How JFK's assassination created the jazz bagpipes

In 1960, when I was still a young lad, and John F Kennedy was still a candidate for the Presidency, I happened to be on my frst ever trip to New York and in Greenwich Village I saw a graffiti which read: "Chou En-lai For President!".

The reason I remember it was not for the message it contained, though it was unexpected, but for the second graffiti which someone else had written underneath.

"Good man, but think of the religion problem ..."

Does that make you blink? It didn't make us blink back then. I knew exactly what it meant as soon as I read it. The papers were full of the horrifying fact that Kennedy was a Catholic, that there had never been a Catholic president, and that his religion would surely disqualify him from ever being President, because too many people would feel that having a Papist in the White House would give the Pope a hot line to the seat of power.

At least Chou En-lai was an atheist.

No secret agenda there, then.

Well, as we all know, Kennedy overcame the religious doubters and became President, and said to his country: "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country!" And comedian Mort Sahl said he was in the crowd lining the avenue when Kennedy drove past on Inauguration Day, and he yelled out: "Yeah, but what do you want us to do exactly?"

And the President did a big slow U-turn in the avenue and came back to where Mort Sahl stood, and said to him: "Even more!"

(Like a lot of Mort Sahl's jokes, it sounds a bit funnier than it really was. Though I still like his joke about the bank robber, which Mort Sahl claimed was the first intellectual joke told by a stand-up comedian, way back in the Fifties. Do you know it? This masked bank robber goes into a bank and slips a note to the cashier which reads: "I have a gun. Just act normally."

The cashier reads it, then writes another note and slips it back. The robber picks it up. The note reads: "Define your terms.")

Anyway, in 1963, 40 years ago, Kennedy was killed in Dallas, and the sound of the shots still hasn't quite died away, because people are still wheeling out their memories connected to that day, and I want to add three of my own, in case I never get another chance.

One is a memory of the only time I saw Rufus Harley. Rufus Harley was a black musician from Detroit who became, I think, the first man to play jazz on the bagpipes. And why did he do that? Because, he said, he saw the pipe band of the Black Watch playing at Kennedy's funeral and, never having seen or heard the pipes before, said to himself: "I got to get one of those things!" He got one of those things, learnt to play and finally came to the Edinburgh Jazz Festival where I saw him. He wasn't all that good, not compared to people like Hamish Moore who came after him, but he looked wonderful. A tall black guy, clad entirely in tartan. And every garment was a different tartan. Ludicrous. Beautiful.

The second memory is of an episode of Red Dwarf, the great comic science-fiction fantasy, in which the crew of the space ship went time travelling and encountered President Kennedy in the late 1960s. Yes, the late Sixties. He had survived that long to become a tired out and discredited President. How, he bitterly asked the crew, could he now go down in history as a great president?

Quite easily, sir, they said. All he would have to do would be to travel back in time to the period of his greatest popularity, and assassinate himself, thus guaranteeing an untarnished image for all time. And that is exactly what he does. They go back together to 1963, and the older Kennedy gets his gun out and shoots the younger Kennedy, before escaping through time again ...

I know it doesn't entirely hang together, but it's a brilliant concept - the idea that Kennedy was shot by a later version of himself.

And the third memory?

Of coming across the autobiography of the same Mort Sahl, called Heartland which, considering it was the life story of a comedian, was among the saddest books I have ever read. Sahl had become convinced that Kennedy's death was the result of some sort of government plot (with cover-up to match) and became obsessed with talking about it, when people just wanted him to go on being funny. People stopped hiring him. If anyone's career was ever assassinated by Kennedy, it was Sahl's.