I was listening to the car radio when I heard the news. John Kennedy was dead--shot by an assassin as he rode through the streets of Dallas. Almost fifty years have passed since that November twenty-second but the memory of the terrible day and those immediately following it is still painful. All of our family were ardent Kennedy admirers. He was popular and probably would have been elected for a second term. Now he was gone. The shooting was at midday and my recollection of the afternoon is blurred. That evening we watched silently and sorrowfully the scenes in Washington. We saw the unloading of the coffin from Air Force One, then Lyndon Baines Johnson taking the oath of office as the new President while his wife and Mrs. Kennedy, in obvious total shock, looked on. It couldn't be true. It couldn't--but it was.
The shooting had been on Friday, the alleged gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, quickly captured and jailed. On Saturday a still stunned nation watched the televised preparations for the funeral. Kennedy's body was laid in state first in the East Room of the White House near where Lincoln's had been almost a hundred years earlier. Later on, it was taken to the Capital Rotunda. Thousands of people, many of them in tears, filed by in what seemed a never-ending procession, to pay their respects. On Sunday morning there was another appalling shock. As Oswald was being questioned in the Dallas jail, a furious-faced man named Jack Ruby burst into the room and shot the accused assassin dead.
Millions of us saw this horrifying sight. It had happened so fast -- in a split second -- that it was nearly impossible to believe that what we TV viewers had seen was real. My memory of the rest of that day is blurred again. There was simply too much to comprehend.
Next day, Monday, we saw the funeral procession. There may have been muffled drums but I mostly recall a stream of silent mourners marching down the street. It was an immensely impressive sight. Former Presidents Eisenhower and Truman, heads of state from all over the world walked past following Kennedy's hearse. Immediately behind it was a riderless horse with empty boots reversed in the stirrups. As it passed a black-veiled Jackie Kennedy and her two children, little John Junior, prompted by his mother, raised his right hand to his forehead in a salute. There seemed to be a somber hush over the whole scene as if the world was holding its breath. No one who saw that funeral procession can ever forget it.
In the weeks and months after John Kennedy's death, his accomplishments were lauded. Then, less than a year later, his enemies began to try to destroy his legacy. His extra-marital activities were the basis for this and unfortunately there had been more than a few of them. Like the great Irish Charles Parnell whose affair with Kitty O'Shea left a permanent blot on his memory, so was Kennedy's damaged. He had loved his wife and been proud of her. When they visited France and she wowed the Parisians, he had quipped "I'm the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris". Now on the tabloid trumpeting of his sexual peccadilloes, his many achievements were almost forgotten. In calmer days we can remember them. He truly hoped for a peaceful world and worked to control the proliferation of nuclear weapon. He established the Peace Corps. He encouraged the civil rights movement. He built up NASA and saw the possibility of a journey to the moon. His deft handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis averted a very possible war. He was, it is said on good authority, planning to get the U.S. troops out of Vietnam. Had he lived, that major tragedy might never have been.
This digression from my recollections of campaigns I have followed is necessary. Kennedy's assassination changed the course of history. I admit to being a romantic and I like to think that "for one brief shining moment" there was a place called Camelot.
.
