Grim but Fading Redletter Aniversary Rolls Around Again

 

New Yorkers hastily gobbled up extra edition newspapers.

Note--The Event that was the pivotal shock to the Old Man's shrinking cohort.

November 22.  For members of at least a couple of generations  I don't have to say or write anything else.  You know.  The date and the event are etched in your memory.  If you were sentient in 1963 the moment you heard the news is so solidly implanted in your memory that you can recall every detail--the cast of the light, the muffled sobs and wails, even the smell of the autumn day 61 years ago.

November 22, 1963 was, of course, the day President John D. Kennedy was shot while passing the Texas School Book Depository Building in Dallas, Texas in an open car with his young wife, resplendent in pink, sitting beside him.

 Moments before shots were fired a smiling J.F.K. and his glamorous wife Jacqueline rode in the open car behind Texas Governor John Connolly and his wife. 

I am not going to relate all the details.  You know them.  Nor am I going to sort out the 1,354 or various conspiracy theories which have been put forward.  Most of them are ridiculous.  A few are compelling.  The official Warren Commission Report was as full of holes as Swiss cheese. and the Congressional investigations since then have at best given us a glimpse "through a glass darkly."  The absolute truth, if there is any such a thing, will probably elude us.

In one of the most memorable moments in television history CBS anchor Walter Cronkite removed his glasses as he delivered the somber news the President had died.  Many who rushed home from school or work saw it live.

It is enough to know that a young President, in whom so many of us had cast great hope, was killed by some vague unknowable Them who wanted him dead.  That hope, merited or not, by the flawed individual was crushed. 

It is the stuff of Legend.  Two hundred years from now operas, epic poems. or whatever form heroic art takes shape then, will  imbue the event in magic and dignity.

Yet right now, this is still particularly our day.  It owns us inescapably.

Many rushed to buy the special hard bound Kennedy memorial Life Magazine edition that included photos of the funeral and kept it for decades.

But for my own grown children it is only a historical event.  Their stomachs do not flip with the remembrance.  They acknowledge it without understanding it the way we acknowledged  December 7, 1941--the single stark moment in our parents' lives.  For them September 11, 2001 the pivot of history.

Much attention was paid to the President's grave at Arlington National Cemetery with it Eternal Flame.  Extreme weather conditions and government shut downs have extinguished the flame briefly.  The bodies of the President's two infant children--Patrick and Arabella, were re-interred on the site at the request of his widow.  Later his brothers Robert and Edward as well a Jacqueline herself were added to the plot.

 And as for my grand childeren...well it just another day in the walk-up to Thanksgiving and the Christmas season.  They hardly know who John Kennedy was.  The never heard of Lee Harvey Oswald.  If reminded, they may grunt a foggy awareness.  But it is no more real to them than the Peloponnesian Wars.