This weekend marks the 50th anniversary of the John F. Kennedy assassination. I wasn’t even born yet by over a decade, but I still like to hear my mom speak of when she heard of JFK’s death.
I look to another presidential assassination…Lincoln and compare it to JFK’s assassination and how Americans look back at it. (That’s me in the photo checking my smart phone in 2010 while on a visit to Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C.). I am fascinated about the reaction of Americans now to Lincoln. Ford’s Theatre has almost a quaint feel to it. I can specifically remember wall clocks positions in the hallway leading to the theatre auditorium. Accompanying the wall clocks there is a timeline of when and what happened. The font of prose of the timeline is reminiscent of a turn of the century / keystone cop / handlebar mustache feel to it. It doesn’t even seem real, but more likely read in one of those newspaper clippings on a Wendy’s restaurant table from the 1980s.
By contrast JFK’s death is still fresh on people’s minds. Although it is gradually getting more difficult to find those who were alive at the time of the assassination, the tragedy still looms large and is not something to be joked about, especially on the 50th anniversary. An aquaintance found this out when he posted this photo with a caption, “Too Soon?” on Facebook. It was removed shortly thereafter.
When I was a middle school student, I can remember my older sister getting a large photo book titled “Five Days in November.” While flipping through the book I discovered the horror that was the Kennedy assassination. The Zapruder film? Someone actually had footage of the president being shot? The blood splatter of the president? This was pretty brutal for myself having only been a teenager when I first found out about it. Even back then I wondered to myself why did Kennedy travel in a convertible? It seems like such an obvious mistake to avoid, but security personnel in the 1960s do not think the way we think in the 2000s.
Then finding out that Oswald was shot? I couldn’t write this type of high paced drama. So for me, learning about the assassination in the late 1980s was pretty dramatic and shocking. So my memories of the Kennedy assassination is limited to books I’ve read and people I’ve spoken to.