Remembering the Day

We had just taken out our science notes in my 8th grade class when there was a knock on the door. A student from a lower grade walked in with a note for the nun. This happened all the time. But when the nun opened the note, her face turned white. I remember her saying, “Boys and girls this is terrible. The president has been shot. Put your notes away.” The principal came over the intercom, and asked all of us to stand and pray. As we stood, Jimmy Ferguson, who sat next to me said, “I bet the Cubans did it.” We didn’t know how this happened, but I had heard on the radio that morning that the president was going to Dallas. The whole school was marched over to the church next door to continue praying. We passed two women on the sidewalk with baby carriages. I didn’t know if they knew what had happened. Once in the church, a parish priest walked onto to the altar and announced the president had died. We said a prayer and were sent home.

All this comes to mind as thousands of documents about the Kennedy assassination are being released. And just like everything about the assassination, there is criticism and disagreement about why some documents are still being held back even though the federal government had 25 years, under a 1992 law, to review everything and release it all by this week. Just about everyone who was old enough to remember November 22nd, 1963 knows where they were when they heard the news, and we all have our own opinions about what really happened. Most people think there was a conspiracy that we still haven’t been told the truth about. But all this was still to come as I walked home alone from school that day. When I got home my mother was sitting in front of the television and there was a photograph of Kennedy on the screen with 1917-1963 under it. I could tell my mother had been crying.

It was the beginning of four of the most traumatic days in American history. The TV seemed to be on non-stop. My father worked for ABC News. He didn’t come home for four days. On Sunday morning, I was playing street hockey with my friends, when one my friend’s older brother came out of the house and said, “They shot Oswald.” I went home and saw the replay of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald in the Dallas police station. The NFL made the terrible decision of playing games that Sunday which I felt a little guilty watching. That Monday was the funeral. We put the full page picture of Kennedy from the newspaper in our front window.

The great CBS News correspondent Bob Schieffer, who worked for a Dallas newspaper the day of the assassination, has said America lost its innocence that day. Everything changed. As a 12 year old entering the critical teenage years, I felt I didn’t know any better. The Vietnam War, civil rights, more assassinations, cities burning, the music, the clothes, the drugs all became part of everyday life. I graduated from high school three days after Robert Kennedy was killed, and two months after Martin Luther King was murdered. America was on fire. It all started that sunny day in November.

Having spent my career in the news business, and being a student of politics and history, I’ve read many books about the assassination, the Warren Commission, the Kennedy brothers, the FBI and CIA. There is no end to theories and the sinister forces that were at work at the time that color our understanding of one of the most significant days in our history. It’s been over 50 years since the assassination that changed our view of government and ourselves. It forshadowed all of what was to come.  It makes me think of that boy who came into my classroom with that note. His name was Robert Kennedy.