I was in my second year of high school on that Friday, and in the afternoon, an announcement came over the PA system from the principal. The news out of Dallas was still confused and incomplete, so all he had to say was that there were "reports that the President has been injured," and that classes would be cancelled for the rest of the day. As it turned out they would be cancelled till the following Tuesday.
Ordinarily, any cancellation of classes would have met with a rousing cheer from everyone, but this was different. Everyone seemed to be wandering around in a daze, and the only sounds in the halls were the low whisperings of speculation about what was really going on. Here and there, a few students seemed aware that JFK had been killed (I never found out what their sources were), but the rest of us were in denial, and were only willing to wonder.
We all left the building in a silent crowd. I lived a couple of miles from school, and walked home alone, a bit concerned but not yet willing to accept what the truth might turn out to be.
When I got home, I found my parents sitting silently in front of the TV set where Walter Cronkite was droning on in low, concerned tones. And at that point, I instantly knew that the worst was true.
We all sat there stunned, in dead silence, fixated on the TV set, not moving or speaking until past five o'clock, when we got up to have a quiet dinner of cold leftovers.
It may be hard for many to understand this today, but JFK was an extremely popular president, and assassinations were something that simply didn't happen in modern America. Garfield and McKinley were just names in our History books to us, and the only presidents who were ever murdered in our day were in banana republics. We had no frame of reference for an aberration of this magitude.
JFK's murder -- reinforced by the two that followed -- shook American consciousness to its center. I still believe that those three killings set the stage for the Sixties upheaval that followed. Today, I have little doubt that the Deep State was involved in all of them. And that they had a heavy hand in the corrupt and incompetent Johnson administration that followed.
There have been several historical events in this century to which we can point and say with some assurance "There -- this is the point at which things began to go off the rails." WWI was one. WWII was another. There may arguably have been others. But the one I remember most personally was the November afternoon when President Kennedy died.
Thank you for taking the time to write this, as someone who was born in 1990 to parents who were 5 or less at the time of the JFK assassination, this really gives a perspective I have not heard. I had a similar experience with 911 as I was in 5th grade at the time, but they told us over the PA and we did not go home early nor have subsequent days off, but the shock and solemness at home was the same.
I haven't forgotten. I never will.
I was in my second year of high school on that Friday, and in the afternoon, an announcement came over the PA system from the principal. The news out of Dallas was still confused and incomplete, so all he had to say was that there were "reports that the President has been injured," and that classes would be cancelled for the rest of the day. As it turned out they would be cancelled till the following Tuesday.
Ordinarily, any cancellation of classes would have met with a rousing cheer from everyone, but this was different. Everyone seemed to be wandering around in a daze, and the only sounds in the halls were the low whisperings of speculation about what was really going on. Here and there, a few students seemed aware that JFK had been killed (I never found out what their sources were), but the rest of us were in denial, and were only willing to wonder.
We all left the building in a silent crowd. I lived a couple of miles from school, and walked home alone, a bit concerned but not yet willing to accept what the truth might turn out to be.
When I got home, I found my parents sitting silently in front of the TV set where Walter Cronkite was droning on in low, concerned tones. And at that point, I instantly knew that the worst was true.
We all sat there stunned, in dead silence, fixated on the TV set, not moving or speaking until past five o'clock, when we got up to have a quiet dinner of cold leftovers.
It may be hard for many to understand this today, but JFK was an extremely popular president, and assassinations were something that simply didn't happen in modern America. Garfield and McKinley were just names in our History books to us, and the only presidents who were ever murdered in our day were in banana republics. We had no frame of reference for an aberration of this magitude.
JFK's murder -- reinforced by the two that followed -- shook American consciousness to its center. I still believe that those three killings set the stage for the Sixties upheaval that followed. Today, I have little doubt that the Deep State was involved in all of them. And that they had a heavy hand in the corrupt and incompetent Johnson administration that followed.
There have been several historical events in this century to which we can point and say with some assurance "There -- this is the point at which things began to go off the rails." WWI was one. WWII was another. There may arguably have been others. But the one I remember most personally was the November afternoon when President Kennedy died.
Thank you for taking the time to write this, as someone who was born in 1990 to parents who were 5 or less at the time of the JFK assassination, this really gives a perspective I have not heard. I had a similar experience with 911 as I was in 5th grade at the time, but they told us over the PA and we did not go home early nor have subsequent days off, but the shock and solemness at home was the same.