In Memory

Forty-one years ago today, John F Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Though I was only five years old at the time, I remember.

I was of kindergarten age, but not in school, as kindergarten wasn’t compulsory in those days and our town’s public schools didn‘t include it. I was out front playing in the mud, when my mother, who’d been doing housework, came to the door and called me into the house.

I knew she was upset when I saw the expression on her face as I walked into the house. She had me to sit down on the couch and then she told me that President Kennedy had been shot. Even at that young age, I knew who the president was, as we lived in Massachusetts, his home state, and my mother had always talked about how handsome he was.

I sat there with her and watched the television coverage of the unfolding tragedy, and to this day, I can remember the moment when Walter Cronkite removed his glasses and informed the nation that our president had died. Not long after this, my sister arrived home, as the town’s schools had dismissed schools for the day after getting word of the assassination. My father and brother got home shortly after that, as their employers had likewise shut down operations for the day. For the next couple of days, we watched the continuing TV coverage, as did most of the rest of the people in this country.

Nearly forty years later, as the events of September 11, 2001 unfolded, and it became clear that it had been an act of terrorism, I recalled Kennedy’s assassination and thought that my employer would surely send us home for the day. Not only did that not happen, but there was never any official announcement whatsoever from management to the employees about what had happened. If someone back in the warehouse hadn’t had a radio, none of us would have known what happened until we turned on our car radios on the drive home from work that evening.

Later that evening, I thought of Kennedy again, about his aggressive response to the Soviet Union during the Cuban missile crisis, and how he took steps to prevent a disaster from happening.

Too bad George Bush didn’t respond to the growing terrorism threat during his first months in office, as Kennedy did to other threats in 1962.