Today is Thanksgiving and it's also the 55th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. Where were you when JFK died in Dallas on Friday, November 22, 1963? For many of you, the answer will be I wasn't even born or I was too young at the time to remember. Your "where were you day" is more likely to be 9/11. Alan Jackson captured the latter day in his great song, "Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning".
For the oldest of the baby boomers like me, and the even older non-boomer folks, I'll bet most will vividly recall that day in Dallas. Walter Cronkite was the main man on the news coverage in my home on our black & white television.
I was in a freshman math class at St. John's University that Friday afternoon when the word came over the PA system. The assassination is one of the only things I remember about that class. At the beginning of the semester, I had begged and pleaded myself out of a calculus course which I could not have passed if my life depended on it. For this general math course, I believe I received a D. It was not the fault of the instructor, a young woman whose name I don't recall. When we were dismissed, I walked to the bus stop to wait for the Q17A which stopped a few blocks from my home in Bayside. I was only 17 so I didn't have my driver's license yet. Quite a few people on the bus were in tears.
For me, the 1960 presidential election was the first that I was old enough to follow a little bit even though I probably didn't understand most of the issues. I do recall watching some of the Kennedy-Nixon debates, the first presidential debates ever televised. My mother was a Democrat and, as Catholics, we were rooting for Kennedy to become the first of our religion to occupy the oval office.
Less than 5 years after JFK's death, I was in a war that may not have happened had he lived. I read a book 8 years ago called "Lessons in Disaster, McGeorge Bundy and the path to war in Vietnam" by Gordon Goldstein. The most interesting thing to me was the author's conclusion that JFK would not have sent ground combat troops to Vietnam even though the joint chiefs and his advisers wanted him to as early as 1961. He continued to resist til his death. While we'll never know for sure if he would have been able to resist their pressure if he had lived, it sure would have been great if things had happened that way. Over 58,000 soldiers died in Vietnam.
What do you take out of an event like the Kennedy assassination? One thing for me was that no one's indispensable. Maybe it was ten years later, someone I knew at work was saying essentially that he would be very difficult to replace. Wait a minute, I thought. If they can replace a sitting president in a few hours, they can certainly replace you. It's a good thing to keep in mind if you're ever tempted to overestimate your own importance.
