He was a friend of mine
The PA speaker came on and someone in the school office announced, “President Kennedy has been shot.”
I had not heard the PA speaker come on during my first three months back at school. I didn’t even know the school had one. The statement was far more shocking and I am writing about it to the best of my ability without any of the knowledge and experience accumulated since that day 60 years ago.
Someone wheeled a television into the classroom. I didn’t know we had those in the school either, and we began watching the television coverage. Eventually, Walter Cronkite announced the time of death. Someone announced that we were being sent home early. No one could get any work done anyway. As we stood in the school parking lot waiting for our school buses, kids cried and chattered in that way people do when they face something so unexpected and don’t know what to say. One of the girls who was crying complained about another girl who wasn’t: “Nancy said she doesn’t care. ‘I’m a Republican,’ she said.” Then, the girl burst out crying again.
I was only 10. I didn’t know what to tell her. I kept my distance and cried inside. We went home and it seemed like we all were sleepwalking for the next four days until President John F. Kennedy’s funeral. In rapid succession, it seems, we saw images of a veiled Jackie Kennedy standing by Lyndon Johnson as he took the oath of office to become the next president. Then, we saw images of assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, Then, we saw images of Jack Ruby assassinating Lee Harvey Oswald, live on TV. We saw the coffin lying in state in the Capitol Rotunda. We saw the caisson hauling the casket. We saw “John John” saluting his dad. Slowly, we returned to normal.
Now, looking back, I realize that the trauma of that day was so shattering because we were privileged to live in a place that wasn’t torn by warfare, a place where the institutions could continue even when the commander in chief was cut down, a place that is prosperous.
For me, I think it was my first encounter with death. One day, this guy was the same vigorous man who we saw taking care of business on the evening news for the past couple of years. The next day, he was gone, never to be seen again except in memory and archival footage.
In some ways, maybe I was a lucky person to have this be the most awful event to happen in my young life. Some people lose parents, never have a good meal, are the victims of abuse, have terrible illnesses, but I suffered none of these losses by the time I turned 11 later that year. I know it scarred and shaped me in some deep way, and I wonder how many of my baby boom cohort were damaged by it. We didn’t get trauma counselors. It’s been 60 years, it seems like yesterday. I looked forward to the future with a hope that was perhaps unfounded. We never thought the future would look like today, and maybe in some inexplicable way this terribly anxious moment has its seeds in a shared trauma six decades past.
<<These two songs about JFK's assassination seem to come from the same place as this essay: That Was the President - Phil Ochs and He Was a Friend of Mine - The Byrds.>>
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