{"id":4324,"date":"2016-05-04T09:00:48","date_gmt":"2016-05-04T16:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/?p=4324"},"modified":"2016-05-02T11:33:15","modified_gmt":"2016-05-02T18:33:15","slug":"big-birthday-memory-9-remembering-jfk-44-years-and-2-days-after-the-kennedy-assassination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/2016\/05\/04\/big-birthday-memory-9-remembering-jfk-44-years-and-2-days-after-the-kennedy-assassination\/","title":{"rendered":"Big Birthday Memory #9: Remembering JFK: 44 Years and 2 Days After the Kennedy Assassination"},"content":{"rendered":"

 <\/p>\n

\"On<\/a>
On the campaign trail. I would have given anything to be that kid.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

NOTE: As I approach my 70th birthday, I\u2019ll reprise a milestone post here each day until the end of May. Today \u2013 from\u00a0November 24, 2007.<\/em><\/p>\n

Thanksgiving Day was the 44th anniversary of the assassination of John Kennedy.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t want that to be my holiday post<\/a>, though, so I\u2019m writing about it today.**\u00a0 I was a senior in high school when our vice-principal, Mr. Hall, a huge scary guy (and football coach) came onto the intercom and announced, his voice breaking, that President Kennedy had been shot, and had died.\u00a0 I remember standing up and just walking out of my creative writing class.\u00a0 No one stopped me \u2013 or any of the rest of us.\u00a0 We wandered the halls in tears, then went home, riding the school bus in tears.\u00a0 I remember the next morning, taking the car out and just driving around \u2014 running in to my friend Jack Cronin on his drugstore delivery route \u2013 and standing on McClellan Drive in his arms as we both wept.\u00a0 I remember, Jewish girl that I was, going to Mass at St. Elizabeth\u2019s Church that Sunday just to be with the people of his faith.\u00a0 I cried for four days.<\/p>\n

Years later, working on the TODAY SHOW 20th anniversary of the funeral, I remember all of it rushing back as we cut tape and realized as adults what a gift Jacqueline Kennedy had given the nation through the dignity and completeness of the funeral.\u00a0 I know that many younger people find the Kennedys a little bit of a joke, thanks partly to the Simpsons, but it\u2019s not possible to describe\u00a0the grief and trauma of those days.\u00a0 Or the gratitude we all felt for his presence \u2014 and the profound nature of the loss.<\/p>\n

Though only\u00a013, I had the great good fortune to attend the Kennedy Inauguration, traveling all night on the train with my mom to sit in the stands near the Treasure Building and watch the parade go by.\u00a0 We stood outside the White House at the end of the parade, in the last of the blizzard, and watched him walk into the White House for the first time as president.\u00a0 I\u2019d seen the culmination of all the volunteer hours my 13-year-old self could eke out to go “down town” and stuff envelopes \u2014 to respond to the the call to help change the world.<\/p>\n

It seems so pathetic now; the loss not only of JFK but of his brother, so beloved by my husband that he\u2019s never been the same since 1968, the loss of Dr. King and Malcolm X, the trauma of Vietnam and all that followed, later of the shooting of John Lennon, even.\u00a0 It seemed that all we\u2019d dreamed about and hoped for \u2013 worked for \u2013 was gone.\u00a0 How could we have been so romantic \u2013 so sure that we could bring change?\u00a0 Believed it again in 1967 and 68 as we worked and marched against the war<\/a>, for Eugene McCarthy or Bobby Kennedy, for civil rights and for peace, for better education and environmental policies, for rights for women, gay Americans and so much more.\u00a0 Most of us haven\u2019t stopped but the American media obsession with America\u2019s loss of innocence emerges from the pain of those weeks.<\/p>\n

Now, to me, even the idea of innocence seems a bit \u2014 well \u2014 innocent.\u00a0 In our case, innocence came largely from a combination of lack of experience and of knowledge.\u00a0 We didn\u2019t know that we stood for the take over of Central American countries and the support of Franco and Salazar as well as the Marshall Plan and remarkable courage and commitment of World War II.\u00a0 We were too close to the WWII generation to have the historic separation that\u2019s possible today.\u00a0 So was much of the rest of the world: in Europe, South America, Africa \u2014 all over the world \u2014 the Kennedys had won hearts and minds.\u00a0 It\u2019s almost impossible to imagine in light of our standing in the world today.\u00a0 And that\u2019s part of the grief too.\u00a0 Even though much of the anger at the US outside Iraq is based on a warped version of political correctness, we know the experience of riding from the glory of having “liberated” Europe through the Marshall Plan and the glory of the Kennedy outreach to the rest of the world.\u00a0 Personally and publicly, John Kennedy validated all that we wanted to see in ourselves \u2013 all that we wanted ourselves, and our country, to be.\u00a0 And today, despite all the revelations of the years since, 44 years and two days later, that\u2019s still true.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    NOTE: As I approach my 70th birthday, I\u2019ll reprise a milestone post here each day until the end of May. Today \u2013 from\u00a0November 24, 2007. Thanksgiving Day was the 44th anniversary of the assassination of John Kennedy.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t want that to be my holiday post, though, so I\u2019m writing about it today.**\u00a0 … Continue reading Big Birthday Memory #9: Remembering JFK: 44 Years and 2 Days After the Kennedy Assassination<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,3799,3800,3,4,3798,3801,27,9],"tags":[1933,3413,384,286,107,469,1935,1934,289,1467,280],"class_list":["post-4324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2","category-3799","category-3800","category-aging","category-baby-boom","category-big-birthday","category-big-birthday-70-1946-2016","category-current-affairs","category-politics","tag-1933","tag-3413","tag-anti-war","tag-assassination","tag-baby-boom-2","tag-civil-rights","tag-foreign-policy","tag-idealism","tag-inauguration","tag-jfk","tag-john-kennedy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4gBq8-17K","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4324"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4324\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4341,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4324\/revisions\/4341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}