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THE AGONY OF “WHAT IF?”

I don’t know how you remember it — and if you’re 40 years old or more, you certainly do. I was a 16-year-old high schooler, living in Hagerstown, Maryland, and it had just happened 10 minutes earlier when I heard the news. Ken was at a fruitstand with his mom in Mentone, California, when the reports began to come in. David, our writer/producer, was just an eight-year-old missionary kid living in Bangkok — and of course, Friday afternoon in Dallas, Texas was already Saturday morning in the Far East. One-thirty in the morning. David and his missionary friends, though, didn’t hear the tragic news until he was coming out of church that morning.

The huge, blockbuster book, The Death of a President, by William Manchester, runs 891 pages in telling this terrible November story. And the plot builds up slowly, with politics and planning and Secret Service strategies and banquet dinners in Houston and San Antonio. Of course, we all know the story, and as you read this book, it hurts to relive it as Mrs. Kennedy puts on that pink dress. The motorcade sets out from Love Field in Dallas. The Presidential car, SS 100 X, with D.C. license plate number GG 300, holds six people: Secret Service agent Roy Kellerman, agent Bill Greer, the driver, Texas governor John Connally and his wife Nellie in two jump seats, and then John and Jacqueline Kennedy. And then, with page after page of details, the streets go by. Field. Market. Twelve-twenty-eight p.m. A right turn onto Houston. Now the clock reads 12:29. A very slow left turn, almost a U-turn onto Elm, which borders Dealey Plaza. Ahead is the triple underpass and the Stemmons Freeway. To the right the Texas School Book Depository, a six-story building.

All the crowds are cheering. People hanging out of windows. A dress manufacturer named Abe Zapruder has his movie camera ready with a Zoomar lens, eager for some footage of the President and Jackie.

And then on page 229 of the book, is this seven-word sentence which brings the country to a violent turning point:

THERE WAS A SUDDEN, SHARP, SHATTERING SOUND.

Twelve-thirty in the afternoon, Central Standard Time, as recorded by the Hertz clock right there at Dealey Plaza. November 22, 1963 . . . and “there was a sudden, sharp, shattering sound.” Fourty years ago this coming Saturday. Bullets hit and killed the President, fired from a bolt-action, clip-fed 6.5 millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano rifle that cost Lee Harvey Oswald a total of $21.45. He ordered it from the magazine, American Rifleman, and paid for it with a money order under the assumed name of A. Hidell.

And now, three-and-a-half decades later, people around the world are still tormented by one word: WHY? What’s the purpose behind something so senseless? Why did this random act of horror have to happen? Where is God at a time like this?

Standing right there on the curb at Dealey Plaza that Friday morning was a young man named Arnold Rowland. And as he looked up at the sixth floor, he could see Lee Harvey Oswald standing there at the open window. It was 12:14 p.m. — the Hertz clock spelled out the critical time. And this Rowland could see Oswald holding his rifle; he could actually see the murder weapon. And he said to his wife: “Do you want to see a Secret Service agent?” “Where?” she asked. “Right there in that building.” And William Manchester makes this observation:

“At that moment an alert policeman, scanning windows, could have altered the course of history.”

A pipefitter named Howard Brennan, sitting on a white cement wall on the perimeter of the plaza, looked up at the sixth floor of the Book Depository; he saw Oswald there too — a motionless statue waiting for 12 more minutes to pass. In fact, Brennan watched in horror as Oswald, the former Marine, calmly aimed and fired the final, fatal shot which took the President’s life.

And so this book and this story are both filled with so many anguished what if’s. What if Secret Service agents — drivers — had had instructions that, at the first sign of danger, the first sound of gunfire, they were to whip a sharp turn and punch the gas on that hugely powerful Lincoln Continental? Oswald would have only gotten off the one shot then, not a fatal one. What if?

Almost a month earlier, a low-level political functionary, Jerry Bruno, was working as an advance man for the Democratic National Committee, trying to find a place for the Dallas banquet and Kennedy speech. They wanted the Sheraton-Dallas Hotel, but it was already booked. So they had to choose between the Women’s Building, a kind of drab structure near the Cotton Bowl, or the Trade Mart, a facility which was quite a bit more showy. Well, it was his job to pick, and he chose the Trade Mart. And for decades now, he’s lived with the fact that the route from Love Field to the Trade Mart took the motorcade right by that Texas School Book Depository. And it haunts him: What if?

Manchester, in his interviews with so many players in this sad drama, encountered that anguished cry over and over. What if? WHY?!

“Throughout that weekend,” he writes, “[presidential advisor] Mac Bundy could not get the German word ‘Unsinn’ — ‘absurdity’ — out of his head. Ken [O’Donnell, another advisor] had much the same thing in mind when he asked those around him, over and over, ‘Why did it happen? What good did it do? All my life I’ve believed that something worthwhile comes out of everything, no matter how terrible it is. What good can come of this?’” And then Manchester adds this disturbing note: “The meaninglessness threatened the anchor of Ken’s faith.”

And really, that’s the challenge for us 40 years later. Someone kills OUR loved one, our spouse, our child. Your dearest friend goes through some kind of agony, a loss that makes no sense. Cancer, maybe. Or Alzheimer’s. And maybe we don’t exactly doubt the existence of God, but, along with a grieving survivor like King David, we certainly wonder where He’s gone off to. Here’s Psalm 10:1:

“Lord, why are You so far away? Why do You hide Yourself in times of difficulty?”

Or chapter 13:
“How much longer, Lord, will You forget that I’m here? It seems like forever! How long will You turn Your face from me?”

As this worst of all weekends went on, as the entire world watched endless television: the flight home from Dallas, Johnson being sworn in, the service at the Rotunda, the funeral at St. Matthew’s, the graveside ceremony, the endless video clips from happier Kennedy days, from “Camelot,” people were in this kind of spiritual anguish. Around the globe people were weeping. Over in Europe, Italians who were watching muttered and lamented over and over about Il fucile maledetto — “that accursed gun,” the assassin’s rifle which had been manufactured in their country.

One of the viewers was Theodore White, a man who has written several bestsellers about U.S. elections, entitled The Making of the President. He’d written about the Kennedy-Nixon matchup just three years earlier. And now, the marathon of television sorrow went on and on until his little girl finally looked up at him and asked: “Daddy, when are we going to be happy again?” Which is our cry too, and King David’s. Just two verses later, still in Psalm 13, he adds this in crying out to God:

“Please look at my distress and answer me, Lord. I plead with You to put laughter back in my eyes, or I will die.”

Well, friend, there are no easy answers to these kinds of what if’s . . . not the ones stemming from November 22, 1963, or the ones you experience every day of your own life in November of ‘2003. After the funeral was over, Jacqueline Kennedy, of course, had to move out of the White House. Can you imagine what kind of packing experience that must have been? And she moved to a house over on N Street. But the memories, the endless second-guessing, had to follow her to her new address. Manchester writes:

“She was tormented by ifs: if only she had insisted on a bubbletop [on the car] that morning, if she had just turned to her right sooner, if the Secret Service had put two men on the back of the car . . . if, if, if. Brooding was pointless now. Nevertheless she couldn’t cut it off. . . . What was so terrible was the thought that it had been an accident, a freak, that an inch or two here, a moment or two there would have reversed history.”

Well, friend, there are no easy answers to these puzzles even 40 years later. I’m sure this coming Saturday all the questions and the cries will surface again as networks remind us. WHY?! What’s the reason for the madness? What was accomplished by this Nightmare on Elm Street?

And in this world, in our human minds, there are no answers. Before November 22, President John F. Kennedy had on his desk a small plaque with this humble reminder:

“Oh, God, Thy sea is so great and my boat is so small.”

Meaning, of course, that even a Chief Executive, the most important statesman in the world, needs the help of God. But friend, we don’t understand these things! We don’t get it. After Warren Commissions and Oliver Stone movies and 40 years of remembering, we don’t have answers. But our loving God, whose sea is so great, still does love us. He’s still there for the grieving widow and the confused nation and the bewildered world. Even when we feel tossed and turned and rudderless, He holds up every boat. I love that old line, so appropriate as we ponder the things we don’t know. It goes like this:

“Faith is trusting God EVEN WHEN YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND.”

God help us to just keep holding on.