselves; not us.

Do not bother to look for Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington on the walls of Jeff Button’s classroom at Huntington Beach High School. The faces painted there are newer icons: Sylvester Stallone, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe.

And when Button feels the time is right to teach J.F.K., there is “probably not a subject you could mention more that students will tune in more and listen to what you say . . . it is probably the most fascinating subject for students outside of the ‘hippie’ syndrome.”

Not always, however, for the best of reasons in the judgment of the 36-year-old teacher who was among the crowd of eager high school students at the Ambassador Hotel the night in 1968 that Robert F. Kennedy was murdered.

“The downside is that the interest is not in the history, or the politics, but the crime, the glamour . . . Quite frankly, I think a lot are still interested in the dirt of it. You mention J.F.K. and they say Marilyn Monroe.” For a lot of them, video-numbed, “the funeral of J.F.K. doesn’t compete with the fourth rerun of ‘Robocop.’ ”

His English students relish the crime and glamour; his honors history students, anxious about college, are impatient at dwelling on “one single incident that 99 times out of 100 isn’t dealt with in the AP or SAT tests.” For many of them, it is “probably just another part of history,” as distant and dead as Lincoln.

If it is a disappointment for Button, an ardent and devoted teacher, it is one he turns to his advantage. “It’s politics, history, glamour, power, charisma, money, corruption . . . I don’t think all year long there’s been such a tool for captivating people.”

Button believes in the teacher as storyteller. So he takes the time to build, block by block, through McCarthyism and Little Rock and Berlin and TV debates, to the world of 1963, when “politicians were less crass and hated than now. It was a time of hope for the country: Civil rights programs, the space program, the Peace Corps”--and there were the Kennedys, “white shirts, sleeves rolled up, those little thin ties pulled off to the side; they can just see them doing battle. They can see the change they were offering America.”

Talk to Parents

Two weeks ago at this high school, mock presidential voting gave 80% to George Bush, 20% to Michael Dukakis. And when the time comes for Button to assign students to go home and talk to their parents about Dallas and J.F.K., a dislike of Kennedy’s policies often communicates itself into the students’ generation.

“What happened to, like, the Bay of Pigs, when he lost?” asked one boy, the class’ outspoken conservative. Then “he was killed, and all of a sudden people thought he was perfect.”

“You can’t rip on a dead guy,” another student countered.

The conservative young man thought a moment. “Kennedy had a much bigger fault than Iran-Contra. He was unfaithful to his wife.”

The assassination is, at bottom, a generational event, like the death of F.D.R. or, to a lesser degree, the Challenger explosion. Button feels that perhaps this generation’s detachment from its elders’ emotions is not altogether a bad thing.

“Watergate, Vietnam (have) convinced the typical American and especially the young that the government is not all good.” And seeing events without tears or rosy glasses, “maybe there is a little more rational questioning. If you can look at this emotion with the Kennedys, you can see the same thing with Reagan/Bush in reverse, Ollie North, wrapped in the flag. It lets you see how certain emotional events can almost blind you to reality.”

Sharon Bergh’s father taught high-school government, and in November 1963, he told his children, as he told his students, remember this, this is important.

Bergh, who was barely 5, teaches government and economics herself now, and every year, one student or another does a J.F.K. term paper. J.F.K. and the space program, or the Cuban missile crisis, or Berlin. The things on paper, the things in books, don’t vanish.

But the other part, the feeling of it, is elusive. Franklin High School in Highland Park is a beachhead neighborhood of new immigrant Latinos and Asians. Boat people who have eaten lizards to survive and buried relatives by the score and kids who see friends die routinely in gang cross fire find that wistfulness for one dead President in 1963 is hardly worth a backward glance from the flinty realities of life in 1988.

Kids Are Younger

And to teach 1963 “is hard,” says Bergh, “because there are some things you assume as background; you forget every group of kids coming in is a bit younger, maybe from a foreign country. So it gets further and further from shared experiences.”

In her government textbook, there are only two references to the Kennedy assassination. Bergh sometimes tells them, “I have to take a minute and share the personal aspect of this,” though she herself was only 5. “You couldn’t believe the optimism, the hope, the prosperity, the we-can-do-it spirit” of 1963. “Then I say, ‘think of the hostages, the gas lines,’ that when Carter left office there was not a good feeling about being American.”

Time has altered other things as well.

These students are propelled by the twin pistons of success and money. Bergh’s honors students are dedicated to math and science, to cultivating salable skills for big-ticket professions, she says. The yearbook editor, a Korean-American, walked off with a post-election trophy--a Bush-Quayle sign.

Amid such focused intensity, there is one further lesson of the Kennedy era that Bergh is finding hard to teach. It is public service.

Each day the students see Bergh come to work, in her faded yellow classroom, a former choral music room, a converted trailer with no windows and not enough blackboards and a roof that leaks without fail when the rains come. Teaching? her students ask in sincere perplexity. “Why would you want to do that?”

“I think they’re much more cynical. Perhaps they’re less idealistic, more self-centered, and feel they can’t get involved . . . The people who counted on the Kennedys, with hope, got ripped apart.”

Because of that, perhaps, “public service, civic duty really aren’t in their vocabulary except as a small, small few. Both Bush and Dukakis stressed public service, but I don’t think (the students) believe it.”

Other Assassinations

Bergh feels that distance has cleared the view to history’s horizon; other assassinations have diluted the horror of this one. “We try to rewrite history and say Kennedy was great and glorious . . . kids want to know, what did he do ? They’re much more practical in that. We tend to look at that period and say wasn’t everything wonderful? But the realities of the time were that for a whole bunch of people things weren’t wonderful.”

“I think it’s our generation that hasn’t put it in perspective yet; this generation . . . can’t figure how anyone could have been enamored of a President. Presidents come and go, they resign in disgrace. They’re just politicians, they’re not part of our lives. The mystique isn’t there for them.”

“Past Leaders Have Sacrificed,” read the hand-lettered sign under Martin Luther King Jr.’s picture in a Jefferson High School classroom. “How about YOU?”

“His words immortal,” a student’s chalked message on an adjacent blackboard noted of J.F.K. “His spirit eternal like the flame.” The jeering question someone scribbled beneath that had been hastily erased: “But what about Marilyn Monroe?”

Jefferson High teacher Hayes Thrower, 38, sighed tolerantly. That is how some of his students think of J.F.K. At least before Thrower gets to them. Thrower, who at age 12 pedaled his bike frantically alongside the President’s blue limousine in a Connecticut town, close enough to touch. Thrower, who passed out J.F.K. literature at age 10. Who circulated petitions to reopen the investigation into the assassination. And who now has developed, with a fellow teacher, a warts-and-all program he makes available to other social studies teachers, about assassinations and American politics, with more than 60 hours of videotape and file drawers of clippings and documents.

Faces on the Walls

Thrower’s students at Jefferson High School are, many of them, inner-city kids on whose living room walls hang photos of both Kennedys, or King.

“As a teacher you have to impress on them your strong belief in the American system. It’s hard to ask somebody to volunteer to help their country when they baby-sit two or three sisters so their mothers can work at night . . . but you tell them if they work hard and get an education they can improve and take advantage of some of the opportunities available to them in part through programs that had a genesis in the Kennedy 1960s.”

For that, he believes, was the jumping-off point of modern history, and Kennedy “the first modern President.”

What is more difficult to evoke for students is the aura of 1963. When crack cocaine is sold as openly as ice cream bars, and chalk outlines of crime victims adorn streets and sidewalks, “They don’t see the country as what our parents told us, a safe and secure place that’d be good to us. I don’t think we can ever recreate that feeling, just as we’ll never understand what it was like to be pioneers like Lewis and Clark.”

A Simpler World

“A lot of us younger teachers feel sorry for them (students today), knowing what an impact it (the assassination) had in our lives, how we feel it played a role in making us the kind of teachers we are,” Thrower says. “The world was a little simpler for us, the issues more defined. How do you demonstrate against gang warfare? The deficit? AIDS?”

So he indulges the student who writes “What about Marilyn Monroe?” on the chalkboard; if no one teaches them otherwise, the celebrity stuff, the miniseries-as-history, is all they hear.

“For me the overwhelming positive attitude of Kennedy is he believed in the role of a citizen accepting responsibility and no matter how bad things are here, it is still better than any place else. Those things are still valid and teachable.”

She can have them read or watch videos until their eyes start to fog, but what Kris Gutierrez has found to be the most effective homework for learning J.F.K. is telling students to ask three older people about Nov. 22, 1963.

“They come back and say, ‘God, my dad knows so much about this, he even remembers where he was when he was shot.’ So they want to know what it was about this guy that made it so.”

Gutierrez could tell them her story: Kneeling in church at age 8 that day, then watching her father, a jeweler who never cared that for politics, craft a little gold charm of John Kennedy Jr. saluting his father’s coffin, and getting a thank-you note from the widow to whom he sent it.

Gutierrez, now 33, is teaching her first year in Los Angeles, at Jefferson High in the inner city, after several years of teaching private and upper-middle-class public schools in the Bay Area.

A Day’s Study

And by taking a day or so for this one incident in one nation’s history from a class that must span many centuries, “I’m trying to inspire them to get an emotional attachment to this person, as well as an intellectual understanding of what he portrayed.”

And when the questions arise, as they always do, about the Mafia and starlets and conspiracy, “it leads into issues of ‘what do we want to hear about our heroes,’ and ‘what do we want to be protected from.’ It forces them to look at their own ideas about their idols.”

Naturally, it makes it more personal: “because I have anger, sadness, frustration, hope, when I talk to them, I’m more passionate about it. And they say, who was this person who created such a sense of hope?”

It isn’t just Kennedy, of course. “Emotion is what history is about. They’ve got to realize that today is history . . . history is life, it’s not names in a book, facts on a page. They need to tap into individuals making decisions, 600 years ago or yesterday.”

Every history teacher strives to evoke a vivid realism for every incident he or she teaches: the Reformation, the armistice. For this time, at least, it comes easily. “It’s almost like I’m two people in the classroom, the historian there to present different biases, and the human being with my own passion for the man, to get them to feel a passion about their own lives.”