Umbrella Man

Edward H. Miller

At 12:30 PM on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas—just as Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots into the presidential limousine—Louis Steven Witt stood on the sidewalk of Elm Street as the presidential motorcade passed. Witt was doing something that many of us would consider peculiar. He carried a large black umbrella opened widely as the sun shined brightly in the Texas sky. In Abraham

Umbrella Man at far left of photo.

Zapruder’s famous twenty-six second film that captured the assassination, Witt’s umbrella can be seen just as the limousine, having briefly been obstructed by a freeway sign, reappears and President Kennedy suddenly grasps for his throat. In the years following the tragedy, assassination theorists produced several outlandish accounts of what Witt—the Umbrella Man, as they named him—was actually doing. Some posited that Witt was a signalman for the supposedly numerous gunmen in Dealey Plaza that day. Another equally preposterous explanation was that the umbrella itself fired a dart, rendering the president frozen for the kill shot. Witt’s umbrella actually exemplified a common form of protest by the far Right, which was strong in Dallas in the 1950s and 1960s. The umbrella was meant to disparage any policy that involved compromise by invoking the memory of England’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (who always carried an umbrella) and the failed policy of appeasement that he championed against Hitler at the Munich Conference in 1938.[1]

Looking Back on Assassinations and Motivation

To mark 50 years since the assassination of president Kennedy, I repost here a piece that appeared on the blog in January 2011.

Randall Stephens

On November 23, 1963 the New York Times announced "Leftist Accused: Figure in a Pro-Castro Group is Charged--Policeman Slain." Will Fritz, head of the Homicide Bureau, Dallas Police Department, linked Lee Harvey Oswald to the left-wing "Fair Play for Cuba Committee." Such connections proved more complicated than originally imagined. Oswald lied and was, by any account, a shiftless loser. Journalists and commentators grasped for a motive in the chaotic hours and days after President Kennedy's assassination. Texas, and Dallas in particular, was a hotbed of anti-Kennedy feeling and theories of a right-wing plot circulated widely. (Replace Texas then with Arizona now and some striking similarities in public discussion are apparent. Tea Partiers and John Birchers . . . anti-immigration and anti-communism . . .)

There was, in fact, enough hard-right political terrorism in the South to make such views seem credible enough. The Klan harassed and threatened civil rights workers and dynamited churches and schools. Pundits called Birmingham "Bombingham." In rare cases, gunmen assassinated black leaders and activists. The murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., in April 1968 created a political firestorm and produced innumerable theories as Kennedy's murder had less than five years before. After King's death in Memphis riots erupted across the country's cities and conspiracy theories of Klan involvement and a government assassin gripped the imagination of Americans roiled by the events of a turbulent year. Writing in Life magazine in June 1968 Paul O'Neil observed, "No real criminal organization conspired with [James Earl] Ray," King's alleged killer. Ray was, in O'Neil's words, like Robert Kennedy's assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, prone to bizarre fantasies and unreal self conceptions.

Medical professionals, journalists, and the general public have often questioned an assassin's sanity. And the current debate over the political motivations of Gabrielle Giffords' mentally unstable shooter parallel related events in history.

Was Leon Czolgosz, who shot and killed President McKinley nearly 110 years ago, insane? The American establishment, observes Eric Rauchway in Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), could not "admit that a low criminal had accomplished so much, and so from the start they insisted he was insane, and his action an accident of a callous fate" (x).

A Reprieve from Oligarchy

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe 

Thank heaven George Washington and Thomas Jefferson failed to produce legitimate male heirs and John Quincy Adams was a presidential dud. Our nation periodically flirts with oligarchy, but with the 2012 presidential results, we spared ourselves for four more years. 

The 2012 election was historically significant in many ways, but the absence of a single WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) candidate merits more than just a mention. Barack Obama was the only black man on the ticket; but he was also the only Protestant on the ticket. (Some may quibble with me about Mormonism’s not belonging under the Protestant umbrella, but Mormons have a prophet of their own distinct from the 16th-century European Reformation that birthed Protestantism in its many forms.)

When Do We Forget?

Eric Schultz

We were sitting round this past Thanksgiving and I asked our assembled crew what day November 22 was, besides Thanksgiving.  Everyone looked stumped.  So I added, “49 years ago?”  One of our 55+ did the math and announced that it was the anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy.  She remembered the day vividly.

In fact, it was a day that we would never forget.  One, it appears, we are now rapidly forgetting.

Intrigued, I checked data from the US Census Bureau and did some arithmetic, making the assumption that someone would have to have been about 5-years-old at the time (or 54-years-old now) to have a “resonant” living memory of the Kennedy assassination. In big, round numbers, then, the 54+ age demographic represents about 25% of the United States’ 2012 population. 

So, at least one reason we fail to remember the Kennedy assassination is that only 25% of us have any real memory of it.

I did the same rounded historical math for the sinking of the Titanic, Pearl Harbor, the first moon walk, the Challenger Disaster and 9/11, just to pick a few of our more vivid cultural memories.  I discovered the percentage of the American population with “resonant living memory” in 2012 would be as follows (again, in big, round numbers): 

• Titanic (95 years or older): There are 70 thousand centenarians, so under 1% of the U.S. population remembers. 

• Pearl Harbor (76 years or older): About 7 to 8% of the population remembers. (My dear departed father would have been 79 years old this year, and when he heard on the radio about Pearl Harbor he hid under his bed—6,000 miles from Hawaii.) 

• Moon walk (48 years or older): About 33% of the population remembers. 

• Challenger Disaster (31 year and older): About 45% of the population remembers. 

• 9/11 (16 and older): About 75% of the population remembers.

JFK: A President of Firsts

Philip White

This week marked the 51st anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s election victory, which saw him become the 35th President of the United States. The Camelot myth aside, he was undeniably a President of firsts:

• The first President to win the office at age 43, and the first "Chief Executive" born in the twentieth century.

• The first Catholic in the White House. It is easy to forget how difficult it was for the Kennedy clan (JFK’s father, Joseph–the US Ambassador to Britain who FDR pressured into resigning in November 1940–masterminded his son’s career) to overcome Protestant opposition to their faith during the campaign.

• The first President to win the Pulitzer Prize. His book, Profiles in Courage, which highlighted the bravery of John Quincy Adams and seven other U.S. Senators claimed the award in 1955. Interestingly, it was patterned on Winston Churchill’s Great Contemporaries, which was not the only literary connection between the two. Kennedy’s Harvard thesis, Why England Slept, (published by Wilfred Funk in 1940 after several big publishers rejected the manuscript) was a play on Churchill’s While England Slept, which examined Germany’s militarism and England’s failure to stem Hitler’s ambitions. Churchill went one better, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature for his war memoirs. On April 1, 1963, Kennedy conferred honorary citizenship on his literary and rhetorical hero.

• A participant in the first televised Presidential election debates, with Richard M. Nixon. Popular opinion contends that the first debate was a turning point in the campaign. The dashing Massachusetts senator and the Vice President were opposites in style and appearance–Kennedy fit and poised, Nixon unattractive and growling. The encounters moderated by Howard K. Smith (a pioneer of broadcast journalism and one of the Murrow Boys) also changed the campaigning landscape for good, and put a premium on candidates’ ability to come across well on the small screen. It’s fascinating to me that last year (yes, 2010) saw the first televised debates in British electoral history. That’s half a century after the US got in on the game!

• The first celebrity Presidential couple. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, were the most photographed, most fawned-over political partners in history. As in the debates, his camera-ready appearance helped, though he was often overshadowed by his gorgeous fashion queen.

• The first President to engage in a high-stakes encounter with a nuke-ready Soviet Union. The October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis saw the world on the brink of mutually assured destruction, and yet Kennedy’s cool head prevailed.

• The first President to take on the hitherto unchecked power of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Aided by his brother, Attorney General and best friend, Robert, JFK sought to limit the jurisdiction of Hoover’s FBI fiefdom, and to reduce the clout of the irrepressible man who had ruled it since 1924.

What he could have achieved if death had not claimed him early, we can never know. But what is certain is that John F. Kennedy was a man of extraordinary talents who, despite his detractors’ vilification (and, certainly with regard to his philandering, some of their criticism is just), presided over heady and turbulent times with a grace and restraint few other politicians could have matched.