A Brief Commentary by Niagara At Large reporter and publisher Doug Draper
Posted November 22nd, 2020 on Niagara At Large
U.S. President John F. Kennedy and wife and First Lady Jackie arrive in Dallas, Texas on November 22nd, 1963. Shortly after this photo was taken, Kennedy was murdered on the streets of that city.
You know that time is flying by (dare I say, at warp speed) and that you are approaching the fossil stage of your life when the date November 22nd comes around and hardly anyone mentions the assassination of John F. Kennedy any more.
There was a time, not so many decades ago, when it was said that virtually everyone over a certain age remembered exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news, on that fateful day of November 22nd, 1963, that then U.S. President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas, Texas.
Many heard about the assassination of the president for the first time from one of the most respected television news anchors at the time, legendary CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, who barely ever lost his professional composure, but did on this one when his voice began to shake and tears welled up in his eyes.
You can watch Cronkite announcing that news to the world by clicking on the screen immediately below –
Open up the obituary pages of your local newspaper now and you l see the growing numbers of people age 70 years and older who are passing on and taking their memories of that shocking news and it meant for those times and for times moving forward with them.
So why does any of that history matter anymore? Why is it worth even bringing it up?
Five years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, in 1968 while he was running for president on a promise to end the deadly War in Vietnam and to fight poverty and usher in racial justice, Robert Kennedy was also gunned down. Many at the time feared that his assassination spelled the end of hope.
One of the reasons may be that you can go back to that event, and to the tumultuous times of the 1960s in general and make a strong argument that the cutting down of this relatively young president, with all of the hope and energy he embodied for a brighter future, and the other assassinations of progressive civil rights and political leaders like Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, led to a slow but steady march to times the U.S. and the world are living in now with the likes of Donald Trump.
A number of books have already been written about that long, dark journey from Dealey Plaza, where those shots rang out in Dallas, Texas, to where we find ourselves now, and we can probably count on many more books of that nature to come.
Slides from what became known as the “Zapruder film,” showing the seconds when the U.S. president was struck by a fatal shot to the head.
Earlier this year, in a lengthy song that channel the kind of beat poetry that inspired him when he first came on the folk music scene in Greenwich Village, New York in the early 1960s, Bob Dylan plays out that trajectory in a piece he calls “Murder Most Foul.”
I will leave you with that Bob Dylan song, which you can hear by clicking on the screen below –
The headline on the front page of The Toronto Star the day after Kennedy was gunned down on November 22nd, 1963
One of the most iconic lines from U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address went as follows – “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”
Could you imagine a Donald Trump – out playing golf when he is not sulking like a three-year old about his election loss, while thousands of his fellow citizens continue to suffer and die from COVID-19 – ever saying something like that?
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