<Begin Segment 26>

AI: Well, so when you did rotate back to the States, then, is that when you came to Fort Lewis?

RS: Right. I had, I think I had a little furlough time and then reported to Fort Lewis and I was on the general staff as Assistant Post Training Officer. And my job, essentially, for my last nine months there was to, I was in charge of all parades and honor guard ceremonies for every event that was at Fort Lewis. And if there wasn't some sort of standard operating procedure, I had to write it by going into the library and finding out what the appropriate -- I had to draw these charts and, I really got into that. It was something I, 'cause even to this day I love the pomp and circumstance of military parades, and presidential funerals, and when JFK was killed. I mean, it was just fascinating. Well, I happened to be doing this job when JFK was assassinated, and I realized the impact that that was going to have upon me, because how many presidents have been assassinated while in office? And, and I'm sure that none of them were around to, to say what was supposed to be done on a military post in the case that a president was assassinated. But we actually, in the office, knew about it before the public did and we got what was called a TWX, which was a sort of ticker-tape thing that twenty-four hours a day pumped out news from all over the country, and you pull it out and you read it like this. And someone picked up on the fact that hey, JFK was shot. And we turned on the radio and there was nothing on the radio but we were reading this thing. And it seemed like about five minutes later it actually came on the radio. So we got it a little before everybody else. And I was away, out of the office because one of my additional duties was to, as a lawyer, was to defend these twenty-five prisoners that went AWOL. And I was supposed to defend them in a military court-martial. And so I got in my car, knowing that JFK was shot, not knowing that he had died yet, and drove over to the stockade. And I went into the stockade and there were all these twenty-five men lined up in the hallways and they were all handcuffed, at the at-ease position. And a lot of them were crying, and had a radio on and that's when I found out that Kennedy died. And here were all these grown men and half of them were sobbing and crying. And they had a cell open for me so that I could interview. And I was supposed to get the extenuating and mitigating circumstances from each person and to build a case, and then at their court-martial, defend them. But it was real difficult because these, most of 'em were real young kids in their early twenties, and some were teens, were just really broken up over this. And so I managed for the rest of the day to get through all of them.

And then I had to go back to the office and pull an all-nighter and go through all these books and manuals as to what a post does, what everybody does, when a president gets assassinated in office. And so I had to make all these charts and diagrams and immediately had to get on this twenty-four-hour gun salute. All night long, ba-boom, cannon would go off on post. And there were certain things that each person involved in this ceremony had to be doing. It wasn't just the cannon going off. All these other things had to happen, too. And then the next day it was just this whole series of events that go through. And I had to be on top of all of that, and watch that all happen. And it lasted for a week, because every night these salutes had to go off at certain times. And I think to this day that that had something to do with some of the performance work that I did later on. My ability to be able to organize these things and put them in the right sequence and manage several things at the same time, I think, came from, from that training.

AI: You were actually producing and directing and managing this whole --

RS: Right, right.

AI: -- arrangement?

RS: Which was a performance, yeah. And there was something really satisfying. I loved doing that. And I actually have this booklet I created that's about this thick that's just filled with all these little architectural drawings about who moves here when, and on certain, and I just love that. And as I said, was just thoroughly enraptured by watching the funeral, that whole procession, and everything about that.

AI: So, you were very immersed in all this activity, all your responsibilities, your duties, things that you had to carry out --

RS: Right, right.

AI: -- for days on end.

RS: Yeah, yeah.

AI: What about your own personal reaction to the fact that he had been killed?

RS: I took it quite hard. I took it very personally. I cried several times in the process of all of that. And I think felt it like everybody else did. Yeah, it was a very dramatic time.

AI: Had President Kennedy meant much to you? Up to that point?

RS: I think he did. I think that whole kind of ambience that was coming out of the White House with Jackie Kennedy -- then I realized that, I knew that his political persuasion was quite different than Barry Goldwater's. There was a certain kind of appeal that Camelot had for me and the sort of style and all that. I'm not gonna say that I sat there and listened to the content and that it persuaded me, but I had a real vulnerability for what all of that stood for. But during that time, I can't really say that I was politically motivated by things. I mean, one thing that I didn't say earlier was that when I got to Korea, one of the first things I did was volunteer to go to Vietnam. And the reason I volunteered to go to Vietnam because of hazard pay, which we weren't getting in Korea, even though we were on twenty-four-hour strack, which meant we didn't, we weren't allowed to bring any civilian clothes with us and the sirens would go off at any time, twenty-four hours a day which meant that we had to locate, relocate into our main battle positions that were several miles away. And, of course, this happened at the worse time when we were partying or drunk or -- we would have to do this. And so, what was my train of thought?

<End Segment 26> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.