Good Morning.
A lot of material related to the Kennedy assassination was released last week with some files withheld until they get cleared for public viewing. The main thing we learned was that Lee Harvey Oswald was known to the FBI and CIA as a dissident and not enough was done to keep track of his activities. I doubt that we'll ever find out what really happened, and it is difficult not to have more answers.
I was a junior in college when Kennedy was murdered. I was in a modern philosophy class when the academic dean knocked at the door and told us that the president had been shot but was still alive. Only a few minutes later, in a crowded TV room, we learned that he had died from Walter Cronkite who took off his glasses and almost broke down as he passed along the news.
The entire student body was sent home because nobody knew who was responsible for the killing or if the country was about to be attacked by Russia, then the Soviet Union. I spent the next several days glued to the television with my parents. We watched as the beautiful Jacqueline in her blood-stained suit stood next to Lyndon Johnson when he was sworn in on Air Force One. We watched the funeral procession as the president's brothers in formal attire and the veiled widow in black walked behind the flag-draped casket and her three-year-old son saluted it. We heard the relentless cadence of the drums, the clatter of the wheels on the caisson, and the slow clip-clop of the horses, including a riderless one; they were the only sounds as the cortege passed by a stunned, silent throng. All of the news coverage was in black and white, whether it was broadcast on the networks, only three then, or printed beneath three-inch headlines. I recently came across the edition I saved and it is brittle and slightly yellow now, but I remember the images in details that haven't faded with time.
After the extended Thanksgiving break, the college reopened and the tables in the dining room were used by students to help Mrs. Kennedy respond to the millions of letters she received from a country in mourning. Almost everyone volunteered for the effort, but there was some vetting of penmanship before a writer was put to work. Gradually we tried to resume a semblance of normal campus living, but there was a sadness that never left, even for a minute. We were very different women after November 22, 1963.
In 1968, John F. Kennedy's brother, Bobby, was gunned down in Los Angeles, four months after Martin Luther King was killed in Memphis. Lyndon Johnson decided not to run for office again, Hubert Humphrey was nominated as his replacement at a convention marked by violence in the streets, and Richard Nixon was elected but eventually had to resign in ignominy. Most of us who lived through that time still wonder what would have happened if Kennedy, a flawed but inspired man, hadn't been assassinated. Vietnam loomed on the horizon, the cold war threatened to become hot at any moment, organized crime was rampant, and the Klan was out in force to stop the civil rights movement, but we called JFK's time in office Camelot and for good reason. We had an idyll and an idol and we lost them.
Best regards,
Elisabeth
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