Saturday, November 22, 2003
Forty years ago, the day dawned like any other, with people going about their business, unaware that by midday the youngest man ever elected president of the United States would be dead, shot in the head.
John F. Kennedy died 1,036 days into his presidency, a presidency that had been more successful at projecting an image than at changing the world. But image can be important.
Kennedy was young, rich and handsome; his wife was beautiful and aristocratic. The White House was dubbed Camelot.
But money, intelligence, education and charm were no guarantee against making mistakes in a job as challenging as that of president of the United States. Already the young president had seen an attempted invasion of Cuba go terribly wrong, and he began sending tens of thousands of American troops to Vietnam (a nation's whose president was murdered in a coup in early November 1963).
Inspirational force
But he had also inspired the nation from the very day of his inauguration, telling Americans that they should not ask what their country could do for them, but what they could do for their country.
He had faced down the Soviet Union over its attempt to fortify Cuba with nuclear missiles, he had championed the issue of civil rights for black Americans and he had vowed that an American, not a Russian, would be the first man to walk on the moon.
He had set an extraordinary agenda. But there had been nothing extraordinary about the third November of Kennedy's presidency. Looking at the newspapers for the first three weeks of the month, the only striking thing was how ordinary those days were.
The president went to Arlington Cemetery on Veterans Day. He took his son, John F. Kennedy Jr., who would turn three on Nov. 25, with him to the wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknowns. An Associated Press wirephoto showed the little boy, in a sweater and short pants, captivated by the flags flapping in the breeze that day.
No one could imagine that the boy would be captured in a much more famous photo on his birthday just two weeks later, saluting the caisson that carried his father's body toward that same cemetery.
Unfinished work
In the 40 years since, Camelot has lost a lot of its luster. The task of pushing through the Civil Rights Act fell to the new president, Lyndon B. Johnson. It fell to the man Kennedy defeated in 1960, Richard Nixon, to extricate the United States from Vietnam.
History has yet to write the final chapter of the Kennedy presidency. But anyone who got up on the morning of Nov. 22, 1963, and headed off to another day at work or school knows that history was changed that day.
Only old-timers remembered what it was like in 1901 when President William McKinley was assassinated. That such a thing would happen in 1963, to the first president born in the 20th century, was unthinkable. That within years a brother of the slain president and the nation's pre-eminent civil rights advocate would also be assassinated was beyond comprehension.
A president was killed in Dallas on this date four decades ago, but anyone who remembers can attest that a piece of the nation died.