The Day King Was Shot

It's the easiest thing in the world for me to relive what happened with me this day 40 years ago, for several reasons. Weather-wise, it was a wonderful early spring day, and the famed D.C, Japanese cherry trees were undoubtedly in full bloom. But my mind was focused dead center on my wife and my mother, after the news of the shooting came in to the company where I worked, in suburban Maryland, and on the heels of that word of the riots that had already broken out in D.C. where I lived. I was quickly given leave to jump into my little black Bug and head south to D.C. and the Navy Department where my wife worked, because it was clear that with a tension gripping the whole Washington area as if it had been bombed by the Russians, I knew that EVERYbody would be getting off work and heading home or wherever they felt it was appropriate to be at such a time.

While I was already 38, B.H. Obama was only seven, and in addition he was living way over in Indonesia with his mother and his Indonesian stepfather. Because of those two factors he could not have had much appreciation for the significance of things that had happened that day not only in Memphis, Tennessee, and in Washington, D.C., but also in the rest of the U.S., especially in dozens of cities where the first plumes of smoke from civil disturbances were rising in the air.

At the same moment J.O. McCain had no access to radio, TV, or even a good rumor mill. Instead he was several months into a stay of over two years in a !0' by !0' room with a tin roof in a North Vietnamese prison camp, with no companion except his thoughts -- a truly dreadful fate for anybody, considering the mindsquirts he was likely to have had. Having been shot down by a missile the size of, as he described it, a telephone pole, and having been thoroughly banged up not only by that incident but also by his captors later, he had also been singled out for special attention because his father, a Navy Admiral, had been named none other than Commander of all the U.S. forces in the Vietnam Theater of war.

Since he was in solitary confinement and was not allowed access to anything much except food and sometimes a bath, it was probably a while before J.O. McCain heard about what had happened to Rev. King. Today he, Obama, and Clinton are dutifully going around commemorating the King tragedy, but if McCain is saying he shed any tears, I would have great trouble believing him, just as I would if he said he jumped up and down with joy in the prison when he heard about his father's ascendancy. --Well, maybe he did, but his constitution surely had something else to say.

In guessing McCain's reaction to the King thing, I'm going partly by my own experience with his Naval colleagues and superiors at exactly the same time. For several weeks I was a civilian copy editor in the company of all these high-ranked Navy Commanders and Captains who had been specially assembled by a certain famous admiral -- not J.O.'s father --to do some brainstorming in coming up with the specifications for a new ship that this man badly wanted the Navy to have.

I don't recall if I was on that project when King was shot but I do recall that when two rainbow Olympic runners named Tommie Smith and John Carlos won medals and on the awards stand they raised their fists while keeping their heads bowed in a silent "black power" salute while the "Star-Spangled Banner" was being played, you could've cut the hostility in those high-powered Navy rooms with a knife, though nothing overtly hostile was said to me. But that's a very poor indicator to give of their attitudes, isn't it? Because how else would it have been even remotely possible for them to feel?

Of the three main candidates currently running to be President, only H.R. Clinton was doing things that are directly related to what they are doing now, short of the normal stuff involved in merely staying alive. On that day in April of 1968, she was 21 and a junior at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, busily undergoing political transformations. As a freshman she had been the head of the Young Republicans there, but having already started seeing things in a different way, she was deeply affected by the assassination of King, and she started assisting the rainbow students in achieving the changes they desired to see at the college

So today, whereas Obama and McCain must've been completely oblivious, though for widely different reasons while being oddly esconsed not far from each other in the same distant part of the world, H.R. Clinton can at least say that when King was assassinated, she was fully cognizant of the event and its significance.

Meanwhile, when I reached the Navy Dept, buildings, my wife was nowhere to be seen. So I hurried home, while able to see the smoke rising in various places over the city, which I easily circumvented, and I found her safe at home with my mother. So I stayed there with them while only a few blocks away in two directions for two days businesses were burned down and rioters ran amuck and some were shot. I had no desire whatever to see up close what they or the police and the National Guard were doing. I knew all too well how other cities had already long since been partly reduced to ashes in the same inexplicable way, though not till then had that calamity happened in my town, and I have not been quite the same since.