It was the Friday before Thanksgiving and we had just sat down for our last class of the day.
I was in ninth grade and for me that was Earth Science.
It was November 22nd, 1963.
I didn’t even know President Kennedy was in Texas, so I was certainly shocked when the principal came on the public address system at about 2:40 p.m. and told us he had been shot and was being taken to a hospital. The shooting actually had happened more than an hour earlier and the president had been dead for 40 minutes.
We got that news about 10 minutes later and the world changed forever.
The last time a president had been assassinated was when an anarchist killed President McKinley in 1901. The last major assassination came in 1935, when Senator Huey Long was killed in the state capitol in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Kennedy himself later said that no assassination ever changed history, but his was the first of four killings in less than five years that certainly did.
After JFK, Malcolm X in 1965 and Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in 1968 took from us four people who truly mattered in good ways. I’m not going to get all philosophical here, but it’s a fact that people who inspired others to be better than they were had been killed.
I remember America came to a full Stop on November 22nd, 60 years ago today. For the entire weekend up through President Kennedy’s funeral on Monday, there was nothing on television except news and there were no breaks for commercials. I watched very little of it — I was not a TV person in those days — and I missed the live shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald on Sunday.
I can’t remember if it was Saturday or Sunday, but there was a day when hundreds of thousands of people lined up to walk past Kennedy’s closed casket in the Capitol Rotunda. My parents went and spent nine hours in line to be part of it.
Then on Monday, America watched the funeral, from the procession to little JFK Jr’s famous salute to the burial at Arlington National Cemetery. And when it was over, we went back to being our usual goofy selves.
If there is one thing true about history, it’s that we in the present tend to believe we are smarter, more insightful and less naive than those who came before us.
We laugh at the way people saw things then.
We think how silly it was to look at the three years Kennedy was in the White House as something special. We look at the flaws we have learned about JFK since and we listen as haters tear him down.
But it was a better time than now. There were great men who never became president, and if someone like Donald Trump had spoken of being president then, people wouldn’t have stopped laughing for a week. If they thought he was serious, they would hae stopped laughing and lobotomized him on the spot.
They had fought Nazis.
They knew how dangerous fascism was.
They would never have tolerated it.
Did we live in Camelot from 1961-63? Not really, but there were good things then that we have all but forgotten now. We admired our president for his intellect and for his sense of humor and he led a party that wanted to make things better for working people and minorities.
It was 60 years ago today that Camelot ended.
It feels like 100.
“Don’t let it be forgot that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.”