The Kennedys and me.

One of the reasons I became a photojournalist was because, as a child, I grew up looking at the incredibly strong images in LIFE magazine of the Kennedys and of the war in Vietnam. LIFE magazine photojournalist Bill Eppridge was wherever the Kennedys were, and when he wasn't with them he was in Vietnam. Or photographing heroin addicts in Times Square. He worked in black and white, documentary style, all real life dramas captured in frozen images.

Today, decades later, there are still images burned in my mind of JFK on the campaign trail in Iowa, and then when he was President, and of his funeral after the assassination. Later, Eppridge was with Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles at the Ambassador Hotel the night RFK won the California primary election. It's Eppridge's photograph of Kennedy, dying on the kitchen floor, a crucifixion image in black and white, that America saw first on the pages of LIFE. While he was shooting that image, I was unconscious in surgery late at night in Bloomington, Indiana, having my broken left leg and knee repaired. I woke up coming out of anesthesia in the wee hours of the morning, with the television on in my room, hearing a reporter tell about RFK being shot and seriously wounded. I couldn't tell if it was real, or if it was my drug-induced and pain pilled imagination.

Days later I knew it was real, when I saw Eppridge's photographs as I held the magazine in my hands.

Bill Eppridge is the kind of photographer who shot the type of images that reached out and grabbed my brain by the stem and made my heart leap into my throat and made me to squirm with envy. Laying in bed with a smashed left leg anchored in plaster through the summer of 1968, I was transfixed; his photographs captivated me and brought me to places in the world that I would never see except through his eyes. Image after image instilled in me the idea that my cameras could be used to photograph more than just the flowers in the yard, my pet dog, or my vacations. The idea of becoming a photojournalist was planted in mind, even though I would go through a lot of diversionary exercises before actually ending up studying the craft.

But those were my two favorite topics: photojournalism, and the Kennedys. I was fascinated with both. I was only in the fourth grade with JFK was killed, but I was certainly aware of it and savored every photograph that came out of the news story and from the state funeral. It was compelling, emotional, overwhelming. It was what pictures were meant to do: document history, but touch the soul in a way that is stronger than actually being there. The photograph of three-year-old John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting the passing casket of his father became an image that is a milestone in the nation's history. That day, it was just one of hundreds of news photos from an overwhelming story. Through time, it came to symbolize the heartfelt grief of a family and a nation. There was still hope; what John and Robert left behind and unfinished was still in the hearts and minds of another generation, their children, who might someday grow up and finish the task through public service.

In the coming years while reading everything I could get my hands on that was written by Robert Kennedy, I learned more and more about RFK's older brother and I was motivated to read as much about JFK as I could as well. The documentary photographs only supported their words; these were people, John and Robert, who could and would change the world that I was going to grow up to live in as an adult. And then it was all cut short, mowed down, snuffed out.

I wanted to someday photograph the Kennedys, whether they were President at the time, a Senator, or whatever. Of course I never got to photograph either John or Robert, but I did photograph Senator Ted Kennedy many times when I worked in Washington. It wasn't the same. He didn't do what John and Robert did, the era of politics and news had changed, and the era of unlimited access to a candidate's private and personal time was long gone, thanks to Watergate and media handlers and sound bites and scandals. I would never have the chance to make the kinds of photographs Eppridge made of the Kennedys. As a student photographer, I was assigned to photograph a Kennedy wedding at the University chapel in Bloomington when a local girl married one of the Kennedy offspring (one of Robert's kids, I think. It was rather obscure). It was a meaningless photograph; a daily blotch on the society page for the entertainment crowd to consume. It would never even be in my portfolio.

 

Visitors from around the world come to stand before and photograph the grave of the thirty-fifth President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, at Arlington National Cemetery.

The impact the Kennedys had on my life, and on my career choice, was significant. That's why this weekend was all that much more sad, to watch the story unfold as John F. Kennedy's airplane was first reported missing, then searched for, then reports of evidence floating up on the western beaches of Martha's Vineyard, and then the inevitable and horrible conclusion of the crash. That little boy, the one who saluted his father, the subject of one of a sea of powerful images that caused me to fall in love simultaneously with photojournalism and with the patriarchs of his family, was gone. It saddens me, not only for the loss of his life, and for the loss of his wife and sister-in-law's life, and for the family, but once again for the loss of what might have been, for what was snuffed out, what was cut short, what ended senselessly.

I hope that he's buried at Arlington National Cemetery with his father John and his Uncle Robert. It gives me great peace of mind knowing that my parents are buried there, on that sacred ground that means so much to so many. For that one brief moment in time, for the salute to a father and a President that will last as long as this history of America lasts, he should be so honored.

A constant stream of visitors and tourists flock to the grave of John F. Kennedy at Arlington National Cemetery adjacent to Washington, DC. The eternal flame marks the site where JFK, Jackie, and their infant son are buried.

Behind the Viewfinder - A Year in the Life of Photojournalism
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