This poem was written in 1963. I was a junior in high school. We didnt know who the driver was. Back in hometown Indiana in the middle of nowhere, population 600, we had no idea how the ‘govmint’ really worked. We assumed those who worked for the president were like us… families of factory and field workers, tradesmen and tradeswomen, men and women who worked with their backs and handds, their bones and blood, and had a fidelity, a love even, to their fellows and to their good bosses.
THus, as you see here, the concern not just for the Kennedy family. It is true there were many who mourned JFK, but far more where I grew up were shocked that anyone would kill a president. That was supposed to be India, Russia, Island Nations, Middle East, Eastern Europe, the very nations many in our part of the farmlands USA the people there had fled from to try to be safe and build a new life.
My father who was an astute observer of human nature said of JFK, “Not a man, but a father’s son who had yet to prove himself.” He was speaking of the corrupt Joe Kennedy, the father of the sons. And yet, there was reverance for that a man had been killed. And the pomp and ceremony were back then, said to be equal “to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth” which was THE culturechanging broadcast on television of its time, and set the stage for JFK’s huge months long funeral brigades and accolades, which in my .02 set the stage for Vietnam War to be brought to the dinner table along with the mashed potatoes every night, rousing, rankling, riling and rendering the people down to their truer political bones.
Back then, here was a first reaction from smalltown persons, regarding JFK’s murder.
THE DAY JOHN WENT FOR A RIDE
The day John went for a ride
it was a sunny warm in hell day.
He had a cool convertible;
it looked like a ‘63 Lincoln Town car
with leather seats.
A chauffeur; a working man drove them.
John wasn’t knocking over mailboxes,
or anything,
he didn’t have whiskey to drink, they said.
He probably never ran a tractor
that turned over and pinned his legs.
They said his hands were soft,
All I know was he was too young to be
my father, and that he was having a good time,
probably wishing he could stop by a lake,
lay out, get come color,
get his pretty wife to put sun tan oil
on his back.
‘A wife shouldn’t have to crawl,’
my grandmother said.
Here was John’s wife crawling
onto the trunk of the car
the way we sometimes crawled out onto
the hoods and trunks of our speeding cars,
holding onto the chrome somewhere
to show that Death could not take us,
even though there was one time too many
when it did.
Amongst my people, we have this heartache about cars—
they go on or off without us, jump off the road,
we slump over steering wheels or turn over
in ditches, drown in lakes, then we float
up near the headliner, our hair streaming.
It would be beautiful if it weren’t for the fact
one would also be so very very dead.
There are about five-hundred dead man’s curves
around here in the woods, and on the rural roads;
and it always rains or blizzards sideways
when someone is driving fast;
it is always icy when
people drink, and there is black ice especially
when there are more
than eight in the car and they are all laughing
like hyenas, and the night promises
to be so very beautiful.
We know people can die when someone else is driving.
But never going just two miles an hour,
like King Johnny was going—
never while not doing anything crazy or criminal,
nothing drunken nor heartbroken.
Just like the black-hand guys who live farther
north from us, in Dallas “they took Johnny
for a ride,” “He got taken on a ride,” as they say—
“. . .three went into the woods,
and only two returned.”
Something like this happened to John.
Except there was no woods,
only a sunny day near a grassy knoll.
And the worst thing I can’t understand
besides why?why?why?—
the thought I kept seeing on my ceiling
as I lay in bed this night—
is how come no one told the chauffeur’s story?
Two of my friends’ fathers drive for families.
They would rather die themselves
than have someone they were driving
die.
We are wondering this morning how can we get word
to the chauffeur who was driving; ‘It is not your fault
man, not your fault in any way.’
We understand
about the day John went for a ride.
We know how hell can jump out,
how hell leaps up out of nowhere
to greet you with a pearly smile.
And it is not your fault man,
for it almost always rains
when someone else is driving,
even when there are more
than just two in the car,
and everyone is laughing
and the night promises
to be so very beautiful.
This poem, “THE DAY JOHN WENT FOR A RIDE” ©1963, 2013, by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, is part of the book La Pasionaria: The Bright Angel, Collected Poems of CP Estés 1960-2013, forthcoming from SoundsTrue Books, in 2014.
The car President Kennedy was riding in was, I believe, actually a 1961 Lincoln Limo/Continental. We found out in ensuing years that the driver was Bill Greer from the tiny farm town of Stewartstown in County Tyrone in Ireland. Mr Greer had immigrated to the US in the midst of the US Depression and worked for years as a servant to wealthy families on the east coast, also being a driver. He served honorably in WWII and when discharged was taken up as a Secret Service agent to drive President Kennedy, including at Berlin, in Ireland, and that day, in Texas. It seems clear that despite the rain of criticism of him at the Warren Commission for turning to look at the shot President in the back seat before accelerating, that Jackie Kennedy and Ted Kennedy both, wrote letters of deep gratitude to him, thanking him for his service to the Kennedy family for so long a time, as Jackie put it… ‘until the sad end.’ Greer’s brother who is still alive says that what Greer actually yelled in his Irish brogue when the gunshots were apparent, was “Let’s get the hell outa here” However, in the chain of command, Greer had to wait until the agent in charge gave the orders to Greer to vacate the plaza. Like we said back then, “It was not your fault man. We know how hell can leap out…”