Another friendly alien invaded our shores on “The Patty Duke Show”. The Scottish, look-alike cousin of an American Boomer moved in and Patty’s family couldn’t tell them apart. The girls discovered that teenagers (Boomers) from opposite sides of the Atlantic had more in common with each other than they did with own parents or War Baby siblings. Cathy landed several months prior to the British Invasion in Rock & Roll… one could say that she spearheaded the attack.
What inspired ABC to import teens from Europe? Didn’t we have more than enough of our own? “Mr. Novak” certainly thought so… his high school on NBC overflowed with problem Boomers. (This program is sometimes confused with another new show on the same network in 1963: “Wild Kingdom”.) Unlike “Our Miss Brooks” and “Mr. Peepers” back in the Fifties, poor Mr. Novak wasn’t having much fun.
“The Fugitive” was one of the classic Boomer favorites from the Sixties. The police wrongly accused Dr. Richard Kimble of murdering his wife, and then society forced the innocent victim to flee in search of the real killer, the one-armed man. Lt. Philip Gerard pursued him relentlessly for years on end, and Kimble must have thought, “What did I do to deserve this, Lord?” Millions of Boomer boys felt the same way as they registered for the draft on their eighteenth birthday the following year.
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The great personal tragedy that drastically altered Richard Kimble’s life struck on September 17, 1963. Barely two months later (on Friday, November 22nd) all of America received an even more devastating blow. As fate would have it, an emotional Walter Cronkite interrupted the soap opera, “As the World Turns”, to announce that the President had been shot.
For four painful days our world stopped turning, as regular TV programs (and commercials!) stood aside for breaking news and special reports. Most Americans hurried to a TV and camped out for the duration. We were stunned. How could this happen? Kennedy was so young and strong, so full of life. At first, Americans felt that television owed them a normal happy ending. Anything less than JFK’s full recovery just wouldn’t make sense. We waited. The usual half-hour passed, and we received no news. “Maybe this is a special, one hour pilot,” we thought. We continued to wait… but, still no news, and no happy conclusion. This scraped right across the grain of many years of careful brainwashing/ conditioning by the networks. “At least give us some damn commercials as a relief from all this tension.”
For nearly two decades (and the entire lifetime of all Baby Boomers) television had provided America with a dependable escape from reality… entertaining, relaxing, reassuring, and never dwelling on unpleasant subjects or challenging the viewer to think. If we didn’t like the program, we simply changed the channel… until now. Every station carried painful updates, and finally the news broke that Kennedy was dead. Television had betrayed us! We had been cheated out of a happy ending. There was no a moral to this story, and the dream machine still gripped us by the throat and wouldn’t let go. The tragedy continued as bits of information and nightmare images came pouring in: the casket, containing the body of JFK, lifted aboard Air Force One, and minutes later, LBJ takes the Presidential oath, as the plane readies for takeoff. A stunned Jackie stands by Lyndon’s side, her raspberry pink outfit splattered with John’s blood. Every few minutes, photographs of the assassination filled the screen, and we relived those fatal few seconds a thousand times. Police trapped and arrested Lee Harvey Oswald in a Dallas movie theatre (the marquee read: To Hell and Back), and soon, TV revealed every last detail of Oswald’s life, except the one we desperately needed to know… why?
Jackie, the model of eloquence and elegance for modern American women, hadn’t changed from her blood-splattered clothes as Bobby met her at Andrews Air Force Base. The TV cameras followed the two, as they accompanied the casket to Bethesda Naval Hospital, and then to the White House. Most viewers thought, “Why don’t they leave the poor woman alone?” And, yet we all watched with morbid fascination.
The worst was yet to come. The most shocking live coverage in television history burned right through our eyeballs, and branded a permanent image deep in our brains. Millions of Americans watched as NBC cut to the transfer of Oswald to another jail. Plain-clothes officers ushered him through a crowd of about seventy uniformed policemen, when Jack Ruby, a striptease-joint owner, elbowed his way up to Lee Harvey, and shot him in the liver with a .38 revolver. Through the miracle of television, it is quite possible that more people had witnessed this one vicious, cold-blooded murder than had observed all of the prior assassinations in the history of Mankind. For two long days and nights, we pieced together all the information, and tried to make some sense out of this tragedy. Instead of providing an answer, TV offered a live demonstration on how to commit murder. With Oswald, died our last hope of ever understanding the death of JFK.
The average American has absorbed thousands of celluloid killings on the tube, but in each story the bad guy had some sort of warped motive (usually one of the seven deadly sins), and the audience learned a moral lesson from his fatal mistake. What was Ruby’s motive and what did we learn from Oswald’s death? That violence begets violence? That no American is ever really safe, even standing amid an army of policemen? Or, did we finally realize that tragedy, in real life, doesn’t discriminate between good guys and bad guys, and seldom sticks around to offer a moral or an explanation?