Word had spread quickly that President John F. Kennedy, the only president most of the second graders could remember, had been murdered.
As we headed to the bus a couple of hours earlier than usual, I remember the conversation. My classmates did not believe it.
"You can't kill the president" one girl said.
"They killed Abraham Lincoln," I said, having just read a small paperback biography of the 16th president. I knew nothing of the assassinations of Garfield and McKinley.
"They killed Abraham Lincoln," I said, having just read a small paperback biography of the 16th president. I knew nothing of the assassinations of Garfield and McKinley.
That weekend my eyes were glued to the small black-and-white television in the living room. I watched as one man, Jack Ruby, murdered another one, presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, on live television- the first time that had ever happened. It was only on one network, but that was the network I happened to be watching.
The Kennedy assassination was the first time that television took over the coverage of an event and dominated the newspapers because of its immediacy. Now it is something we expect.
On the 30-year anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, Nov. 22, 1993, I combed through the third floor archives set up by Marvin VanGilder in the old Carthage Press building and wrote a story about what it was like in Carthage three decades earlier.
The Carthage Press account from the Nov. 23, 1963 issue began, "Carthage today was a city in shock, still unable to comprehend the brutality with which the nation's chief executive was removed from office and from life."
"Carthaginians repeatedly remarked only, 'It's unbelievable...What a terrible thing! I didn't think it could happen in this country...What happens now?'
Flags on the courthouse lawn, over the post office, before Memorial Hall and elsewhere in the city dangled limply at half-staff, the article said.
"The city mourned the death of a president and mourned with equal fervor a demonstration of hate to awful to comprehend."
5 comments:
This "hate" wouldn't have been as "awful to comprehend" if the Left in the US hadn't white washed, when they didn't outright deny, the 85 million or so genocidal murders by Communists by that date, before Mao got back in power through his Cultural Revolution, and the Cambodian Genocide. See for example the Pulitzer Prize awarded to the NYT for Walter Duranty's "reporting" on Stalin's Soviet Union and the terror famine in the Ukraine.
JFK's assassination by a American Communist upset with his policy toward Cuba shouldn't have been at many levels shocking, and it was never accepted by the country's "liberal" Left. Even given that a month earlier JFK had the strongmen running Vietnam, its President and his brother, assassinated (LBJ's following interventions were in part based on the "you broke it, you own it" principle, he had that much honor, just not the wit to sanely prosecute the war).
Instead, the media you worship and are a part of transformed JFK's assassination into a Black Legend against the Right in the US, and frankly all this "broke" the liberal Left, which never recovered, as we can for example see today in the deranged "Resistance" against an elected President. Who is axiomatically illegitimate, the planning for his impeachment started in the April before the election when it became clear he was had a good chance of winning the Republican nomination. Snopes implicitly pointed out the Left has tried to impeach every elected Republican President after JFK, by quibbling that Ford was the exception.
This sort of madness destroys a Republic.
To make clear to those new to the topic, the "mourned with equal fervor a demonstration of hate to awful to comprehend" refers to how the media and the Left (but I repeat myself) immediately blamed Dallas and the nation's Right for JFK's assassination. When it became clear it was a Communist who'd even defected for a while to the Soviet Union, had spent more time there than in Dallas in the previous decade, they doubled down, and to this day spin fantastic conspiracies about what really happened, always blaming the Right in one way or another.
Although of course today the Deep State including the previously irredeemable CIA is lionized for its still in progress coup against Trump, an amazing reversal to those of us who've watched the Left denounce its elements including the FBI as one of the greatest threats to the nation. "No bad tactics, only bad targets."
OMG! Maybe it was just some unhinged fool.
@12:07 PM: The Official Story that an "unhinged fool" who was trained and tested in the Marines to be a good marksman with a rifle is entirely adequate to explain what happened, as long as you also know that bullets can follow strange paths once they enter human bodies.
Oh come on, Trump told you that Ted Cruz's father killed Kennedy, and you know Trump would not lie to you.
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