Tag Archives: 1963

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[November 24, 1963 cont.] Kennedy: Making sense of it all

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CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite reports that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

[You have likely gotten much of your news from one source during this crisis — the television.  Once a junior partner in the new business, TV has come full flower in its coverage of the Kennedy assassination. 

Part of it is propitious timing.  This season, news broadcasts expanded from 15 to 30 minutes.  Steps had already been undertaken to provide live coverage of events, as was demonstrated so shockingly with Jack Ruby's murder of Lee Harvey Oswald just a few hours ago. 

And so, television news has transformed from sideshow to centerpiece.  May we never have to be glued to it for such a spectacle again…]


by John Boston

I learned of the assassination in high school geometry class, after returning to school from lunch. Then I understood why one of the right-wing S.O.B.s among the students had been standing outside the school door as I came in, clasping his hands over his head in the manner of a victorious prize fighter.

Tragedy, drama, outrage, grief.  Yeah, we’re all together, we all agree, at least the reasonable ones among us.  But what next?  What does this mean?

We’ve all heard that this is the American Century, and at least since the end of World War II, the US of A has been riding high internationally, both in public prestige and power and in less obvious ways, exercising its will in more covert fashion in countries all around the world, getting its way with little meaningful challenge.

We are told that the accused assassin lived for several years in the Soviet Union, and that he is involved with something called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee—Cuba, one of the countries the United States tried to dominate, in that case with disastrous results publicly exposed.  Is the murder of our President a response to our government’s covert activity in Cuba, or in the world generally?

We do not know and we may never know.  But this terrible event is America’s first significant reminder since Pearl Harbor that it does not look down on the world from a protected height and is not immune either to the sweep of history or to its caprice.  Will our government and people take the lesson and conduct themselves circumspectly in the world, for example in Vietnam, where there seems to be developing an open-ended American commitment to prop up a government as incompetent as it is undemocratic, regardless of cost or consequences?

We will all know soon enough.

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[November 24, 1963 cont.] Oswald dead, shot by Jack Ruby

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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

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[November 24, 1963] Mourning on two continents

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[President Kennedy's body has been transported to the Capitol where it will remain in state pending his funeral tomorrow.  Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, West Germans have offered an outpouring of sorrow for their fallen fellow Berliner…]


by Cora Buhlert

Like most West Germans, news of the terrible events in Dallas reached me at home, just settling onto the sofa for an evening of TV. Like some ninety percent of West German television owners, I had my set tuned to the eight o'clock evening news tagesschau. But instead of the familiar tagesschau fanfare, the screen remained dark for a minute or two, something which has never happened before in the eleven years the program has been on the air. When the image finally returned, the visibly shaken news anchor Karl-Heinz Köpcke reported that John F. Kennedy had been shot in Dallas, Texas, and was rushed to hospital. By the end of the program, we knew that Kennedy had not survived.

John F. Kennedy was extremely popular in West Germany, not least because of his memorable visit to our country earlier this year. And so many West Germans spontaneously burst into tears. People called friends and family, rang their neighbours' doorbells and shouted the news from windows to random passers-by on the street. Theatres and cinemas interrupted their programming, dancehalls closed down (on a Friday evening, i.e. prime business time) and in less an hour, the entire country was in shock.

The shock and grief was nowhere greater than in West Berlin, where Kennedy had won the hearts of the population, when he proclaimed "Ich bin ein Berliner" earlier this year. The people of Berlin took him by his word and mourned him as one of their own.

The students of the two big West Berlin universities heard the news during a student dance at the Hilton Hotel and spontaneously took to the streets, joined by many other Berliners. Several thousand – overwhelmingly young – people marched to the Rathaus Schöneberg, West Berlin's city hall, bearing torches, flowers and placards. 

"Berlin has lost its best friend", West Berlin's mayor Willy Brandt proclaimed last night on the very spot in front of the Rathaus Schöneberg where John F. Kennedy held his now historic speech only five months ago, while the gathered mourners provisionally renamed the square in front of the city hall "John-F.-Kennedy Platz". By now, Willy Brandt has announced that the square will be named in honour of Kennedy for real on Monday. I'm sure it won't be the last John F. Kennedy street or square in West Germany.

By today, the soon to be John-F.-Kennedy Platz was drowning in flowers and thousands of mourning West Germans had signed one of the condolence books laid out around the country. In West Berlin and elsewhere, people placed candles in their windows in memory of John F. Kennedy. Reportedly, flickering candles have also spotted on the far side of the Berlin Wall.

For John F. Kennedy was not just a friend of Berlin, he was a friend of all of Germany. 




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[November 23, 1963 cont.] After a fashion

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by Gwyn Conaway

I'm hungry for answers, but more than anything, simply heartbroken. We will forever relive this day through Jackie Kennedy's watermelon pink Chanel suit. Make no mistake, our First Lady's ensemble will live forever. Rather than being the symbol of strength, compassion, and grace, as both Coco Chanel and Jackie Kennedy would have wanted, the suit has been transformed into a symbol of tragedy and death.

I am heartbroken, not because it is a beautiful piece of fashion tarnished by the fall of a great man. I am heartbroken because we will all experience today over and over in the decades to come. Fashion will lash out and redefine the watermelon pink suit as a symbol of the crumbling American Dream. Its visage will become sour, like rotten fruit, as our nation's loss fades away. More than that, I mourn for Jackie Kennedy, who will stand by as her suit is redefined in the years to come and see the ghosts of today rise anew. 




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[November 23, 1963 cont.] Give sorrow words

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by Lorelei Marcus

It was around 11:30 AM, just before lunch. The PA system crackled to life and every head turned from their desks towards the speaker. It was my 10th grade English class.

“The President has been shot!” said the tinny voice. We had just been wrapping up our unit on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, all about the death of a nation's leader, but I didn’t really have the chance to appreciate the synchronicity at the time.

My teacher wheeled in a portable TV. I looked to my left at my good friend Cecilia. She was German, and only just moved here a couple years ago. She was shaking real bad, a sharp contrast to the cold stillness I’d been shocked into. I didn’t, couldn’t believe what I was hearing. In fact I’d expected the class to erupt into a sea of whispers, but all that was there was a faint crackle and Walter Cronkite's strong voice repeating over and over.

“In Dallas Texas this morning President Kennedy was assassinated at 1:30 Eastern Time, 10:30 Western Time. Three shots were fired-”

The school couldn’t let us out early, but they might as well have. The rest of my classes were a hazy tear-filled blur, punctuated by the continuous drone of Cronkite’s voice. When I was walking home that day across the softball field, I saw the football coach, one of the toughest men I know, with a wet handkerchief blanketing his face. Even the trees seemed to be weeping as their leaves crackled in the autumn wind.

Even in the fall it doesn’t get cold in Southern California. Yet under a pile of blankets in the living room, snuggled up to my parents with a cup of cocoa, I couldn’t ease the chilling squeeze on my heart. Even writing this now it’s like a subtle blizzard is raging inside me. If the President was shot, how can we say any of us are safe?

November 22nd, 1963 will always be a day to remember. Everything’s changed, I’ve changed. We’ve found now that Lee Harvey Oswald was responsible for this… horrendous act. He’ll be put in jail for life, where he belongs.

Even so, I think I would trade a lot to have my dad come in and tell me it was all a misunderstanding. During the live coverage, Cronkite kept saying “The president is dead… but not officially.” I think he was hoping so too.

Instead, he and we were left with loss. A loss to Jackie, a loss to the nation, a loss to the world. At this point, I think the only thing left to do is grieve, quietly and together.

And try to understand. Oswald, a U.S. Marine, started an innocent flower, but the serpent was beneath it. MacBeth's motives were plain and old as humanity. But Oswald's..

Why?




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[November 23, 1963] President Kennedy returns to D.C. one last time

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[Early this morning, the body of our slain President was flown back to Washington D.C.  Now he lies in state in the East Wing of the White House, where he will remain until 24 hours have passed.  Then will come the funeral.

Where do we go from there?]


by Jason Sacks

Camelot is over. A titan no longer walks the earth.

John F. Kennedy is dead.

Will our country — will our world? — ever be the same?

President Kennedy represented the dreams of all us. Manifested in his success and the shimmering images of his family, we saw the dreams of a perfected post-war world. In watching JFK and his family, we became participants in a triumphant America reaching its full potential, spreading our secular gospel of capitalism and freedom throughout the world.

For all of us born during or after the War, Kennedy represented everything our parents fought for, everything we aspired to as a nation, and everything the world dreamed of becoming.

And now he is gone.

Will America survive?

Of course we will. Our country is more than a single man, no matter how influential or important he is.

But JFK’s savage assassination, in front of his beloved wife Jackie, our country has lost some of its innocence. We will always feel his loss. After all, when we lose a titan, we lose a lot of what makes America its greatest self.

President Johnson is a great American, a man who I’m sure will help America transcend its weaknesses and become a more perfected version of itself.

But we will never be the same again.

Goodbye, President Kennedy. Goodbye, Camelot. We will always miss you.

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[November 22, 1963 cont.] Highest indictment for Presidential assassin

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[Lee Harvey Oswald, who shot and killed President Kennedy this afternoon, has been charged with murder of a President.

In other news, Erica Frank offers her thoughts on today's events:]


by Erica Frank

My cousin has a job with a restaurant supply company. While making deliveries yesterday, a woman told him, "The president's been shot and taken to the hospital." He tried to absorb that and finish out his workday, but during his next delivery, he looked at a school nearby – and saw the flag at half-mast. That's how he knew.

He says he knows several other people told him in the afternoon, as he finished his route, but he doesn't remember the details. He only remembers the shock of seeing that flag.

I was at work all day in the records department, so I heard nothing until I went home. I'm still trying to get caught up on the news.

Some people feel they have inside information, though. The John Birch Society is already saying that that yesterday's murder was part of a Russian communist plot. It seems awfully quick for them to say they have answers, especially since they've been spreading such vile lies about him.


Propaganda poster put up across Dallas by the John Birch Society on Nov. 21

I can understand wanting closure in such a terrible time, but with a crime of this magnitude, it is important that we find the truth of the matter rather than jumping to conclusions.

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[November 22, 1963 cont.] Ripples down under

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[Science fiction author, David Rome wired us his reaction to today's news:]


by David Rome

This is the day never to be forgotten. I am returned from England where I had been writing science fiction and comics, and am staying for a short time at my parents' home in Sydney while I wonder about my future survival in the dying pulp market.

On This Day, for no reason at all, I suddenly feel an impulse to turn on the TV set – and the news is coming through in these dreadful moments.

The world psyche perhaps, somehow influencing us all.

A day of loss which I believe will only intensify as the years go on.

Vale JFK. God help the world.

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[November 22, 1963 cont.] Murder charge for Lee Harvey Oswald

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[The name of President Kennedy's assassin is now known to the world: Lee Harvey Oswald, once a Marine, a defector to the Soviet Union.  We also know the name of the Dallas police officer that he killed: J.D. Tippit.  Oswald was just formally charged for the policeman's murder, and we understand more charges will be forthcoming,

In other news, Texas Governor John Connally, injured in the same attack that claimed the President, is in serious but stable condition.

We now bring you the first of the reports from the Journey's correspondents…]


by Victoria Lucas

I do not think I shall ever forget these 4 words: "Texas School Book Depository." 

I hardly know what they mean.  It's a building.  The building in which the shooter hid to kill.  I can't say it, can't write the name of the man he killed.

My mother called me at work to tell me that he had been taken to the hospital, but we have no radio and of course no TV at work.  No news except what is brought to us from outside.  People with car radios, with a portable radio brought to work somewhere else. 

My mother called back.  He is dead.  Our president is dead.  Johnson has been sworn in.  I can't really take it in.  I'm crying.  People who come into my office have wet faces. 

What can I say?  I feel as if my own life has been taken away from me, and I don't know why.  Why am I writing you today?  I know no one else to write.  I guess I just want to let you know how it is here in Tucson, Arizona, hearing the news. 

My mother says that when I get home tonight I will see nothing else on the television.  There will be nothing else on except repeated footage from the assassination.  Yes, assassination.  And how the government is in transition.  Just as now there is nothing else to talk about.

He is dead.

He Is Dead.

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Fashion, music, politics, sports

[November 22, 1963] President Kennedy has been assassinated

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by Gideon Marcus

We interrupt the Journey's normal publication schedule to bring you breaking news.

According to several television, radio, and wire services, John F. Kennedy was shot twice, at around 12:30 p.m., CST, as his motorcade traveled through Dealey Plaza in Dallas.  The gravely injured President was rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital where he was pronounced dead of his wounds shortly thereafter.  Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in as Kennedy's successor one hour later. 

At about the same time, President Kennedy's assailant was apprehended by local law enforcement, but not before the killer slew a Dallas police officer. 

We will have more details on this event as they come in.  In addition, several of the Journey staff will be submitting observations on the events: their impact on themselves and those around them.  We welcome yours as well.

Please stay tuned.  Be strong.  We are all in this crisis together. 

Together, we will get through it.

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