Remembering November 22, 1963

November 22, 2008

"Johnny, we hardly knew ye"--traditional 19th century Irish song

It is an unshakable memory, even forty-five years later--that gray November afternoon at Fort Holabird, Maryland, when an Army officer burst into our classroom with the news that President John F. Kennedy had been shot in Dallas and was probably dead. As Army counterintelligence officers in training, we were accustomed to being surprised in class by the team of actors whose job was to test our interrogation skills--and our first reaction was that this was a classroom exercise. Would that it had been. Tragically, it was true.

We sat, stunned. Then, without a word, we began to file out of the classroom--nobody dismissed us, we just walked out. As we left the building, the officer just ahead of me muttered an oath and sprinted over to the flagpole and pulled the flag down to half-staff. It was at that moment that the enormity of this moment began to sink in. He really was dead.

The next few hours and days are a blur. Anne and I found ourselves in the apartment of one of my classmates and his wife from Texas, and all the four of us could do was watch the terrible sickening drama unfold on live television, with veteran anchorman Walter Cronkite fighting back tears as he reported the chaotic events that made us reel with every new bizarre and incomprehensible development. In that span of time, the purported assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was apprehended and taken to jail, where millions of shocked viewers watched Jack Ruby surge past Oswald's police escort and shoot him dead. The shocked expression of the detective who held Oswald at the moment of Ruby's vigilante act was shared by everyone who saw the pictures.

And then Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was quickly sworn in as President on Air Force One, with the widowed Jackie Kennedy standing beside him, in the same dress she had worn in the parade, now spattered with blood from her attempts to shield her husband, whose lifeless body lay in the belly of that plane as it headed back to Washington, D.C.

The country and the world were almost immobile--glued to television sets in living rooms and department store windows and barbershops and bars. We were grief-stricken and numb from the realization of this incredible loss. This vibrant, articulate, handsome young successor to the grandfatherly Eisenhower, who had rekindled the American spirit and who had inspired the hopes and dreams of the country was gone.

The country shut down to grieve Kennedy. To this day neither Anne nor I remember how we found ourselves standing on that Washington D.C. curb in the bitter cold wind to watch the funeral cortege creep along Pennsylvania Avenue, muffled drums beating to an unmistakably slow dirge, as the horse-drawn casket crept toward the Capitol, flanked by a riderless horse with boots turned backward in the stirrups. Shiny black limousines followed closely, carrying the mourning Kennedy clan and an impressive train of world leaders and famous personalities come to pay last respects to the fallen leader of the free world.

The most poignant image seen by the world that day was the young John-John Kennedy, barely two years old, standing in his short pants, saluting his father's coffin as it crept past on its way to Arlington Cemetery for its final rest. Johnny, we hardly knew ye.

Each person alive at that time can remember in vivid detail where they were and what they were doing on that dread day. It is an indelible mark on my memory. We lost our innocence as a nation that day, and we who witnessed that nightmare will never be the same. The panoply of violent events that followed--the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., riots in Watts, California, and the opposition to the Vietnam war--set the country on a violent and tortuous path far different from the one we had expected when JFK challenged and inspired us with the admonition to "ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."

The hopes of my generation were shattered and our dreams were interrupted. We will always wonder what might have been, but life has moved on. My generation can hopefully be forgiven for having anxiety that history might repeat itself.

Now, forty-five eventful years later, the country has once again taken a new path and has chosen a bright young leader who has the capacity to lift our hearts and inspire optimism and hope. He is already being compared to Kennedy for his charismatic appeal and his challenge of service to others. It is my fervent hope that as the future plays out, President Obama and his generation--including my children and their children--will stand on the mountaintop and witness fulfillment of their dreams.

May God bless and protect America and her leaders in these difficult and challenging times.

Charlie Crow © November 22, 2008