5/7/17, 1'37 PM What the Kennedy assassination meant to us Page 1 of 7 http://www.pbs.org/newshour/multimedia/jfk-essays/ Tweet 4 On Nov. 22, 1963, 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time, President John F. Kennedy was gunned down in front of a crowd of supporters as his presidential motorcade made its way through downtown Dallas. His wife Jacqueline was by his side. The shooter was a 24-year-old self- described Marxist named Lee Harvey Oswald. A half-century later, the world's fascination with the 35th president of the United States hasn't waned. There is no shortage of television specials, books and documentary films that have been produced to mark the anniversary of his death. The PBS NewsHour remembers the assassination of a president with a series of online and on-air features. We hosted a conversation with NewsHour co-founders Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer, who covered the event in Dallas. SUPPORT PROVIDED BY: Moved Permanently The document has moved here. Bill Minutaglio, author and journalism professor For years, I lived and worked very close to where President Kennedy was assassinated. Every morning during my first days in Dallas, I walked by the site. I could even see the site from the building where I was employed. I eventually lived very close to where the assassin had resided and been captured. For years, my wife and I could palpably feel the tragedy... We could still sense the aching loss remaining from Dallas 1963. There was a heavy quality in the air, something pressing down. We often wondered why the entire assassination site had not been hermetically sealed. It's too easy to say that the city and some people in it had become haunted. But it clearly changed Dallas forever deep down to the very DNA. Life went on but never in the same way. It was like that sorrow and that quest to salvage some meaning had become a lingering companion. Blessedly, something else began to emerge. Many people in Dallas began to see the tragedy as a burning reminder to choose reason, Moved Permanently The document has moved here. What the Kennedy assassination meant to us 50 years later, 10 reflections on JFK It changed Dallas forever Like 368
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5/7/17, 1'37 PMWhat the Kennedy assassination meant to us
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Tweet 4
On Nov. 22, 1963, 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time, President JohnF. Kennedy was gunned down in front of a crowd of supporters as hispresidential motorcade made its way through downtown Dallas. Hiswife Jacqueline was by his side. The shooter was a 24-year-old self-described Marxist named Lee Harvey Oswald.
A half-century later, the world's fascination with the 35th president ofthe United States hasn't waned. There is no shortage of televisionspecials, books and documentary films that have been produced tomark the anniversary of his death.
The PBS NewsHour remembers the assassination of a president with aseries of online and on-air features. We hosted a conversation withNewsHour co-founders Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer, whocovered the event in Dallas.
SUPPORT PROVIDED BY:
MovedPermanentlyThe document has moved here.
Bill Minutaglio, author and journalism professor
For years, I lived and worked very close to where President Kennedywas assassinated. Every morning during my first days in Dallas, Iwalked by the site. I could even see the site from the building where Iwas employed. I eventually lived very close to where the assassin hadresided and been captured.
For years, my wife and I could palpably feel the tragedy... We couldstill sense the aching loss remaining from Dallas 1963. There was aheavy quality in the air, something pressing down. We often wonderedwhy the entire assassination site had not been hermetically sealed.
It's too easy to say that the city and some people in it had becomehaunted. But it clearly changed Dallas forever deep down to the veryDNA. Life went on but never in the same way. It was like that sorrowand that quest to salvage some meaning had become a lingeringcompanion.
Blessedly, something else began to emerge. Many people in Dallasbegan to see the tragedy as a burning reminder to choose reason,
Moved PermanentlyThe document has moved here.
What the Kennedy assassinationmeant to us50 years later, 10 reflections on JFK
It changed Dallas forever
Like 368
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dialogue and the enduring human spirit -- to choose them over hateand vitriol.
Bill Minutaglio is co-author of the book "Dallas 1963" and a professorof journalism at the University of Texas at Austin.
Thousands of anti-Kennedy flyers weredistributed in downtown Dallas in thedays before the president's November1963 visit.
Jerry Parr, retired Secret Service agent
On Nov. 22, 1963, I had been in the Secret Service only 13 months.Along with every agent in the service that day, waves of grief and lossoverwhelmed me. President Kennedy's murder was a colossal failure.Our very reason for being was to keep the president alive. And he wasdead.
I thought it might take 100 years for us to redeem ourselves, to provewe were worthy to carry this responsibility. I believed our agency couldnot survive the loss of another president -- and maybe we would notdeserve to survive. I vowed I would do anything to keep this fromhappening on my watch. But on March 30, 1981, when PresidentReagan was wounded and hung between life and death, it almost did.
All agents do the best we humanly can to carry out our seriousmission. But every night that a president goes to sleep safely I know inmy depths it is by the grace of God.
Jerry Parr is a retired Secret Service agent. He is credited withsaving President Ronald Reagan's life on the day of his assassinationattempt on March 30, 1981.
Secret Service Agent Jerry Parr, in araincoat just left of the president, isphotographed moments before hepushed President Ronald Reagan intothe presidential limousine after he wasshot in an assassination attemptoutside the Washington Hilton Hotel.
Tom Fitzgerald and Lorenzo Marquez, fashion bloggers
Did she ever wear pink again? Or carry roses? These are the things wewonder.
There's so much to the Kennedy mystique and legacy. We're not surethere's anything left to say about two of the most examined people ofthe last century, but we can't help focusing on their tremendous style -- a marriage of New England moneyed Irish preppiness and French-infused finishing school couture that shouldn't have blended well butmanaged to become iconic. With John and Jacqueline Kennedy, theFirst Family became an aspirational image for the first time -- amagazine cover version of the presidency, perfectly suited for an ever-accelerating mass-media age of across-the-board middle class growth.That good-looking couple just down the street. Jack and Jackie.
But they were much more than that, of course, this refined, privilegedand well-educated couple, who filled the White House with artists andantiques or managed the near-impossible task of charming the Frenchpeople on their home soil, in their own language. The world watchedthem greet and host a succession of world leaders and great artists;
President and Mrs. Kennedy arrive atLove Field in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.
Bound by duty, overcome with grief
The end of Camelot
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Jack, charming everyone with his smile and ease in a tux, andJacqueline, owning the room in opera gloves, a bouffant and onestunning gown after another. Pure post-war continental glamour. Apresidency of style.
And in the end, when it was over and something needed to be said,some expression of grief or rage needed to be expressed, sheremembered that the world looked to her and saw only the surface ofwho she is, focusing on her clothing above all else. When asked if shewanted to change out of her blood-encrusted pink suit on thatinterminable plane ride back to Washington from Dallas, she declined."Let them see what they've done."
Tom Fitzgerald and Lorenzo Marquez write the fashion blogTomandLorenzo.com and are known for their in-depth analysesof '60s-era fashion on the AMC TV show "Mad Men."
Beverly Gage, historian
Two trends define the historical memory of John F. Kennedy. First,Americans overwhelmingly rank Kennedy as one of their favoritepresidents -- sometimes in the top 5, almost always in the top 10.Second, Americans overwhelmingly believe that Kennedy was killed asthe result of a conspiracy.
On the surface, these trends seem to be at odds with each other. Theyoffer competing views of the Kennedy White House. On the one hand,it's a place of limitless idealism, the Camelot of glamour and promise;on the other hand, it's a rank, dismal swamp fed by rivers ofsubterfuge and danger.
Kennedy himself, we now know, lied repeatedly to the Americanpeople about Cuba and the CIA, about his sexual affairs and theprecarious state of his health. And yet this knowledge has done little todamage his popularity (though historians tend to be a bit lessforgiving). It may be that Americans need both parts of the story tomake sense of Kennedy's legacy. By channeling the darker side of ColdWar politics into an array of assassination theories, we manage to holdon to the image of Kennedy as a young idealistic president, untaintedby the corruptions of his age.
Beverly Gage is a professor of 20th-century U.S. history at YaleUniversity.
Official White House portrait ofPresident Kennedy
Jeff Nilsson, director of The Saturday Evening Post archives
In its 192 years of publication, the Saturday Evening Post hasproduced only one issue dedicated to a single news story: its memorialissue for President Kennedy. The Post's editors began hurriedlyassembling its contents over the weekend that followed theassassination. Because of long production times, the soonest theircoverage could hit the newsstands was three weeks away, and only if it
Holding on to Kennedy's image
Only one story like this one
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was on the press within 72 hours.
The editors feverishly gathered and reworked material into a 27-pagesection that would give readers a broad overview of the events andconsequences. Among the stories were a detailed article about LeeHarvey Oswald and an account of how the extended Kennedy familyhad responded to the tragedy. There was a eulogy by Kennedy adviserArthur Schlesinger, reassurances from former President DwightEisenhower and a profile of President Lyndon Johnson.
And there was the editor's confident assurance that the nation would,in time, learn the truth behind the "many curious rumors andunanswered questions" surrounding the assassination. It was a naturalassumption in an age before Americans began believing inconspiracies and doubting government experts.
Jeff Nilsson is the director of archives at the Saturday Evening Postand an historian, author and researcher. Each week, Nilssonresearches and writes a web feature that focuses on a differentnews item from America’s past as reported in the SaturdayEvening Post. He is currently building a digital archive of themagazine that will span its 190 years of publication.
The Saturday Evening Post's "Inmemoriam" edition for the latepresident from Dec. 14, 1963.
Barbara Perry, oral historian
What could have been more fun for a second grader than coloringpictures of pilgrims on the Friday before Thanksgiving? I wasconcentrating on staying in the lines, as the nuns taught us, when myworld turned upside down. Our teacher announced that PresidentKennedy had been shot.
From the moment my mother had placed me in front of JFK's podiumat his 1960 Louisville campaign rally, I was obsessed with all thingspresidential, devouring children's books on Presidents GeorgeWashington and Abraham Lincoln. As we marched to church on Nov.22, 1963, I heard a radio report that President Kennedy had been hit inthe head. I knew that Lincoln died from such a wound, so I prayed therosary fervently with my classmates. It was for naught. By the time wereturned to the classroom, our teacher instructed us to say the day'sclosing prayers for our martyred president.
Mrs. Kennedy's bloodstained suit, the skittish riderless horse,Oswald's murder: all are seared in my memory. Those tragic days,portrayed on our family's TV, inspired my life's work as a scholar ofthe presidency and the Kennedy family.
Barbara Perry is a senior fellow in the Presidential Oral HistoryProgram at the University of Virginia's Miller Center and projectdirector of the Edward M. Kennedy Oral History. She is author of"Rose Kennedy: The Life and Times of a Political Matriarch" and"Jacqueline Kennedy: First Lady of the New Frontier."
A child's biography of JFK, purchasedfor Barbara Perry by her mother a fewmonths after the president's death.
A child's perspective
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Peniel Joseph, historian
President John F. Kennedy's shocking assassination on Nov. 22, 1963,dramatically transformed America's domestic and internationallandscape. Domestically, his successor, Lyndon Johnson, used thecrisis triggered by the Kennedy assassination to help pass the long-stalled Civil Rights Act on July 2, 1964. We can make the argumentthat the roughly one year between Kennedy's death and Johnson'slandslide presidential election victory over Barry Goldwaterrepresented a national valediction of sorts for Kennedy's legacy. Inthat year Johnson proposed, all in the name of the fallen president, asweeping vision of American democracy that harkened back to theNew Deal and was more progressive than the legislation that Kennedyhad backed while in office.
In a very real sense, the Kennedy assassination produced a nationalsense of vertigo with Americans, regardless of age, race or background,questioning the very meaning of citizenship, freedom, security andjustice.
The corresponding mythology surrounding JFK was inspired by FirstLady Jacqueline Kennedy's deft use of journalists in the immediateaftermath of the assassination. Her repeated comparison to thecouple's brief time in the White House as being "Camelot" served as anenduring metaphor for not only the man, but of the times he lived in.Fifty years later, we have a much better appreciation for what Kennedywas and wasn't but, as happens with legends, the myth and aura ofmystery that JFK evokes remains timeless.
Peniel Joseph is a professor of history at Tufts University and theauthor of the books "Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A NarrativeHistory of Black Power in America" and "Dark Days, Bright Nights:From Black Power to Barack Obama."
President Kennedy gave a prime-timetelevised address on civil rights onJune 11, 1963.
Ellen Fitzpatrick, historian
F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote: "Show me a hero and I will write you atragedy." We return to JFK because he tapped into a spirit of idealismand soaring aspiration in the American people. Our first televisionpresident. Americans felt they "knew" Kennedy and his vivaciousfamily. In the flood of condolence messages received by JacquelineKennedy, many wrote that they felt as if a member of their own familyhad died. Just as we don't get over great losses in our personal lives --in the sense that the loss is never undone -- so it had been with thisyoung president who captured the imagination of the country for hisbrief 1,000 days. The admiration for Mrs. Kennedy certainly was real.She was 34 years old and had been only inches away from her husbandwhen he was murdered. Suddenly a widow with two small children,she behaved with great dignity in the immediate aftermath of hisdeath. The totality of this moment in American history the death of apopular, youthful, charismatic president and all that followed in theUnited States, became a part of the lived experience of millions ofAmericans. I doubt the memory of it or interest in it will die even whenthey do.
Jacqueline Kennedy and her familyleave the U.S. Capitol during PresidentKennedy's state funeral.
Kennedy's legend lives on
America's fleeting hero
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Ellen Fitzpatrick is a professor of history at the University of NewHampshire and author of the book "Letters to Jackie: Condolencesfrom a Grieving Nation."
William Jones, historian
"The bullet that killed Kennedy paralyzed the civil rights drive," onecivil rights leader stated as he left a memorial for the slain president."Everything's in a state of suspension for the moment," echoed thethen president of the NAACP.
Such statements indicated how far the civil rights movement hadpushed Kennedy since his election in 1960. Approaching the issue ofracial equality primarily as a "political problem," the candidatebalanced appeals to black voters with clear signals that he would notchallenge segregation in the South. Civil rights activists forced thepresident's hand, however, by provoking confrontations withsegregationists in Alabama and other southern states. Kennedy shiftedin June of 1963, calling civil rights "moral issue" and urging Congressto adopt laws ensuring equal access to public accommodations and theright to vote. He went further that fall, endorsing an equalemployment law and stronger enforcement measures that werepushed by the massive March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
Ultimately, the assassination did not stall the effort to pass a civilrights law. This was due, in part, to President Lyndon Johnson's skillat making support for the law a way to honor his slain predecessor.But it was also a testament to the influence that the civil rightsmovement had developed through its struggle to win Kennedy'ssupport.
William Jones is author of the book "The March on Washington:Jobs, Freedom and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights" and aprofessor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
President Kennedy met with the civilrights leaders who organized the 1963March on Washington for Jobs andFreedom at the White House.
William vanden Heuvel, former ambassador
I met JFK at his sister Jean's wedding in 1956. The political gossipalready had him running for the presidency. And in 1960 when heannounced, I was part of the generation that rejoiced to have his freshthinking, his youth, his political charisma and his idealism available asa candidate for the Democratic Party. I was running for Congress thatyear as the Democratic candidate in the Silk Stocking District ofManhattan. JFK always stayed at the Carlyle Hotel. My headquarterswere a block away. He would often drop by and I would walk with himat his invitation to meet the voters.
In October 1960, I brought him to Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt's apartmenton 74th Street where they had breakfast and discussed what she coulddo to support his campaign. After that meeting, she was one of his
Then-Senator John Kennedy standswith New York City Mayor RobertWagner Jr., left, former Sen. Herbert
Carrying on a commitment to civil rights
A bright light diminished
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most enthusiastic backers. He inspired a whole generation to considercareers in public service -- the "highest calling", as he frequently said.There was an attitude that if something should be done, it could bedone, and in the spirit of the New Frontier, it would be done.
Obviously he had political considerations in all of the major decisionshe had to make, but he never avoided the tough ones. In the civil rightsstruggle, his speech following the Birmingham riots was like removingthe shackles from a nation as he declared the race issue as a moralchallenge for every American. In foreign affairs he brought a newattitude and a determination to resolve problems peacefully whereverpossible. The Bay of Pigs was an object lesson in relation to the CIAand the military that he never forgot. It always impressed me greatlythat in the missile crisis discussions, with every military leader in theroom recommending, even demanding, the invasion of Cuba, JFKmade his own decision to avoid military confrontation and to seek adiplomatic solution if it was at all possible. It was possible, and he didit. His great speech at American University on June 10, 1963, held thepromise of ending the Cold War. In his leadership, America and theworld found hope and inspiration. With his loss, the world turned; thebrightness of the day was diminished.
I spoke with composer Igor Stravinsky in 1964 about the classicaldimensions of JFK's murder in the context of ancient Greek drama --the midday sun in Dallas; the magnificent young leader in the embraceof the people's love and cheers; the powerful father, Joe Kennedy,muted by fate watching his son become the most powerful man onearth; and then the thunder; the bolt of lightning and destiny. I believeStravinsky later composed a musical statement that resembled thatstory.
Stravinsky's Elegy for JFK
William vanden Heuvel was special assistant to Attorney GeneralRobert Kennedy. He is the author of the book "On His Own: Robert F.Kennedy, 1964-1968" and is a former U.S. Ambassador to theEuropean offices of the U.N. and U.S. Deputy Ambassador to the U.N.He is featured in the documentary "JFK: A President Betrayed".
Lehman, center, and William vandenHeuvel, right, at a workers' rally in NewYork's Union Square in October 1960.
Posted November 21, 2013
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