The short and official version of the story is: Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy, riding in an open limousine, with a rifle from the School Book Depository building. Oswald was captured in a movie theater in Dallas within hours. On Sunday, Oswald was killed at the Dallas jail by Jack Ruby, a mobster.
There were many conspiracy theories about the assassination, including that Oswald was a dupe and someone else shot from the grassy knoll adjacent to the highway. The Warren Commission investigated the assassination and concluded that Oswald acted alone. The story is detailed on Wikipedia in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_John_F._Kennedy.
On that date at noon, I was in the cafeteria on the San Diego State campus eating lunch. They made an announcement over the intercom that the President was shot and died at the hospital. They told everybody to go home. It took me awhile to get the bus and get home - I had to make two transfers. When I got home my father (who was anti-Kennedy, because JFK was Catholic and a Democrat) told me very somberly “This is a terrible thing, Randy.” Yes, it was!
We watched all weekend on our black and white TV - the news reports, the evidence, the speculation, the Oswald killing, and President Johnson’s swearing in. Kennedy’s body lay in state in the Capitol, and on November 25th there was a funeral parade in Washington DC with Mrs. Kennedy and their two children walking behind the horse-drawn hearse.
I have always been interested in the story. Like many people, I followed the news closely in the newspaper and on TV, and everything that happened thereafter. I read several books about the Warren Commission report and some of the conspiracy theories.
I was 20 years old, and this event sort of blew up my rosy, hopeful, optimistic view of the world around me. I saw how the assassination plunged the nation into a period of despair, and the ten year period following the assassination was a time of upheaval in the United States as the Viet Nam war started, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated in 1968, the radical left student movements, Watergate in 1972, and Nixon’s resignation in 1974 occurred.
Dwight Eisenhower, the President before Kennedy, was born in 1890 and was a World War II hero. When Kennedy was elected in 1960 he was 49 years old, and started serving as President on 20 January 1961. It brought a spirit of hope and optimism to much of the country. Kennedy was the first of the “Civic” generation (the "Greatest Generation" born 1905-1925) that fought in World War II and the Korea Conflict, rebuilt and renewed the country after the wars, and was a voice in the Senate before being elected President.
I liked John F. Kennedy because he was younger, much more spirited, articulate, and pro-American. He set significant goals for space exploration (like going to the moon by 1969) and he held the Soviet Union in check after the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. I didn’t tell my father I liked him, because I didn’t want the arguments about him being a Catholic, an Irishman, and a Democrat. My father was from Massachusetts, and many people there did not like him for those reasons.
After 62 years, we know what happened - Kennedy was shot and died. We still don’t know exactly how it happened. It’s a good example of one of my favorite sayings - “There are things that happen in a second that take a lifetime to explain” from Catch-22. I doubt that we will ever know the full story.
The URL for this post is: https://www.geneamusings.com/2025/06/monday-memories-kennedy-assassination.html
On that date at noon, I was in the cafeteria on the San Diego State campus eating lunch. They made an announcement over the intercom that the President was shot and died at the hospital. They told everybody to go home. It took me awhile to get the bus and get home - I had to make two transfers. When I got home my father (who was anti-Kennedy, because JFK was Catholic and a Democrat) told me very somberly “This is a terrible thing, Randy.” Yes, it was!
We watched all weekend on our black and white TV - the news reports, the evidence, the speculation, the Oswald killing, and President Johnson’s swearing in. Kennedy’s body lay in state in the Capitol, and on November 25th there was a funeral parade in Washington DC with Mrs. Kennedy and their two children walking behind the horse-drawn hearse.
I have always been interested in the story. Like many people, I followed the news closely in the newspaper and on TV, and everything that happened thereafter. I read several books about the Warren Commission report and some of the conspiracy theories.
I was 20 years old, and this event sort of blew up my rosy, hopeful, optimistic view of the world around me. I saw how the assassination plunged the nation into a period of despair, and the ten year period following the assassination was a time of upheaval in the United States as the Viet Nam war started, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated in 1968, the radical left student movements, Watergate in 1972, and Nixon’s resignation in 1974 occurred.
Dwight Eisenhower, the President before Kennedy, was born in 1890 and was a World War II hero. When Kennedy was elected in 1960 he was 49 years old, and started serving as President on 20 January 1961. It brought a spirit of hope and optimism to much of the country. Kennedy was the first of the “Civic” generation (the "Greatest Generation" born 1905-1925) that fought in World War II and the Korea Conflict, rebuilt and renewed the country after the wars, and was a voice in the Senate before being elected President.
I liked John F. Kennedy because he was younger, much more spirited, articulate, and pro-American. He set significant goals for space exploration (like going to the moon by 1969) and he held the Soviet Union in check after the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. I didn’t tell my father I liked him, because I didn’t want the arguments about him being a Catholic, an Irishman, and a Democrat. My father was from Massachusetts, and many people there did not like him for those reasons.
After 62 years, we know what happened - Kennedy was shot and died. We still don’t know exactly how it happened. It’s a good example of one of my favorite sayings - “There are things that happen in a second that take a lifetime to explain” from Catch-22. I doubt that we will ever know the full story.
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Monday Memories are a theme to tell my own life stories. Some of them are chapters in my StoryWorth and MyStories books.
Monday Memories are a theme to tell my own life stories. Some of them are chapters in my StoryWorth and MyStories books.
The URL for this post is: https://www.geneamusings.com/2025/06/monday-memories-kennedy-assassination.html
Copyright (c) 2025, Randall J. Seaver
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