Here's Kesey on the assassination as it happened and affected him:
The Loss of Innocence
Ken Kesey
I was back in New York with my wife and family for the opening of "Cuckoo's Nest" on Broadway. I had just finished my second novel and I wasn't working on anything else; I was waiting for whatever came up to come up. After the opening, my wife and family flew back, and I drove back with this friend of mine, George Walker, and another guy that we sprung from the nuthouse.
And we were about half a day out of New York, headed west and eating peyote. It makes the driving interesting, especially the late fall in that northern part of America. We were in Pennsylvania when the news began to come in over the radio that the president had been shot. And I never paid much attention to politics,but as we drove, and the news came in over that car radio, and we stopped in at service stations and Howard Johnaon's and llittle fast food places across the United States, a really profound thing happened to all of us. We liked the feeling of the country and the look of the country and the look of the people. It was like a light was shining and everything else was foggy.
As we drove farther across, the weather began to get worse, and the information was coming in steadily all the time. At first he was wounded, and they wouldn't say whether he was dead, and then you hear about Officer Tippet being killed, and then you hear about Oswald, and by that time we were in Michigan. So all the way across the United States, we're involved in this, all these characters like old radio-fiction characters in my mind. We pulled into Jackson Hole, Wyo., as it was sort of finally coming to its end. It was blizzarding, and during that afternoon, the road finally was just too snowy to go on anymore. We pulled up and stopped at a closed-down station, a big red, white and blue Chevron. Three days on peyote and national grief, and looking up in the sky in this blizzard coming down, and then this red, white and blue Chevron, and I thought, "This is no accident. This is something very, very special and deep."
As we drove farther across, the weather began to get worse, and the information was coming in steadily all the time. At first he was wounded, and they wouldn't say whether he was dead, and then you hear about Officer Tippet being killed, and then you hear about Oswald, and by that time we were in Michigan. So all the way across the United States, we're involved in this, all these characters like old radio-fiction characters in my mind. We pulled into Jackson Hole, Wyo. as it was sort of finally coming to its end. It was blizzarding, and during that afternoon, the road finally was just too snowy to go on anymore. We pulled up and stopped at a closed-down station, a big red, white and blue Chevron. Three days on peyote and national grief, and looking up in the sky in this blizzard coming down, and then this red, white and blue Chevron, and I thought, "This is no accident. This is something very, very special and deep."
And I began to cry, not so much for the president as for something American that was innocent and bright-eyed and capable. And it's not been the same since; we lost the last person I can think of that we could believe in. I remember when they finally said the president was dead, George Walker said, "The son of a bitch has killed him." He didn't say some son of a bitch, he said the son of a bitch. We thought we didn't have him. The European nations had him, the Muslim crazies had him, but the United States? No, we were above that. And this was a real loss of that opinion of ourselves as an innocent, wonderful, above-board nation. It was a loss of our feeling of invulnerability — that you could walk across the nation and be all right, nobody is going to hurt you. That next spring, we packed up to do the same thing, just drive across the country in a bus. It spun off of this feeling of seeing the landscape of the American people in this new way. I think the whole hippie movement, this love-every- body feeling for each other, was born of that feeling. It was born of the death. When God wants to really wake up a nation, he has to use somebody that counts. When God wants to get your attention, he always has to use blood.