Ultimate Sacrifice

My mom came home crying. I've never seen her that upset before or since. CTTOI, I'm not sure I've ever been more shocked.

HORATIO I saw him once; he was a goodly king.

HAMLET He was a man, take him for all in all,

I shall not look upon his like again.

Does anyone really think Bush will catch bin Ladin?

As a junior in high school, I had just returned from lunch and my analytical geometry/trig class was just resuming when without any kind of announcement, the intercom came on with a radio account.

By the way, Hillary noted in Living History that she also was in math class as a junior in high school. (She's two months younger than I.)

Since reading her book and her accounts of the major events that happened at key points in her life, I've felt a kind of kinship with Hillary. I hope she lives to a ripe old age as a Senator from New York.

Stan Davis
Lakewood, CO
BE THE CHANGE you wish to see in the world.
If not us, WHO? If not now, WHEN?

I was two years and four months. My memories of the event on the television were probably from repeated showings later in life, but I'd swear I remember that day and my mother crying.

I was in fifth grade. We were outside on the playground for recess, and the class brainiac, with his transistor radio to his ear, announced to us that President Kennedy was dead and Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson had been sworn in as the 36th President. We just stared at him. After we went inside, the principal made an announcement with the news and asked for a moment of silent prayer. Our family spent those four days in front of the television.

We immediately went on high alert in case the Soviet's tried to take advantage of the situation!

Win with Wes in '08

and sitting at my desk, in school. A knock on the door required our teacher to step out into the hallway. When she returned, her eyes were filled with tears. She asked us all to come to the front of the room where we sat in a circle and she explained to us what had just happened. Our beloved presdient, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, had just been asassinated!

I wasn't quite sure about all the sorrow she was exhibiting. I had never experienced a death in my immediate family and found her reaction to be puzzling on many levels. Our principal then made an announcement that they were going to allow all of us to go home early. (It was a neighborhood elementary school.....we all walked.)

When my brother & I got home, my mother's face was red and tear-streaked and she was sitting at the kitchen table looking dazed. I'll never forget it.....I had never seen her in such a state before. This was definitely upsetting.

Later, when my father came home from work, we sat in front of our black & white TV and picked at our dinners. The sorrow in our household was so thick you could cut it with a knife. Later, my Aunt, Uncle and cousins came over and the grown ups stayed awake and talked late into the night.

Things never quite seemed the same after that. The carefree days I had been living up until that point never returned. Our president had been killed by a madman and we lived in front of the TV for several days. Those sorrowful images of Jackie, Caroline & John-John are forever burned into my mind's eye. And I'll never forget that riderless horse being led through the streets with the boots mounted backward in the stirrups. Death had made a solemn impression on me. It brought with it an end of innocence.....the end of Camelot.

Walking down a crowded hall, the kids were buzzing "Did you hear that President Kennedy's been shot." I thought it was just another Kennedy joke like the ones about the "Jack in the box." Where's the punch line? It soon would settle over all us as we took our seats in Civics' class, that a national tragedy was descending. When the intercom finally gave out the principal's tearful announcement that indeed the President was dead, a strange hush accompanied our departure. That same hush was out in streets as people struggled to make it to the comfort of their homes.

I don't remember even waiting for my friends. I just walked. My mother of course was crying as I entered our living-room, lighted only by the black-and-white TV. Those pictures coming out of Dallas, and then Washington, were on constantly as we joined in the national wake. I remember wishing and praying very hard that this entire event would prove not to be true.

The town where I grew up, then a thriving steel community, now a place for Pittsburgh workers to sleep, had four Catholic churches and could be counted on for Democratic votes. President Kennedy was not just any president, he had broken the mold...for us. The ladies in my town and family if they were cool, all appeared on Sundays in their pill-box hats. Moving from Ike to Jack had meant an entire cultural shift both internal and external. My family and community had lost a dream.

During one online rambling at Salon, while we dutifully typed about the horrors of bush, someone raised the question: where are our leaders? The answer soon came: they killed them all.

Oh how different the history of the United States would have been if a gray and slowly aging set of Democratic sages had been there over the years to stand up and give their advice. JFK, Bobby, and Martin would have sent messages to America. Maybe we would have totally disagreed with them. We will never know. Instead, we are left to remember dark announcements that we did not want to hear. Instead we lost a dream. May new and great leaders once again rise to send and receive the voice of the people.

You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.--J. V. Marley 

I walked out of one class to the outdoor corredor of Carl Hayden High School in Phoenix to hear a buzz that the president had been shot.

Shot? Surely not! Not Jack Kennedy! He was invincible!

Like others have retold, within a few minutes of taking my seat in my next class (I don't remember which it was, I was too stunned to even remember getting there) the intercom spoke the words that rocked the nation. "President Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas, Texas."

Because there were literally two school districts attending one school in my area at that time, I started school before 7am and got out of school somewhere around noon. When the morning students left for the day the other district's students filed in.

I walked home, again not knowing how I found my way, to find my mother staring at our little TV, tears streaming down her face. We sat together on the couch...holding hands, mesmerized by the pictures in shades of grey flashing on the screen...still, I think, hoping against hope that some how the words that were pouring out of the box were wrong. That it was all a big mistake.

We sat and stared at that box for days. We watched a young child salute his father, unaware of the finality of his loss.We watched while the dream that had begun such a short time before was buried on a rise at Arlington.

I'm still waiting for that dream to be reborn...for a leader who makes me feel as John Kennedy made me feel to take the helm of the American ship of state.

I've found the leader...I am yet to know if he will take the helm...and restore the dream.

I was in 8th grade, standing in line at the junior high school cafeteria.  An announcement was made that President Kennedy had been assassinated and none of us could eat our lunch as we all sat stunned and sobbing.  We all went to our first afternoon class.  My class was chorus and we were practicing singing contatas for the upcoming Christmas pageant, and we were all sobbing so much during these beautiful cantatas. The chorus teacher at the piano kept sobbing, so she decided it was just too much for all of us and so we stopped singing.  The chorus teacher stood up in front of the class and talked about the fallen President and what he meant to our country.  From that day on and into the next weeks it was a gray time in America, with all of us glued to our televisions.  And Jackie Kennedy's favorite piece of music, "Ave Maria," was played often during the televised scenes of the night-lit White House. 

My mom was crying.  My dad got angry -- at her or at what had happened, I don't know -- and stormed out.  I remember only because it was the first time I'd noticed that the wheels of the car turned as the car backed out of the driveway.  As the days went on, my dad got angrier because "there's nothing on TV but those damn Kennedys."  (My dad used to tell us that the Ku Klux Klan got the blame for a lot of bad things, but was actually a good organization that "kept people in line."  'Nuff said.)

Crissie

I was in third grade. We were sitting in class and an announcement came over the loudspeaker. We were all sent home, but since my (single) dad worked, I went to Joanne Koistenin's home who ran a day care for working parents kids. I don't remember much else. My memories of the years after my mom left are very sketchy.

Once in a while you get shown the light, In the strangest of places if you look at it right. - Hunter/Garcia