By Robert Tannenhauser
It was 60 years ago today that John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States was assassinated. Everyone who was old enough on that day remembers to this day where they were and what they felt.
It is seared in my memory, it was my sophomore year at Syracuse University, and I was at the library (for the first and last time) studying or trying to, when we were jolted by the announcement – “The President has been shot.” Trying to process the information I rushed to join my friends as we sat glued to the TV as the updates came in. The blurring cascade of JFK’s dead, Oswald arrested, Oswald’s killed, Jack Ruby arrested, Johnson sworn in and the reality that optimism for the future was gone. Little did I realize that the decade of assassinations was in it’s early stages, first Medgar Evers, then JFK, Malcom X, MLK and then RFK (which I watched live while studying for a law school exam). It was a difficult decade, but in retrospect it does not seem as troubling to me as the current level of discord, hatred, extremism, and inability to compromise or to simply agree to disagree in a civil manner that we are experiencing now.
Send us your memories and thoughts in the comments. If you are too young to have experienced it, what have you learned, heard, and thought about JFK and the assassination?
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I was very young and have only vague recollections of the day. All the adults were agitated in a way I never had experienced before. My clearest memory growing up was my father saying that while he wouldn’t live to see it I would be alive when all the documents and classified reports were released. Of course every president who could release the final tranche of documents. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that each president has acted in violation of the laws that required the documents to be released. There must be a reason for that and I personally don’t buy the story that all that’s left is redundant documents that are meaningless. The intelligence community has made each president a “deal he can’t refuse” to hold back those documents. Maybe, one day we’ll see it all but I doubt it.
I was 17,in band class, announcement intercom, world stopped, everyone crying. That night no basketball game cancelled,, in my car 4 friends, alcohol stole from my house , cigars, all dirge music on radio, cursing the world,, soo young and innocent then!
The largest conspiracy the nation has ever seen, Every President since has been complicit. Every President has failed to unseal records related to this. Does any thinking person believe for 1 second the Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone? This was coordinated at the highest levels why else are some records too sensitive to release, after 60 years?
I would remind people that the House Select Committee on Assassinations – formed in 1976 to look into the assassinations of JFK and MLK – issued its report in 1978. In that report, it states quite clearly that, “The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.”
That was the OFFICIAL position of the committee that spent two years studying all available evidence, and hearing dozens of witnesses.
So, yes, there WAS a conspiracy behind the assassination of JFK. The question that remains is what people and/or agencies were involved. The answers to those questions may never be known. I personally believe that, for all its occasional silliness and frenetic motion, Oliver Stone’s “JFK” has probably come closest to the truth.
OPOD: That is the way it has gone down in history. The conspiracy theorists speculated on every aspect of the case but could never come up with anything.
What theory do you subscribe to?
LBJ all the way.
I was 20 years old, on my first job as a newspaper copywriter. We heard about the shooting but weren’t yet aware that JFK had died. We were shocked and upset, even more so when a few of the senior executives cheered at the news.
Whoa. Cheered. Why? This is all new.
I guess they were Nixon fans
I was a kid in Bucharest, Romania. My grandma just had a stroke and the paramedics were in our apartment when my father got the news on Voice of America (your tax money well spent). One could go to prison for listening to VOA back then.
Communist Romania was no joke (I was there in 1973).
Patrice Lumumba was assassinated on 17 January 1961
Most respectfully, Sir, I am questioning the accuracy of your recollection. I am wondering if you were ever once in the library.
I was 7. just a year older than Caroline, and I was shocked as I watched the funeral on TV with my parents and grandparents. The riderless horse haunts me still. My mother wept
I was utterly traumatized and had nightmares. For 2 or 3 years I couldn’t bear to have my parents go out in the evening because I thought they would be shot in a taxi. My mother spoke to a friend who was a psychiatrist. She said my reaction was not at all unusual for a “sensitive child” and to just not go out for the time being, and that it would pass. Eventually it did but it was an unthinkable catastrophe. I was 7; I didn’t know that parents could die.
I was almost 20 yo, my son was sleeping peacefully in his crib, my husband was at work. The apt was so quiet. I turned on the radio and the announcer was saying President Kennedy had just been shot. How utterly shocking !!! It was JFK for whom i cast my first vote and i felt so very proud of my country. I called my husband, he just heard it too. I remember clearly when the Warren Commission came out with their report, i was getting into the car, my husband was driving me to the hospital about to have my second baby. I listened to the findings and knew in my heart it wasn’t true. Just like that i knew. 57 years later,
11/22/2020 my 4th grandchild was born on that exact same date, a powerful number and once again i was in the hospital maternity ward !
The day of John Kennedy’s assassination is seared in my memory as a mother of two young children. Little did I dream that day marked the birth of the “Deep State” with a Warren Commission whitewash and subsequent assassinations of Malcolm X, Dr. King and Robert Kennedy. The involvement of the CIA is still kept secret by the Assassination Records office which 60 years later has not released all the documents. A tragic day for Peace and Democracy – November 22, 1963.
I was a young Army Officer in Germany when JFK was elected and nobody in the Officer’s Mess could believe that he had defeated Nixon. We had only heard the debate on radio and I guess the video on TV made the difference. When he was assassinated, I was at work in NYC.
I hadn’t voted for him and didn’t like his policies, but I was nonetheless saddened by his demise. Then we got Johnson, and the downward slide began.
I’ve been listening to Rob Reiner’s newest podcast about the assassination called “Who Shot JFK?”
Aside from the fact that it’s a tad slow to take off and that he and co-host Soledad O’Brien speak like 1st grade teachers to a pack of children — the information he imparts is terrific. The second in the series finally gets to the meat of the CIA and mafia issue and that the murder was finally ruled a “conspiracy” but not named by whom. I’m anxious to listen to the rest of the series.
If you want to be enlightened about this sad day in American history tune into his podcast at your favorite supplier of podcasts or Spotify.
I in my junior year in high school. The loud speaker came on as we were moving from the 6th to the 7th period in the day, asking us to hurry to class. We sat through the whole class – mine was geometry – moving from the fact that he was shot to that he was dead. The teacher was clearly not a fan of JFK’s, and at the end of the class with most of us in tears, he reminded us that we had our exam on Monday. Of course, there was no school on Monday, as we were all clued to the TV. I was in Europe when RFK was shot. It felt as if it would never end.