| The Last Word: Jack From The Block
Kennedy was a rich man’s son, a Harvard man. But when he campaigned
in the Bronx, all they saw was one of their own. By Rosemary Rogers
 Back in 1960,
when it seemed that the cute Irish guy might actually make it to the White
House, my Irish immigrant parents were almost too superstitious to talk
about the idea. Never big on assimilation, they still referred to Ireland
as home, even though they had lived in New York for more than 30 years.
If John F. Kennedy became president, we kids wondered, would our parents,
relatives, neighbors, all those greenhorns and people “from home”
finally feel like real Americans?
He made his last campaign swing through New York on Nov. 5, three days
before the election, and I went with my sister and some neighborhood kids
to Fordham Road and the Grand Concourse to watch his motorcade pass by.
Kennedy appeared sometime after 12:30 p.m., seated on top of an open convertible
and looking more like a conquering hero than a candidate for office.
Seeing the diverse, hyphenated crowd, along with signs like “The
Home of the Knishes Think Jack Is Delicious,” we realized that this
candidate resonated not just with Irish Catholics but with every minority
group.
These adoring Bronxites didn’t see his father’s money, Harvard
or the Court of St. James’s; in their eyes, Kennedy was a guy from
the neighborhood who made good.
The crowd knew only that he wasn’t a Protestant and wasn’t
a Mason and that his great-grandparents “had come over on the boat.”
He didn’t have a WASPy first name like Woodrow or Grover or
Millard. At the time, he seemed shockingly ethnic.
The afternoon Kennedy’s motorcade paused outside the Loew’s
Paradise Theater; he parted the Grand Concourse much as Charlton Heston
had parted the Red Sea inside the theater a few years earlier.
His triumphant procession did have elements of farce; people fainted,
women rushed out of beauty parlors with towels over their wet hair, and
doctors, their stethoscopes swinging from their necks, left their patients
just to catch a glimpse of him.
Confetti was everywhere. Teenage girls screamed and did manic jumping
jacks to see the candidate over the heads of the crowd. Another Jack,
a goofy bicyclist named Jack Fleishman, escorted the motorcade, weaving
in and out between Kennedy’s car and his police escort.
While these people were not the type to use the word “charisma,”
they were under Kennedy's spell and they knew it; they saluted him even
after he passed by. All I can remember is the color of his hair –
copper – and being awed that someone with a full head of hair, unlike
Ike, might actually be elected president.
Kennedy finally arrived at the Concourse Plaza Hotel, Babe Ruth’s
former hangout, and in his speech he described himself as “the candidate
from the Bronx,” a reference to his childhood years in Riverdale.
This remark was enough to make some less refined Bronx boys overthrow
the barricades, upend a press table and force the police to call in reinforcements.
The candidate then headed out to Queens, but not before stopping his motorcade
and jumping out to offer congratulations to a Bronx bride he had spotted
in the crowd. After he left, the rain that had been threatening all afternoon
began to fall.
Forty-two years after Kennedy’s assassination, it’s hard to
remember what an enormous issue Kennedy’s religion was 45 years
ago.
That September, 150 Protestant leaders led by Norman Vincent Peale had
publicly opposed his candidacy, charging that Kennedy’s Catholicism
made him, like Khrushchev, the “captive of a system.” Nor
were these ministers alone in their paranoia; a large segment of the American
public believed that Kennedy intended to move the pope into the Oval Office
and force every American to attend Sunday Mass.
When we went to bed the night of the election, the outcome was still undecided.
“It will take a miracle for him to win,” sighed my mother,
never an optimist.
When she woke us the next morning with the words “He won,”
she sounded as if she didn’t quite believe it herself.
Kennedy’s victory seemed more unreal when I got to school. At St.
John’s Grammar School, at Kingsbridge Avenue and 232nd Street, even
the crabbiest nuns, their flushed faces poking out of their habits,
couldn’t stop smiling, convinced that their prayers had won the
election for the man whose tiny mother went to Mass daily.
The day of Kennedy’s inauguration was a succession of extraordinary
events. The morning weekday Mass, usually the province of a smattering
of biddies, was packed, despite a snowstorm the night before.
My father, a bartender who labored through Christmases, Thanksgivings
and the births of his children, took off from work the day the first
Irish Catholic president was inaugurated.
Both my parents, usually so quiet and reserved, gushed as they watched
the proceedings on television. My mother, a dental assistant, noted the
new president’s “beautiful teeth.” My father, who always
wore a hat, was thrilled that the new president went hatless.
“The cold doesn’t bother him a bit,” he exclaimed.
My sisters and I couldn’t stop staring at Jackie, who carried a
muff and wore the most adorable fur-trimmed boots. Like the rest of our
neighbors, except for those who had a problem with “the drink,”
my parents had alcohol only when company came for dinner. They hardly
ever drank when it was just the two of them, and never in the daytime.
So it was something of a shock to me when they both had highballs after
Kennedy was sworn in, toasting each other with their customary “good
luck.” That one afternoon, they felt very American.
When a wake is held, it is customary to give out prayer cards for the
deceased. The tragic weekend of Kennedy’s death, the company that
makes these cards, a Brooklyn business called Abigal Press, did something
it had never done before: it manufactured thousand of J.F.K. prayer cards
and distributed them to funeral homes around the five boroughs.
That weekend, mourners went to their local funeral parlor, took a J.F.K.
card and said a prayer for the slain president, almost as if his wake
were being held in one of the nearby rooms.
Rosemary Rogers is the co-author of seven books, most recently The Saint-a-Day
Guide, written with Sean Kelly (Random House).
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