Replaying Kennedy Grief and the Beatles

In the same week that Capitol Records issues a reworked CD version of an old Beatles album, the History Channel has offered a spate of programs leading up to the 40th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy.

In short, a baby boomer’s bonanza.

As a freshly minted high school freshman in Weeping Water, Neb., when Kennedy was killed, I can’t claim many worldly insights from that day. I watched TV coverage all weekend, but not out of intense historical interest or personal hurt. If truth be told, one of my big concerns was whether the assassination would force cancellation of the big Nebraska-Oklahoma football game scheduled for that weekend.

Even peering through that narrow lens, I had one panoramic vision. A moment of clarity. I distinctly remember thinking for the first time that, contrary to all known evidence of mine, life did not unfold pretty much the same day after day.

Wanting a more grown-up perspective this week, I talked to Lawrence de Graaf, who was a 31-year-old history professor at Cal State Fullerton on the day Kennedy died. He had what I didn’t -- a fuller context of Kennedy’s appeal and the currents of U.S. politics in the early 1960s.

Even so, what the professor remembers most is the sorrow. Not the historical implications or the details of the shooting ... but the grief.

“There was grief such as I don’t think I’d ever seen before or have seen after -- even after 9/11,” De Graaf says. “It was just an absolutely shocking event. I’m not a particularly religious person, but I did something I don’t believe I’d ever done before or after in a classroom. I went into the class and asked the students for a moment of silence. That’s just a small example of how we were struck.”

The political assassinations and other national traumas that came afterward -- the attempt on President Reagan’s life and, yes, even Sept. 11, “haven’t struck a lot of us in quite the same way,” De Graaf says.

As upside down as my world seemed as a high school freshman, De Graaf says it was much the same for adults. “We hadn’t had a tragedy like that for a long time,” he says. “The last president they even tried to assassinate was Truman, and that was botched. No president had been killed since McKinley in 1901. So, the uniqueness of it was one factor.... And then there was that special air about Kennedy himself. In those days, we called it charisma. To many people, it was a new word at the time.

“On the one hand, the president was widely criticized, and his policies could evoke as much negative as positive reaction. Yet, on the other hand, there was this image that was bigger than life and evoked a tremendous outpouring of grief when he died.”

Life is so big and in our face today that it’s hard to picture that, in November 1963, the Cal State campus basically was confined to a single building. “The collective sense of grief became much more easily communicated,” De Graaf says, noting that he remembers a campus “numbed” for several days.

For today’s still-forming youngsters, Sept. 11 will be seen as their first proof that life sometimes slips wildly off the rails. History has given successive generations Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy assassination and the terrorist attack, so the fates must have concluded that at some point everybody needs a dose of cataclysmic reality.

I’m glad for this week’s leavening presence of a “new” Beatles CD. It makes for good cosmic balance, in that the lads first hit the charts in America two months after that day in Dallas.

And it would be a nice thought to believe that, when Sept. 11 anniversaries begin making their inevitable rounds in the decades ahead, today’s youngsters will at least get a new Beatles record along with it.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821, at dana.parsons@latimes.com or at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626.