Remembering meeting JFK

Friday marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, an event that conjures many images and emotions for people all over the world.
Often mingled with the murder of the nation’s 35th president are the words: “conspiracy” and “plot”.
Jack Burson, Eunice Alderman-at-large, said that he was involved in a plot to be photographed with then-US Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1959 in Crowley.
The proof of Burson’s plot – which is a black-and-white photograph of a young Jack Kennedy with an even younger Jack Burson – hangs on his office wall at Eunice City Hall, he said that it is one of his most prized possessions.
He said that he met Kennedy in Crowley at the home of Judge Edmund Reggie before Kennedy made a public appearance with the future first lady, Jaqueline Kennedy, at the 1959 Crowley Rice Festival.
A plot developed after Burson appeared with fellow college students at a backyard, pool-side reception at the home of Judge Reggie. (Reggie died on Tuesday of this week).
Burson said that the heavily attended reception was for the visiting JFK, the special guest speaker at the Rice Festival.
Burson said that he and his crew were there representing the Southwestern Louisiana Institute at Lafayette – which would later be named USL and then ULL – as members of the student government and Blue Key Honor Society.
“We didn’t have a long conversation about it,”said Burson. “We just plotted all day how to get a picture with Kennedy. We were just mingling with the crowd. There were a lot of elected officials that were all from Southwest Louisiana. We kind of positioned ourselves so that we could watch when Kennedy came up so that we could get a picture with him. And none of us had a camera.”
Not having a camera was an obstacle remedied by a visiting reporter-photographer from The Crowley Daily Signal (later Crowley-Post Signal) who was covering the event.
“He agreed to take the picture for us, if we could get Senator Kennedy to pose,” said Burson. “So, when he came out of the house, I don’t remember which one of us asked him, ‘Senator, we’d like to take a picture with you if you don’t mind’. And Senator Kennedy, in the time before smart phones and cameras in every hand, asked, ‘Sure, you got a photographer?’”
Burson and crew did have a photographer to preserve the moment which passed quickly amid a brief chit-chat session with the future President. Burson said that even in 1959, JFK had a magnetism much like a movie star.
“He had already written that book, ‘Profiles In Courage’, so he was well-known, not as well-known as he was going to get,” said Burson. “But he was a war hero too. He didn’t get the Medal of Honor but he got the next best thing to it. He was a PT-boat captain and his boat was sunk. He swam for miles with an injured back and a rope, or strap, around one his guys to save his life.”
After JFK was elected to the White House, Burson went to school for a year in Georgetown in late 1961.
Burson said that during his second semester he got a job running an elevator in the US Senate Office Building.
“The day that President Kennedy came in with a parade with the first astronauts and it had snowed that night,” said Burson. “And they came to the front of the Capitol to end the parade. Back then, I worked from 7:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. So, I ran outside where I could see the end of the parade. And I got to see him riding by with the astronauts in the convertible. And I thought of that later when he got shot out of that convertible in Texas.”
Burson said that he believed that JFK carried Louisiana during his bid for President of the United States because JFK was the first Roman-Catholic who stood a chance to be elected President. He said JFK’s Catholicism resonated with Louisiana voters – which were predominately Catholic.
“There had only been one Catholic candidate for president before and that had been Al Smith and, of course, he got pretty resoundingly defeated in his election in 1928,” said Burson. “And ironically, there’s never been a Catholic President since Kennedy. John Kerry was a Catholic candidate. And that was a big deal at the time because there was a lot of people who said that a Catholic couldn’t get elected in 1960. That was the reason for JFK having a base of support in Southwest Louisiana.”
Burson said that he remembers “precisely” where he was when President Kennedy was shot. He was at Tulane Law School in the Zemurray Hall dormitory, in his room studying.
“Someone came down the hall with the news and I popped downstairs immediately to look at the television – which was in the big lobby of the dorm then – to see what was being reported,” said Burson. “That’s when I became aware of it.”
Burson quickly referenced a published Gallup poll which said that 61 percent of Americans believe that Oswald did not act alone in the assassination.
“All I can say is that I agree with the majority,” said Burson. “It strains credibility to believe that one way-out, Communist fellow-traveler, could have planned and put together all that by himself. And then the thing that really throws the bomb in the middle of that theory is the fact that a night-club owner, Jack Ruby, could have walked up while a man was being transferred in police custody, with policemen all around him, pull a gun and shoot him in front of everybody in the country watching on television. I mean, what’s the chances of that? Unless somebody’s not wanting him to talk. There’s no question that Ruby was a stooge for organized crime. He was their ‘boy’ in Dallas.”
In regards to the investigation that followed the assassination of JFK and Oswald, As for the Warren Commission – chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren to close the case on the murder of the President and any possible conspiracy – Burson said, “I think that the Commission suffered, first and foremost, from a fundamental error in investigating any crime,” he said. “They were looking for evidence to support a conclusion that they’d already reached. They went in thinking that Lee Harvey Oswald acted as the lone gunman. And whatever supported that theory, they grabbed for...it’s no question that a lot of very relevant evidence disappeared along the line. Now, that can happen just through sloppy handling sometimes, but again, it strains credibility to believe that some of it...just got lost because people weren’t particularly interested in it being on the front page of the paper.”