The connection that Bob Dylan has with former President John F. Kennedy is circumstantial at best. Dylan’s first works came out while Kennedy was still in the White House, and Kennedy was included as one of the figures that Dylan converses with in the song ‘I Shall Be Free’ from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. But after Kennedy’s assassination, Dylan stepped into the first major controversy of his career.
While being presented with the Tom Paine Award by the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee for his work in civil rights, Dylan took the stage after a few drinks and proceeded to claim that he saw some of himself in Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. The comments came only two weeks after Kennedy’s death and led to a firestorm in the press.
“When I spoke of Lee Oswald, I was speakin’ of the times, I was not speakin’ of his deed if it was his deed,” Dylan explained in a statement shortly after. “The deed speaks for itself but I am sick, so sick at hearin’ ‘we all share the blame’ for every church bombing, gun battle, mine disaster, poverty explosion, an’ president killing that comes about.”
“It is so easy to say ‘we’ an’ bow our heads together I must say ‘I’ alone an’ bow my head alone for it is I alone who is livin’ my life…I do not apologize for myself nor my fears,” Dylan added. “I do not apologize for any statement which led some to believe ‘Oh my God! I think he’s the one that really shot the president.’”
While Dylan’s statement did little to alleviate the criticism, Dylan himself had mixed feelings about the major event. “I didn’t feel it any more than anybody else,” Dylan told biographer Anthony Scaduto. “We were all sensitive to it. The assassination took more of the shape of a happening. I read about those things happening to Lincoln, to Garfield, and that it could happen in this day and age was not too far-fetched.
“It didn’t knock the wind out of me. Of course, I felt as rotten as everyone else,” Dylan also said. “But if I was more sensitive about it than anyone else, I would have written a song about it, wouldn’t I? The whole thing about my reactions to the assassination is overplayed”.”
But Dylan did eventually channel his feelings about Kennedy’s assassination into a song… it just took 57 years to do it. In 2020, Dylan released the 17-minute single ‘Murder Most Foul’, which focuses heavily on Kennedy’s death. Interpreted variously as a Covid-culture contrast or a song supporting the “multiple shooters” theory, ‘Murder Most Foul’ found Dylan looking back at one of his oldest controversies and reframing it under his own power.
Check out ‘Murder Most Foul’ down below.
