Today marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. I suspect many Facebook friends of a certain age will be posting their recollections of that fateful day. Here is mine: I was a junior at Grossmont High School in La Mesa, California, a suburb of San Diego. It was lunch time and students were either in the lunch room or outside in the Quad enjoying their brown-bag lunch. We had an in-school radio station in those days, just a couple of speakers and a student DJ who played records and also read school announcements. Someone must have had a transistor radio, because the buzz of a rumor began floating around that the President had been shot. Soon the DJ made the announcement that President Kennedy has been shot in Dallas and has been rushed to the hospital. The crowd of students went silent for a moment, and then everyone began voicing their reactions. This was San Diego, the conservative heart of the military-industrial complex at that time, and some of the reactions were not so nice. Just as now, it was a time of political polarization, particularly in Texas, not surprisingly, and some conservative San Diegans would not have been too unhappy with the loss of this Democrat president. After a short time the school principal walked somberly from the office toward the lunch room where the radio studio microphone was located. Principal Walter Barnett took the microphone and announced, President John Kennedy has been shot and killed in Dallas, Texas. His voice quaked just as Walter Cronkites voice had done as he made his now-famous television announcement on CBS. Students returned silently to their afternoon classes for a short time while school faculty figured out how to respond. Soon it was announced that classes were being dismissed. When I arrived home my mother told me how she had heard the news. It was not a time of cable TV or CNN, so no television or radio had been on in the house. My mom had had a furniture reupholstering worker in the house, adjusting the new upholstering on a favorite old chair. (People repaired and reupholstered things in those days!) The worker was Mexican. The telephone rang and my mother answered. It was the reupholstering company asking to speak to their employee. Mom handed the phone to José or whatever his name was, and watched as he gasped and his Latino face turned ashen white. His boss had broken the news to him, and had added that the initial rumor was that the assassin was Mexican and that the borders had all been sealed. For a few hours Texas and California were not hospitable places for a Mexican to be! That phone call was my mothers first news of the assassination, and the Mexican worker told her through his tears that Mexicans were already literally scared for their lives. Soon the phone was ringing off the hook. Thats the way things were in those days - news traveled from friend to friend by telephone. My other recollections of that day are actually of the entire weekend that followed. I was lying in bed watching the television news coverage when out of nowhere Jack Ruby shot and Killed Lee Harvey Oswald on live TV. I, along with the rest of the country, attended the presidential funeral and followed the hearse and caisson through Washington, watched little John-John salute his fallen father, and saw the eternal flame lit for the first time. There was a pall over the entire nation, the likes of which we would not experience again until the weekend of September 11th, 2001. It has frequently been observed that November 22, 1963, was the day America lost its innocence. There is some truth to that, I would say, but just as 9/11 was symptomatic of other social conflict and change occurring then, so too was the Kennedy assassination symptomatic of a national experience of huge social upheaval in 1963. The assassination of JFK was the end of Camelot, but only the continuation of dramatic post-World War II change that continues today.
Posted on: Fri, 22 Nov 2013 21:08:04 +0000
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