What We Really Lost 50 Years Ago
Everyone that knows me well knows the effect Friday November 22, 1963 had on me. It was the event when this 5 �½ year old boy sat and cried with his mother and grandfather watching the coverage of the assassination of the President without perhaps fully understanding the enormity of the event, yet knowing the most tragic thing had happened in my young life.
Over the years, my family fed my obsession by buying me every new book that came out on the assassination and the Kennedy’s in general. As a 16 year old I had the guts to pick up the phone and call Dr. Cyril Wecht who put me in contact with researcher Robert Groden from whom I obtained a bootleg copy of the Zupruder Film (how many 16 year olds would consider that his prized possession), I became a telephone friend with Penn Jones Jr., (a former reporter who wrote the “Forgive My Grief” series of books) an old man who always talked as long as I wanted to about the assassination) and in 1979 at 21 year old, interrupted my 1st real “family vacation” with my wife in Louisiana to fly to Dallas and visit Dealey Plaza for a few days.
Over the years, while my opinion of what happened that day in Dallas has changed (as well as my opinion of JFK as president and as a man has evolved), what hasn’t changed is my opinion that that cool day in November was the beginning of all the craziness in this country. It was the end of the real 50’s, Ike’s America and Hoola Hoops, Sock Hops and innocent teen idols were gone forever. The optimism and hope for the future that people in America felt vanished the second that 6.5 mm bullet crushed JFK’s skull.
What followed the events in Dallas was a nation that nearly tore itself apart for the rest of the decade, the Vietnam War, the racial unrest, the drug epidemic, rioting on college campuses all culminating in 1968, (the most traumatic year in America’s history) which saw the capture of the USS Pueblo, the Tet Offensive, the My Lai massacre, the assassinations of both the President’s brother & Martin Luther King (and the burning of major US cities in the days following), the Riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and the election of Richard Nixon.
But for all the spin, had Kennedy lived, I don’t subscribe to the theory that the 60’s and 70’s would have been all that much different than they actually were. Kennedy failed to get most of his agenda passed into law (although Johnson managed to get quite a bit of JFK’s agenda passed as a tribute to the fallen king). Quite frankly, his 1,000 days in office were without many notable accomplishments.
While it can be argued that Kennedy was more style than substance, the new frontier was indeed the vision of a different world, a world where a nation of bright young Americans would lead in areas of space, science, education, and we would “do the other things – not because they were easy, but because they were hard.” – It was a time when young engineers didn’t know that it was impossible to go to the moon.
What we really lost on November 22, 1963 was our youth. We quit being dreamers, a nation of hope with a youthful inquisitiveness to dream of great things in the future. We became a nation that so easily accepted the status-quo.
This was best summed up by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan who, just after the assassination, was told by a friend Mary McGrory, “We will never laugh again.”
“Oh, Mary,” Moynihan replied. “We’ll laugh again. It’s just that we will never be young again.”
