The Day Kennedy Died
It’s a tragic version of Groundhog Day. Every year on this date, November 22, we relive the trauma of a generation. Edward Curtin’s deep recollections are exemplary in this regard. The rest of the year, these feelings, the buried facts of the case, and its pervasive implications are conveniently forgotten. From JFK to 9/11 and beyond, we cannot bear to look in that dark mirror of what our world has become, with its “unspeakable” realities manufactured for the benefit of so few.
Here is my own version of what took place on November 22, 1963, and what it meant to my generation:
Civil Rights, the Space Race, the Arms Race, U2 and the Cuban Missile Crisis… these matters of state largely transpired on the edge of my boyhood, concerns framed in a talking box in the living room. Since John F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech nearly three years before, the national spirit took residence in a mythical realm shamelessly referenced as Camelot — our collective hope for the future. That hope died a most ignoble death, the day we heard the grave news: President Kennedy, champion of all the noble ideals of our country, was assassinated.
I was too young, only thirteen, to grasp the full import of it. I just absorbed the blunt impact of the shock wave that passed through the halls of North Springs High School that day. Shortly we all sat watching coverage on the school TVs wheeled into classrooms for the network feeds. The astronaut launches had been mildly exciting to witness, live and in progress. But the presidential murder had already happened; and like audiences everywhere, we students were left to try and digest the unpalatable wrapup.
How do you wrap up a regicide? What can a body politic do, after a coup d’état? I found the coverage at once both maudlin and matter-of-fact, puzzling and depressing.
The whole drift of the cultural zeitgeist had been reversed in one coup. I didn’t understand this intellectually, or personally. Even as a national public, could we grasp its full implications then, or in the days to follow? No, it was a tsunami of the unconscious, silent and dark. We believed the official story, because it was the only one told… though the noir device of Jack Ruby, the classic mob hit on the patsy Oswald, reeked of a cheap and artificial ending.
Camelot no more, what kind of world was I growing into? Whatever had been taken as a given, held true no longer. Me and my generation, we were on our own now.
— excerpt from a new book, My Generation: A Memoir of the Baby Boom, by Nowick Gray
