Just two hours ago, at 11:21 CST, Presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was shot by Jack Ruby, a local nightclub owner. Oswald was being transferred from the Dallas police department, where he had been charged for the murder of the President and a local law enforcement officer, to a nearby county jail when the attack occurred.
Ruby was immediately subdued and arrested. Oswald died just a few minutes ago.
It is hard to imagine the drama of this national crisis rising any higher. Our new UK correspondent, Jessica Holmes, is having similar trouble…]
By Jessica Holmes
I'm having a lot of difficulty putting my thoughts into words today. I'm not even an American, but the recent news knocked the wind out of me. It'd be silly to say, what with the world being the way it is, that I could never have imagined something like this. However, there's a difference between being able to imagine a horrible thing happening and actually believing that it may. We take normality for granted, that we go to sleep in a world unchanged from the world we woke up in.
Sadly, that's not how the world works. A horrible thing happened the other day.
I don't know what more I can say that hasn't already been said by people far more eloquent and knowledgeable than myself. I'll keep it simple: I liked President Kennedy, and to have him be gone so soon is a horrible thing. My thoughts are with his family and with the American people.
President Kennedy with UK Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in June 1963
No disrespect meant to the late President Kennedy, but this heavy reportage on his assassination is perhaps inappropriately shifting the focus here from the broader theme of mankind's future towards the political concerns of the day. I hope that we'll soon see your coverage return to it's former focus, and that you'll resist the urge to cover future political events quite so heavily – however important they may become – if doing so means that they overshadow the loftier themes of your Galactic Journey.
I guess we all hope that we can get back to science fiction and mankind's future soon, but sometimes something so terrible happens that it usurps all other concerns for a while.
As for Lee Harvey Oswald, I suspect absolutely no one feels sorry about what happened to him. Though with the alleged shooter dead, it will be much more difficult to uncover what really happened and whether Oswald was acting alone or whether he had backing and by whom. I fear we may still be debating about this in fifty years.
I've been having difficulty getting myself to focus on much of anything since the news broke. I'm old enough to remember Harding's passing and almost all of us undoubtedly remember when FDR died, but this is different. Those were matters of old age and illness. This is something different.
To Curt, I would point out that we strive toward grows out of the soil of the events of the now. Had Nixon won, he never would have set the lofty goal of putting a man on the moon before the decade is out. I'm sure he would have continued Eisenhower's space program, and advances by the Soviets would have spurred us to keep pace, but it would always have been a game of catch-up without real ambition. Will Johnson keep his eyes on the moon or will he get distracted by events at home and in South-east Asia? Only time will tell and those choices will alter our vector into the future.
President Kennedy inspired a lot of younger people to become interested in politics and world affairs. Many of them still aren't even old enough to vote. Let's hope this doesn't disillusion them. LBJ is a wily old coot and knows where all the bodies are buried in Washington, but I don't see him being terribly inspirational, especially not for the younger set. Maybe Bobby will pick up the mantle.
This latest development has left me emotionally drained. Vigilantism is not justice, no matter how much we might revile the victim of it.
Allow me assure Mister Phillips that, despite all that has happened, I will soon provide my usual review for our host, although it may seem as if I am just going through the motions, with some of my passion for the genre lost in these tragic times.