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The Watercooler: 'Mad Men' takes on Kennedy assassination

By Dawn Davenport
Press TV Blogger
ddavenport@johnsoncitypress.com

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I wasn’t around when President Kennedy was murdered, although I’ve heard many people talk about what it felt like to live through that day.

There are few moments that change a country on a dime. That moment 46 years ago — 12:30 p.m. Nov. 22, 1963 — was such a moment. So was 9/11.

Fans of “Mad Men” have been waiting all season to see how that day would play out for the employees of Sterling Cooper and their families. An episode that is met with such great expectations can be a letdown in its execution, but as with most things associated with this show, that wasn’t the case this time.

Last night’s episode, “The Grownups,” takes up on Nov. 21, 1963. The Sterling Cooper offices are without heat, and whiny Pete Campbell is curled up in a fetal position on his couch. He complains when his secretary brings him cocoa made with water from a nearby diner. Pete is this show’s perpetual man-child. He responds to life’s disappointments the way my 11-year-old son sometimes does: by becoming sulky or petulent or a combination of the two.

Witness Pete’s reaction to Lane Pryce’s announcement that Cosgrove is being promoted over him: He storms out of the office, goes home to the apartment he shares with his wife and hunches over a pot of leftovers.

By the end of the episode, after becoming absorbed in the nation’s shared tragedy, Pete seems more mature. Is he finally ready to take control of his future and go to work for Duck Phillips?

The events of Nov. 22 play out on “Mad Men” much as I suspect they did in many homes and workplaces (and hotel rooms) in real life. In the offices of Sterling Cooper, phones go unanswered as everyone gathers in Harry’s office to watch the news unfold on a fuzzy black-and-white TV screen. At the Draper home, housekeeper Carla comes home with the children to find Betty crying. “They just said he died,” Betty tells Carla, who gasps at the news before collapsing onto the couch next to her boss and lighting a cigarette. Here, little Sally, always most affected by Betty’s moods, becomes comforter to her distraught mother.

On the surface, Don seems the least affected by these tragic events. Forever the survivor, he brushes aside his emotional wife, telling her to take a pill and lie down. Everything will be fine, he assures her. But she’s not buying it.

Betty had lost everything in that fall of 1963. She learned her husband lied about who he was. His name, his past, his whole life with her were fabricated. Her father has died, and now her president, leaving her orphaned and alone. When she turns to her friend and would-be lover Henry, she is searching for a way out of that lie, the life that is crumbling around her.

When she finally tells Don it’s over, he again refuses to hear her, insisting, “You’ll feel better in the morning.” But the look on his face as he walks away tells me he knows it’s over.

My two favorite scenes last night were quiet ones involving Don in the wake of that world-shattering weekend. In the first, he sits alone in the bedroom he has shared with his wife. The room is quiet and he seems weary and filled with sadness. This seems to be the moment when he realizes that the life he had built mountains of lies to protect had slipped away from him.

The other takes place the next day — Monday, a national day of mourning and the day of Kennedy’s funeral. Don finds Peggy working in the empty Sterling Cooper offices. She had escaped there from a roommate who was organizing a gaggle of girls to write condolence letters to Jackie Kennedy, and later her mother, who was praying and crying so hard “there was no room for anyone else to feel anything.” When Peggy excuses herself to watch the funeral on the TV in Mr. Cooper’s office, Don shuffles into his office, hangs his hat and pours himself a drink before the screen goes black and we hear Skeeter Davis’ “The End of the World.”

The entire episode left me with a feeling of dread.