Jack's+oral+history+answers

What do you remember about the red scare in the U.S.?

I was a young child during the height of the red scare but during the '60s, there was certainly still alot of worries about communism and the Soviet Union and a nuclear war. So my memories of it as being a young child and for instance there would be, drills at school about what to do if there was an attack and I remember I had a friend when I lived in Wauwatosa who's parents had a bomb shelter built off their basement. You'd get into it from the basement and it was built underneath the hillside and it had concrete block walls and cots and food and water and it was designed for use in case of a nuclear war. I also remember as a kid, that we were told to pay attention to buildings that were marked as bomb shelters so you would see these yellow, civil defense signs which you were supposed to go in the basement of the building to protect yourself if there was a nuclear war and as kids at school, they would have us do, now that we realize, stupid exercises like getting underneath the desk in case that an attack was announced which would have been completely inadequate to protect you from anything, maybe flying glass and that would be about it. A lot of that I think was done more for public propaganda purposes than for any real protection of the public.

What do you remember about the Cuban missile crisis itself?

I was fairly young when the Cuban missile crisis happened but I remember the feeling of concern and fear that I suppose I picked up from my parents and I have vague memories of watching a little bit of it on the television news. Probably my strongest memory is being in the kitchen of our house and my mother having the radio on to Wisconsin Public Radio and I remember the radio sitting on the table and everyone listening to it and there was a lot of concern with everybody that we were going to wind up in a war or something terrible was going to happen so people were paying a lot of attention and I just remember that feeling of worry. I remember that people went about their normal business and I was a kid in grade school and we went to school as normal but people were acting a little bit differently because the entire country was at least worried and some people were deathly afraid but it was a different atmosphere but when it was all over, there was a tremendous feeling of relief and I think people in general felt genuinely appreciative that Kennedy had handled it intelligently and carefully.

What do you remember about the Bay of Pigs and what was the reaction to it?

I was pretty young when the Bay of Pigs happened so it's hard for me to sort out memories from it actually happening to opposed to memories from reading about it and learning about it later but I think everyone was pretty surprised when it happened and not a lot of information was coming out as it was happening but it had a feeling at the time of sort of embarrassing crisis for the country and it became a humanitarian crisis because of the fighters that were captured by Castro and the Cubans and there was anguish which lead to a bad situation which made things worse as it went on and in retrospect, even though it was a stain on Kennedy's presidency, it did teach him valuable lessons about his military advisers in particular and being talked into something that couldn't fail or shouldn't fail and turned out he was being given horrible advice and in some ways deceived and he learned from that which really paid huge dividends when the Cuban missile crisis happened and he learned not to take at face value, what he was being told by his military advisers.

Did most people at the time think the Kennedy administration was being soft of communism?

I was pretty young at the time so I don't have strong memories of that but certainly in my household and with my parents, there wasn't that feeling and I think some people felt that way particularly in other parts of the country. I think in Wisconsin, there was still sensitivity left over from the McCarthy years, that sensitivity resulting in people probably backing away from that anti-communism hysteria and certainly the news media in Wisconsin, was trying to move away from that hysterical reporting about communism. I have no memories in feeling that Kennedy was soft on communism I certainly remember attacks from competing Republican politicians like Nixon and others who were trying to paint Democrats and Kennedy as soft on communism but I certainly don't remember anyone around me taking that as more than political posturing although I do remember a feeling that Kennedy and Congress were pushed into situations they probably wouldn't have gotten into because they were worried about being perceived soft on communism and therefore felt they needed to take a hard line stance on things they wouldn't have otherwise. One of the interesting things in my household was as my father was a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel wound up being on a list that McCarthy had put together of his own, personal enemies list which in later years came out and my father was proud of the fact and sort of amused by the fact that he was on the list not that my father was a communist but McCarthy's net of enemies wound up including a lot of people so he was sort of proud that he was on the list.

What was it like in the U.S. during the Vietnam war and what was it like watching the war on television?

Like with other news of the time in the '60s and early '70s it was network T.Vs where everybody got their visual news and then newspapers as well but the most striking memories are of the news reports that would be on with Walter Cronkite at 5:30 and there would always be news about the war, really unlike most recent wars because the military has gotten smart about restricting news coverage but in Vietnam, it was pretty much wide open and every night you would see footage of gun battles or helicopters or people being killed and there was always the famous body count where they'd talk about how many Americans and other allies were killed and how many Viet-Cong and North Vietnamese were killed and there was always wildly asymmetric in that lots more of the enemy were killed than allies. In the end that didn't make too much difference. So there would be the body counts and the movie footage and the specifics about what had happened really turned out out not to matter that much. And then there would be the controversy about bombing North Vietnam and Hanoi and about bombing the dikes in North Vietnam and bombing the Ho Chi Min Trail and when Nixon started bombing Cambodia so it was sort of a series of news events that would come out and each one would be more disturbing than the previous. And then, particularly pilots getting shot down and being captured. Every once and a while, the North Vietnamese had films that would be seen on T.V. of some captured pilot and it was very disturbing. I remember reading stories in Newsweek and Time magazine and the vivid pictures of people being killed and I remember a very vivid one of a beheaded American pilot that they showed in Time magazine that was very disturbing. The best word to describe what was happening was disturbing plus as I got older, starting to realize that I might be drafted and have to go.

What was the reaction like to JFK's assassination in 1963? I have pretty strong memories of it even though I was a kid but my first memory of it is being in school. They called all the kids into the gym and we didn't know what was going on but remember hearing a couple of the teachers talking to each other in the hallway so they told alll of us in the gym that the president had been shot and the teachers in particular were very upset about it but as young kids, we didn't really know quite how to react. I remember getting home and my father had already left because he was sent down to report on it for the Milwaukee Journal. Watching on the news and then seeing that Lee Harvey Oswald was shot and they kept showing that clip over and over again so I remember that pretty well. Then I have real strong memories of Kennedy's funeral procession with the horse drawn casket and Jackie Kennedy and his kids. If you were old enough to remember, that T.V. coverage brings back pretty strong memories.