Shots in Dealey Plaza began anguish of the 60’s

By Rabbi Ben Kamin

Rabbi Ben Kamin
Rabbi Ben Kamin

OCEANSIDE, California — Fifty-two years ago, Nov. 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy, 46, was slain while riding in a motorcade in Dealey Plaza, Dallas.

Unlike today’s ongoing televised carnage, this was a singular, searing, shockingly unexpected event.  Bad enough on its own, it lay the bloody groundwork for the terrifying world we endure today across cable and cyber media that were unknown then.

On 11/22/63, the world stopped, the kinetic, violent, transformational 1960s truly sprung, at 12:30 PM CST, when the shots were fired from the Texas School Book Depository Building.   While the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster of Jan. 1986 came to be the defining disaster of the X generation, and 9/11 is the very gestalt of global tragedy, the public execution of the young president remains the crime of the 20th century.

Where you were when you heard about it?  If you were born any time after 1955 or so, you remember it viscerally.

In those days, journalists weren’t “embedded” with soldiers, and only a cataclysmic event like the assassination of a president was “Breaking News.”  For many of us, the brooding “BULLETIN” that came across the screen was a grim bellwether, not the routine, inflated declaration of cable news that is gratuitously repeated every few minutes.

Television news, essentially black-and-white, thickly wired, carried forward with bright lights and sweating, nervous-lipped men, trans-morphed from puberty to fullness: The dreadful dispatches were piped in by only the three networks, spoken by hushed, urgent-sounding men, about confusion and blood and crushed flowers and a young widow in Texas. There wasn’t regular programming of any kind on radio or television till Tuesday, November 26, the day after the young president was laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery.

The ‘60s, which actually began in Dallas, sprouted birth control pills, the Beatles, more assassinations, endless war  and summer riots, Woodstock, and the first landing on the moon.

A weak-chinned, eerie assassin named Lee Harvey Oswald, ex-Marine, alleged commie, Russian expatriate, came through the cathode ray of the television set with the pronged antennae and click-click channel setter.   We had real demons to fear and young men to bury, starting with the chestnut-haired president and hemorrhaging into thousands and thousands of peach-fuzzed soldiers who began to die for us in the jungles and rice-paddies and fires of Vietnam.

Broadcast live on my luckless living room Zenith, a stocky, TV-gangster look-a-like named Jack Ruby thrust himself out of the grainy crowd in the Dallas police garage and fired a pistol into the sweater of Lee Harvey Oswald that very Sunday afternoon, November 24, 1963. Suddenly, the government and policemen were no longer sacrosanct as we assumed they were and nothing seemed as safe as we took for granted it would be. There was now “A Threat” out there.   Violent death was abruptly an unwelcome companion in our thoughts. There was a new vulnerability; some thought of fleeing to Canada to avoid the inexplicable war in Indochina.

Race riots scorched everything the next several summers from Newark to Watts. Japanese cars and lavish bar mitzvah parties and Afros and bell-bottoms and condoms came through like the tide and my sixth-grade crushes went on to their lives and our innocent little flirtations were as distant and ethereal as the morning stars disappearing into the blazing light of a post-modernity that everyone feted but none of us really, truly welcomed.

When the youngest (and oldest) Kennedy brother, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, died in 2009 at the age of 77, it truly sealed the end of an era.  None of his three brothers, Joe, John, or Robert, died peacefully or at a ripe age.  The 2010 passing of JFK alter ego Ted Sorenson seemed to truly draw the curtain on everything but our memory.

President Kennedy, we still miss you—and how we felt before everything was scattered, like the frightened birds fleeing the ricocheting bullets of Dealey Plaza, 11/22/63.

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Rabbi Kamin is an author and freelance writer.  He may be contacted via ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com.  Any comments in the space below should include the writer’s full name and city and state of residence, or city and country for non-U.S. residents.