When Camelot's Illusion Fell

The Boston Herald

The day that President John F. Kennedy was killed I was 16 and a senior at Archbishop Williams High School. My class was in the cafeteria at a sodality meeting when the announcement came over the PA that the president had been shot. A half-hour later we were back in our homeroom when the PA clicked on again and we learned that the president had died.

It happened the week before Thanksgiving, just like now. But that's the only thing that's the same after 40 years.

I wish I could draw that moment. I see girls in plaid skirts sobbing and boys tugging at their ties and Sister at her desk, not doing anything, light pouring in the window but the mood dark, the school clock crawling to 2:30 and everyone looking scared and sad and uncertain.

It's like peeking at a page from "Little House on the Prairie," a faded line drawing, because it all has so little to do with now.

Here's what I wrote in my Hallmark Daily planner that day: "President Kennedy killed." And in the squares for Nov. 23 and Nov. 24, I wrote, "Class play cancelled." And for the rest of the week up until Thanksgiving all the squares are blank.

The world stopped when President Kennedy was killed. It's hard to believe this now because the horror of that assassination has been diminished by all the other horrors that have happened since. But this was our first taste of national tragedy. Not one person in my class would have believed that Nov. 22, 1963 wouldn't be the worst day of their lives for their entire lives. Or that the time would come when this terrible day wouldn't seem remarkable anymore.

It was remarkable for so long. "Where were you when Kennedy was shot?" was a question that was asked for years, a question we thought would always be asked. Now it's ancient history, an almost "Who cares?”

A bigger question is WHO were we 40 years ago? And who are we now?

The body sheds its cells and replenishes its blood supply and there is nothing of the children we were holding us together, no random cell that remembers. But something does. We have the same heart and lungs and eyes and ears. So who are we now and how did we get from there to here? From youth to late middle age, from trust to cynicism, from being shocked by disaster to expecting it?

Do young people flinch when they watch the Magruder tape? Does anyone flinch anymore? Has fact and fiction been so interwoven that the murder of a young president feels like just another made-for-TV movie? Has all that we learned about John Kennedy made us indifferent to his death? Or has life simply hardened us?

It seemed the worst of tragedies when he died. But it wasn't. They're all the worst. Vietnam was worse. Pan Am flight 103 was worse. Oklahoma City. The Twin Towers. The sniper killings. The deaths of men and women in combat right now. 

And before his death there were other worsts. Every generation has its worsts and its wars and its worries. But we believed, because we were young, that John Kennedy was different, that Camelot was real, and that privilege and prayers would protect him. And us. Other presidents had been assassinated. But not ours. And not on national TV.

Forty years later we know things now that we could never have imagined, and we look back at 1963 and wonder if we imagined this: The safety we felt. The trust we had. The belief that a president's death was the worst thing that could happen.

We had our class play three weeks after President Kennedy died. It was a comedy and people laughed. And then it was Christmas and New Year's and spring and graduation. And though we had changed, life went on.

It always does.