Kennedys Put Past On Auction Block
While we sure can measure the auction activity in dollars, it is a little more complex trying to figure why otherwise rational human beings would spend hundreds of thousands at Sotheby’s last week simply to get a chair Jack Kennedy once sat in or a cigar humidor he touched 33 years ago. The bidding looks to be an effort to buy back an American past locked in the thick fog of nostalgia.
And a lot of people are wondering why the Kennedy family - Jackie’s kids actually - put a warehouse of memorabilia on the market. Estate taxes? Walking-around money? Who knows?
Maybe a better question is what would prompt a person to shell out five figures for a high chair or six for a simple mahogany table? Why is this event - an auction - accorded so much coverage in the papers and on TV? And why are so many so mesmerized still by a wholly sentimental, sometimes false impression of those long-ago White House years when everyone seemed so young, funny and totally invincible.
On the day Jack Kennedy died, he was not as old as Bill Clinton is this morning. On Nov. 22, 1963, those still living included his brother Robert, Martin Luther King, John Lennon, Ho Chi Minh, Malcolm X, Mary Jo Kopechne, John Sirica, Jimmy Hoffa, Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, Vincent Foster and more than 48,000 young American boys who would die over the next decade in South Vietnam.
On that fall afternoon when the country got old in a single Texas second, the civil rights movement was barely out of infancy. The women’s movement had not begun in earnest. Gay rights wasn’t even a dream. Pornography was not legal. The Dow Jones closed at 732. The Instamatic camera just hit the market. Stamps cost a nickel and the post office introduced ZIP codes.
Nobody had ever heard of Apple PowerBooks, cable TV, satellite dishes, pay-per-view, cellular telephones, Toyota Land Cruisers, BMWs, AIDS, Woodstock, the Beatles, People magazine, USA Today, Watergate, My Lai, Khe Sanh, Operation Rolling Thunder, Hue City, Tet, Chappaquiddick, Medicare, Medicaid, day care, welfare fraud, Rush Limbaugh, Larry or Rodney King and O.J. Simpson too. The Menendez brothers were not even born.
People actually knew their neighbors and kept doors unlocked. Nobody had a car alarm. If you stopped anywhere to ask a stranger for directions, you’d get them because we knew where we were and who we were, too; families didn’t move and fathers did not change jobs with the frequency they do today.
Buy back the past! Maybe that’s what the auction represents. Maybe the interest in it as well as the actual dollars expended is some kind of naive effort to try to reclaim a time in the life of a country before so much seemed to unravel.
It is nearly impossible to measure what has happened to items like morality, caring, politeness, pride, accountability and responsibility between 1963 and 1996. There are no charts or graphs to document the slow, sure slide of innocence that has occurred over the past three decades as America rushed toward becoming a disposable society where previously critical things like friendship, marriage, pregnancy, loyalty, conscience, right and wrong often last no longer than the Big Macs we pick up at the Drive-Thru window and toss aside just as quickly.
In 1963, murder was important. If one happened on a block, residents would talk about it for months afterward. Today, homicide is trivialized and outrage is extinct, replaced by an insular fear that has many of us thinking it is normal to live behind barred doors, leading lives where children are prohibited from walking across a courtyard, going to a store, or riding a bus because of the daily menace of a society where guns are more common than books in the hands of too many kids.
The numbers bid for things the Kennedys sat on, used, wore or owned are staggering. But so too are these numbers: Since the inauguration of his presidency in January 1961, our population has increased 41 percent, government spending on social programs has gone from $142 billion to $787 billion. Violent crime has increased 560 percent. Illegitimate births increased more than 400 percent. Teenage suicide grew by 200 percent. SAT scores dropped an average of 75 points per high school pupil.
No doubt, it’s a totally different country today. There has been much improvement and certainly more people are better off, healthier, with more stuff. But despite everything, we still have this longing to be anchored in a dreamlike past when things seemed more peaceful, stable, less crazy, and maybe the question of the day is: How high do we bid for something that was perhaps only a fleeting dream?