Well, Mad Men had the moment yesterday that the entire season, set in 1963, was leading up to. WARNING: SPOILER ALERT! DON’T READ FURTHER IF YOU HAVEN’T WATCHED LAST NIGHT’S SHOW YET!
The credit in the opening titles that yesterday’s show was directed by Barbet Schroeder, whose name rarely graces American TV shows, was probably the first clue that something was up, but still, kudos for the way the show weaved the Cronkite moment into the early proceedings. Two of the junior account execs are discussing being screwed by their bosses at promotion time, while the now legendary clip of Cronkite quietly plays in the background, before everyone rushes in:
And kudos for the show for attempting to show that life went on in the immediate aftermath of the assassination. (Though that also benefits the drama of the show — there wouldn’t be that much if the characters stared at CBS for 55 minutes.)
There’s a moment in series creator Matthew Weiner’s video recap of yesterday’s show that doesn’t ring true from the period:
In the clip above, Weiner says:
I called [the episode] “The Grown-Ups”, because to me, it’s a lot of people realizing that they are orphaned, or that their father is gone, or that it’s time to be an adult…When Oswald is shot, there’s a kind of nihilism that takes over, because the system does not work. There’s all the stuff in that show about the System, and how the institutions that are supposed to take care of you, be it marriage, be it government, be it justice – everything breaks down.
Their father is gone? In 1960, Mort Sahl was doing jokes about how the dominant theme of the then-ongoing president campaign was “Oh yeah? Well, so your old man!” Kennedy and Nixon were both were dependent on much older and more experienced men for their careers. Nixon wouldn’t have been running without Ike’s two successful terms in office of course, and Kennedy’s wealth and power came literally fromhis father.
Mad Men is of course, the latest Boomer victory lap for how the Most Enlightened Generation Ever™ brought civilization out of the dark ages of their parents’ gray flannel past. But I honestly doubt most people of that era viewed Kennedy as “their father”, in the same way that wide swatches of today’s left seem determined to create some sort of strange paternalistic connection with the equally youthful-appearing Obama. Also, despite 30 years of the New Deal and its aftermath, most Americans still weren’t as intimately connected with their government as the now increasingly all-encompassing nanny state and wall-to-wall 24/7 cable news makes it seem today.
And as far as the system not working, Weiner has a point — one element really broke down. The media narrative of the time was crafted to avoid discussing the facts of the case as much as possible. As Jackie Kennedy was quoted as saying, her husband “didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. It had to be some silly little Communist. It even robs his death of any meaning.” Rather than credit JFK as a victim –the American victim — of the Cold War, a wildly incoherent narrative was crafted to place Kennedy on the vanguard of civil rights. The result was an astonishing case of societal cognitive dissonance, as James Piereson noted in Camelot and Cultural Revolution, and discussed in depth with Peter Robinson:
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Weiner is right though — as a result of that cognitive dissonance, the dominant forms of society that were built in the wake of the New Deal would break down and the sixties would get progressively weirder and nihilistic as they went on. It will be interesting to see where Mad Men goes from here.
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15 Comments
1. James Hudnall:If you haven’t seen this, I can’t recommend it enough. They are playing it over and over again on the History channel as it’s that time of year. http://tinyurl.com/yl925ak
I thought this Mad Men episode was great and I look forward to the season finale next week. But I agree, Kennedy wasn’t seen as a daddy figure. People have mostly had fatherly presidents up to that point. He was young, so the were mostly energized by him. The Oswald thing really threw people and that’s the point where people started distrusting the government and the media. They saw that the whole thing was a lot more fragile and incompetent than most people thought up till then.
Nov 2, 2009 - 8:20 pm 2. Tweets that mention Ed Driscoll » …When After All, It Wasn’t You Or Me -- Topsy.com:[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Ed Driscoll, Ed Driscoll. Ed Driscoll said: #tcot #hhrs …When After All, It Wasn’t You Or Me: Well, Mad Men had the moment yesterday.. http://bit.ly/2hdWJb [...]
Nov 2, 2009 - 8:53 pm 3. DG in GA:As someone who remembers the Kennedy assassination (albeit, I was a child) what I remember was not the feeling that the country had “lost a father” – give me a break! – but that the news was on ALL THE TIME! That was rare in those days. If you had the TV on, you couldn’t get away from the news. Now, with 24/7 cable news, it’s not such a big deal. But other than the shock of the President being shot – which, thank God, doesn’t happen very often – and a lot of people overreacting, just like they did when Michael Jackson died, it wasn’t the earthshaking big deal that the liberal media likes to make of it. The world did not shut down. Life went on. Heck, we had to stay in school the whole day and they didn’t cancel the next day. After all, Kennedy had only been President for a couple of years. It’s not like when Roosevelt died and a lot of people couldn’t remember when he wasn’t president.
And, by the way, Matthew Weiner wasn’t even BORN yet when Kennedy died. What makes him think he knows ANYTHING about it – except what he reads in the liberal media.
Nov 2, 2009 - 11:21 pm 4. bic:The left never ceases to try to find new ways to milk JFK nostalgia from a Romanticized
underachieving President.
They should spend more time reminding everyone JFK was really a drug addicted, serial womanizer
whose father admired fascism and Hitler; and that after the failure of the Bay of Pigs, and just weeks after Khrushchev assessed him at the Vienna summit as a weakling and loser, nuclear missiles were being sent to Cuba, and the Berlin wall being put up Germany, and Kennedy had to order the assassination of Diem in Vietnam to try to stem communism to bolster his street cred.
We lost all that, and JFK was only in office 2 1/2 years. They never tried that with IKE.
Obama is on that same path of Romanticized failure as JFK, that’s the comparison.
Nov 3, 2009 - 2:13 am 5. Philip:As a young boy growing up in the NYC borough of Queens, JFK was a hero to me much as Mickey Mantle & the NY Yankees were. Except for the fact that no actor was as good looking as him, it made complete sense to me that Cliff Robertson would play him in the movie PT109 which I saw at the local movie theater w/my friends when it came out. Yes, Not only could our Young Prez give a great speech, but as the movie pointed out, he was selfless & he had guts too. Like Officer Joe Bolton, Sandy Becker, Chuck McCann, Soupy Sales, & other hosts of local tv shows for kids my age, it seemed JFK was on TV ALL the time, & his press conferences were must see TV in my home. He was quick on his feet, seemingly never at a loss when responding to a question, confident & in chargs, & it was clear he had a hell of a sense of humor. The fiction that is Oswald as lone gunman fooled the naive me back in 1963, but I’ve wisened up since then & no longer believe in that or the many other fictions that have come down the pike in the ensuing years. I’m convinced JFK died at the hands of our National Security State operators, w/military & intelligence community people orchestrating this black op. I still believe to this day that no one is safe as long as this crime remains covered up.
Nov 3, 2009 - 3:12 am 6. Phil:JFK was a hero to me much as Mickey Mantle & the NY Yankees were. Like Officer Joe Bolton, Sandy Becker, Chuck McCann, Soupy Sales, & other hosts of local tv shows for kids my age, it seemed JFK was on TV ALL the time, & his press conferences were must see TV in my home. He was quick on his feet, seemingly never at a loss when responding to a question, confident & in chargs, & it was clear he had a hell of a sense of humor. The fiction that is Oswald as lone gunman fooled the naive me back in 1963, but I’ve wisened up since then & no longer believe in that or the many other fictions that have come down the pike in the ensuing years. I’m convinced JFK died at the hands of our National Security State operators, w/military & intelligence community people orchestrating this black op. I still believe to this day that no one is safe as long as this crime remains covered up.
Nov 3, 2009 - 3:21 am 7. Gary:I was 11 years old at the time but remember it quite well. Kennedy was no father figure in my family even though my mother was a devout Catholic. My parents thought that Kennedy was a big step down from IKE. And although they disliked him they had the common decency to mourn the passing of a President that was murdered by a communist punk. The most accurate thing about this episode is that this event was all about television.
Nov 3, 2009 - 6:47 am 8. Sheldon Gilman:I was not a child when Kennedy was assissinated, as many of the people who have commented on both your article and on the Mad Men episode were. The episode rang true to me in every respect except perhaps any comments about a “father figure”. Kennedy was anything but that. He was young, vigorous, handsome, clever, witty (such a nice change from Eisenhower). He was intelligent, appeared to be forthright, met the attacks on his Catholicism head-on, he was brave. We did not know the back stories that we think we know now. But we did know that both the assisination of Kennedy and the shocking shooting of Oswald interrupted what had become our cozy world in a shocking, sickening way. And yes, the news was on all the time–a way of bringing the country together and of showing what it meant to the news media and the country to have information, coverage, pictures, erudite discussions immediately available.
Too bad some of the people who have commented here know nothing about the 60s or the assination but still feel it is their duty or their right to make immature, silly comments on your blog. Interestingly, I remember no silly or immature comments from TV during the Kennedy coverage. I guess the good old days are gone forever.
Nov 3, 2009 - 7:47 am 9. R. Dittmar:Far from being a “father figure”, I don’t even think Kennedy was all that popular at the time of his death. After all that’s the reason he was in Dallas in the first place – trying to scare up enough votes to win re-election. And remember what a squeaker the 1960 election was. Just a few thousand shady votes in Chicago sealed the deal for JFK over Nixon.
It hurts to say negative things about the man given the truly tragic circumstances of his death, but those glasses we use to look back on his term are far, far too rosy in color.
Nov 3, 2009 - 8:10 am 10. Flashpoint:New Flash.
Matt Weiner arrived on Planet Earth in 1965. This cinches the “romanticized martyr” allegory. “Lost a father” isn’t the right characterization, Matt. Romanticized and elevated to martyr in a mass-consumption haze of the JFK legacy? Yes. Absolutely.
It’s not that complex. For us little kids in ‘63, it’s more accurate to say we “lost our mothers” for a short time. Much of MM’s target demo today are boomers who were then pre-school, grade-school or junior high. I remember the funeral on TV, but don’t distinctly remember any of the news coverage before it. I was too busy playing on the swingset in the backyard. But I distinctly recall Mom crying — and it was distressing to me, because I couldn’t validate her reasons for WHY. I didn’t make sense to me. Death isn’t something a kid crazily embraces like (American) adults who adore their martyrs and elevate them to hero status.
In the 60s, moms were the primary care-givers, dads disappeared for the whole day. So I’ll argue that his mom “losing it” was imprinted on Matt Weiner’s mind somehow, although he wasn’t even a zygote when Dallas happened. But in many of the Boomers’ family annals: JFK is “when Mom was crying and us little kids didn’t understand it.” JFK was many Boomers’ first encounter with grief. The Kennedy good looks and dreamy East Coast privilege absolutely entranced the bourgeoisie and martyrdom for 2-1/2 years was made complete.
Matt “supposes” that we lost a father then. Someone wants to assign a benchmarks for when this country began the journey of lost innocence. Let’s hang it on JFK’s assasination.
(BTW: When Jackie succumbed to cancer, it resurrected sorrows all over again. At age 66, it worked for my mom to revisit being the 35-year-old homemaker sobbing on the couch in front of the TV…all…over…again.)
Nov 3, 2009 - 8:39 am 11. Ed Driscoll:Phil,
“I’m convinced JFK died at the hands of our National Security State operators, w/military & intelligence community people orchestrating this black op. I still believe to this day that no one is safe as long as this crime remains covered up.”
And yet you feel safe enough to discuss this topic openly on the Internet, much like the more recent 9/11 “Truthers.”
Nov 3, 2009 - 10:21 am 12. Rob De Witt:I think the time has come to get a little precision into the conversation.
While it’s true that Mad Men is seen as, as you put it, another “Boomer Victory Lap,” simple math should make it apparent that it’s not about the BoomyBabers. And no, I don’t watch it.
C,mon, Ed, in 1963 the oldest Baby Boomer was 17 years old – and damn sure wasn’t working on Madison Avenue. Talk to some people my age, born during WWII. The distinction between common sense and the Me Generation has never been subtle. Virtually anybody born before 1946 has a clear and well-focused vision of the difference between up and down – even though there are plenty of folks who are Lefties anyway in those generations.
The difference between us and the Boomers is that we were taught that it’s a virtue to think for yourself, and not an abberation.
Nov 3, 2009 - 10:58 am 13. ak138:“He was young, vigorous, handsome, clever, witty (such a nice change from Eisenhower).”
And knowing what we know now, who was the better man? Kennedy or Eisenhower? The fact that one was liked and respected (and you can hardly argue that Ike wasn’t popular) by the people who made it through the Depression and fought WWII, and one was idolized as handsome and stylish by the spoiled youth culture of 1960s should tell you something.
Nov 3, 2009 - 12:20 pm 14. Rob De Witt:By the way, Mort Sahl also delivered the line “The final headline of the San Francisco Chronicle will be ‘World Ends – Women And Minorities Hardest Hit.’ ”
In the ’50s. Imagine.
Nov 3, 2009 - 1:31 pm 15. Pajamas Media » PJM Political 11/7/09: Obama, Ayn, Caesar, Scozzafava!:[...] Questions For James Lileks — including questions about the midterms and The Big Episode of Mad Men last [...]
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