As recounted in Candace Millard's "Destiny of the Republic," a newspaper reporter lamented upon the passing of a fallen president that future citizens would never know that he was a man "who read Tennyson and Longfellow at 50 with as much enthusiastic pleasure as at 20, who walked at evening with his arm around the neck of a friend in affectionate conversation and whose sweet, sunny, loving nature not even 20 years of political strife could warp."
The reporter wasn't referring to John F. Kennedy; he was referring to James Garfield, who was unable to survive an assassination attempt on his life 82 years before Kennedy was killed.
Unfortunately, the reporter was right. Most Americans do not know Garfield was a Civil War general who grew up in poverty to inevitably become an eloquent protege of Abraham Lincoln's, committed to the full emancipation of former slaves. He was killed before he was able to leave his mark in an era before radio and television could convey a sense of the man for posterity.
Political assassinations were a way of life in the half-century after Lincoln's murder. Presidents Garfield and McKinley were both shot and killed. Teddy Roosevelt was shot while campaigning for President in 1912. Europe was beset with assassinations, culminating in the murder of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand on the streets of Sarajevo in June 1914, propelling the world's powers into the World War I.
One thing I distinctly remember on that sad November afternoon in 1963 was that Alice, an older woman in her late 70s who often looked after my brother and me, said she remembered when President McKinley died.
It was just hours earlier when I learned that President Kennedy was shot in Dallas. Our teacher went out into the hall and talked with the other teachers. Our classroom of fifth-graders wondered among ourselves whether someone could survive a gunshot to the head.
Minutes passed, and then we were abruptly told the president was dead. My teacher cried. Our school was closed.
Presidents had died before and even been murdered, but never had a dashing, handsome president with a young wife and small children been shot to death in an era when he was on television in everyone's homes all the time.
I walked home in a daze that afternoon, not knowing what it meant or what would happen next. Who would become president? There was no live coverage online, no cable news, no Twitter and Facebook.
Unlike Garfield though, Kennedy would not be forgotten. As Melville Bell Grosvenor, president and editor of National Geographic at the time, wrote, "When men now boys are old, in distant time beyond the year 2000, they say, 'I remember when they brought him home, the murdered President, from Dallas.'" In those early days of black-and-white television, Kennedy was transformed into an American icon within days, with broadcasts of his past speeches and glorious moments showing his youth, his vigor and idealism.
Congress passed a bill for a Kennedy half-dollar, Cape Canaveral was renamed Cape Kennedy and New York's airport became JFK. His picture would hang in the homes of many Catholic families and others across America.
The parallels between Kennedy and Lincoln were widely circulated. Both were assassinated. Lincoln became President in 1860, presiding over the Civil War. Kennedy, elected in 1960, was president during the climax of the civil rights movement. There were even novelty pennies with Kennedy etched in facing Lincoln.
Little did we know that we were entering another period of assassinations. The murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy in 1968 stunned and traumatized the nation. Presidential candidate George Wallace was shot in 1972. Two women tried to shoot President Gerald Ford within weeks in 1975. President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II both barely survived shootings in 1981.
A 30-day national mourning period ended for President Kennedy right before Christmas. 1964 dawned. Six weeks later, four young shaggy-haired Britons would land in New York and Beatlemania would sweep the country.
Our childhood resumed for a while, before Vietnam and Selma and the shootings that escorted us into high school and adulthood.
It would take a long time before we ever got over the sorrow of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.