JFK Assassination Fifty Years Ago Today

Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of a horrendous national event: the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in the middle of a publicly intense motorcade running through downtown Dallas, Texas.   Since then, all kinds of conspiracy theories have abounded concerning who shot Kennedy and why...enriching quite a few of their promoters in the process.  As for me, I'm inclined to believe that the official suspect, Lee Harvey Oswald, acted alone without anyone pulling the strings behind the scenes.  As for you, believe whatever you want to believe...bet you can't prove it! 

I was in the second grade in Hollywood, Florida on that fateful afternoon, just following lunch, when a kid from the adjacent classroom rushed in to inform us that President Kennedy had been shot...either in the back or the eye, he wasn't sure.  From that moment on, everything changed as no one could talk or think about anything else.  When I got home, the television was on CBS/Channel 4/WTVJ, which was providing continuous coverage of the crisis.  Both of my parents were Kennedy supporters although neither voted in order to avoid jury duty (nowadays this is a moot point with having a driver's license being the prerequisite for summoning).  It was pretty heavy and somber as I remembered it.  And of course, by the time I had gotten home from school, word had gone out that Kennedy was dead. 

I was only seven when JFK was killed.  I didn't know anything about politics, although I remember being familiar with the name of Kennedy as the President when the news came down that sorry Friday afternoon in 1963.  I became aware very quickly who Lyndon Baines Johnson was as Kennedy's successor...and even more so the following year when he would preempt regular televised programming by sounding war alarms about Vietnam and how we needed to respond...a double tragedy.  Some speculate that John Kennedy would have kept us out of Vietnam...I tend to think that he would have kept a covert US presence there without going overboard with the troop commitment and subsequent mass carnage.  And since a great part of the tide of changing American history turned on that war, it's easy to see how this assassination was so pivotal...as Stephen King speculated so provocatively in his recent novel 11/22/63...