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U.S. Rep. Dale E. Kildee found his destiny the day John F. Kennedy died.
The president's challenge to Americans to answer the call to national service and the youthful leader's assassination inspired Kildee to journey into politics.
"That was the exact reason I ran for office," said Kildee, who like Kennedy was an Irish Catholic, and first won election to public office as a 34-year-old Democrat in the state House. Now, he represents Saginaw in Congress. "I began to think this would be an area where one could make a difference in our society."
Kennedy, at 43 the youngest man ever elected to lead the nation, inspired a generation of Americans in his call to pioneer a New Frontier, which was not a place but a way of thinking.
All that seemed lost that day in Dallas 40 years ago Saturday, when a gunman felled a president.
Though his time in the White House was short, Kennedy's legacy looms large, and his death is remembered unlike other national leaders, a presidential historian says.
"It's had a profound cultural impact that can be measured simply by the number of people who mourn his passing 40 years after the fact," said Don Holloway, a historian at the Gerald R. Ford Museum in Grand Rapids. "You don't see that in the passing of other presidents under equally tragic circumstances."
The Democratic senator from Massachusetts won by little more than 100,000 votes against Republican Vice President Richard M. Nixon. Some attribute Kennedy's charismatic style, youth, intelligence and optimistic vision as key points that tipped the balance in the 1960 election.
"Kennedy was remarkable for having his pulse on the culture of his time," Holloway said. "He embodied a new vision that the people eagerly sought after World War II and the Eisenhower administration. He gave them a sense of movement that the country sorely needed. One of the things that he will be long remembered for was his call to put a man on the moon. That was the type of challenge that the country was hungry for."
'My generation is thirsty'
In Kennedy's call to national service, he chose the steps of the Student Union at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor to announce the creation of the Peace Crops.
That call still reverberates in a new generation searching for its own political star, said Andrew J. Coulouris, at 25 the youngest member of the Saginaw City Council and a former vice president of the Ann Arbor campus' student body.
"My generation is thirsty for the kind of leadership and vision on a national scope that Kennedy embodied," he said. "If our generation had a Kennedy-esque figure, I think you would see more of us in public service."
Public service wasn't Kennedy's only call to arms. The U.S. Navy veteran who survived a Japanese attempt to kill him and his PT boat crew when their vessel sank in World War II challenged communism to the height of brinkmanship during the Cuban missile crisis. Ultimately, the Soviet Union withdrew atomic warhead-tipped rockets from the island nation as the United States and the Russians appeared headed toward the unthinkable -- nuclear war.
It was a comeback of presidential prestige on the foreign stage following a disastrous invasion of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, supporters said. Cuban rebels working covertly on behalf of the United States were killed or captured in a failed attempt to overthrow the regime of dictator Fidel Castro.
Kildee, 74, remembers Kennedy leaving Michigan for Chicago in October 1962 and then unexpectedly returning to Washington, D.C., because of "a cold."
When Kildee had just seen and talked with the president, he appeared vigorous and healthy.
"That was the cover for the 13 days in October," the Flint congressman said. "The Cuban missile crisis, where he soared."
'A moral issue'
Though criticized by civil rights leaders for moving too slowly on their behalf, Kennedy became an advocate for equal rights for black Americans and school integration.
"He got the ball rolling, you might say, for some period decisions on civil rights," said Leola Wilson, leader of the Saginaw branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. "He seemed to be very comfortable with all people. That was part of his personality."
He was "the first one who made racial issues a moral issue, not just a constitutional issue," Kildee said.
Kennedy's push to integrate Southern schools and advance civil rights and the Voting Rights Act legislation stand as an example to the congressman.
"Those two bills have done more to advance the cause of African Americans," Kildee said. "The Voting Rights Act changed the face of the South. It was really a turning point in American history."
But the president's fate in the upcoming 1964 election was anything but certain when he went to prop up electoral support in Texas, said the Ford Museum's Holloway.
"The South was not particularly inclined toward Kennedy," he said. "To have met the fate that he did, where he did, and under those circumstances just added to the profundity of the movement."
Conspiracy theories abound. The accusations blamed the Central Intelligence Agency, the Soviet Union, the Mafia and Castro.
The Warren Commission, which investigated the shooting caught on 26 seconds of the Abraham Zapruder home movie film, concluded Lee Harvey Oswald alone had shot and killed Kennedy from the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.
That day in Dallas
The reverberation of the assassin's bullets shook the national landscape, from the downtown Saginaw Second National Bank office of lawyer Leopold P. Borrello to Saginaw native Nancy A. Schrems' secretarial workplace at the Federal Bureau of Investigation headquarters in Washington, D.C.
"The phone rang and it was my wife, and she told me the president was shot," said Borrello, now chief judge of the Saginaw County Circuit Court. "To tell you the truth, I didn't think of him being dead. I thought he was going to survive, but then I turned on the radio."
That's when he heard the finality of what would echo through a generation. JFK was dead. The era of "Camelot" had ended, violently.
People cried. Borrello left his office because he couldn't focus.
"This was something that hit everybody," he said.
"To this day, I do not watch much TV regarding the assassination," he said. "I just can't watch it."
Wilson watched the news bulletin on a television screen in her Saginaw home. By the time she had arrived with her sons at Barbara's Barber Shop on North Sixth, the world knew the outcome.
"It was very, very sad," said Wilson, 64. "I cried. As a matter of fact, in the barber shop, I would pretty much say quite a few people, their eyes were wet."
Neighbors came to the shop in an outpouring of grief.
"Especially if something like that happens, it becomes a gathering place," she said.
The impact of the death of the youthful president was felt by the youngest in society.
Gary L. Shepherd, former chairman of the Saginaw County Democratic Party, was then an 8-year-old second-grader.
"I remember exactly where I was standing," said Shepherd, who was outside Hemlock Elementary School with his classmates when a teacher told them what happened. "Immediately, the kids on the playground started crying. We were just devastated."
Republican state Sen. Michael J. Goschka, then a 10-year-old fifth-grader at Chesaning Our Lady of Perpetual Help, heard the announcement in class.
"We immediately watched it on TV, and I remember the horror," said the Brant Township resident. "We were kids, but we knew something serious had happened.
"When I think about it, and when I talk about it, I wish it had never happened. It was very tragic. When you are alive when your leader is killed, it never leaves you, and to a degree, you are always haunted by it."
The loss then was hard on Catholics "because we always felt he was ours," said Goschka, a former Catholic. "Anywhere you went, we were proud he was Catholic and he was our president.
"We all loved Jackie (Kennedy), we all loved the children. They truly were Camelot. It was partly make-believe, but we wanted to hear it, we wanted to believe it."
Kildee, then an English and Latin teacher, saw Kennedy's death unfold with his call to public service.
"I was in Room 314 of Flint Central High School when one of my students came in and said, 'Mr. Kildee, there's been an unconfirmed rumor that President Kennedy has been shot."'
Kildee told the student to take the keys to his car and listen to the radio.
"He came back within three minutes, and his face was as white as can be," the congressman said. "He said, 'Mr. Kildee, he has been shot, he's been taken to the hospital."'
Kildee's class of about 30 crowded into a neighboring classroom. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder with nearly 30 other classmates during the last class period of the day and quietly watched the only television in the school.
There, they learned the truth.
The students were "very somber," Kildee said.
"I was very, very sad. It was like losing someone in your family. I felt cheated, too, because I had so much hope in him because he put a moral dimension to so many things."
Schrems listened to the news in disbelief as she sat at her desk at the FBI, and the "rumors just started spreading around."
"Of course, everyone was in shock," the then-23-year-old stenographer said. "They dismissed all the employees. They were allowed to go home because no one could concentrate."
Schrems had seen Jack and Jackie Kennedy ride in a convertible, just like the one in which the president was killed, at least a half-dozen times while she was in the nation's capital.
"Whenever a dignitary visited Washington from another country, there was always a parade," she said. "They would ride in the convertible with the top down.
"They would just wave to the crowd, and of course, I waved back. It was an exciting time to be there."
Now, the president would take his final journey down Pennsylvania Avenue in a horse-drawn flag-draped casket.
Schrems paid her final salute on a "very cold" November day on the avenue where she had waved to the president and the first lady.
"I was being a part of it," she said. "There wasn't much else you could do." t
Barrie Barber covers politics and government for The Saginaw News. You may reach him at 776-9725. |
