Sombre nation
U.S. marks 50th anniversary of Kennedy assassination.
DALLAS (AP) — A half-century after rifle bullets cut through a presidential motorcade, the city that has long struggled with its own wounds from the Kennedy assassination paused Friday to honour the fallen leader, remembering a young, handsome president with whom Dallas will always be “linked in tragedy.”
On the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s death, Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings presided over a solemn ceremony at the exact time and place where the president was gunned down in an open-top limousine. It was the first time the city had organized such a large event, issuing 5,000 free tickets and erecting a stage with video screens. “We watched the nightmarish reality in our front yard,” Rawlings told the crowd in Dealey Plaza, just steps from the Texas School Book Depository building where Lee Harvey Oswald fired from the sixth floor onto the motorcade. “Our president had been taken from us, taken from his family, taken from the world.”
Sombre remembrances extended from Dallas to the shores of Cape Cod, with moments of silence, speeches by historians and, above all, simple reverence for a time and a leader long gone.
Two generations later, the assassination still stirs quiet sad- ness in the baby boomers who remember it as the beginning of a darker, more cynical time.
“A new era dawned and another waned a half-century ago, when hope and hatred collided right here in Dallas,” Rawlings told the crowd that gathered under grey skies and in near-freezing temperatures. The mayor said the slaying prompted Dallas to “turn civic heartbreak into hard work” and helped the city mature into a more tolerant, welcoming metropolis.
The slain president “and our city will forever be linked in tragedy, yes,” Rawlings said. “But out of tragedy, an opportunity was granted to us: how to face the future when it’s the darkest and uncertain.” Historian David McCullough said Kennedy “spoke to us in that now-distant time past, with a vitality and sense of purpose such as we had never heard before.”
Kennedy “was young to be president, but it didn’t seem so if you were younger still,” McCullough added. “He was ambitious to make it a better world, and so were we.”
Past anniversaries have been marked mostly by loose gatherings of the curious and conspiracy-minded, featuring everything from makeshift memorials to marching drummers and discussions about others who might have been in on the killing.