For about twenty years, I could get a congregation to nod their heads in agreement when I said, “We all remember where we were and what we were doing when we heard that President Kennedy had been shot.”
But now, as Longfellow once wrote about another event, “Hardly a man is now alive who remembers that fateful day and year.” (There are, statisticians tell me, more women alive who remember).
I was in a 10th-grade English class. We were in the middle of reading Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. I remember reading out loud a speech by Marc Antony encountering Caesar’s body after he had been assassinated:
O mighty Caesar, dost thou lie so low?
[ Act 1:Scene 1)
Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils
Shrunk to this little measure? Fare thee well.—
There was a knock on our classroom door. Our teacher, who would unexpectedly die in a car accident herself in about eighteen months, went out and then returned a couple of minutes later to tell us that the President had been shot.
That moment taught me that even the most important people are mortal and how quickly and unexpectedly life and even history can change — the same thing Shakespeare was trying to say.
Shakespeare also says that the assassination of Caesar had consequences that Brutus and Cassius never intended when they drove their knives into Caesar’s heart.
I grew up in a family and a community that preferred the upright and honest Richard Nixon to the spoiled Democrat (said with distaste) John Kennedy. And many of us believed that Nixon would have been president if Richard Daley had not been able to dig up a lot of Democrats from Chicago’s graveyards. Kennedy won by only five electoral votes and a little over 100,000 popular votes (cp. Joe Biden’s 74 electoral votes and seven million popular votes in 2020.)
But, we (following Nixon’s example) accepted the official results when Kennedy was elected and mourned along with the rest of the country when he was killed. And we wished the new President well.
That taught me what it means to be an American.
I don’t know how the world would be different if Kennedy had not been shot that day. Historians I respect doubt that JFK could have gotten the Civil Rights Act through Congress the way LBJ did. Some of them also wonder if he would have escalated our involvement in Vietnam the way LBJ did. Both of those events have shaped much of our history since.
I’d be interested in your answers to at least one of these questions:
Where were you, and what were you doing on November 22, 1963?
Do great people make history, or does history make great people?
What event or experience taught you what it means to be an American?
What event taught you that life can be unpredictable?