BoomerZoo Almanac for November 18-24, 2007: Gone, but not forgotten

John F Kennedy

Like the attack on Pearl Harbor for our parents, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, was a seminal event for the Boomer generation. I’m sure our parents always remembered where they were when they heard the Japanese had taken out the U.S. Pacific fleet in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, just as we will always remember where we were when we heard the news about JFK. 

It was a Friday, so I was at school—and it was not yet lunch time in the small town where I grew up in Oregon. I can’t remember now if we heard it over the public address system or if our teacher, Miss Hager, told us that the president had been shot. We did not know, then, that he had died. We were sent home. My friends and I walked along the dusty street to our houses a few blocks from that small elementary school. I remember being frightened and confused. We were all crying. We stayed out of school until after the Thanksgiving holiday, which was the following week.

The TV seemed to be always on over the next 10 days, with reporters talking about the events as they had unfolded; talking, talking about what had happened: the motorcade in Dallas, the shots and where they came from, Kennedy slumping in the back seat of the convertible, and everyone—not just me—being frightened and confused. (Television cameras did not, in spite of what some of us might think, capture this event. A bystander was taking home movies of the motorcade on his Super8 camera and it was that footage of the assassination, released in 1975, most of us probably remember most clearly.)

Soon after, on that very day, Lyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in as the next president of the United States and Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested. We heard he was a communist, he’d defected to the USSR and later to Cuba, and we were even more frightened and confused.

Then on Sunday, November 24, Oswald was shot by Jack Ruby, a night-club operator and big fan of JFK, who was said to be distraught after the assassination. This—unlike the assassination of the president—was seen live by television viewers, who hadn’t turned their sets off since the news of the shooting of the president on Friday. This did not ease our fears or confusion; it seems to have set them both in stone for many people. (Check out some of the conspiracy theories on Wikipedia.)

JFK motorcade

Finally, there was the funeral. That’s the part I remember most vividly. By Thanksgiving Day, I was pretty tired of watching the casket being carried through Washington, D.C. by a horse-drawn carriage, the salute by little John-John, the swearing in of LBJ, the constant barrage of fear and confusion. I did learn the word “cortege,” of course, but even that it didn’t make up for missing all those TV shows I usually watched. I was just a kid, and—I admit it—I was getting bored. No school, no cartoons, just that dirge and those horses.

It wasn’t too many years later that I began to feel a bit guilty about that reaction. I really was just a little kid, I reminded myself, but I still thought of it as insensitive. That is, until about September 13, 2001, when I could no longer stand to watch those twin towers falling over and over again, my sense of fear and confusion growing with each repetition. I finally realized that I had to reach out and turn off the TV! That was the only way I’d maintain my sanity. It also allowed me to realize that limiting how much news about the assassination of the president I could handle—especially when I was still just a child—had probably been a blessing in disguise. I was able to move on, still believing that most people really are good and have better things to do with their lives than plan ways to kill each other.