It was an ordinary autumn Friday 60 years ago. I was a 16-year-old student in high school history class when history came to life. The school’s assistant principal burst through the classroom door, red-faced, frightened and angry. “President Kennedy has just been shot in Dallas,” he shouted. It was Nov. 22, 1963, and we students who had been learning about past history were experiencing history as it happened.
Within minutes word came over the school intercom—and over radios and televisions across America—that the president had died. It was appropriate that my classmates and I heard the announcement in history class, but at the time I recalled words of poetry. In literature class we had studied Walt Whitman’s poem “O Captain! My Captain!” that he wrote in the aftermath of the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. The words of that 19th century poem leapt back to life in the 20th century. On black and white television and on transistor radios, millions of Americans heard the somber and sonorous voices of network news reporters reading Whitman’s poem to a shocked nation.
President Kennedy and his vivacious wife Jackie were cheered by thousands during their motorcade through Dallas. Large and happy crowds thronged the streets and sidewalks, surging forward to get a glimpse of the president and first lady. The scene was reminiscent of Whitman’s line, “For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning.” Then history changed in one horrific instant on that dark day in Dallas 60 years ago.
Television news is said to have come of age with its coverage of the Kennedy assassination, and newspapers worked overtime to bring readers in-depth coverage of the awful event. The New York Times ran a 17-word banner headline summarizing the murder in Texas and Lyndon Johnson’s ascendancy to the presidency aboard Air Force One: “Kennedy Is Killed By Sniper As He Rides In Car In Dallas; Johnson Sworn In On Plane.” Here in Georgia, The Atlanta Constitution’s headline was more succinct. As I read the front-page headline on the morning paper, the few words of the headline crackled like gunshots: “Kennedy Assassinated; Johnson Takes Oath.”
Also on page one of The Atlanta Constitution the morning after the Kennedy killing was a column titled “Before We Begin to Mourn” by the newspaper’s crusading editor Ralph McGill. Celebrated as “the conscience of the South” for his writings against Jim Crow segregation in the region, McGill was also vilified by the forces of hatred and regression in darkest Dixie, and his words from 1963 still apply today: “Before we begin to mourn,” wrote McGill, “we would do well to understand that hate can kill a president, and if unchecked on behalf of morality, decency and human dignity, it can kill a nation, or so weaken it that it will die.”
Kennedy was assassinated just days before Thanksgiving in 1963, and the holiday was muted because of the murder. Millions of Americans viewed constant TV coverage of the event, and newspapers printed updated editions during the weekend after the crime. A front page editorial printed by the Athens Banner-Herald on the day of Kennedy’s funeral was headlined “Kennedy Achieved Much, Leaves Great Challenge.” The editorial said, “Although we often disagreed with Mr. Kennedy about domestic policies, we always admired him as a man of purpose, determination and dedication. He was a pragmatist who never lost his idealism.”
Today, pragmatism is lacking and idealism is mocked in an America of sordid, surly reactionary politics and a mad march toward authoritarianism. Millions are willing to trade the promise of democracy for the blandishments of a demagogue. In 1963 America had its problems with a Cold War arms race, racial injustice and economic hardship, but there was a sense that the young President Kennedy could, in his words, “get this country moving again,” and that the citizenry would help. America lost its innocence in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, and for those old enough to remember that day, the words of poet Whitman echo still down the long hallways of history: “Here Captain! Dear father!/ This arm beneath your head;/ It is some dream that on the deck/ You’ve fallen cold and dead.”
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