JFK - 60 Years later

 

Sixty years ago today JFK was gunned down in a Dallas motorcade.

The anniversary seems to have generated much less attention than the 50^th, as to be expected, but anecdotally it seems to be slipping further from the forefront of the American consciousness with each passing year.

Its grip on the American subconscious though – our disillusionment, our distrust of the government and what it tells us – remains as sharp as ever.

Long ago, in 1983, the  20^th anniversary garnered a tremendous amount of media attention. It was, realistically, a turning point in the retelling of Camelot. 20 years on, JFK would no longer be the young husband and father people remembered. He would have been 66, had he escaped harm, and I remember a magazine age-progressing his photo for shock value. If the post Dallas America still longed for “what might have been,” they now also had to deal with the idea that even in an ideal world, that utopian moment they longed for would have already passed into memory.

Nerd that I was, I collected as many of the JFK magazines and newspapers as I could, and along with some contemporary pieces sent to me by Dave Powers, a JFK aide who then worked for the JFK library. I showed this collection off to my very disinterested 4^th grade classmates with the permission of Sr. Dorothy.

(30 years hence, I offered to do the same for my kids classroom on the 50^th anniversary. Their middle school history teacher demurred; by 2013, JFK apparently wasn’t worth taking up class time)

I imagine for the 75^th anniversary the media attention will briefly spike, then subside until the centennial. In between, it was be an event recalled by fewer and fewer people. 

None of that reduces the shock, and horror, of a few minutes in Dallas in the fall of 1963.