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In reply to the discussion: John Fitzgerald Kennedy 11-22-1963 Where Were You? [View all]VOX
(22,976 posts)Another bulletin was rushed in on foot by some hapless assistant; the French teacher read allowed, The president is dead. Her face turned ashen, and she had to sit down. Quite a mixed reaction by the shocked students: weeping, some nervous laughter, quickly hushed. Most of us just kept looking at one another, with mouths agape, trying vainly to make sense out of the insane news wed just heard. Nothing in our lives had prepared us for something so beyond the boundaries of decency and the highly regarded stature of JFK...you mean JFK is DEAD? Yes, *snaps fingers* just like that.
The man who stood up to Kruschev, who used diplomacy and strategy like no one else, who was youthful and rode (while he contributed to) the ascending trajectory of the post-WWII United States was now gone. Unbelievable. Alive on Friday morning, memorialized the following Monday.
I mark this staggering tragedy as the event that turned the country away from what it was briefly, and what it could have been for decades to come. Instead, the assassination ignited a series of events, each being a further step away from the liberal democracy that was in our grasp,
We were close. So close.