Sixty years ago today, on Nov. 22, 1963, America became a different place. John F. Kennedy was struck down in a motorcade in Dallas, in the middle of a campaign smile, amid a cheering crowd on a sunlit afternoon, and his assassination left behind a darker country than the one we thought we’d always known.
Goodbye to post-war optimism, and belated goodbye to the safe 1950s. This was the moment when the tumultuous ‘60s began, and so did a national mood of paranoia and vulnerability.
When you have some nameless nobody come out of the gutter to murder a president, then no catastrophe is unthinkable.
The national mood swing began with Dallas and darkened relentlessly: more assassinations followed and endless war in Vietnam, and Nixon’s Watergate and twin towers collapsing in lower Manhattan where loved ones of the murdered and the missing stumbled through the streets for days with handwritten signs reading, “Have you seen my wife?” “Have you seen my husband?”
After all this, we ask “Have you seen America?”
When John Kennedy was gunned down, a madness was let loose which found its political culmination in Donald Trump. In Kennedy’s time, could anyone have imagined America putting such a fraudulent, bullying narcissist into the White House?
Sixty years since Dallas, millions still remember where they were when they heard the assassination news.
If you were watching television in Baltimore, perhaps biding time until “The Buddy Deane Show” came on the air, maybe you heard an announcer say, “Here is a bulletin from CBS News. In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade. … First reports say that Kennedy has been seriously wounded by this shooting.”
If your name was M. Shakman Katz, you were presiding over a meeting of 250 members of the Maryland State Conference of Social Welfare, at the Lord Baltimore Hotel. He was giving a speech called “Equal Opportunity,” about Black people finally getting a fair political chance, when someone gave him a scrap of paper.
Then Katz, his voice soft and breaking, announced, “Someone has handed me a bulletin. The president has been shot in Dallas.”
That was all he knew. He asked for prayers. People were already standing with their heads bowed. Then he said, “Is there a doctor in the house?” One woman had fainted. Another, State Sen. Verda Welcome, the only Black person in the Maryland Senate, had broken down in uncontrollable sobs, her head buried in a handkerchief.
If you were sitting in Judge R. Dorsey Watkins’ courtroom, in the old federal courthouse on North Calvert Street, you were one of 102 immigrants from a dozen different countries gathered for ceremonies to make them American citizens.
Some of them carried little American flags and waved them in the air. A few of them had official letters of welcome they had just received in the mail. The letters were signed by President John F. Kennedy.
Then, a deputy sheriff approached the bench and whispered into Judge Watkins’ ear. Everybody in the courtroom watched as the judge slumped forward. When he finally raised his head, he announced, “I can’t go on. President Kennedy …” barely getting the words out, “… has just died.”
In the stunned silence of the moment, some were still holding up their little American flags. A few showed each other the letters they’d gotten with Kennedy’s signature at the bottom. All these joyful, smiling, brand-new Americans — here was their welcome to the full America, exploding in their faces.
If you were anywhere in the U.S., you spent that grim November weekend watching television, which left everyone with images that remain with us 60 years later: the grieving Jacqueline Kennedy in a widow’s veil, and a little boy in short pants saluting his father’s casket; a bugler playing taps at hallowed Arlington National Cemetery with its ghostly thousands; and a crummy Dallas police basement where the owner of a striptease joint emerged from the shadows with a gun.
The madness was just beginning, but its echoes are with us, all these years later.
Michael Olesker’s latest book, “Boogie: Life on A Merry-Go-Round,” was recently published by Apprentice House. It’s the life story of Baltimore legend Leonard “Boogie” Weinglass, an original “Diner” guy who grew up to create the Merry-Go-Round clothing chain and contribute millions to charity.
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