The anniversary

November 22, 2013 • 7:49 am

All Americans, and many others, know that today is the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, Texas in 1963. He was 45 years old.

If you were alive then, and in America, you’ll remember the initial confusion after he had been shot, for it was a considerable time between the shots in Dealey Plaza and the official announcement of Kennedy’s death. You’ll also remember the mass outpouring of grief: the way perfect strangers hugged each other and everyone was crying in the streets, listening the news on car radios.  If you were watching television, you’ll remember Walter Cronkite’s poignant announcement of Kennedy’s death, and how he removed his glasses to look at the clock, checking the official time of death:

Everyone who was alive then, and old enough to have memories, knows exactly where they were at the moment they learned that Kennedy was dead. I was in junior high school, in class, when an announcement came over the public address system giving the news.  There was horror, shock, and lots of tears, but I don’t remember classes being cancelled.

If you’re old enough, you’ll remember the next three days until Kennedy’s funeral: the wondering whether the Russians would take advantage of his death to “do something”, the speculation that the assassin had acted on behalf of a group, the killing of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby, live on television. And finally the closure of the funeral itself: the grace and dignity of Mrs. Kennedy in the face of her husband’s horrible death (she had recovered bits of his brains from the trunk of the car in Dallas), the caisson, the riderless horse with the boots backwards in the stirrups, and the ineffably moving salute of John-John as the coffin passed.

If you were alive then, do you remember where you were?

127 thoughts on “The anniversary”

  1. I was in my 8th grade class when the announcement came over the loudspeaker system. They brought in a TV to the classroom and we watched. Intense times.

    1. My parents cried – which I think was the reaction of many of their generation even outside the USA…

    1. I was just reading about these types of memories and they are the best ones (in that you actually form them) because they are personal.

    2. Reading that, I’m wondering just how specific the memory details they studied were. I’d never claim to have photographic memories of these events but at the same time I know exactly where I was (high school gym class for Kennedy’s shooting), recall the confusion that followed, and of course details (that could be checked) from the subsequent media coverage. My parents’ reactions remain with me as it was one of those few times the barriers were let down and real emotions exposed.

      Seems to me we all know that certain people tend to elaborate their stories over time, I guess in an effort to sound uniquely affected about something that actually impacted the vast majority of their fellow citizens. And some personality types seem compelled to make up memories when they’ve lost their actual ones.

      For more recent events I don’t know how my memory could have changed much. 9/11 occurred during one of those few times that I occasionally had the morning TV news shows on (when I had to get my kids up and off to school, then was alone at home), and I watched it unfold in real time, from the first cutaway of “we have reports a plane has struck the WTC” to watching the last tower fall. Same circumstances for the Challenger disaster.

      1. Seems to me we all know that certain people tend to elaborate their stories over time, I guess in an effort to sound uniquely affected about something that actually impacted the vast majority of their fellow citizens. And some personality types seem compelled to make up memories when they’ve lost their actual ones.

        In most cases don’t think it is a deliberate lie, but simply imprecise memory.

        It happens to me regularly…

  4. It was my senior year in high school. Like so many others, I was an ardent Kennedy supporter.

    We had just returned to Spanish class from lunch when it came over the speaker system that the President had been shot and killed.

    I picked up my books, walked out the door, and went home. Except for some of my time in Vietnam I have never been more disgusted with “the world” than I was durng that dark period…

  5. I was alive, but too young to remember. But Kennedy and the Kennedys were iconic figures of my childhood, as I suspect they were for most Americans of my age, whether they agreed politically with the Kennedys or not.

  7. I was home from 11th Grade at the American International School in Vienna (GMT). My parents were out somewhere. I answered the phone and a correspondent friend of my dad’s was calling from Berlin to give him the news.

    1. Just heard from a couple of my friends who went
      to high school in Vienna with me. One of them remembers being at my house with me when we got the call (and our parents were at some function together – Embassy or IAEA). Nice to know my memory is at least semi-accurate;-)

  8. As I recall, I was out for lunch or recess and some boy I didn’t much like came running towards the playground shouting “Kennedy’s been shot!” I was skeptical because of the source: he made stuff up. But when we got back inside we were informed it was true and — here’s what really made the impression — sent home early. I vaguely remember the solemn walk through the neighborhood and my mom not being surprised to see me. This was important. But I don’t recall anything else.

    I was in first grade. My memory from those years is probably not very reliable, but it’s a very short and plausible scenario.

    MOST people who remember the assassination today will remember being in school.

  9. I was in hospital, recovering from surgery for cancer. Not being American, and only 6 years old at the time, I don’t recall much about Kennedy’s assassination myself. But I do remember my parents being very disturbed by it.

  10. I was teaching the middle school class of 8th grade teaching. The death of the President came over the PA system. I did not hold the students there; they went out and many students hugged each other.

  11. I was five at the time, living in Bucharest, behind the Iron Curtain. JFK’s face was familiar, and a welcome contrast to the grey, old, sour mugs of Eastern Bloc leaders.

    First rumors about Dallas came in the early evening, Eastern Europe time. Too early yet for good shortwave reception of the BBC World Service or Voice of America. Radio Free Europe was muddled. I was sent to bed without a clear notion of what had transpired.

    The next morning, even the official state radio proffered a bowdlerized report of the assassination. At 10:15, I was due for an appointment with the dentist, one of my first ever (Saturday appointments were one of the few benefits of the Socialist work-week). My grandmother took me there. When I arrived, my dentist, a petite but forceful, honey-haired beauty with steely eyes resembling Lee Remick, was in tears. She whispered to my grandmother that she had been weeping all night because of JFK. She was shaken and found herself unable to perform, and would I come again next Tuesday? My grandmother was in tears, too. I hugged them as well as I could — the only time I ever hugged a dentist — and promised that I would dedicate the rest of my life to finding out the truth about Kennedy’s assassins.

    The following Tuesday, Oswald was dead, and I got my first filling.

  12. I was four years old, and I only vaguely remember my parents talking about it. In junior high school I became kind of obsessed with the assassination and started reading books about it, starting with Death of a President by Manchester. What can I say? I was kind of dark back then. Then I fell into reading some of the conspiracy theory books. These were puzzling to me. Here were a bunch of adult ‘experts’ who supposedly studied the films and interviewed people, only to come to fantastic conclusions that flew in the face of the Warren commission. Like so many people I started to believe those stories.
    In high school I had a friend whose parents worked in the local TV station. Gelardo Rivera had just come out showing the Zapruder film on TV (which I learned later was the 1st time most people saw the whole thing). So we sat in a studio one night, playing the big reel-to-reel tape of the Zapruder film over and over. But then I saw something. All of those conspiracy theorists claimed the film shows that the head shot came from the front, but it clearly was from the rear. It was obviously from the rear!
    I credit this as the first time that I really began to be a hardened skeptic of extraordinary claims.

  13. I was in fourth grade in a Catholic school in a factory town in Massachusetts, where there were also many Irish Americans. As you can imagine, Kennedy was worshiped there – the first Catholic President. We were nearing the end of the school day (I was in art class), and we could see a nun come in and tell our teacher (also a nun). We were shocked to see them crying, perhaps because they were usually such stern disciplinarians and were covered from head to toe with the old nun’s habit clothing. We caught a glimpse of their humanity in that moment. As Professor Coyne notes, it was probably the next three days that provided particularly lasting memories, as we were glued to the black-and-white TV images.

  14. I was in 4th grade in a Dallas, Texas classroom. My private school (Greenhill) had been temporarily quartered in a Jewish temple due to a fire a few months earlier. Circa 11 am a custodian came in with a rueful expression and told us say JFK had been shot. Classes continued in a perfunctory way- there was much weeping and around 1, the same custodian arrived to tell us he was dead. Classes were dismissed and we all went home. I was in a state of shocked disbelief.

    Although a resident of the city, I was unaware of how much anti-Kennedy sentiment there was in Dallas at the time. Indeed, local ministers were threatened in phone calls to NOT hold memorial services, and a few even celebrated. I did not know this till years later.

    For the next three days, television was wall-to-wall coverage of the circumstances.

    Two years later I was living for a year in England and noticed that the deadly shooting of a London policeman got almost as much TV coverage as the Kennedy assassination did here, impressing me with how much rarer gun violence was in that country than in America.

    1. I was 20 yrs old working at the General Motors Assembly plant in Kansas City, Kansas and my older brother woke me up and told me Kennedy had been shot and then I went back to sleep. The hatred against JFK in the Dallas area and throughout much of the south was something I knew about and have followed up by doing research from various newspapers from libraries and some on microfilm when traveling in southern states. I have never heard any such comment on any of the tv show or newspaper articles about the Kenndy assassination. I did ralk to people when I was in the South that remember how Kenndy was hated for what little did had done for Civil Rights for Blacks in the south. Bill Bolinger thnk4yurself@yahoo.com

    2. I’ve always felt a bit sorry for Dallas for being the venue for this tragedy and thus always associated with it. Certainly there was a lot of anti-Kennedy sentiment there (but not only there) at the time. OTOH, this is the same era in which TX produced LBJ and John Connally. Around the same time or soon after Robert Kennedy was practically worshipped by the poor and the liberal left (who did exist in TX). TX has always been a big melting pot and often politically roiling.

      Any shame associated with the assassination deserves to be spread amongst all the haters and deluded, wherever they were.

  15. I was in the Marine Corps stationed on Okinawa. We mounted out and was sent to the air field, waiting to be sent anywhere in the Far East in case any country decided to “do something.” We stayed there for four days, but was eventually returned to Camp Hansen.

  16. I was 3 years old and the only thing I remember is that I was upset that I couldn’t watch cartoons because every station was showing Kennedy lying in the capitol rotunda.

    1. Me, too.

      My father was active military, and the Air Force base was on high alert. In addition to resenting the hell out of the wall-to-wall coverage, I resented how tense my father was, with his attendant bad mood.

      This is one my very old memories that’s always had the power to make me feel . . . small.

      1. We lived within a few miles of a Strategic Air Command airbase in Salina, Kansas. Since I was in high school, and coming up on draft age, I paid particular attention to what was going on in the world. Most of my friends fathers were in the Air Force, and I remember a lot of high alert status around Schilling Air Force Base. We also had 12 Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile silos within 50 miles of Salina. We lived the “Cold War” every day…

        It was really intense during the time of the Kennedy killing. Schilling’s strategic bombers, B-47’s, were on the move a lot during that period… It was tense!

  19. I was a freshman in high school in Kansas. My first class after lunch was home economics, and we were sitting in class waiting for our teacher to arrive. When she came in, we were stunned to see she was crying. She told us President Kennedy had been shot and killed. We were all in shock. Classes were dismissed and we went home and watched the coverage on our black and white television. We sat in front of the tv for the next several days watching the solemn events unfold – the lying in state, the funeral procession and even the drama of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald. It was overwhelming and surreal. I adored the Kennedys.

  20. I was in sixth grade in Midland, Texas. I seem to remember an anguish and unease spreading among the teachers, and then the principal going room to room to tell us what had happened. We were all sent home.

  21. First year university, Western Ontario. Had just finished lunch at residence and we were heading up University Hill to class when friends coming down the hill advised us that Kennedy had been shot. We immediately returned to residence to watch events unfold on TV. I remember a feeling of incredible sadness, a feeling which I have only experienced one other time, the morning of 9/11.

  22. I was 5 years old in my Kindergarten class when the principal came in to tell my teacher. My main memory of that day was being curious at why all the adults were so sad. A few days later I remember watching the funeral and seeing a little boy saluting his father’s flag-draped casket. That was the image that stayed with me over the last 50 years.

  23. Impossible to forget. I was a junior at Indiana University with no classes that Friday afternoon and was just settling down for a study session after lunch. There was a hubbub out in the hall and I was told that the President had been shot. Everyone was glued to the radio after that, with the long alternation of hopeful speculation and mournful music, finally culminating in the announcement that the President was dead. When I went down to the dining hall for dinner I passed the reception desk where there were copies of the local paper with a banner headline: PRESIDENT ASSASSINATED.
    When you are in the kind of numb shock that everyone felt then, you sometimes focus on odd details. I stared at the letters of the headline and thought what a lot of S’s there were in the word “assassinated”.
    The next night people were only marginally less shell-shocked. I went to a performance in the packed Auditorium of Louis Armstrong, who put on a show as though nothing had happened. I don’t know how he did it. He sang “What a Wonderful World” as usual. It was a strange experience to be enjoying the performance with one part of the mind while feeling the dull ache of bereavement in another part.
    For most of us it was as though a close family member had been killed–it was that same sense of loss, disbelief, and pain.

  24. I was in the gym running around on a too full stomach with my 7th grade basketball team that day, and wishing my group did not have to use the gym so soon after lunch to make way for 8th graders and the high school teams that followed.

    I had a fair grasp of the scope of the tragedy at that age, and registered the shock and in some cases horror of adults around me, but I remember I also experienced a (guilty) sort of glee at getting an unexpected vacation from school. And I vividly recall the many appearances Walter Cronkite made on WIBW, the only tv channel my community received, between the Tuesday assassination and the Friday burial.

    What? The assassination occurred on a Friday? The burial was Monday? I only missed an hour of school Friday plus Monday? I would have sworn …

    Never mind.

  25. I was in 10th grade and heading for my biology class when a senior girl came running toward us, crying and yelling, “the president has been shot!” We were all upset and talking but the biology teacher scolded us for carrying on and disrupting his class. Lot of empathy there…
    We watched all the tv programs and the funeral, of course. It has always bugged me that Jack Ruby prevented the whole story from coming out by killing Oswald. A trial would have answered a lot of questions.

  27. Oh yes, Algebra class, Grade 13, in Scarborough, Ont.

    My Dad went to the American Consulate on University Ave in Toronto to sign the book of condolence.
    A few years later that same consulate was the site of protests and sit-ins opposed to Vietnam.

  28. I was on a field trip on 22 Nov. 1963 headed to the Florida panhandle to learn some marine ecology first hand. Driving through south Georgia, along the way we saw flags at half-staff in front of schools but didn’t find out why until we stopped for gas. What stuck in my mind was the comment by a man helping at the dock to the effect that Kennedy had got what he deserved.
    Good luck with your talk tonight.

  29. I was only two when Kennedy was shot but I have a very strong, clear memory of standing next to a b&w TV that was on a gold metal cart that I could hold onto. I remember seeing the flag-draped coffin in a funeral procession. Of course, I had no idea that’s what it was, (being a toddler Canadian, I certainly did not yet recognize the flag) but something about the emotion around me (or the horses) seared it into my brain.

  30. I was four, but I have no memories of President Kennedy. My parents didn’t seem to be very news oriented so I really have almost no memory of any news events of the sixties. Other than the latest space launches, the only things I remember from newscasts was the daily numbers of Dead and Wounded in Vietnam, followed by another number of some weird thing called the Dow Jones Industrials.
    Oh, also that the Huntley-Brinkley report always started with the second movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

  32. I was in fourth grade class,public school in Buffalo, NY. Teachers were talking about something in the hallway and seemed upset but they told us nothing. As best I can recall, we were not sent home early and I only found out what had happened after I got home. I recall nothing about subsequent happenings or how my parents reacted.

  33. My brothers and I were just let out of elementary classes and were waiting for our ride. A taxi driver heard the news over the radio, and it spread like wildfire.

    There was a lot of horror on the part of the parents and teachers, and all the little kids were bewildered, as this was on a little island far away, and some didn’t know a whole lot about the American president. But we knew it was horrible, and people were crying and distraught.

    My parents were distraught and angry when we got home, and were listening to the non-stop radio broadcasts.

    Our teachers explained more the next day, and the school had a day of mourning. All very sad memories of that time.

  34. Biology class, sophomore year, Ames ( Iowa ) High School, first afternoon period, facing the blackboard (westerly direction) from the left side of the second row of lab benches.

    Mounted television on the west wall immediately switched on by teacher stat after announcement ( throughout school ) of ‘likely’ tragedy over pa – loudspeaker – system

    Witnessed in real time the eyeglasses’ removal of Walter Cronkite checking the wall clock

    Also a Friday, classes were not cancelled that afternoon yet either they were all of the next week .or. no one went to school — cuz we all were in front of home television sets the entire next several days’ worth.

    Blue

    1. The nest Thursday was Thanksgiving, so you would have been out of school anyway. It was a rather bleak Thanksgiving, as I recall.

      1. Wha’ ? ! re ” so you would have been out of school a.n.y.w.a.y. “? !

        This year’s calendar even : w- w- w-ames.k12.ia.us/Calendars.html .

        Classes IN session till cob on the full school day, this year even, of Wednesday, 27 November 2013.

        S o o o o, as was as well in 1963.
        AND since.

        S o o o o, wha’ ? ! re ” so you would have been out of school a.n.y.w.a.y. “? ! What does this mean ?

        Blue

        1. Schools generally have a holiday from Wednesday afternoon, all of Thursday and all of Friday for Thanksgiving. In 1963, as this year, Thanksgiving falls on November 28. Blue might have been in school on the Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday morning, but not the rest of the week.

  35. I was in my sixth grade Social Studies class, and I remember my history teacher Mrs Holmes crying. We were all dismissed to go home. I remember my mom crying to, and my brother, who was only a week or two past a year old crying because mom was crying too. There was a radio program called “You’re an old timer if…” and the announcer said, “In 50 years in the year 2013, you’ll be an old timer if you remember…” My dad and mom said, “We probably won’t remember that.” They didn’t–they died in 2008 and 2006.

  36. Two comments on here about “the anti-Kennedy sentiment there was in Dallas at the time.” Also the man in southern Georgia who said Kennedy “got what he deserved”. Over my 71 years when there are tv shows on about the Kennedy assassination or newspaper stories I have never seen where they were willing to point out that Kennedy was hated through the South for what little he had done in favor of Civil Rights. The same from the books on who killed Kennedy! We still are being censored about how people felt strongly against Kennedy. It is way over due to tell the truth.

    1. At the time, most of Texas was Democratic but Dallas was a center for right-wing extremists. Kennedy was much loved in most of Texas, according to my Texan husband who is 68 years old today.

  37. I knew how hated Kenndy was in the south at the time but that has never been mentioned in all the tv specials and long newspaper articles on the assaasination I have followed in my 71 years.Censorship has been alive and well! Bill Bolinger

  38. I should have stated why Kennedy was so hatred throughout the south.Long hatred toward Catholic versus Protestants , but especially for what little he had done in favor the Civil Rights for Black people! He was hated by many. Ministers in the Dallas area were threatened if they were planning a memorial service for Kennedy. Many thought he “got what he deserved!” My complaint is that is has not been worth reporting that this was the truth. Bill Bolinger

  40. Ninth grade shop class. Our instructor had us shut off the machines and called us together to tell us the initial news. “Boys, the President has been shot.” Then classes changed, and by the time French class started, we knew that he had been killed.

    Living only 12mi from DC, a friend and I took a bus in to watch the procession. I will forever be able to summon up the sound and rhythm of the drummer behind the caisson.

    Rump, rump, rump, brrrr rump rump-ba-bump.

    1. I will forever be able to summon up the sound and rhythm of the drummer behind the caisson.

      Won’t everyone.

  41. Eleven years old, growing up in Holland. I happened to be sic in bed and, as it is in The Netherlands seven hours later than in Texas, I only heard the news next day from my mother. Eleven years was old enough to be totally shocked. I later heard that my school-teacher was crying in front of the class, which seemed to be one of the things that impressed some of my classmates the most. I remember many details of that period, like the headings in the (Dutch) newspapers, and that nobody was talking about anything else. We did not even own a televison set then. Nevertheless, apparently the USA was very close to us.

        1. It’s okay to say anything, but we in Europe are definitely not later but ahead. That’s why Australia celebrates the New Year hours ahead of the USA, for example, and not hours later.

      2. Obviously, English is not my first language, so I guess you must be right. I figured that if a clock says 1 pm in Texas and at the same moment 8 pm in most of Europe, we could call this later, mainly because 8 pm is not earlier than 1 pm. ‘Ahead’ would seem to indicate (to me) that things are happening here before they happen on your side of the Atlantic, which is only true for a limited number of things, in particular sunset: When JFK was assassinated, it was evening here and early in the afternoon in the USA, but it happened at the same moment, not later.

  42. I was in school. They sent us home but didn’t tell us why.

    One of the things I clearly remember was that the news reports said that Oswald was seen carrying a long box near the motorcade route, and when asked about it, twice said it was a window blind. To my six-year-old sensibilities, it was more of a shock that he lied to the police than that he killed the President. I guess that’s because people expect six-year-old to lie, and so impress them with how wrong (and sinful) that is but don’t worry about telling them not to murder people.

    I’m just waiting for the first wingnut to claim that it was Obama on the grassy knoll.

    3. No, just the ones commenting. If you weren’t born yet, how could you state where you were?

  44. I was in a junior high class, on the outside of the left hall in the building, in a small Michigan town. The PA system came on, by accident it seemed because all we heard was nearly incomprehensible news from a radio. Then the principal announced that President Kennedy had been shot. The radio came back on, better oriented to the microphone this time and we listened in shocked silence for the rest of class. I cried. A couple of the boys teased me about it and I was embarrassed.

    My siblings and I played near the TV nearly the entire weekend. On all three channels (all we got; ABC, NBC, CBS) the programming was mostly news, alternating with (can you believe it!) classical music. We watched the funeral, too, so it if was on a weekday we didn’t go back to school.

    My parents were disturbed. This was a pretty thoroughly Republican town (though my Mom probably voted Democratic), but people were highly upset by the disorder, the lack of respect for the office of the President. It didn’t matter (as far as I could tell and I wasn’t especially perceptive) if they actually liked Kennedy himself.

  45. I remember that moment as if it was yesterday – I was in Geneva canton, Switzerland, living out in the country, and we didn’t have a TV at home nor did we listen to news on the radio, preferring reading the news in the morning paper. That morning, on November 23, as every week day morning, my mother drove me to school (I was in 11th grade). Opposite the school complex entrance, on the sidewalk, there was a newspaper vending box with the banner headlines that said, in big black letters, “Le Président Kennedy Assassiné” (note that here we are six hours “earlier” than in the East Coast of the USA, so early in the morning the newspaper printed the news that had happened in the previous evening and night). As I entered the school (it was then a smallish private international school that has grown a lot since, the Collège du Léman in Versoix, Geneva Canton, and I was on the English side). Everyone was in tears and we were all numb the whole day.

  46. I was a PhD student at Tulane University. When President Kennedy visited New Orleans, he had a motorcade down St. Charles Avenue. I watched out of an unscreened second floor window in Dinwiddie Hall, maybe 50 yards away. I was impressed that he looked so old and tired. He was the only president I have seen in the flesh.

    We were contracting for a diaper service for my son, who was born 29 December, 1963. The lady was scheduled to come by. When she came in she told us about the assassination. We had neither radio or TV, and did not take a newspaper.

  47. I was driving a station-wagon full of JV basketball players (grades 9-10) to another school for a game, when the report came over the car radio. Can’t remember if the game was cancelled. Can’t remember lots of things nowadays.

  48. “All Americans, and many others, know that today is the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, Texas in 1963.”

    Only because we can’t avoid being reminded by our elders. 🙂

    This website and a listserv I subscribe to are so far the only places I’ve heard of this anniversary. Left to my own devices, I’d have been lucky to guess either the month or the year, never mind the day, of Kennedy’s assassination.

    And it won’t really be that long until September 11th is the same, as all such dates recede into the past and become days that are important because we have a tradition of saying they are important, rather than because the dates have any direct significance in the lives of most citizens. See also: every federal holiday. This phenomenon seems to me a bizarre form of mass delusion. We decide that a date that was once important should continue to be so, and we celebrate or mourn events in which we took no part. Even for those alive in 1963 (a minority, now), exceedingly few had any personal connection with either Kennedy or the assassination. For the remaining 99.99% or so, it is a memory that once something bad happened to someone else far away. September 11th, likewise, is for almost all of us simply a memory that someothing bad happened to some people far away; it has no effect on us beyond what we ascribe to it, no relevance to our lives beyond what we ourselves create. Yet, on such non-events does history turn–or so we imagine.

    1. I think that one of the principal factors which left such a deep impression on Kennedy’s contemporaries was the fact that he managed to steer the situation away from a nuclear holocaust during the Cuban Missile Crisis when all the Hawks in government and in the military top brass were pushing so hard for attacking Cuba and the USSR with nuclear weapons. In so doing, Kennedy became one of the most loved and admired men in all times, and his brutal assassination left most of the informed world’s population in great shock.

      9/11 was a country picnic compared to the Blitz on London in WWII which lasted for weeks and during which some 43,000 civilians were killed and at least 71,000 were seriously injured, yet it didn’t result in some morbid worship of the event to be celebrated every year. People simply went on with their lives, rebuilding London and carrying on as normal.

      1. AFAICT, Kennedy (under advice or otherwise) -created- the Cuban Missile Crisis. Otherwise, the story would have been that the Soviets dropped some missiles off in Cuba. The end.

        But, yeah, I get it. I think you do, too. Sure, September 11th was a picnic compared to–well, just about -anything- that happened in WWII. But, then, Kennedy’s assassination was a picnic compared to September 11th. The importance we ascribe to an event, and our reverence of it afterward, has no particular relationship to the actual event. Regardless of the original importance of the event, a few decades on it devolves into “famous for being famous”.

        1. It is not as clear cut and simple as you seem to make it with regard to the Cuban Missile Crisis. I lived through it and was scared shitless, as were all the kids at my boarding school in England, all of us so far from our families, from our homes, from our parents – we were the children born shortly after Hiroshima and Nagasaki and were acutely aware of the devastation created by the atom bomb. I even wrote a long letter to Nikita Khrushchev begging him not to start a nuclear war.

          The next year, my mother had me go to a school in Switzerland close to where we lived out in the country, so that I would be at home and close to her.

          1. It is the ideology of a American or Western person to NOT think to write to President Kennedy to “please do not start a nuclear war!” The U. s. was the ones who when only they had the atom bomb threatened the Soviets that they would use it on the Soviets. The U.S. had already put missles in Turkey aimed at the Soviets and had already sent mercenaries into Cuba trying to overthrow the government.

      1. Me? Of course not. 🙂

        I guess I don’t respond well to “here’s what’s important to us” narratives in which conformity is presumed, though.

        1. And, seriously, hearing “I agree!” in one phrasing or another becomes tedious after a dozen or so repetitions. Variety is good.

          2. “Variety is good”

            I agree.

            Except with your general whining. There are other thing to read on this Internet if you are bored.

          3. Yeah, aspidoscelis, I don’t take well, and neither do the readers, to the implication that they’re some desire for conformity here. People are expressing the emotions they feel, as did you. So you can say what you want, but saying that the comments are “tedious” because of some presumed desire for conformity is out of line. An apology would be nice.

          4. You’re right, I was being rude and abrasive. My apologies.

            Reinforcing a shared cultural narrative and common identity is the social purpose of paying attention to anniversaries like this, though, isn’t it? An affirmation that these are the events and people that are important to us as Americans?

          5. And your point is…? That you’re above and beyond such mundane matters? That someone’s manipulating us all? Or…?

          6. Well, I certainly haven’t said either of those things. I’m not sure I can add anything productive to my previous comments, so I think I’ll take Diane G.’s advice.

          7. I think you’re reading way too much into the simple sharing of a common experience. I’m tuning out all of the media anniversary hoopla, but this level of connection–a loose group of us who convene here somewhat regularly and can chime in on a mutual memory–satisfies whatever need I have to be a least somewhat of a social animal.

    3. The USSR is no longer in existence, a fact of tremendous significance to hundreds of millions of living people, perhaps primarily due to defense budgets that were unsustainable. A case can be made that the missile crisis hastened that demise. Web Link: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/cuban-missile-crisis

      In August 1914 an assassination ignited WWI. Both the creation of the USSR and WWII were directly attributable at least partially to that specific event; WWII most significantly.

      It is the height of delusion to convince oneself that historical events have ‘no effect beyond what we ascribe to it’ (them), ‘no relevance to our lives beyond what we ourselves create.’ Pure hubris.

      Non-events, indeed. Tens of millions die, hundreds of millions suffer, in the aftermath of two world wars in the 20th Century alone. No event, anytime, is insignificant. Every thing is part of the whole story of human existence, the story is real, and so are the consequences of its events.

      Eroded civil liberties, official government/military endorsement and application of torture tactics, abandonment of jurisprudence and presumption of innocence until the conclusion of trial, abrogation of responsibility by one of the three branches of government, concentration of powers in the Executive beyond Constitutional provision, draconian legal sanctions against whistleblowers/press who attempt to bring to light actions the government attempts to conceal from the citizenry: this is just a short list of direct outcomes of the 9/11 ‘non-event.’

      Let’s not ignore the dead in the US military, and within civilian populations in the regions it has been sent in reaction to 9-11. The injured, the permanently maimed, the permanently dispossessed. All very real people, all very real family members affected, all very real communities and nations impacted who continue to endure the consequences of these events.

      Colonialism incites acts of terrorism against colonial states. People flew planes into buildings in 2001 in reaction to events that spanned over half a century. Something bad happened to the society their parents inhabited and they stand to inherit. Some terrorists were not alive when the events occurred that motivated acts of revenge decades later, acts they executed, often in suicidal fashion.

      The aspi cocoon is pierced well and true; its occupant simply fails to notice. So far.

      1. “For want of a nail the shoe was lost”, & etc. But the world isn’t that simple. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand did not itself cause anything beyond his death. The rest was caused by other people and other circumstances.

        Similarly, the events of September 11th caused the destruction of several buildings and the death of ca. 3,000 people. And that’s it. Subsequent events, including the Patriot Act, invasion of Iraq, etc., happened not as a result of the September 11th attacks but through the combined actions of millions of people telling themselves and each other that these were appropriate and necessary reactions to that event, and acting together to carry it out.

        The only causation there is actively created by us, in our perceptions of events… even events in which we really aren’t involved. We just have to tell ourselves that an event is important to us and, voilá, it is. Absent that story, it isn’t.

          1. If I throw a ball into the air, does whether it comes back down depend on what story I tell myself about the ball?

            And -if it did-, wouldn’t we have to talk about causation in terms of that story? The cause then, is not something about the ball or gravity, but something about the story.

          2. “If I throw a ball into the air, does whether it comes back down depend on what story I tell myself about the ball?”

            Again, complete nonsense. Can I affect someone by talking and not touching them? Can I make a cat go to a feed bowl by placing food in it? Nothing you have said here has any sense to it. You are clueless.

        2. I agree with aspi. Many of these events would not by themselves have been significant if a host of surrounding circumstances had not pushed events in a certain direction, and the famous event that ’caused it’ has just been singled out for recognition.

          9/11 and the invasion of Iraq is a prime example. Iraq and Saddam had nothing whatever to do with the World Trade Center attacks, Dubya just used that as a pretext. The one thing certain was that the US was going to take revenge on somebody, any scapegoat would have done. Cuba was probably dead lucky they don’t have big enough oil reserves to qualify.

          1. “Iraq and Saddam had nothing whatever to do with the World Trade Center attacks, Dubya just used that as a pretext…”

            You disprove your own argument.

          2. About par for the course for a New England Bob contribution to the debate, apparently.

  49. I heard the news on the tv and rushed upstairs to tell my mother. The man’s charisma made him stand out from the crowd as a politician. I was only 12.

    John Lennon’s death affected me far more personally. The utter crazyness of it.

    1. Not born at the time of the Kennedy assassination, but remember the Lennon assassination – was at school and it even made a mention at School assembly, mainly, looking back, I assume because my teachers would have been of the right age to be heavily influenced by the Beatles. Whether one finds such events ‘important’ or not almost doesn’t matter – why else would I remember a particular day in detail but for one event to hang it off?

      1. Also not extant in ’63, but in 1980 I wasn’t at school because I had the last week of the school year off to work as a field assistant on an ecology study, my first paid work in biology. After the day spotting lizards in quadrats in the half-burnt forest, we cleaned up and piled into a couple of cars to catch some band I’d vaguely heard of at the Tathra Hotel. The radio started with the car and the news was on. (Apart from being a Beatles fan, I felt personally connected since I was at school for a year with Julian ‘Powell’, without knowing his family circumstances at the time.) The band playing that Tuesday night was ‘Midnight Oil’, and I had my first beers in a pub (underage, of course).

    2. Yeah, Lennon’s death was a punch in the gut.

      I also remember just where I was when I heard Carl Sagan had died.

  50. I was nine years old, living near Philadelphia, and didn’t learn of the assassination until I was riding home on the bus. I was a Kennedy supporter only to the extent of being the youngest child of a Nixon hater. I will confess that my initial reaction was fascination. Presidents don’t get assassinated every day, and here I am living in a historical moment. At some point, I realized that presidents have families, and became rather more somber. Still, my focus remained that this is a hell of an event. Truth is that I’ve never really been able to mourn the death of anyone that I didn’t know personally. (And, right now, I’m mourning the death of someone I did know personally, so I feel the difference.)

  51. Thank you for making that a question. When I was younger, it was a lot more common to randomly see statements like “if you were alive when JFK was assassinated, you remember where you were.” To which my reaction was always “no, I don’t” (and not because I have some weird sort of amnesia).

    I am reasonably certain I was somewhere in New York City, because that’s where my parents and all my grandparents lived. But that’s logic, not memory: the set of people who were alive on any given day includes those born only days or weeks earlier.

    1. It was around the tenth anniversary (’73) that people started the trope about remembering where you were.

      The first time somebody said, “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?” I said, “Why? Am I a suspect?”

  52. I was in my third grade classroom when our teacher tearfully told us that the president had been shot.

  54. I was in the 4th grade. A student messenger knocked on the door, came in, and handed our teacher a note. She started breaking down and sobbing, but then composed herself and said that the president had been shot, and school was being dismissed at 2:30.

    What I also really recall was on Sunday morning. My father was watching the continuing TV coverage, but by then I was bored and was just reading something in the same room. Then he started screaming “He shot him! He shot him! I can’t believe on TV he was shot!” I didn’t know what was going on until he said that Oswald was just shot. Of course then there was no videotape instant replay. Had to wait till later (film at 11) to see it.

  55. Well, I don’t have a clue what I was doing at the time. I guess I wasn’t aware that it was significant. I tend to regard my doings as ‘my business’ and public affairs as ‘other business’ and the two things just don’t connect.

    So “everyone knows where they were” is false – I don’t. It only needs one and I guess I’m it 😉

    I do remember what I was doing when the World Trade Centre got hit – but only because my father rang me (woke me up) early in the morning to turn on the TV.

  56. I was 8 years old, out in back of the house “painting” our wooden fence with water. My Aunt Jean was supposed to come over and babysit us kids, something we always looked forward to. I remember being told she wouldn’t be coming after all and then the shock of why. I remember watching the TV afterward and learning that the Soviets had sent their condolences and thinking how hypocritical it seemed, because everyone knew the Russians were evil and were probably, actually rejoicing.

    1. Which of course is nonsense. The last thing any country facing a nuclear cold war wants in its opponent is assassinations, political instability and the chance of some complete raving fruitcake getting his finger on the nuclear button…

      The condolences were probably genuine and in any case, diplomatically de rigeur.

  57. Ah, that would explain the Lee Harvey Oswald story of a few days ago. I’d known it was at this end of the year, but hadn’t ever had any need to tie it to a particular day.
    And now I have to check if this was posted yesterday or today. OK, 22nd ; I’ll try to remember that.

  58. I was living in a small Arabian Sea coast town in India and saw the information first in the Malayalam (my mother tongue) newspaper which in those days was delivered before 6 o’clock in the morning. Since the assassination had taken place during what was our night, ordinary people came to know of it only from the morning newspaper or morning 6 o’clock radio news. There was no TV in those days.
    Rest of that day, everybody was talking only about it – family members, neighbors, my schoolmates, and every person I saw on that day. While repeatedly expressing horror at what had happened, everyone asked the same question – Here was a man for whom life was opening up in such a beautiful way. Why did destiny choose to send its giant sword down?

  59. I was taking a spelling test when the announcement came. Sister Marywhoever was so shocked; she could only sit there and stare for a while. When some kid asked her for the next word, she looked up at us with a ‘little girl lost’ kind of look and said the test was cancelled, put her head on her desk and sobbed uncontrollably until someone came and helped her away. Most of you Americans, and some of you who are not, no matter what age, if you know anything about American politics/history know what having an Irish Catholic being elected president meant to any and all of them (probably more than Obama meant to any one of any race, no insult to anyone intended.) My very first thought was ‘spelling test canceled? Alright! Let me explain that I was always ‘that kid.’ If I made a “B” on anything, I wept copiously. I never made a “B” on a report card until I was in High School. But I still cannot, and never could, spell. I also had my elder brother Tom as example (he was 18 months my senior.) Tom was very smart, very athletic, very attractive, a natural charmer (yeah, that other kid) and a rebel without a cause and antagonizer unparalleled. I watched as he was punished: verbally, physically, grounded, had no supper, (anything that came before a ‘time out’) and I took careful note. I was never scolded, punished or spanked ever (until my parents found me having sex on the floor of the living room.) I was always the favorite student. I not only made good grades, I was always cheerful, ready to help and voluntarily took over some of the mind-numbing teachers’ chores (straightening the class room, redoing poster boards more than once a month, grading simple papers.) I was always and everywhere the favorite student (my brother’s behavior taught me how to be a champion manipulator), except for Sister Mary Whoever. She hated me on sight; I have never figured out why. But to having something distress her this much pleased me somewhere in my dark little heart. Amazingly our school was not sent home early either; we sat around the classroom and watched the nuns cry. Except for our routine ‘duck and cover’ drill. But I had never known anyone who had died before. I knew my father hadn’t voted for him (probably the only American Irish Catholic who didn’t) and I really didn’t understand why even my parents were so upset and crying. But I was only 7 and had no knowledge or understanding of politics, the Cold War or even death. I think that the guilt of my attitude was why I became such a raving conspiracy hunted/ investigator. It also became a personal rule. When my husband and divorced, I went back to work. I remember standing around our cubicles discussing the assassination on one of its anniversary. I asked my current boyfriend where he was when it happened and he said “I wasn’t born yet”. That became the limit; no dating guys born before the Kennedy assassination.

  60. I was an 8-year-old in primary school on the outskirts of Glasgow, Scotland. Our teacher took the whole class to watch the news report, possibly because we had a lot of Americans in the class (their fathers invariably worked at a local Caterpillar plant). I remember our teacher having tears in her eyes …

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