Rolling Stones – "Sympathy for the Devil" (1968)

I shouted out, “Who killed Kennedy?”

When after all, it was you and me

A young person I know recently posted this online:

Hit rock bottom on the golf course today.  Truly a rotten, vile round.  The kind of round that makes you wish you never found golf in the first place. . . .

To say it didn’t go well is like saying that the Titanic didn’t go well.  

Or that JFK’s car ride didn’t go well.

I know that golf can be an extremely frustrating sport, and that a bad round can cause even a good person to say terrible things.  So I’m willing to overlook that truly tasteless statement about JFK.  (Given some of the stuff that I’ve posted online over the years, it would be the pot calling the kettle black for me to criticize someone for tastelessness.)

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I find it interesting that I reacted much more strongly to the line about JFK than the line about the Titanic.  After all, some 1500 people perished when the Titanic sank – the death of any one man pales in comparison to the loss of 1500 lives.

But while I winced when I read that reference to JFK’s assassination, I didn’t have the same kind of visceral response to the Titanic reference.    

Why was that?  Maybe because the sinking of the Titanic took place long before I was born.

Most of what I know about the Titanic comes from the 1997 movie.  And while that movie depicted the tragedy in very realistic fashion, viewing a fictional recreation of an event – no matter how vivid and dramatic – is not the same thing as living through the actual event.

I experienced the Kennedy assassination first hand.  I saw the graphic and traumatizing Zapruder film of that event over and over.  I remember seeing Lyndon Johnson being sworn in as President aboard Air Force One and Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald.  And I was glued to the TV during Kennedy’s funeral.  (Who can forget the image of the riderless horse, with the pair of boots placed backwards in the stirrups?  Or the shot of Kennedy’s three-year-old son saluting his father’s casket as it was carried from St. Matthew’s Cathedral?)

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A few of us may be able to give the date when the Beatles first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, or when the Apollo 11 spacecraft landed on the moon, or when Richard Nixon resigned.  But all of us remember November 22, 1963.  

Can you even name the year the Titanic sank – much less the exact date?

The person who wrote the message I quoted above is far too young to have lived through the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath.  For him, that event probably feels just as distant from the present day as the sinking of the Titanic feels to people who are my age.

But for people my age, JFK’s death is something that we remember very vividly.  I suppose that’s why I reacted much more strongly to his reference to it than I did to his reference to the sinking of the Titanic – even though that event was a much greater tragedy in objective terms.

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In case you’re wondering, the Titanic sank on April 15, 1912 – exactly 114 years ago today.

The Beatles first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964, while Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon on July 20, 1969 and Richard Nixon left the White House in disgrace on August 8, 1974.  

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The lyrics quoted at the top of this post were the lyrics that Mick Jagger sang when the Rolling Stones began recording “Sympathy for the Devil” on June 4, 1968.

But when Robert Kennedy was shot by Sirhan Sirhan on the very next day, those lyrics were changed from “Who killed Kennedy?” to “Who killed the Kennedys?”   

Click here to listen to “Sympathy for the Devil.”

Click here to buy “Sympathy for the Devil” from Amazon.