You could feel the holiday mood just beginning to fill the air on that Friday morning before Thanksgiving which was late that year, falling on Thursday, November 28, 1963. It was the last Friday of classes before a weekend that was sure to be a festive runup to next week’s early dismissal for the holiday. It was my sophomore year at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio.
There were classes on Monday and Tuesday, but they would be mere formalities. Tuesday evening would be the traditional Sour Hour at our fraternity house. The volunteer bar man would mix an enormous punchbowl-full of whiskey sours. The brothers would don coat and tie and entertain any women brave enough to dress up and attend. It was one of those times when you felt almost adult.
Wednesday before Thanksgiving was a half day, and I had a ticket on a charter bus from the student union to the Orrington Hotel in Evanston where my parents would pick me up for the short drive back to Arlington Heights, IL.
Sunday the 24th was going to be a big NFL day. I was looking forward to watching the contending Browns who were playing Dallas in Cleveland. The Bears were my team, but NFL television policy dictated that in our geographical area, we watched Cleveland Browns games. I had come to enjoy watching the Browns because of their incomparable halfback, Jimmy (acceptable then, later ‘Jim’ only) Brown, still the most amazing running back I’ve ever seen.
But that was two days away. I still had a Friday afternoon government class to attend. Then, maybe some b-ball on the fraternity house patio court before heading uptown to Al and Larry’s, The Varsity or the Purity for 3.2 beer and pub grub. Oxford was a dry town except for near beer, but we made do.
I enjoyed my government class. A friend and fraternity brother, who would later become a congressman, got me interested in politics. He knew his stuff and would kindly point out my political ignorance as he gave me an almost tuition-free political education. The discussions sometimes became heated because I was being moved left under the influence of my liberal professors, while he remained staunchly Republican.
It was an exciting time in politics. John F. Kennedy, the young, dynamic, personable and witty president, had captured the fancy of most young people with many, including me, being inspired to get involved in politics for the first time. Later, I would join the Peace Corps, Kennedy’s creation. My friend, was less enthusiastic about the popular Democrat. He saw through the facade to the political realities behind the illusion and did his best to make me aware of them.
Just a few weeks earlier, November 2, 1963, Ngô Đình Diệm, the president of South Vietnam, was arrested and assassinated in a coup d'état. My friend had been telling me of rumors he heard from friends in Washington that Diệm was on his way out. When the assassination happened, he immediately told me that the CIA had engineered the whole affair. That seemed a wild conspiracy theory to me at the time, but he turned out to be correct.
In Government 101, we followed politics closely. The professor was a crusty old proselytizing socialist who wore coke bottle glasses, a prominent hearing aid and shuffled along on thick-soled scuffed Oxfords. He liked Kennedy, but like many on the left, he felt that JFK was moving too slowly in instituting promised liberal reforms, particularly expanding civil rights for Negroes and ending segregation in the South.
Kennedy argued that he was stymied by the Senate and major reforms would have to await his second term for which he had already begun campaigning. By that time in his first term, many pundits opined that JFK would have been better served by having LBJ back in his old job as Senate Majority Leader. He had gotten things done. Many believed that LBJ would have gotten civil rights legislation done as well.
Vice-President Lyndon Johnson was disliked by the Kennedy family and was not their choice for second-in-command. Joseph Kennedy, the patriarch, however, knew that his son needed Texas to win the 1960 election. Johnson would insure a Texas victory—legally or extralegally. And he did.
Now, JFK’s support in Texas had grown shaky. A split had developed in the Texas Democrat Party between the liberal faction led by Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough and Governor John Connally, leader of the more conservative faction of the party. Kennedy would need the state again in the 1964 election, and he again needed LBJ to twist the arms that needed twisting.
That’s why JFK was in Texas that morning despite warnings of the disagreeableness and possible dangers awaiting him there. As I was preparing for government class, Kennedy was preparing to embark in a motorcade to travel to the Dallas Trade Mart to give a speech. Thousands of mostly admirers lined the streets along his route.
I do not recall the details of class that day although it is certain we discussed JFK and his Texas campaign swing. I do remember the crush at the classroom door as we rushed to exit and get a head start on TGIF festivities. Contributing to the bottleneck were the students trying to get in the room for their two o’clock class. I was vaguely aware of a student rushing down the hall towards us.
“President Kennedy’s been shot,” he said, or words to that affect.
The initial reaction was laughter and disbelief. It had to be a joke. He assured us that he was not joking. The president was in very serious condition.
In an instant not only had my plans for Friday changed, but although I did not reallize it at the time, so had my plans for my entire life.
I rushed back to the fraternity house. By the time I got there, the house TV was on and Walter Cronkite was announcing, through tears, that John F. Kennedy had been pronounced dead at Parkland Memorial Hospital. From that moment on, I barely left the TV for three days.
Schedules became a shambles as everywhere planned activities were put on hold, canceled or rescheduled. The Big Ten canceled its entire Saturday football schedule. In a way, that turned out to be a plus for me because the Illinois vs. Michicgan State game, the winner of which would be the Big 10’s Rose Bowl representative, was rescheduled for Thanksgiving day. That meant I could watch at home. I wanted to see the game because a player from my high school was on the Illinois team, as were Dick Butkus and Jim Grabowski.
Debate raged over the Sunday NFL scheduled games. To play or not to play? The consensus seemed to be to cancel the games. Despite the pressure, NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle ordered the games to be played, although not televised. After all, Rozelle reasoned, Monday, not Sunday, had been declared a National Day of Mourning.
The latter stipulation of no TV was moot because the three networks were all committed to wall-to-wall coverage of the latest developments in the ongoing assassination story and had cleared their lineup of scheduled programming.
Lee Harvey Oswald had been identified as the alleged assassin, and all hands were on deck trying to learn the details of Oswald’s life. Soon enough, his time spent in Russia, his Russian wife and his Marxist sympathies surfaced and speculation began among some that the Soviets had something to do with the assassination, an accusation that the Russians soon officially and vehemently denied.
On Sunday, I was still glued to the TV screen, not watching the Browns, but still absorbed in the assassination coverage. Thus, I was watching when I and millions more witnessed the shooting of Oswald by Jack Ruby on national TV as the alleged assassin was being escorted by officers through the Dallas Police Department parking garage. That event only heightened my interest in staying tuned for the next improbable event.
The TV remained on until it was unplugged so that it could be moved into what we called the front bumming room. This was an RCA Color console television set in a very large, very heavy hardwood cabinet. It took four or six brothers to carry the TV and lift it on top of a table so that the crowd in the living room would have a better view of the state funeral.
We witnessed John John saluting his father’s casket as it passed by on a horse-drawn caisson. The rest is history and pretty widely known. I remember some of the lesser-known details that hit home for me.
First, the gun.
In March 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald, using the alias "A. Hidell", purchased by mail order a 6.5×52mm Carcano Model 38 infantry carbine (described by the Warren Commission as a "Mannlicher–Carcano") with a telescopic sight.[1] He also purchased a revolver from a different company, by the same method. The Hidell alias was determined from multiple sources to be Oswald.[2] (Wikipedia)
The mail order house turned out to be Klein’s Sporting Goods of Chicago. They did a huge mail order business, sort of the Amazon of their era. I had ordered several items from them myself. Their prices were low compared to most sporting goods dealers. Their big business was in mail order guns. On Thursday, Novemeber 21, 1963, while the Chicago Tribune was previewing JFK’s Dallas visit the next day in their news section, the sports section carried an ad for Klein’s Sporting Goods.
The actual ad for the rifle purchased by Oswald accompanied a later Tribune article under the subhead No Comment on Weapon used in Dallas.
Officials of Klein Sporting Goods, Inc., 4540 Madison st., last night declined to confirm disclosures of the Federal Bureau of Investigation that an Itallian carbine used to assassinate President Kennedy was purchased by mail order from the firm.
William J. Waldman, president of the firm, said he was under orders of the FBI not to comment at this time. He said all the Chicago stores of Klein’s would be closed until Tuesday, and that sales records of the store would not be made available until after that time.
The Kennedy assassination greatly influenced people’s politics, including my own. I had been raised by conservative parents in a Republican district but now fancied myself a liberal Democrat. I quit Air Force ROTC and joined the Peace Corps. I read and was influenced by the infamous Mark Lane Playboy interview in which Lane criticized the Warren Commission Report. Along with others who, upon hearing the news of the assassination, I at first concluded that it had to be some right-wing nutcase. It had to be propaganda or some sort of conspiracy that Oswald, a communist, had been the lone assassin.
After reading extensively on JFK, the Kennedy family and books on the assassination, I gradually moved back to the Oswald as lone assassin theory. The definitive book for me was Gerald Posner’s Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK that debunked the assorted grassy knoll theories and settled on Oswald as the lone assassin. Tnat closed the case for me as well…or so I thought.
My mind was reopened by the political lunacy of recent years that I will collectively refer to as the Age of Woke—the emergence of the Deep State as political weapon. The politicization of the Department of Justice, the FBI, the CIA, the CDC and NIH and just about every other federal government agency including the EPA has left me with a deep distrust of government.
Joseph Kennedy had a close association with the mob from his days as a bootlegger. He was particularly close to Chicago Outfit boss Sam Giancana. In addition to Texas, JFK had to take Illinois in order to win in 1960. Chicago was the key to taking Illinois and Giancana was the key to taking Chicago and its labor union vote. The quid quo pro was that JFK and RFK would lay off the mob racketeering investigations that had been taking place in the Senate under the leadership of Robert Kennedy.
Giancana and the mob, particularly Jewish mob leader, Meyer Lansky, were raking in money from the Havana casinos they conrolled through Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista before he was ousted by Fidel Castro in a 1959 coup. The mob wanted Castro eliminated and a pro-U.S. leader installed.
In exchange for Giancana’s gifting of a Chicago squeaker of an election victory to JFK, Joe Kennedy assured Giancana that his boys would lay off the mob. When Robert Kennedy as attorney general reneged on his father’s promise, Giancana was furious.
That was one clear motivation for the mob to be involved, but there is so much more. For an extensive list of what one has to believe in order to believe that Oswald acted alone, I suggest reading David Blackmon’s recent substack The JFK Assassination is the Mother of all Rabbit Holes.
To believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone – or acted at all – in the killing of the President as his car barely crept through Dealey Plaza at 12:30 p.m. CT that day, one must suspend all disbelief and accept the proposition that a seemingly endless series odd events, associations and incredibly unlikely coincidences are all perfectly normal things that happened organically.
As the years have gone on, I’ve realized that one of the best ways to make folks unfamiliar with the case understand why the government’s legend about the assassination is so microscopically unlikely to be true is to point out some of those thousands of odd events, associations and unlikely coincidences they must believe to also believe Oswald acted alone, or indeed, that Oswald acted at all.
I’m now afraid it is about as likely that I will live to see the Kennedy assassination mystery solved as it is that I will be alive when they stumble upon the sunken remains of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. At least I can hope that all documents related to the Kennedy assassination case will finally be released. We have way too much secrecy in government these days.
Well put together and memories of a weekend that is so clear in my mind. My guess is Mike Dundy is the AHS grad that played for the Illini with Grabowski and Dick Butkus.
Happy Thanksgiving Ross.
Scott Randle
Mike Dundy it was. Not that big but a tough hombre. Happy Thanksgiving Scott.
Ross