The end of the innocence

Another major anniversary today…

It’s difficult to get my mind around the fact that John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot and killed forty-one years ago.  As I wrote last year on this date, my memory of that horrid, devastating day is stark and vivid.

America lost its innocence that day.  Until November 22, 1963, assassination was something you read about in dusty old textbooks.  Sure, we knew all about John Wilkes Booth, but was it the “disgruntled office seeker” or the “anarchist” who shot McKinley?  Ummm, Teddy Roosevelt took over for McKinley, but who was Garfield’s VP?  And did it make any difference?

It wasn’t just that our presidents didn’t get shot ... no one did, unless they were bad guys like Albert Anastasia in a New York barber shop or Johnny Stompanato in Lana Turner’s Hollywood mansion.  And the latter was stabbed by Lana’s daughter, anyway. 

Certainly not respected and respectable politicians ... that was simply inconceivable.

Since November 22, well, I don’t need to remind anyone of the assassination attempts and successes, of who we lost and what might have been.

As I see it, what we now know as the Sixties started exactly and precisely during that sunny lunchtime in Dealey Plaza.  The ferment, the torment, the uproar, the outcry of the next decade and more—from Vietnam to Prague Summer to Dylan going electric to Bader-Meinhof to the Mexico City and Munich Olympics to Salvador Allende to Yoko Ono to Six-Day and Yom Kippur Wars to Woodstock to Kent State to Watergate, and a thousand more events—all of that exploded into being when the core of our national being was ripped away in Dallas.  What may have been bubbling under the surface, what might eventually have produced major, earthshaking changes in American and world society, was suddenly and violently facilitated by a single rifle bullet ripping through the brain of one man.

Forty-one years ago today.

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