Sixty Years Ago

At the top of this hour, Walter Cronkite announced President Kennedy had died.

 

I was in fourth grade. For many of my generation, the memory of our lifetimes.

 

If I may be so bold but not wanting to be too intrusive, did the Principal announce the news? Was school dismissed?
That was what basically happened when President Reagan was shot. I was in typing class and the substitute was a science teacher whom I did not get along with. To his credit, he shouted down a couple of kids for cheering when the announcement was made.

 

We were in Spanish class, about six doors down the hallway from our regular room. We'd sat there for about 10-15 minutes, with no teacher. Then Mr. Mendoza came into the room, clearly upset and almost crying, saying "President and governor dead. President and governor dead." We had no idea what he was talking about.

Our teacher came down into the room and walked us back to our classroom and told us. Then the principal came on the PA system, told us what had happened, and school was dismissed about 15 minutes later.

It was a beautiful Friday afternoon, unseasonably warm for WNY (I just looked it up; it was 61 degrees that day and 63 on the 23rd). I walked home with a neighbor, we talked about it but really had no idea what happened until we got home and started watching TV.

 

My father is a similar age to some of you; he was 8. He's told the story to me of hearing the news; was walking home from the school when a neighbor shared the news. Vividly remembers seeing Oswald shot on live TV and his sister screaming.

I have mixed emotions of this day, because I'm beyond sick of the mythmaking the surrounds Kennedy and the conspiracy nuts, my father among them. He got me into the conspiracy theories through Stone's (fictitious) film when I was young. We made it down to Dallas on a trip to Oklahoma* when I was around 10. Luckily (and thanks a lot to getting into journalism) I was able to see through the BS as I aged.

But as someone who was a month shy of his 10th birthday on 9/11, I try to be understanding to my dad and others of his generation. I imagine it was much like having your own father being murdered, which makes the deification that occurred after his death more understandable. But I hope a more nuanced view of Kennedy will take hold later this century after all those who were alive (and emotionally attached) at the time die.

*We were in OK to visit my uncle Dallas, whose birthday is today. He turned 18 on 11/22/63. Happy 78th, Uncle Dal! You better believe he's sick of hearing about his name and birthday coinciding with the assassination.

 

I would have been in (EDIT: Kindergarten), so I'm much more of a Man On The Moon than JFK where were you guy. (I know where I was, but not the events of the day.) I do remember my mother watching the procession to the Capitol, I think.

I'm stunned in this day and age -- with drones, IEDs and remote electronic devices -- that no crazy, smart would-be assassins have gotten a shot off since Hinckley. The Secret Service is pretty damn good at their jobs, or Presidents have been really lucky.

 

I have never believed anyone other than Oswald was involved in the shooting. Just a misguided, angry man with a rifle, the location to shoot from and the skill to make what most who know about these things (I don't) consider an easy shot.

 

I'm a huge fan of Sy Hersh and seems to think the same.

 

Many years ago on Nov. 22, A&E would air NBC's coverage of the assassination beginning at the very minute it broke into regular programming in 1963. It was fascinating.

 

I was 5 and I was in afternoon kindergarten.
My dad had been home for lunch and returned downtown to his job on the news desk of the Starrville Daily Screech.

Not too long after dad went back to work, my mom got me dressed for school, and walked me around the block to my elementary school maybe 100 yards from our house. My mom was pushing my sister, just barely 2, along in a stroller. She dropped me off at the front door and went home.

I got to school and got busy reading TIME magazine or something, while the other kids were chewing on their crayons or whatever.

Fairly quickly there was a knock at the classroom door and the teacher went to answer it.

It was my mom. She stepped into the classroom and whispered something in the ear of the teacher, who seemed visibly shocked, she said "oh my god" or something very similar.

My mom stepped over to me and said, "we're going home," took me by the hand and walked out. The teacher said, "OK."

We started walking home and I was asking my mom, "what's going on, why are we going home?" She didn't have many answers. "I don't know what's happening, but we have to go home," she said.

We arrived home and walked in; as I recall the TV was already running. Walter Cronkite was talking about something happening in Texas, which I understood was where the cowboys lived.

No details other apparently somebody had taken some shots at the motorcade.

As an Irish Catholic family in the early 60s, of course I knew exactly who JFK was.
My parents sort of vaguely resembled JFK/Jackie -- tall rangy Irish red haired husband and dark/black-haired mother, so I thought it was the natural order of things. With my dad working as a news editor and my mother also being a former daily newspaper editor, they discussed the news all day, every day.

Every morning at lunchtime my dad came home with the noonday edition they had sent to press at 10:45 am; after lunch he'd go back for the afternoon reroll that went to press at 2:45 pm and was the final edition that got delivered to all the home customers.

Every night Walter Cronkite came on about dinner time at 6.30.

I learned to read sometime around the age of 2 1/2, so every day I read two editions of the Daily Screech, so as a result I was probably one of the very very few 4 year olds in the US in October 1962 who understood the basic details of what the Cuban Missile Crisis was about.

Anyway as soon as we got home Walter delivered the details as available at the moment:

-- Shots fired at the JFK motorcade, witnesses reported people injured

-- Motorcade speeds directly to hospital

-- He was hinting the situation was very serious. He was mentioning various reports that JFK was dead, but reiterating that was unconfirmed. My mom, as a reporter, explained the difference to me: "they cannot state that as a fact unless they get absolute proof. Otherwise you get people spreading crazy rumors."

-- Shortly thereafter, Walter delivered the word: "The flash, apparently official ..."

The phone rang within 10 minutes or so. It was dad, telling mom he'd probably be very late that night (he was).

I remember my mom -- both parents, actually -- was in a stunned daze most of that weekend. The previous October with the Missile Crisis my parents had discussed, if some kind of war started, was there anyplace we could go?

The answer, really, was no; both my grandparents' houses were in or near major manufacturing cities; they talked for a minute about running off to my grandma's cottage up north, before realizing it was about 10 miles from an Air Force base. So there was really nowhere to run; I think she realized it.

 

The Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas is pretty good, with lots of stuff you don't usually encounter when considering the assassination. They have an old newswire printer with a scroll (perhaps a reproduction) of wire activity those first few minutes after the shooting ... lotta folks being told to stay the fuck off the wire. This, at the UVA library, may be the same one.

Nov. 22, 1963 UPI radio broadcast wire teletype printout

I've been surprised over the years at how jaded I've inadvertently become about the whole show. I think a lot of folks of my ... ahem ... vintage are similarly kinda numb to it. For example, I was at the museum several years ago and was watching the Oswald-shooting footage alongside a couple dozen Japanese school kids. The footage they show has the TV reporter closing with a "Holy cow!", which struck me funny that day. Oddly, my chuckling was not amusing to those school kids.