Lou’s View – The Man Who Met Kennedy

By Lou Bernard

A couple of months ago, I realized that the fiftieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination was coming up. November 22, 1963 is when he was killed—We’re approaching the anniversary. I’m really not that good—I didn’t get it from memory. I got it from a Stephen King book at the library.

There’s always a local connection to these national events. If I look hard enough, I can come up with some local tie-in. So, get this: An LHU professor was on the grassy knoll.

No, not really. Before you run off and create some conspiracies, you should know I’m kidding about that. But there really is a local connection.

A couple of months ago, I met Richard Lipez, published novelist and Lock Haven native, a meeting that I plan to milk as much as possible over the next few months. He told me that he enjoys my columns, which flatters me beyond all reason. I mentioned that I was going to write a piece about the death of John F. Kennedy.

“There’s a local connection to that?” he asked.

“I’m sure,” I said. “There’s a local connection to everything. The Titanic, Amelia Earhart….”

“You know, I met Kennedy,” he mused.

“Really? See,” I said. “Right there. You’re our local connection.”

Lipez kindly agreed to e-mail me the details for this column, and I stopped screaming,”OH MY GOD, A PUBLISHED AUTHOR LIKES MY WORK!” long enough to finish it. He told the story, which began in 1962. And, I figure the best way to tell this story is to let him tell it to you himself, with the occasional interruption by me.

“As a member of the LHU Young Democrats, I campaigned door-to-door for John Kennedy in 1962,” Lipez says. “In the summer of 1962 I had had enough of academic life and had left grad school at Penn State to do something useful and interesting in the larger world, and I’d signed up for the Peace Corps. I recall having to consult an encyclopedia to find out exactly where Ethiopia was. My training, along with a couple of hundred other mostly young volunteers, was at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.”

“Not long before going home for a brief leave before flying off to Ethiopia, we got word that we should show up nicely dressed after lunch the next day on a Georgetown street to board busses,” Lipez continues. “The rumor was that we were being taken to the White House for a send-off from the young president who was a hero to us, and while the higher-ups would not confirm this, it was true.” (Higher-ups don’t like to confirm anything.) “Our group was driven down Pennsylvania Avenue and through the White House gates, and we soon were gathered on the South Lawn. The director of our Ethiopia program was Harris Wofford.”

Wofford had been an advisor to Kennedy on civil rights, and later a United States Senator from Pennsylvania. Lipez recalls,“Harris was among those who accompanied JFK out of the Oval Office and onto a platform in front of us, where he flashed the famous grin and wished us well and told us how important our work was and advised us to behave ourselves.  Then he plunged into the throng, shaking hands, and looking more at ease in his own skin than anybody I had ever laid eyes on in my entire twenty-two years. It was thrilling.”

It was over a year later when Lipez heard the bad news about Kennedy.

“It was already nighttime in Ethiopia when Kennedy was shot dead on a Friday afternoon,” he recalls. “I didn’t have my short-wave radio on, so it wasn’t until Saturday morning that I heard the news.” A short-wave radio is a huge thing that was used for communication before every square inch of the planet had cell phones. “I’d walked over to the Addis Ababa grocery store where I customarily shopped on Saturday. An Ethiopian man walked up to me and barked out,’Sir, are you an American?’ I said I was. ‘Your president is dead!’ he said. I stared at him in confusion. The insane asylum was nearby, and my first thought was that this man was an inmate who was delusional. Then I looked over at the Italian lady who ran the grocery store. With a look of terrible sadness, she just nodded.”

Lipez continues,”As I walked back toward my house, I was numb. Passing MAAG headquarters, the US military advisors to the Ethiopian army, the American flag was at half staff and I went in. I soldier showed me an AP dispatch just in, saying a Texan named Lee Harvey Oswald had been arrested for the JFK murder and then been shot by a bystander. It was all surreal. I loved living and working in Ethiopia, but suddenly I never felt so far from home.”

Lipez remembers it as a turning point in his own life, as well as the history of America.

“When I flew out of Idlewild Airport in September of 1962, I’d been young and innocent.  When I flew back into it two years later, I was a changed man—stronger, more confident, not so innocent— and that airport had another name.”