Better Than Sex

Better Than Sex

JOHN F. KENNEDY, who seized the White House from Richard Nixon in a frenzied campaign that turned a whole generation of young Americans into political junkies, got shot in the head for his efforts, murdered in Dallas by some hapless geek named Oswald who worked for either Castro, the mob, Jimmy Hoffa, the CIA, his dominatrix landlady or the odious, degenerate FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. The list is long and crazy—maybe Marilyn Monroe’s first husband fired those shots from the Grassy Knoll. Who knows? A whole generation of American journalists is still embarrassed by their failure to answer that question.
 
JFK’s ghost will haunt the corridors of power in America for as long as the grass is green and the rivers run to the sea.… Take my word for it, Bubba. I have heard his footsteps for 30 years and I still feel guilty about not being able to explain the biggest news story of my lifetime to my son.
 
AT ONE POINT, not long ago, I went to the desperate length of confessing to the murder myself. We were finishing breakfast in a patio restaurant on a bright Sunday morning in Boulder. It was a stylish place near the campus, where decent people could meet after pretending they had just come from church and get fashionably drunk on mimosas and white wine. The tables were separated by ferns and potted palms. Bright orange impatiens flowers drooped from hanging urns.
 
Even I can’t explain why I said what I did. I had been up all night with my old friend Allen Ginsberg, the poet, and we had both slid into the abyss of whiskey madness and full-bore substance abuse. It was wonderful, but it left me a little giddy by the time noon rolled around.
 
“Son,” I said, “I’m sorry to ruin your breakfast, but I think the time has finally come to tell you the truth about who killed John Kennedy.”
 
He nodded but said nothing. I tried to keep my voice low, but emotion made it difficult.
 
“It was me,” I said. “I am the one who shot Jack Kennedy.”
 
“What?” he said, glancing quickly over his shoulder to see if others were listening. Which they were. The mention of Kennedy’s name will always turn a few heads, anywhere in the world—and god only knows what a tenured Professor of American Political History might feel upon hearing some grizzled thug in a fern bar confess to his own son that he was the one who murdered John F. Kennedy. It is one of those lines that will not fall on deaf ears.
 
My son leaned forward and stared into my eyes as I explained the raw details and my reasons for killing the President in cold blood, many years ago. I spoke about ballistics and treachery and my “secret work for the government” in Brazil, when he thought I was in the Peace Corps in the sixties.
 
“I gave up killing about the time you were born,” I said. “But I could never tell you about it, until now.”
 
He nodded solemnly for a moment, then laughed at me and called for some tea. “Don’t worry, Dad,” he said.
 
“Good boy,” I said. “Now we can finally be honest with each other. I feel naked and clean for the first time in 30 years.”
 
“Not me,” he said. “Now I’ll have to turn you in.”
 
“What?” I shouted. “You treacherous little bastard!” Many heads had turned to stare at us. It was a weird moment for them. The man who killed Kennedy had just confessed publicly to his son, and now they were cursing each other. Ye gods, what next?
 
What indeed? How warped can it be for a child born into the sixties to finally be told that his father was the hired shootist who killed Kennedy? Do you call 911? Call a priest? Or act like a cockroach and say nothing?
 
NO WONDER the poor bastards from Generation X have lost their sense of humor about politics. Some things are not funny to the doomed, especially when they’ve just elected a President with no sense of humor at all. The joke is over when even victory is a downhill run into hardship, disappointment and a queasy sense of betrayal. If you can laugh in the face of these things, you are probably ready for a staff job with a serious presidential candidate. The humor of the campaign trail is relentlessly cruel and brutal. If you think you like jokes, try hanging around the cooler after midnight with hired killers like James Carville or the late Lee Atwater, whose death by cancer in 1991 was a fatal loss to the Bush reelection effort. Atwater could say, without rancor, that he wanted to castrate Michael Dukakis and dump him on the Boston Common with his nuts stuffed down his throat. Atwater said a lot of things that made people cringe, but he usually smiled when he said them, and people tried to laugh.
 
It was Deep Background stuff, they figured; of course he didn’t mean it. Hell, in some states you could go to prison for making treats like that. Felony menacing, two years minimum; Conspiracy to commit Murder and/or Felony Assault with Intent to commit Great Bodily Harm, minimum 50 years in Arkansas and Texas; also Kidnapping (death), Rape, Sodomy, Malicious Disfigurement, Treason, Perjury, Gross Sexual Imposition and Aggravated Conspiracy to Commit all of the above (600 years, minimum) …. And all of this without anybody ever doing anything. Ho, ho. How’s that for the wheels of justice, Bubba? Six hundred fify-two years, just for downing a few gin-bucks at lunch and trading jokes among warriors.…
 
Richard Nixon was not a Crook. Ho, ho.
George Bush was innocent. Ho, ho.
Ed Rollins bribed every Negro preacher in New Jersey to hold down the black vote for the Governor in ’93. Hee-haw.
James Carville set Hamilton Jordan’s heart on fire and then refused to piss down his throat to save his life. Ho, ho.
 
That is the kind of humor that campaign junkies admire and will tell to their children—for the same perverse reasons that make me confess to my son, over breakfast, that I blew John Kennedy’s head off in Dallas.
 
You have to be very mean to get a laugh on the campaign trail. There is no such thing as paranoia.