A Day in Dallas

I remember it so clearly: November 22, 1963, a day the world changed forever. For those of us alive in 1963, that afternoon was a defining moment for sure. I asked a few people about their memory of that fateful Friday, and every one of them immediately knew where they were when they first heard the news.

In front of a locker after his ninth grade gym class at Bennett High School, Mike listened to his principal’s voice over the loudspeaker – President Kennedy has been assassinated. Karen was in eighth grade when her principal whispered the news to the nun teaching her class, and the children immediately knelt in prayer on the wooden floor, praying for the dead president’s soul and the bereaved family. Larry remembers crying as he walked home, unsure of why the tears fell so freely. And as a college student at Valparaiso, Judy first heard the news in her dorm room, and can still see students streaming into the chapel as the university president, clothed in his black cassock, fell to his knees in prayer. The chapel bell tolled on and on, Judy recalled, and across the country tears flowed from eyes old and young, black and white, Republican and Democrat. Our president was dead.

I was in third grade with Miss Kramer, the most beautiful teacher in the world, when she was called into the hallway. With tears of her own, she told us that the President, our beloved president, was dead. Days of communal mourning followed, when the only television broadcasts were from Dallas, Washington, and the network newsrooms. Over and over again, we watched replays of the motorcade, the swearing in of LBJ, and the subsequent killing of Lee Harvey Oswald as he was escorted out of the Dallas Police Headquarters.

Regardless of political affiliation, Americans were glued to the television, disbelief mingling with profound grief, fear and anger. Jackie Kennedy’s pink pillbox hat, a toddler saluting his father’s coffin, the rider-less horse – the scenes flash through my mind as though they were yesterday, not fifty years ago. I still have my scrapbook, filled with newsprint detailing the Kennedy story, preserving the history of that time and place. There’s even a letter from Jackie Kennedy nestled on its pages, thanking the little girl for her donation to the JFK Library, for I’d sold hand-made potholders up and down my street to contribute to the preservation of Kennedy’s memory.

While the horrors of 9-11 and the image of the Challenger explosion are imprinted forever on my mind, the death of JFK and the resulting shock waves that coursed across the nation were like nothing I’ve experienced since. The adage is true: if you weren’t alive then, you will never really know what it was like. It was a different world in those days, and, in ways I can’t fully understand or explain, the world changed forever on that sun-kissed day in Dallas, for me and for our country. At age eight, I was a stranger to tragedy, and still shudder that this initial introduction was so profound, so devastating to the hope of a little girl. Yet I was not alone, as a nation mourned deeply as well. Even the bugler cracked on the sixth note of Taps. Said one historian, “It’s like the bugle was weeping.”

Looking back through the eyes of a child, I was drawn to our country’s royal family, with its dark-haired children scampering in the halls of the White House. I didn’t know much about the Bay of Pigs or the rumors of the passion-driven president, about backroom political deals or any of the dirt the muck-rakers would dig up in the intervening years. I only knew that the president, our president, was dead.

As we mark the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35^th president of the United States, we remember. And as we remember, we honor the grief of a family steeped in tragedy, we mourn the loss of innocence of a generation’s children, and we wonder what might have been, had an assassin’s bullet not destroyed the happily ever after promise of Camelot. Indeed, Johnny, we hardly knew ye.