Krause: The band played on despite horrific tragedy

Fifty years ago tomorrow, there occurred one of the most tumultuous days in the nation’s history. The alleged assassin of President John F. Kennedy was himself shot to death, on national television, no less, by a nightclub owner named Jack Ruby.That single act – more than anything else – gave people all over America pause to wonder about the theory that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman responsible for Kennedy’s death. Then, as in now, doubts about the official version, and speculation about what really happened, have continued almost unabated.Something else happened that day too. The National Football League played its full slate of games. And it’s something that former commissioner Pete Rozelle regretted to the day he died.At the time, Rozelle was only 37 and six years into this tenure as commissioner. He hadn’t even begun feuding with Al Davis of the Oakland Raiders.Contrary to what many have been led to believe, Rozelle didn’t make this decision callously. He went to the University of San Francisco with Kennedy press secretary Pierre Salinger, and consulted his fellow Don to ask his opinion on whether he should proceed with the league’s slate of games.Kennedy, Salinger told him, would have wanted the games played. Armed with that go-ahead, Rozelle ordered them to proceed.It was not a popular decision, and Rozelle never stopped taking grief for it. It may have been easy for Salinger to speculate about what his former boss might have liked, but who’s to say he was right? And more important, who’s to say that’s what the country wanted?We were only slightly less divided politically in 1963 than we are now. The day Kennedy touched down in Dallas, there was a full-page ad in one of the city’s newspapers blaming the president for everything from nuclear proliferation (or disarmament, depending on your beliefs) to halitosis. It was worthy of any hate screed that any extremist group puts out today.Despite that, and despite the ravings of the lunatic fringe, Americans were united in their grief and anger over this assault on the presidency. Liberal, conservative … Democrat, Republican … it didn’t matter. Nobody was in much of a mood to watch football. People just wanted to bond in their grief as much as they could. The NFL got in the way.It matters little that Rozelle was acting upon the well-intentioned opinion of a member of Kennedy’s inner circle. It may have been a magnanimous gesture on the part of Salinger, and to his credit, he always backed Rozelle up whenever the subject was broached. But it was the wrong decision just the same.If there were ever a time to acknowledge that games are simply that … games … this would have been it. The American Football League, only in fourth year at the time, elected to not to play its games and there probably isn’t a single AFLer still alive who regrets that decision. But there are a lot of NFLers from that era who weren’t happy to be playing. Vince Lombardi, the epitome of the “run-through-a-brick-wall” mentality, was one of them.One of the unfortunate byproducts of that Sunday was the entire roster of Dallas Cowboys players being booed in Cleveland as they took the field … as if they’d shot Kennedy themselves.Almost 38 years later, on September 11, 2001, the NFL – now one, big happy family – had a similar decision to make. Terrorists had hijacked airplanes and destroyed the twin towers in New York, damaged the Pentagon, and caused nearly 3,000 deaths. This time, commissioner Paul Tagliabue made the right call. The NFL postponed its games, pushing them back to the end of the season.Sometimes, reality is far too important. Nov. 22, 1963 was one of those times. And as he got older, Rozelle ruefully admitted as much.