Bells toll as Americans relive a dark day
Thousands attend ceremony in Dallas where JFK assassinated
DALLAS — This time it was the pealing of bells rather than the crack of bullets that rang across Dealey Plaza in Dallas.
At 12:30 p.m. Friday, an invited crowd gathered to honour the life and legacy of president John F. Kennedy, 50 years to the minute after an assassin cut him down in his prime.
On that November afternoon in 1963, the cheers of onlookers turned to silence and screams as the presidential limousine roared off on a futile dash to a hospital, the mortally wounded president slumped in the lap of his wife, Jacqueline.
About 5,000 people stood in the cold and rain in Dealey Plaza on Friday, their numbers restricted only by space and security. Around the nation, Americans also stopped and mourned, their eyes once again on the Texas city. Many in the crowd glanced up toward the far window on the sixth floor of the red-brick building that stands at the northeast corner of the plaza.
It was from there, unless some of the wilder conspiracy theories are correct, that Lee Harvey Oswald, a disgruntled former marine and communist sympathizer, fired the fatal shots.
“A new era dawned and another waned a half century ago when hope and hatred collided right here in Dallas,” said Mike Rawlings, the Dallas mayor, speaking in front of a huge U.S. flag flying at half-mast — as the Stars and Stripes were across the country. “Our collective hearts were broken.”
Kennedy was silenced that day. But the words of a president renowned for the power and inspiration of his oratory have lived on and it was his message of hope and promise that was at the heart of Friday’s tribute.
Rawlings read the final lines of the speech that Kennedy had been intending to deliver that lunchtime in which the president would have noted that “by destiny rather than choice” Americans are the “watchmen on the walls of world freedom.”
The words that he never had the chance to say in 1963 are inscribed on a new memorial unveiled in the plaza during Friday’s ceremony.The mayor then called for a moment’s silence, the quiet giving way to a rendition of America the Beautiful, sung by the U.S. Naval Academy choir, in honour of Kennedy’s time with that service during the Second World War.
And then the power of Kennedy’s language resounded again, as David McCullough, a presidential historian, praised him for his eloquence and read excerpts from his most famous speeches.
“He was ambitious to make it a better world and so were we,” McCullough said. “He was an optimist, and he said so, but there was no sidestepping reality in what he said. He spoke to the point and with confidence. He knew words matter. His words changed lives. His words changed history.”
He read extensively from Kennedy’s “New Frontier” speech in which the young politician spelled out his challenge to Americans when he won the Democratic presidential nomination.
“The New Frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises — it is a set of challenges. It sums up not what I intend to offer the American people, but what I intend to ask of them. It appeals to their pride, not to their pocketbook — it holds out the promise of more sacrifice instead of more security.”
For the crowd, this was the chance to imagine what might have been.
“I look up at that window and just think ‘What if ?’ — what if history could be tweaked, if there was just some small change in the course of events that day?” said Carol Chazdon, a business consultant who was 12 when her teacher tearfully told her class that the president had been shot. “I am here in memory of the hope, joy and pride he brought us all as Americans.”