I did. Yesterday morning National Public Radio carried a brief mention that, a half century before, John F. Kennedy had been sworn in as 35th President of the United States. Culver's Black Horse Troop, a cavalry unit, had been invited to ride in the Inaugural Parade as part of Indiana's contingent. As members of the Troop, Brad and I were in Washington, D.C., to play our small role in that historic event.
Culver first participated in a presidential inaugural in 1913. Woodrow Wilson's Vice President, Thomas Marshall, was a Hoosier and wanted the Black Horse Troop to serve as his official escort. Since there was no precedent for a Vice President having an escort, Marshall's request was denied by parade planners. Wilson himself gave approval and, not without some arm-twisting, arranged for Culver's participation. Thus as Wilson and outgoing president William Howard Taft, along with their vice presidents, drove from the inauguration site to the parade reviewing stand in open landaus (four-wheeled, horse-drawn carriages) Culver's Black Horse Troop followed behind as part of the official escort. The Black Horse Troop's next "inaugural gig" was President Dwight Eisenhower's first inaugural in 1954. Culver has participated in almost all inaugural parades since then, including John Kennedy's on January 20, 1961.
We cadets arrived in Washington on January 19 and were billeted at Anacostia Naval Air Station in the District of Columbia. Our parents were in town, too. Bill White, Dad's best man, had gone to work for U.S. Steel and, twenty years later, was that company's chief lobbyist in the Capital. He pulled a few strings and got Mom and Dad seats in the bleachers directly across from the presidential reviewing stand. In Washington — then, as now — it's all about who you know. Somewhere in storage I have the official inauguration program which our parents received at the festivities.
Brad recalls that on the evening of January 19 Mom and Dad picked us up and took us to dinner at a Washington restaurant. The weather forecast for that night mentioned snow, but said that accumulation for the Capital would be minor. That's not quite how it turned out. By the time we left the restaurant, snow was falling steadily and D.C. was quickly being overwhelmed. When we got within a mile of Anacostia, driving conditions were so poor that we convinced Mom and Dad to drop us off and head for their motel. Brad and I walked that last mile to the air station. As we got nearer we found Culver cadets out in the streets; they were helping direct traffic as local residents and thousands of inauguration-goers wallowed along in the "minor" accumulation.
That storm is now remembered as The January 1961 Nor'easter, one of three big storms to assault the Atlantic coast during the winter of 1960-61. Officially, it was a Category 3 Storm (classified "major" by weather folks) and it dumped heavy snow from West Virginia and Virginia to Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Washington got off with only eight inches of accumulation, but it was enough to cause some officials to consider canceling the inaugural. That rash idea was quickly vetoed. District employees and hundreds of troops worked through the night to clear roads. The Army even employed flame throwers to boil away snow and ice!
January 20th dawned clear and sunny. It was so sunny, in fact, that in the glare Robert Frost was unable to read a poem he had written especially for President Kennedy's inaugural ceremony, and instead recited from memory "The Gift Outright." I wouldn't learn that until much later. I spent most of that day trying to control the horse I had been assigned to ride. You should understand that I had arrived at Culver in September 1960 with no prior experience in horseback riding. After just three months my skill level had risen from complete ignorance to gross ineptitude. We trained for several weeks in preparation for our Washington trip. Instructors even threw firecrackers next to the horses to desensitize them to loud noises. My horse was as slow a learner as his rider! Accordingly, on Inauguration Day I was fully occupied from start to finish just keeping my horse under control. As we passed in front of the presidential reviewing stand I didn't see the new Chief Executive at the "Eyes Left" command, because my horse was doing his best to dump me in the street and go cantering down Capitol Hill.
We finally returned to Anacostia and put the horses in their stalls. ("Good riddance," I surely muttered to my high-strung charger.) Then someone said, "The President is coming!" I turned, looked down the street, and caught a momentary glimpse of a long black limousine as it flashed by, escorted fore and aft by police and security vehicles. The car's interior was brightly lighted. In the back seat was a man reading a newspaper — our new President off to one of the evening's inaugural balls.
Friends in Grand Haven, with its long, warm relationship with the Coast Guard, may be interested in this memory from January 20, 1961. It was mentioned by Newsweek's Eleanor Cliff in her account of the inauguration at Newsweek.com:
After the swearing-in, speechwriter and new special assistant to the president Richard Goodwin, hatless and coatless, walked the two miles from the Capitol to the White House. Freezing, he retreated to the White House to look for his new office, when who should he encounter walking down the hallway but "the guy I had been traveling the country with for the last year and a half — Kennedy. And he said, 'Dick, did you see the Coast Guard contingent in the parade? There was not a single black face in that delegation, and I want you to do something about it right away.'
"So I ran upstairs to my office in the West Wing and I said, 'Who's in charge of the Coast Guard?' I learned they're not under the Defense Department; they're under the Treasury Department. So I called Douglas Dillon, the new Treasury secretary. And it struck me as I went up the stairs that we'll no longer just make speeches, we actually can do something about this. I told Dillon and within a few months the Coast Guard Academy was integrated."
How quickly time passes. Just two years, ten months, and two days later John Kennedy's presidency ended in Dallas. In the wake of the recent outrage in Tucson, many are now pondering our polarized, hyperbolized political dialogue and wondering what caused it. Pundits suggest various points in recent history when "everything started going bad." However, I wonder if that terrible day in Dallas in 1963 marks the turning point, because the hope and moderation that Kennedy symbolized were so violently snuffed out and, in a few short years, America would be embroiled in Vietnam and in all which followed in its wake.
The Gift Outright
The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become. •••
I didn't see Kennedy either, John. Word is that he had retreated inside - out of the cold. Perhaps this isn't sufficiently respectful, but, "Wimp!"
ReplyDeleteI suppose that's the risk you run when you're at the very end of the parade! And I, too, would have headed inside!
ReplyDelete