For those who are of my generation, Friday, November 22, 1963, will always be the day the world changed. Like December 7 for my father’s generation, and September 11 for younger people, if you were alive and conscious then, you will always remember exactly where you were and what you were doing when you heard the news.
On that day I was a junior at Central Catholic High School in Lawrence, Massachusetts. I had turned fifteen less than three weeks earlier. Eleven months earlier, in the middle of my sophomore year, the family had endured a more wrenching move than usual, from rural Maine to urban Massachusetts. At the beginning of the school year I had transferred to CCHS after serving a six-months’ sentence in Lawrence High School. (Don’t worry — I will write about all of this sooner or later.)
We were in our homerooms awaiting dismissal when the principal announced over the public-address system that the President had been shot. I don’t remember exactly what our dismissal time was (I’m assuming 3:00 pm), but I do remember that the school acknowledged delaying the announcement until final assembly so as not to throw the school into pandemonium on a Friday afternoon. The shooting took place at 2:30 pm Eastern, but the announcement of Kennedy’s death didn’t occur until slightly over an hour later. All I heard at school was that he had been shot. It was only when I got home that I learned that he was dead.
The television was on all weekend, as it was in most of the homes in the country. I don’t know how continuously I watched, but I certainly didn’t watch everything. I know I missed Oswald’s murder.
Kennedy was the first President I knew anything about. I was in grade school during the Eisenhower years. I knew Eisenhower’s name and saw his picture everywhere. I think I was aware of a few things about him — he was a golfer, he’d been a general, he had a heart attack while in office — but my family didn’t discuss politics or world affairs, and the workings of the Federal government were remote and didn’t touch us.
In 1960, though, as I moved from seventh grade into eighth grade in Newport, Maine, even I couldn’t help but start to pay attention. Kennedy’s youth, charm, and galvanism (not to mention his Catholicism) woke the country up, and suddenly, it seemed, everyone was either passionately for him or passionately against him. The election even stirred up our family a bit. I don’t remember this, to be honest, but it seems that my brother Mark, already an activist at the age of eight, put up Kennedy signs around town, which caused some consternation in my father’s church. Nixon, of course, won both Penobscot County and Maine as a whole.
I don’t remember Election Day, but I remember Inauguration Day, January 20, 1961, pretty well. Our eighth-grade class watched the inauguration on TV in our classroom — the only use of TV that I can remember in my official schooling. We saw Kennedy give his “ask not what your country can do for you” speech, and we saw Robert Frost recite his poem “The Gift Outright”.
To return to 11/23/1963 — it’s a commonplace to say that the whole country shifted on that day, as if an earthquake had occurred. Nobody knew what was going to happen next (except that we were getting Lyndon Johnson as our next President). What we did get, of course, was the rest of the sixties: Vietnam, flower power, the ’68 Chicago Democratic convention, Nixon, the draft …
Kennedy’s assassination may not have caused any of this, but it’s certainly convenient to regard it as an inflection point on the timeline.
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