Streaming 1963: CBS Brings Back the Four Days of Kennedy's Assassination

• We interrupt this blog to note that I have been spending much of the last 30 hours in November 1963. 
  
  
  Like many boomers and others, I've been watching CBS' as-it-happened livestream of its Kennedy assassination broadcast coverage, just as I stayed glued to live TV in the living room for four days, from the moment I got home from school on Friday, to see my mother crying in the kitchen, to the Monday of the funeral. 
  
  
  The black and white footage brings back a sharp melancholy. It feels like the day the American historical trajectory bent south, no matter what unchivalrous things we've learned about Kennedy since. Some of it's got to be late-middle-age longing for lost youth, but it can't all be.
  
  
  Amazing to see how on that day, television turns into radio for the first 15 minutes.  While we wait  to hear what three shots in Dallas means, and how bad, all we have is a black "CBS Bulletin" screen and Cronkite's voice.  Amazing to see how the network reacts at first, in denial, returning to As The World Turns and dog food commercials after seconds of possibly world-crashing news. And then when they finally switch to video, so heart-breaking to watch Cronkite's face and body language subtly switch from denial and hope to realization, anguish and suppressed shock as the reports, increasingly irrefutable but not yet official, come in. Those thick framed glasses, on and off, on and off...
  
  
  The wall-to-wall coverage is also fascinating for the era it recreates and the people it revives.  Amazing to see how much longer ago 50 years is than I thought.  Here's proof I was born into a different world than the one I inhabited 20 years later. 
  
  
  And here are all the faces and voices I paid attention to and trusted, people who'd come of age themselves under Roosevelt: Eric Sevareid, Harry Reasoner, Robert Trout, not to mention dear old Walter himself.  To my mind then and now, people so much more about the news they covered than about themselves, so different from our Anderson Coopers and Wolf Blitzers.  And so much more earnest. 
  
  
  Was cynicism born that week?  Is that how we shielded ourselves?
  
  
  Eisenhower was still with us.  So was Truman; I forget my life ever overlapped with his.
  
  
  Words I learned that weekend: caisson; catafalque; bier.  
  
  
  People talked differently; someone interviewed on the street referred to a witness or a bystander as a "colored man." Another woman-on-the-street drew some comfort from the fact that this was "a Christian country," and that JFK was a Christian.
  
  
  In 1963, politicians seemed to have bigger vocabularies and were all male. 
  
  
  

  So was everyone else who mattered, it seems.  All the cops, politicians, reporters, dignitaries, newscasters -- all men in suits or uniforms.  Even the CBS orchestra  (television networks had orchestras?), given an hour or so to spell the anchormen putting in marathon, seat-of-the-pants reportage -- was entirely male.  Women were so ancillary, so invisible, except for some street-reaction clips and of course, Jackie herself, central figure as the widow.
  
  
  TV itself was so much younger.  Yes, it's black and white and low definition, and live remote feeds are not so instantly and smoothly punched in.  You also see the news being assembled, wire copy being delivered to Cronkite, people (a few women, even) huddling behind him, phones being answered, developments even being shouted from somewhere across the room.  No time for packaging.  Everything too fresh.  And no screen crawl; no splintering of our attention.  One screen, one picture.  Unified, communal  grief.
  
  
  I don't expect to have another chance like this to time travel.  No other anniversary I'm likely to reach is going to get this thorough a treatment, or have this many living survivors, in contemporary retrospectives, to tell the tale.  Or inspire CBS, once the closest thing to our collective American consciousness, to stream the era back. Thank you, Tiffany network. 
  
  
   

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