Category: Greetings

Today is the anniversary of the Kennedy Assassination.

President-elect Donald Trump promised during his reelection campaign that he would declassify all of the remaining government records surrounding the assassination if he returned to office.

That release is overdue, isn’t it? It’s been simmering for 61 years.

November 22, 1963. Seeing that date in writing still gives me the chills, even when the year is omitted.

It’s strange to see how unimportant that date is to younger people, even though it remains possibly the most memorable day of our lives for me and my classmates. We were just the right age – old enough to worship JFK as the eloquent, dashing young hero-President who got us through the Cuban Missile Crisis and let his adorable kids play in the Oval Office, but not old enough to be cynical about his recklessness, or his philandering, or anything else that would have shattered the myth of Camelot.

Since he was our unsullied idol, his death was elevated to a Homeric level of tragedy. He was our Achilles, the seemingly invulnerable icon somehow brought down by a cheap shot from a distant coward.

There was no relief from sadness that weekend because we were reminded of our grief by an entire nation echoing our feelings. It was the sole subject discussed by our relatives, our friends, and every talking head on every TV channel across the republic. Normal TV programming was pre-empted by made-for-grief TV. We were bathed in sorrow, immersed in our sense of loss. The limitless resonance of those feelings made that weekend more memorable than the times when I lost my parents or my dearest friends.

When November 22nd arrives, all those memories return as if they had happened last week. For those of us in the early boomer demographic, November 22nd is our generation’s day, more even than September 11th. For me, it reverberates even more than December 25th or July 4th because it is so personal, so particular to our age group and our most powerful, enduring memories.

For at least two generations, more than a century ago, April 14th was that kind of day, and then it wasn’t. I can remember that Lincoln was killed in April because it was when lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d, but it’s not on the top of my mind that it happened on the 14th, or that it happened on Good Friday. When I see the words “April 14th” written out, it doesn’t produce any reaction.

December 7th was once that kind of day, but the memory no longer stirs us the way it stirred The Greatest Generation. When I see “December 7th,” I immediately recognize its importance, but there’s no emotion.

November 22nd is already fading. For those too young to recall the emotions of that weekend, it’s just the day between the 21st and the 23rd. We boomers will be gone soon, and the date of Kennedy’s assassination, like that of Lincoln’s, will fade from America’s collective memory, absent even a Whitman poem to mark the month.