• Location: on the comfy loveseat with Abby
• Mood: curious
• Music: Michael Jackson-"Black or White"

JFK's Final Days: October 30, 1963

On Wednesday, October 30, 1963 (50 years ago today) President John F. Kennedy was in Philadelphia to speak at a fundraising event. Three years earlier when he was campaigning for president, large adoring crowds had come to greet him. Now the crowd was very sparse and unresponsive. He spoke on the topic of civil rights, despite a perception by the African-American community in that city that too little had been accomplished by the Kennedy administration on that front. On the flight home from Washington with Pennsylvania Governor David Lawrence. According to author Thurston Clarke, Kennedy told Lawrence an ethnic joke, which referenced an African-American family that had become the first to purchase property in the middle class Delmar Village neighborhood of Philadelphia. This is an excerpt from page 275 of Clarke's recent book JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President:

After ascertaining that Lawrence remembered how to play knock-knock, [Kennedy] said "knock knock."
"Who's there?" Lawrence dutifully replied.
"Iza."
"Iza who?"
"Iza ya next door neighbor."
Lawrence laughed while recounting the moment. "Iza ya next door neighbor. I can hear him say it."



According to Larry Newman, Kennedy "wouldn't listen to a dirty joke, especially if it was an ethnic joke. And especially if there was a mimicked accent involved. He would simply say 'I don't want to hear it' and walk away." Given this, his "Iza" joke becomes even more inexplicable. Was he smarting from the poor turnout for his motorcade? Upset that he appeared to be losing the support of blacks and backlash whites? Did it prove that his civil rights education remained incomplete, or could never be completed? That he would have been among the whites telling pollsters that they wanted blacks to have equal rights, but did not want them next door? Perhaps he considered jokes like this one simply, as he had told George Taylor about the practice of segregating his campaign workers at lunch in 1946, "one of the things of the time."