It will be an anniversary draped in black crêpe and ribboned with old
newsreels, a day of somber re-appraisals by the usual bores and lurid
speculations by the usual loons. But beneath the cacophony, not all of
it generated by Chris Matthews’s yap, will rest the severed feeling of
irretrievable, inexplicable loss. Fifty years ago, on November 22, 1963,
President John F. Kennedy was assassinated riding in a motorcade
cruising through Dallas’s Dealey Plaza, the top of his head torn off by a
rifle shot fired from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book
Depository, his brain matter spilling into the lap of First Lady
Jacqueline Kennedy, whose pink suit and pillbox hat colorize our
memories of a noir nightmare unfolding under a noonday sun. Like the
bombing of Pearl Harbor, in 1941, and the destruction of the Twin
Towers, in 2001, J.F.K.’s assassination was one of those unifying,
defining moments when everyone alive remembers where they were when the
news struck, shattering the glass wall separating before and after. I
was in the sixth grade, a member of the safety patrol, with a white sash
and official-looking badge: I remember the light at the end of the
school hallway reflecting off the floor as word went round and the
weight in the air the days after. For kids my age, it was like losing a
father, a father who had all of our motley fates in his hands. (During
the Cuban missile crisis, of 1962, a lot of us grade-schoolers thought
we might be goners, our Twilight Zone atomic nightmares about to come true.)
In
those big-three-network days (ABC, CBS, NBC), television was broadcast
mostly in black and white, and the images of the coverage that
followed—the riderless horse, John-John’s salute as his father’s casket
went by, Jacqueline Kennedy’s mourning veil (which Andy Warhol would
multiply into a silkscreen montage, deifying her as a widow
Madonna)—bled into our consciousness like irremovable ink. A deluge of
memoirs, biographies, photo albums, magazine special editions, political
reconsiderations, pulpy reconstructions (Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Kennedy),
tales of Camelot romance, and pantie-sniffing scandal trawls have
followed ever since, a perpetual cottage industry of Kennedyiana,
building to November’s golden-anniversary publishing crescendo.
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