Stepping out of his 11 a.m. calculus class as a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin-Madison 50 years ago, current Mayor Paul Soglin immediately realized something was wrong.
"I got out of class, which was at Van Vleck, and walked alongside Bascom Hall to go down to the Union. At that hour, there were literally thousands and thousands of people going to and from class, and there was no one on the hill,” Soglin said.
“After I walked around Bascom Hall by North Hall, I ran into one lone guy and I said to him, ‘Where is everyone?’ It was like a scene out of one of these science fiction movies where you’ve got a city that’s desolate and all the people are gone,” he added. “And he said, ‘Haven’t you heard? The president was shot and they think he may be dead.’”
On Nov. 22, 1963, Soglin said he stood at the top of Bascom, devastated. And as he walked to Memorial Union to stand with students glued to the television, UW-Madison professor Joe Elder walked to his graduate-level sociological theory lecture.
Elder said although he noticed the flag at half staff, he was not aware President John F. Kennedy had been shot until a student interrupted him during lecture. Despite his students assuming class would be canceled, Elder carried on.
“I can’t think of a good reason not to have a class. I’m here, you’re here,” Elder told his students. “I began giving the lecture, but it was one of these, ‘what’s going to happen here?’ and I was sort of amazed and horrified at the notion ... something awful had happened.”
It was not until another faculty member notified him the university had closed that Elder said, “OK, that’s all for today.”
During the following week, Elder said he was engrossed in keeping up with the details of the president’s assassination as they emerged. At first, everyone watched television to find answers.
“What happened? Who did it? What would happen to Jackie?” Elder said.
As the story unfolded, Elder watched Lee Harvey Oswald get shot and Kennedy’s funeral procession. He said it was as if everything shut down until the funeral ended.
Elder said the UW-Madison faculty displayed “sorrow, dismay, uneasiness … the possibility that something was coming unraveled,” Elder said. “Mostly, it was like losing a friend.”
Although campus shut down, state Sen. Fred Risser, D-Madison, said the Capitol remained open. Fifty years ago today, Risser was sitting in a dentist’s chair when he heard Kennedy was shot. He said he ran home and spent the remainder of his day watching the news.
“It takes a while to register, because you can’t believe it,” Risser said. “The first feeling is that this couldn’t happen. And then when you realized it happened, you get mad and sad at the same time.”
Risser said he personally met and spoke with Kennedy several times during his 1960 presidential campaign. At the Democratic National Convention, Risser was a delegate under Hubert Humphrey, one of Kennedy’s democratic competitors. Kennedy tried to persuade Risser and Humphrey’s other delegates to join his campaign.
“He was quite affirmative, quite focused,” Risser said. “I remember talking to him, saying ‘Get your staff out of here and let us talk to you personally.’ So he told his staff to leave and was in the room alone with us and communicated with us, answered our questions. It was quite an experience.”
Elder said he too had a personal experience with Kennedy, when the Massachusetts senator at the time sat on the board of regents at Elder’s Harvard Ph.D. commencement ceremony in June of 1959.
“So there he was with his top hat, and everybody was talking about this young senator who looked like he might run for president’s office,” Elder said.
After earning his degree, Elder contemplated joining the Peace Corps and said for years he trained Peace Corps volunteers going to India. Because of that, he said he felt very engaged in Kennedy’s foreign diplomacies, especially in India.
Soglin also said the Peace Corps became a popular option for UW-Madison students following Kennedy’s assassination. For those already politically active like himself, Soglin said the incident “led us to reinforce our commitment to change.” In addition, Soglin said it mobilized other students to become involved with “an intensity that was never seen prior to the 1960s.”
“Up until the president’s assassination, U.S. students were probably less political than any other university students in the world,” Soglin said. “With President Kennedy’s election, there’s record campus political activity, which is then increased with his assassination, and we see it through the next decade.”
Elder also mentioned the shift in the campus climate when Kennedy was elected into office. His presidency was “kind of like a euphoria,” Elder said. “We felt very good in the United States about having a vigorous, young, well-educated, progressive president. And then, he was killed.”
And then he was killed. What would have happened if Kennedy did not die? Although nobody was asking it at the time, Soglin said when reflecting on his death, this is the most valuable question.
“The most important thing is what would have happened to this country if President Kennedy had lived,” Soglin said.
He said despite all the conspiracy theories, “There’s others of us who think that maybe the social and economic changes in the fight for equity and equality would have advanced further if President Kennedy had not died.”
Fifty years later, people continue to speculate on what could have been. Fifty years later, people continue to be influenced by Kennedy’s legacy, a legacy from which Elder said lessons can be learned.
“There was this element of idealism, which he captured,” Elder said. “And a sense of youthfulness. His death was a great loss. Here was somebody who was just getting going, who was bright and well-educated … the kind of person you were pleased to have in the White House.”
