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When I started pondering the 40th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, I knew that most Americans my age -- if not -- all remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when the news arrived.
I was in eighth grade at Evans Junior-Senior High School, just south of Greeley. We had an open campus, and at lunch time, most of us gravitated a couple of blocks down the hill to the Frostop Drive-In on U.S. 85, where we enjoyed 5-cent soft-serve ice-cream cones.
Someone teenager parked there had his car radio on, and said he heard that the president had been shot in Texas. Moments later, there was an accident on the highway, and my friends and I all ran to stare at the blood, broken glass and twisted metal -- we were, after all, eighth-grade boys, and that's what gets the attention of 13-year-olds. Ask any movie producer or video-game maker.
I remember wondering about the radio report, and thinking that assassinations are important historical events, and nothing so significant could happen during my boring lifetime. So President Kennedy would walk out of the hospital.
Not until we got back to the school grounds, just ahead of the bell, did we learn that the President had died. No one seemed to know quite what to do; within minutes we were herded into the school gym, where a TV had been set up. And that -- sitting numbly in front of the TV -- was pretty much where everyone stayed for the next three or four days.
My parents remember Dec. 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor Day, with the same intensity and clarity. I expected that my children and their friends would remember Sept. 11, 2001, in the same way.
But that's not the case. Their day of shock was Jan. 26, 1986 -- the day the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after lift-off, killing everyone aboard. One was a teacher, Christa McAuliffe, and elementary schools across the country had followed her closely with special lessons and presentations.
So I suspect that 9-11 will be etched into an even younger generation, those who were in school at the time. When something big happens after you've turned 18, it doesn't wire itself into your nervous system in the same way as a horrible event does when you're younger.
Thus I found myself consulting references to find the dates of events that I remembered: the Murraugh Federal Building in Oklahoma City was bombed on April 19, 1995; a dozen students and a teacher were killed at Columbine High School near Littleton on April 20, 1999; the space shuttle Columbia fell apart over Texas during re-entry on Feb. 1, 2003.
Do these events have anything in common, other than tragedy? The ones that stick, the ones that become permanent mental circuits, seem to be those that upset our sense of security and control.
In other words, auto accidents kill about 800 Americans every week, but we don't feel threatened by them, since most of us figure that accidents will happen. But we do feel threatened by a military attack on American soil, by the failure of our best engineering, or by the murder of one of the best-protected men on earth.
Those events make us feel vulnerable, and that's not the
normal American way to feel. There is, after all, the
widespread belief in American exceptionalism,
which
makes us think that it can't happen here,
-- and
when it does, we're shaken to the core.
As for the Kennedy assassination, two questions still linger. One was whether it really changed the course of history, and the other is whether it was solely committed by Lee Harvey Oswald.
I don't think it changed history much, especially as regards Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson had the same advisers as Kennedy, and saw it as his duty to pursue JFK's agenda. Their differences were those of style, not policy. LBJ faced the same political situation as JFK -- an American right wing demanding that we stand up to the commies in Vietnam after failing to regain Cuba -- and I don't see how JFK could have acted much differently than LBJ did.
Like millions of other people, I had trouble believing the Warren Report and its conclusion that there was no assassination conspiracy. It's interesting to read all the theories about Cuban exiles who felt betrayed, the illegal removal of Kennedy's body from Dallas, hired Corsican assassins, American Mafioso putting out a contract, friendly fire from the Secret Service, the alleged puff of smoke on the grassy knoll, and the possible links between Oswald and Jack Ruby and the CIA and the FBI.
But it's been 40 years. And in that time, despite intense interest and the prospect of a fortune from publishing deals, nobody has appeared with any credible evidence or testimony that it happened any other way. If there were anything, it should have turned up by now, and we ought to focus on the actions of the current political dynasty rather than replay an old one.
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