Rousmaniere: A President's Work-Related Injury

Memorial Day this week marked the 100^th anniversary of the birth of an individual who at age 46 suffered a fatal work-related injury. John F. Kennedy’s death by violence propagated a wave of memory that even today laps at our shore. The memory should remind us that every work injury probably is unfair from someone’s perspective, and the response to that injury is in some way a comment on decency.

I met John Kennedy twice. The first time when I was twelve, living on Long Island, I went with my dad and mom to pick up the then-Senator and Jackie at LaGuardia Airport, and we drove them into Manhattan. I asked him if Alaska was going to achieve statehood (it did within a year). I don’t recall talking with Jackie but I remember us stopping while she leaned outside the car window, perhaps coping with morning sickness.

Before I met him again, I was with my family at a restaurant in Venice in July 1960, when my father announced that the Democratic convention in Los Angeles had nominated Kennedy for president.

The second time was in March 1963, in the White House. My father, a friend of mine, and myself were led into the secretarial office that was between the Oval Office and the cabinet room. Evelyn Lincoln, his secretary, asked if we were connected to PT 109.  No, my father was Kennedy’s roommate at Harvard. Then JFK strode out from the Oval Office, looking tanner than I had ever seen anyone, and strikingly handsome.

My father had negotiated Kennedy’s acceptance into one of Harvard’s dining fraternities — “final clubs” — when Kennedy’s Catholicism and his father’s reputation did not sit well among the Ivy League elite. They both applied for the Navy in 1942; my father was turned down due to color blindness.

In November 1963, I heard about his fatal injury by the radio at the student center at the University of Ibadan, in Nigeria, where I was spending a year between high school and college. My father convened a quick memorial service at a chapel in Harvard Yard — he was running annual fundraising there at the time. My mother was driving two of my siblings from Cambridge to New York City. When she heard on the radio, she decided to pull into Stockbridge Village to compose herself. 

John Kennedy’s violent death, and those of other leaders, shocked me to viewing the universe as rough-hewn. Life can be noble; yet, something is not entirely right. To successfully adapt, one has to somehow hold both impressions close. Millions of Americans, to be sure, discerned that before they were ten. 

For Americans in the 1960s, violent death on the job was slow motion carnage. In 1964 Malcolm X visited my African campus, coming from Mecca, enthusiastic over the brotherhood of men. Within eighteen months he was dead.

I expect that many people my age remember within one hundred feet they were at the moment they learned that Martin Luther King (“I Have a Dream”) was shot in April, 1968, and Bobby Kennedy (“Why Not?”), a few weeks later. 

These deaths, of course, did not change the world of work injuries. Instead, deaths from coal mine disasters in the 1960s contributed to the pressure to enact the law that created Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and the temporary federal commission on workers’ compensation.  

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Rousmaniere is widely known throughout the workers’ compensation industry, both for his writing and consulting experience. Based in the picture perfect New England town of Woodstock, VT, he is a regular on the conference circuit, and is deeply in tune with trends and developments within the industry. His passion is writing and presenting on issues largely related to immigration, and he maintains a blog on the subject at www.workingimmigrants.com.

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