My Cousin Ron/Presidents Day

Jackie and President John F. Kennedy PHOTO:TOWN&COUNTRY

"Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." -- President John F. Kennedy 1961 from his inaugural address.

There was a time when young men and women in the United States were inspired by their President to join a newly-established humanitarian organization called the Peace Corps. These young citizens took their idealistic spirit to various countries in the world to help and serve poor nations.

I was in 8th grade when John F. Kennedy began his run for president. I didn't know anything about politics. My major focus was sports. I was obsessed. My older cousin, Ron Wheatley, was attending Gonzaga University in Spokane, where my family was living at that time. Ron was a major Kennedy supporter.

My family moved there at the beginning of the summer of 1960. It was a hot muggy summer and I had no friends so I hung around Ron as much as I could. He probably got tired of seeing my sad sack face. His mother was my mom's sister, my Aunt Cecelia, a widow with four kids, three of them still at home living in a small apartment. That included Ron. His father, my Uncle Buz, had died relatively young of health related issues.

The apartment was near the university in a neighborhood that my aunt slyly called "pious flats," a reference to the local Catholic population. Aunt Cecilia was a spirited woman with a quick wit whose Irish eyes actually did smile.

I don't remember much about the details of Ron's enthusiasm. I only recall... "Kennedy this and Kennedy that." I was fixated on the Spokane Indians Triple-A baseball team, a farm club for my favorite team, the L.A. Dodgers, who had left Brooklyn in 1958 and moved to Los Angeles, near where I had been living in Pomona. In Spokane, I watched several future Dodger stars -- Willie Davis, Frank Howard, Charlie Neal, Ron Fairly -- play up close in a small baseball park for the Indians. Ron took me to the games.

Kennedy was Catholic, which made him popular with my aunt and mother, Dorothy. Lots of Irish here, as well as evident in the surnames of kids I would meet in Spokane: Mooney, Moran, McGivern, McGough, Flynn.

Kennedy was handsome and a WWII hero and the following November, 1961, he triumphed over Republican candidate Richard Nixon to become our 36th President, not only the first Catholic to reach the White House but also the youngest president at age 43.

Media analysts claimed that he won the election based on his charisma in front of the TV camera during a debate with Nixon. He introduced a vital, fresh elan to the country. He encouraged physical fitness -- a Kennedy trait, as we've seen. He and his wife Jackie cut a dashing, modern style -- je ne sais quoi -- for the White House.

His first year in office Kennedy established the Peace Corps to promote world peace and friendship through global service. Ron eagerly volunteered. He was sent to Nigeria, Africa to teach English.

My family, which included my parents and sister Mary, returned to Southern California in 1961 and I lost touch with my cousin, but I was able to read about him in newspaper clippings sent from my aunt. He had studied and learned to speak Igbo, an African language. He was helping to educate local villagers amid a region suffering hunger and political unrest. He became a hero of mine.

Less than two years following his election, President Kennedy was assassinated while riding in a convertible automobile in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas, November 23, 1963. Perhaps his greatest accomplishment was to lead us safely through the Cuban Missile Crisis, regarded as the closest we've ever come to a nuclear war. It was essentially a face-off between Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Soviet Union, who ordered the installation of nuclear missile sites in Cuba within range of the U.S.

My mother had begun to stock canned goods in the event of war. The atmosphere was tense, even for a 14-year-old kid whose world revolved around sports.

Everything stopped following the assassination. For three days, all news centered on the shooting and our former president. We saw endless films of the Kennedys. There were no sports or other shows on TV. Today it would be as if the entire internet focused on one subject.

Sitting alone in my home, I watched the suspected assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, being transferred through a basement hallway of the Dallas Police Dept. Suddenly a man with a fedora-style hat appeared out of the shadows and fired a gun at Oswald. He was identified as Jack Ruby, a New Orleans nightclub owner. Oswald died from the gun shot. I watched this live in real time on black and white TV. 

Oswald's murder multiplied speculation about Kennedy's assassination. Was it a conspiracy? What was going on? Who was behind it?

Ruby, who shot Oswald, was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in 1964. His conviction was appealed. He was awaiting another trial when he died of a pulmonary embolism caused by lung cancer.

Following Kennedy’ death, Vice-president Lyndon Johnson was immediately sworn in as president and soon after asked for an internal investigation, to be led by Chief Justice Earl Warren. Johnson wanted to staunch conspiracy theories as quickly as possible and settle down the country. The 888-page Warren Report stated that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he assassinated President Kennedy. It further claimed that Jack Ruby was the sole killer of Oswald.

Fast forward to 1979, a House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) found that the Warren Commission was incomplete. The Select Committee determined, "There was a high probability that a second gunman, in fact, fired at the president." Period. No names or suspects.

Some believe that the death of President Kennedy changed the course of history, that we never would have become as militarily involved in Vietnam had Kennedy remained in office. In 2004, heretofore unreleased recorded White House conversations indicated that Kennedy had an exit strategy for leaving Vietnam. 

"President Kennedy had long regarded the war as South Vietnam's alone to win or lose," according to Howard Jones, University Research Professor at the University of Alabama and author of "The Death of a Generation: How the Assassinations of Diem and JFK prolonged the Vietnam War. Jones was one of many to take this position. 

Two more political assassinations occurred during the 1960s: Martin Luther King, Jr., April 4, 1968 in Memphis TN, and Robert F. Kennedy, the former president's brother, June 5, 1968 in Los Angeles. RFK was campaigning for the Democratic nomination for president.

All three men had been in their 40s and espoused similar progressive politics. Their deaths were a significant factor during the cultural revolution of the 1960s that included political division and a war in Vietnam in which more than 58,000 American men were killed. Young people dropped out of the mainstream and joined communes. Many, seeking enlightenment or escape, experimented with mind-altering drugs, followed gurus and joined cults. Some draft age men fled to Canada. A vital new music scene emerged that crescendoed at a three-day concert in August of 1969 in upstate New York called Woodstock. 

The Nixon White House

Following his stint in the Peace Corps, Ron returned home, earned a masters degree in communications at the University of Washington, enlisted in the U.S. Army and served in the First Signal Brigade in South Vietnam (1967-68), after which he earned his JD degree at Gonzaga School of Law. As a lawyer, he landed an advisory position in President Nixon’s White House. I didn’t realize he had become a Republican.

He had found a home on the East Coast, first in DC. Following several corporate positions as legal counsel, he opened a law practice in Scituate, MA. One of his major interests over the years was writing. He had three books published, including a novel, Song of Africa, inspired by his Peace Corps experiences.

Ron with his novel, Song of Africa. Cover graphics by his daughter Elizabeth Wheatley.

My trajectory was quite a bit more pedestrian than Ron’s. I had married my high school girlfriend, Linda, at age 21, one year before graduating from college in 1969. By that time we had already brought our first beautiful child, Molly, into the world. Following graduation, I found a writing gig at the San Jose Mercury-News, became frustrated with the newspaper's conservative politics and walked out. 

This led to an anti-establishment journey that included a three-month cross-country trip in a VW bus with Linda and Molly, followed by the birth of a second daughter, Vanessa. On September 13, 1976, Linda, 29, died in an automobile accident. I ended up in Santa Cruz, CA , with Molly, 8, and Vanessa, 3, employed as editor for Santa Cruz Publishing Company.

We Meet Again

In 1982, Ron and I met for the first time since our summer hanging together in Spokane in 1960. We had had occasional correspondences by mail and were able to set up a meeting in Rancho Mirage near Palm Springs where he would be attending a business conference. We were with our spouses, Edith and Barbara, whom I had met in Santa Cruz. We were wed on Christmas Eve, 1981. 

I recognized Ron immediately, although his temples of dark hair were flecked with grey. He had the same manner of a college professor that I remembered. We took seats by the pool beneath an umbrella, enjoyed lunch and lemonade and chatted about our lives and mostly about our common interest in writing. I was having fun writing a local column and he was in the throes of a play. We never spoke politics.

We spent the hour chatting away. That was the last time I would see Ron. We continued to exchange email messages and eventually became Facebook friends. When I started writing my blog Talking Real Stories in 2016, I included Ron on my mailing list. 

"You have to write a book," he said. He sent me the name of a writing consultant whom he had used. During this period he completed his novel, Song of Africa, for which I penned a glowing review on Amazon, comparing his writing to the great Graham Greene, who wrote eloquently about exotic places and intrigues and Catholicism. Ron's novel contained a dose of Catholicism.

While I had left the church and become more progressively liberal, Ron had become more conservative,  perhaps due to his marriage into an old-money East Coast  Republican family. I gleaned that information from comments by my mother. I posted a negative comment on Facebook regarding Donald Trump during his first term as president.

"Please don't say those things," Ron messaged me. "I don't want to hear them."

"I thought you were a fan of President Kennedy," I answered.

"I was." His reply was brief.

I wasn't about to change my opinion of Trump on Facebook.

We maintained our correspondence without talking about politics. Ron suggested that we meet me in Havre, MT, the birthplace of our mothers and home of our Herron lineage, near Fort Assiniboine where our great grandmother, Mary Larkin Herron from Galway, Ireland, is honored as a pioneer woman of the Old West. “I'll show you around," he said. 

I thought that was a grand idea, although neither of us followed up on it. The last time we communicated, which was three years ago, it was I who suggested that we meet at the old homestead in Montana.

He answered:

"I'm afraid that's a bridge too far." Ron was suffering from lymphoma cancer. I didn't reaIize the degree of his illness. The news of his death was devastating. I think because I believed he would continue to be there, distantly in my life, and we could discuss our writing, our stringing of words into sentences and stories, an Irish tradition that we shared.

Ronald Brian Wheatley passed away at age 82. He is survived by his daughter Elizabeth and son John Wheatley. Edith had died a few years before Ron. He had been active with a Veteran's group in Scituate, a quaintly appearing harbor town in Massachusetts from photos I have seen, a long distance and different territory from the Palouse and Spokane. He didn't live long enough to see Trump re-elected. 

I would love to have had a discussion with him about Trump 2.0. Compare and contrast Trump with Kennedy. Ask what Trump had done for our country and what he's asked of us? What would have happened if Kennedy had not been killed? 

Thank you, Ron, for your encouragement and the moments you gave me in Spokane. Somehow, God willing, as you would say; or as I would say, "If the stars are aligned” — We may meet in Havre after all. Writers do believe in dreams.

"They blew off his head while he was still in the car / shot down like a dog in broad daylight" -- Bob Dylan from his 2020, 16-and-a-half minute dirge, Murder Most Foul. Title from Shakespeare, subject the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Final Note

As is the case with so many of my stories, I did not know where this one would take me. I began with the idea of Presidents Day. One of my first thoughts was President Kennedy's famous inaugural words, followed by how it contrasted with what is happening in our country today. Which led me to the Peace Corps and my cousin Ron. It took off from there. I did not intend to rehash Kennedy's assassination, yet the more I got into the story, I felt, for context, it had to be there. 

For one, people who lived through it tend to forget, and two, many today may not have heard a personal story of the event and its ramifications. I hadn't realized, how the president's assassination -- his brother's and MLK's -- were such tremendous influences on the cultural upheaval of the Sixties. I think I believed the reverse: that the upheaval was responsible for their deaths. Today we see protesters being killed in the streets and our government informs us that it's their fault. Some believe this.

Reviewing the investigations of JFK’s death, I found it important to tell how and what the investigations revealed. I am not a conspiracy theorist, yet in this case the facts reveal a truth: the "high probability" of a second gunman. Lastly, I couldn't write about the subject without referring to my cousin, since he essentially introduced me to JFK whose words spurred him to the Peace Corps. I believe personal relationships make any story more realistic and evocative. Dylan's line at the end is a final punch! 

May your Presidents Day be real.

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