To most people alive today, it’s a page in a dusty American history book... but to me and others of my generation, it’s an event we can still recall with razor sharpness: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy forty-seven years ago today.
That event - and the sequelae that unfolded over the next several days - delivered a trauma unto the national psyche that still resonates in a myriad of ways.
I was a sixth grader who had struggled with what, in retrospect, seem like eerie premonitions of Kennedy’s demise.
SWMBO’s father, at that time an assistant principal at a high school near Meacham Field, had seen the Presidential motorcade go by shortly after Kennedy’s arrival in Dallas.
Neither of us - two people whose lives would eventually become intertwined - had any notion (aside from the above-referenced foreshadowing) of what would occur before sundown.
Years later, SWMBO and I were dining in Houston only a few tables away from former Texas governor John Connally, who had narrowly escaped with his life that November day in 1963. He had been riding in the limousine with Kennedy and suffered wounds to his chest, wrist, and thigh. It was our first brush with JFK and history... but not our last.
Sometimes I wonder what might have been had things been different. Other people have wondered as well.
In its February 1977 issue, the National Lampoon celebrated JFK’s fifth inaugural, imagining a world in which Kennedy had, Roosevelt-like, accumulated 6,000 days in office. In that fictional world, Jackie Kennedy is the one who was felled by Oswald’s shot... with JFK later marrying Christina Onassis.
The Lampoon issue was played for laughs, but Nick DiChario’s brilliant short story “The Winterberry” was set in a world in which JFK survived Oswald’s attempt on his life. The story is written from Kennedy’s point-of-view... the point-of-view of someone with the mind of a child, owing to the brain damage sustained in the botched assassination. The story unfolds over decades, during which time JFK is kept immured in the hidden crannies of the White House, his continued existence a closely-held secret, illuminated only by occasional distant glimpses of a beautiful woman who looks, somehow, vaguely familiar...
It’s a heartbreaking story, perhaps even more tragic than actual events.
Where were you when Kennedy was shot?
Monday, November 22, 2010
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9 comments:
Mmmm... as Bones would say, "In the palm of God's hand". I wasn't born yet and Mom was not yet pregnant.
Dude.. the National Lampoon ruled!
Along with Bou, I was not yet a twinkle in my father's eye...
I have, however, been to the book depository building in Dallas... And as a hunter and a shooter I can say that Oswald would have had no trouble making that (those) shot(s). As I said to the Red Queen whilst looking out that window, "I could have hit him with a brick from here".
But, who doesn't enjoy a good conspiracy theory?
I was in the girl's locker room at school when I found out about it. It was in the basement. I remember sitting on the steps outside and sobbing.
I was at lunch in the seventh grade when it was announced at school. It seemed somewhat unreal at the time.
I was a snot-nosed four-year-old kid and, as such, had little or no awareness of events outside my bubble of existence. I do remember being at my grandmother’s house when the funeral was broadcast on TV. I saw the processional with the flag-draped coffin and asked Granny what it was. I remember that she sighed and said something like “Someone shot the president” or some such. The somber way in which she spoke is what sticks in my mind, rather than the exact words.
I was still 5 years away from entering the world when JFK was shot. When RFK was shot, I was only 2 months from splashdown.
However, I was almost a year old when Teddy went for a swim in an Olds 88.
I was in the cafeteria at South Ocala Elementary. I was in the sixth grade. We were watching "TV Science", a kind of closed-circuit TV science class that we watched on a portable TV that had been wheeled into the cafeteria. An announcement interrupted the program that the president had been shot. One or two students, unbelievably, applauded. The TV teacher, John Hockett, came back on and tried to continue the science class, stating something like "we'll continue, with our thoughts and prayers for our president". He didn't go on for very long before the program suddenly went off the air, and an announcement came on that the president was dead. I can't remember who made it. We were ushered back to our classrooms. Our sixth-grade teacher, Virginia Starratt, who was about as tough and hard-nosed a teacher as one can imagine. was distraught. That's about all I can remember.
I was where Bou was, wherever that was.
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