One Friday afternoon in late November during our senior year at De La Salle High School in Minneapolis, we were sitting in Mr. Miller’s religion class when suddenly there was an unusual amount of activity out in the hall and students started whispering to each other.  Something was up.  Then Brother Mark, our principal, came over the PA system with the news that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas.  We prayed and sat quietly awaiting further news.  Soon Mr. Roach came in and whispered something to Mr. Miller.  I heard only two words clearly: “He’s dead.”  No death up to that point in my life had touched me so deeply and my heart sank.  The shock was unbelievable.  This was quickly followed by fear.  What did this mean?  Would the Soviets take advantage of this moment of confusion to launch an attack?  Before long, Brother Mark’s voice came over the speaker again to tell us that classes were dismissed for the rest of the day and that we should listen to the radio over the weekend to find out when they would resume.  Everyone says they remember exactly where they were when they heard the terrible news on November 22, 1963, and I can truly say that the memory is seared into my mind for life.  I still think about it when I drive by the old school and look at the windows of the classroom where I heard the words “He’s dead.”

The long weekend that followed was a tumult of all the emotions of the early stages of dealing with a terrible loss: denial, anger, fear, and uncertainty.  The individual and communal grieving process was rudely disrupted by two additional murders as well.  It began with the bus ride home on Friday afternoon, a glum silence replacing the usual chattering and horseplay.  At home we were unable to leave the TV for long.  Our need for more information was insatiable even though no new facts could restore our murdered hero or lighten the overwhelming burden of our grief.  The great unanswered question was why, but that could not be answered until we knew who.  The authorities answered that for us quickly as we learned that less than two hours after JFK’s death an arrest had been made, but only after a Dallas police officer had been gunned down by the same suspect.  Oswald’s name meant nothing, of course, and he was certainly providing no answers. Then there was the photograph of LBJ taking the oath of office on Air Force One with Jacqueline by his side still wearing her blood-stained suit, but this was not the same Jackie we had known for the last three years, so self-assured, beautiful, intelligent, and yet somehow also so warm and approachable.  Instead we saw a woman slumped forward in abject sorrow, her beautiful face a pathetic frozen mask not so much of grief as of utter shock and incomprehension.  We looked into her hollow eyes hoping for some sort of reassurance but all we saw was a reflection of our own despair.  By early Friday evening, Air Force One, bearing JFK’s body, Jackie, and our new president, was back in DC.

On Saturday, the president’s coffin lay in state in the East Room of the White House.  All the while, the newscasts kept breaking in with updates on Oswald’s background, his repeated questioning by various authorities, and eventually his being charged with the two murders.  On Sunday, the coffin was drawn to the Capitol on a horse-drawn caisson where it lay in state under the great dome of the rotunda while an estimated quarter-million mourners filed by to pay their respects.  Again the nation’s futile attempt to come to terms with our loss was interrupted by a news bulletin telling us that Oswald would be seen on live TV as he was transported between jails.  Despite our hatred for this man, we could not resist the need to see him, as if that might provide some understanding of his motivation.  Then, just as he came into view in the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters, a stocky man in a dark suit and fedora stepped forward and shot him in the stomach, the first murder witnessed by millions as it happened.  I was largely unsuccessful in resisting the sin of rejoicing at this bizarre turn of events, but our attention soon turned back to the live coverage of the endless procession winding its way silently through the Capitol.

On Monday morning, the caisson again carried the president’s coffin back to the White House, and then on to St. Matthew’s Cathedral for the funeral Mass.  We thought our hearts would break as Jackie finally broke down briefly as a tenor sang “Ave Maria,” the same singer and prayer as at their wedding Mass ten years earlier.  Then the body was carried to the caisson one last time for the funeral procession through DC and across the Potomac to Arlington.  If we had any tears left, we offered them up at the sight of John-John saluting his father’s flag-draped coffin in front of St. Matthew’s.  It was his third birthday.  The solemn drama of that procession is one of my most vivid memories of those horrible four days: the beautiful riderless horse Black Jack with the empty boots backwards in the stirrups, the endless staccato beat of the drums, the mournful funeral marches played by the military band, the bagpipers, the flyover of fifty fighter jets followed by Air Force One, and finally the lighting of the eternal flame at the grave-site on the slope beneath the Custis Lee mansion at the national cemetery.

On Tuesday, classes resumed at De La Salle, businesses reopened, and we began the process of trying to move on.  I cannot say we resumed our normal routines because somehow things were not the same, even though we could not yet know how utterly they had changed.  The reason I stare at those classroom windows whenever I drive by the old school is because that is where the last vestiges of my childhood died, but hindsight also was to make clear that, in Churchill’s eloquent phrase, the hinge of fate had turned and a new chapter in our nation’s history began on that awful day.

Any murder is a horrendous crime because it robs the victim of his future, but if the victim is a great leader it robs many people of the future that might have been theirs if the deceased had the chance to attempt to live out the realization of his vision.  If the victim is the President, the assassination robs the entire nation of the future they hoped for when they cast their votes.  We felt as though something we treasured had been stolen from us.  Looking backwards, the greatest of all the unanswerable questions is whether JFK would have involved America in Vietnam to anywhere near the extent that LBJ did.  Could the great debacle have been avoided?  Could the defining event of our generation have been something other than that bloody quagmire?  It is true that under Kennedy we had about 15,000 “advisors” in Vietnam, but it was Johnson who made the fateful decision to commit American combat troops.  That was not until March, 1965, so it could only loosely be termed a continuation of what JFK had begun, and yet LBJ had retained most of Kennedy’s foreign policy advisors, “the best and the brightest” who supported this escalation.  My own gut feeling has always been that JFK had been burned too badly by following his advisors’ guidance in the Bay of Pigs affair to be drawn into a large scale land war in Asia, and that incident also demonstrated that he could admit when he had made a mistake.  My generation will always be haunted by the knowledge that we will never be able to know what was truly lost on November 22, 1963.

I believe that a major reason for the endless conspiracy theories about the assassination is that many people are simply unable to come to terms with the possibility that a single vicious act of senseless violence by a pathetic deranged nobody such as Oswald could have started a chain of events that led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese.  Our hunger for reassurance that there is some order and justice in the Universe rebels at such a proposition.  If faith waivers at the daunting task of accepting such a sickening thought, perhaps listening once again to the inspiring call to action of his magnificent inaugural address might begin to restore at least a glimmer of belief that the promise of America is too precious to allow it be tarnished for long by despair, but even half a century later I remain unable to overcome a haunting sense of bitterness and melancholy over what was stolen from all of us on that awful day in November.