THE DAY CAMELOT ENDED : FATE THRUST A MAN INTO THE LIFE OF A SLAIN PRESIDENT AND BY EXTENSION, HISTORY. BOTH ARE GONE, BUT THE LINK IS NOT FORGOTTEN.

Byline: Arthur R. Vinsel

SOMETHING about the slant of the wan November sun always reminds me it's another year since the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

The small boy photographer saluting the black-draped casket atop an Army artillery caisson, dressed in tweed against the chilly Washington fall weather the day of his father's funeral. John Kennedy Jr. and big sister Caroline are high-achievers in their own right, she an author and John Jr. a lawyer and publisher of a political affairs magazine. They have found their niches as the newer adult generation of the closest America has to a recognized aristocracy.

Every November, I remember one of those Americans most profoundly affected that weekend, so unlike any other in its impact on so many, save perhaps Dec. 7, 1941, when Pearl Harbor was attacked. I was then - and remain - struck by his ordinary Americanese and his improbable brush with history.

Ray Starkey would be in his 80s, but died relatively young, a casualty of heart disease, rather than the broken heart inflicted on Nov. 22, 1963, when The Skipper was shot down in Dallas.

Today, I am six years older than Ray was, the first time I interviewed him about his place - surely it and he were modest, by his own admission - in the 20th century history books as a member of the star-crossed crew of the PT-109.

He said the skinny, scholarly Harvard kid, Lt. j.g. John F. Kennedy, was so anxious to go in harm's way that he wasn't too fussy about his companions on the trip. Ray explained most of their band of rowdy misfits had trouble in other crews, before JFK gathered them up to man the PT-109 he'd resurrected from a mooring where it had sunk from damage and neglect.

Compared to John Paul Jones and other naval heroes, JFK and his guys were more like the TV spoof ``McHale's Navy.'' But, they were game.

The first interview preceded an August 1963 goodwill trip to Japan by the surviving PT-109 crew to meet remaining crewmen of the destroyer Amagiri, which accidentally rammed and sank the small plywood attack boat. It was Aug. 12, 1943, about 3 a.m. of a moonless morning in Blackett Strait, Solomon Islands.

``Hell, it was war, and we'd have done the same to them,'' groused Ray, mulling over his combat tour and JFK's ascension, that Saturday morning in his modest Garden Grove tract home kitchen. We split a couple of pots of Navy-strength coffee.

``The skipper saved my life,'' Ray would say. Their PT boat knifed in half and was engulfed in blazing diesel fuel, survivors led by the future president made their way from island to island. Two crewmen were lost on impact. Starkey and one other were badly burned. Ray could paddle despite his pain, but JFK towed the most critical victim by a belt clenched between his teeth.

Without JFK, however, a rich collegian whom common men might dislike on instinct, the PT-109 crew could never have survived days of island-hopping until friendly natives led them to an Australian coast watcher. ``The Right Stuff'' hadn't been coined yet as a uniquely American attribute, but JFK clearly had it, Ray emphasized.

Ray's forearms still bore ugly burn scars from the service that earned him a Purple Heart and one line - the only one found - of their action in Navy annals in public libraries. The PT-109 episode identifies him among the crew as: ``Starkey, torpedoman.''

Ray described then-President Kennedy as an ingenious thief, suspected, but never nabbed, in forays to steal gear from other PT boats so he could get his beloved craft into action. He was quick-witted and compassionate.

As a PT boat commander, Kennedy would never ask his men to do anything he couldn't or wouldn't do. Ray had worshiped The Skipper ever since.

Ray thought the visit was foolish and even had to borrow money from a storefront finance company to go. But he was that kind of guy. He'd have hopped a Greyhound bus to hell if JFK said do it.

Summoned to the 1961 Inaugural Ball in Washington, D.C., as a VIP, the grizzled oil field roustabout donned a tuxedo and even danced with Jackie, as all the world watched and smiled. This, after all, was America, where Brahmins and commoners dance to democracy's tune.

Worship was an acceptable term for Ray's attitude. And he was not ashamed to admit it. Nor was he ashamed to weep when we next met late on the morning of Nov. 22, 1963, the day the president was slain in Dallas. If Pearl Harbor, on Dec. 7, 1941, had been the Day of Infamy, what could we call this?

Modern scholars declare that three-day weekend of events a watershed in the history of America and the world, because it was shared through modern media, moment by moment as it transpired.

Stunned at the first broadcast news, I headed for the windswept oil and natural gas field where Starkey worked, to interview him again, as my bureau chief editor, Tom Murphine, ordered me to phone in ASAP. All deadlines were on hold.

Ray had been on lunch break in the oil field locker room. He was sitting with eyes downcast, a bologna sandwich in his big workingman's hand, crude oil speckled over handsome white hair.

``I just hope it wasn't an American who did it . . .,'' he muttered. ``I just hope he doesn't die. . . .''

Just as I swerved my second-hand sports car onto the Signal Oil property, the word had come. The somber, dirge-like music ceased.

``Ladies and gentlemen . . . President John F. Kennedy is dead. . . .''

So I went ahead and told Ray it was too late to cling to that hope now. Word had just come in.

``I'm awfully sorry, Ray.''

He set down his homely bologna sandwich on the worn bench next to his old-fashioned black tin lunch box and wept. One forearm rested across his hip and the other hand was on his knee. I studied the pink-and-white mottled burn scars on his sun-browned arms, from August 1943 and grasped the depths of his personal history.

His oil field work pals cleared their throats and shuffled their muddy, tar-stained work boots. They looked at the ceiling and at the walls; anywhere but at the man who resembled John Wayne, shoulders shaking like a hurt child.

I remember this most memorable story as the first ever dictated off the top of my head, from a telephone booth. And, deciding to put myself into it, a reporter who now knew, at 23, he was still very young and shockable.

It just felt right. As an American, it was my story too.

I began something like: ``One of the toughest tasks anyone ever has is to tell a man one of his best friends is dead.

``I had to do it today.''

Ironically, only three paragraphs of the 16 or so I composed and dictated as I went along appeared in the newspaper.

And somewhere in the past 33 years, I lost the clipping.

But this November, I think again of that old swabbie Ray Starkey, who died later in the '60s of heart disease. And I will remember JFK as the standard-bearer for my generation.

All of us at the age of awareness 33 years ago, you see, are the veterans of that day in Dallas.

CAPTION(S):

Photo

Photo: Brink of apocalypse: The late President Kennedy, right, confers with his brother and attorney general at the start of the Cuban missile crisis.