Opinion/Brown: 60th anniversary: Remembering the assassination of President John Kennedy

The truly pivotal events in our history are the ones for which everyone living at the time has the story of where they were and how they learned about it. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy — 60 years ago on the 22^nd — is etched into the memories of those of us who were alive when it happened.

I was a senior at a boarding school when a local shopkeeper asked if I knew that President Kennedy had been shot. There was an appliance store next door. The walls were lined with television sets, all tuned to the same station. From where the television camera was located, a stream of limousines was rushing past, sirens wailing. Then came the announcer's voice.

“I repeat,” the voice said, “the only information we have at this time is that the president was shot from an overpass on his parade route through Dallas, Texas.”

Word was out quickly

By the time I got back on campus, the word was out that Kennedy had died. Within hours, Lee Harvey Oswald was in custody and charged with the murder. Americans were glued to their TV screens, watching in a mixture of horror and astonishment as Oswald himself was gunned down in the lobby of the Dallas police station by a small-time thug named Jack Ruby, who claimed his only motive was sympathy for the dead president's wife.

There were irregularities with Kennedy's autopsy, and the public still hasn’t seen thousands of documents. It stunk to high heaven.

Chief Justice Earl Warren was appointed to lead a massive federal investigation into the assassination but by the time it was published, few people in America were prepared to believe it. It all seemed too pat. Maybe it’s hard to believe that an event with such profound and varied consequences could result from the efforts of a single deranged individual. And I never forgot what I heard in that appliance store when it just happened: "shot from an overpass on his parade route through Dallas, Texas."

A complex individual

Kennedy was certainly a complex individual. He was, as it turned out, an unfaithful husband. He warmed to the civil rights movement with reluctance and had a miserable record of getting bills passed through Congress. But as a teenager, I was struck by his youth, the endearing sight of little children romping through the White House, and the way he challenged the country to move forward. After eight years of grandfatherly President Dwight Eisenhower, Kennedy was a breath of fresh air.

Boarding school was painfully far from home when the Cuban missile crisis blew up during Kennedy’s presidency. Our dormitory master brought us into his apartment to see the videos of Russian ships steaming toward Cuba with long-range missiles … and American warships steaming to intercept them. If the Russians wouldn't turn back, Kennedy said, there would be war.

My roommate and I lay in our bunks that night, unable to sleep. It was a clear night. Suddenly, out our window, a meteor shower blazed across the sky. There was no time to say anything. We held our breath and waited for a sheet of white light to turn us into atoms. Nothing happened. Rarely in my life had I ever wanted to be home more desperately than at that moment.

After the assassination, the school wisely decided to let us all go home for the weekend. Waiting at the train station, my eyes fell on a newsstand and one of the tabloids that announced with huge banner headlines, “LIZ BITES BURTON.” It was my first realization that while a large segment of the population might be fixated on one issue, millions of other Americans might be thinking of other things altogether.

If Kennedy had trouble getting his bills passed, the new President Lyndon Johnson had no such trouble. Kennedy’s civil rights bills passed through Congress. Johnson declared a war on poverty and then mired the country in Vietnam. It was a turning point that passed quietly in its own way: a national loss of hope that the federal government was our friend, or that it could successfully channel our national energy into massive projects worth doing. Or, remembering the Warren Commission report, that our government could be trusted to tell us the truth. A lot of things died when Kennedy was struck from behind by Oswald's bullets — or when perhaps he was struck through the forehead from the grassy knoll, or from an overpass on his parade route through Dallas.

I was an adult with children of my own before I ever found my way to Dealey Plaza in Dallas. I had been asked to speak at a convention and then asked to take several teenage children on a field trip. You can go up to the old book repository building, up to the very floor, the very room from which Oswald took aim at the president of the United States. They've left the place exactly the way Oswald left it, cardboard boxes stacked in piles near the window. I tried to explain to the kids what had happened when my eyes filled with tears. How could I explain to them that this was the moment at which my generation was slapped awake and informed that, Happy Days notwithstanding, all was not right in America, and it wasn't going to be.

Lawrence Brown is a columnist for the Cape Cod Times. Email him at columnresponse@gmail.com.

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This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Opinion: Remembering President Kennedy 60 years after assassination