BURNED IN THE MEMORY
After 50 years, John F. Kennedy’s assassination haunts us still
He haunts us still. Fifty years ago Friday, John F. Kennedy, the president of the United States, was, as a Citizen headline put it at the time, “shot to death.”
Half a century later, the images of those fateful days — Jackie Kennedy holding the bloody head of her mortally wounded husband; Lyndon Johnson being sworn in as president with the widow by his side; Kennedy’s young son saluting his father’s funeral cortège — remain burned in our collective memory.
Indeed, the assassination of the 35th president of the United States on Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, was one of those events in which those who were alive at the time remember where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news.
That much was evident in the response of Ottawans.
“Shock like a giant tidal wave swept over the city with an almost unbelievable impact,” Citizen staff writer Joe Finn wrote in the paper’s Nov. 23 edition. “Thousands here recalled the Kennedys’ visit to Ottawa in 1961 when they saw the handsome, smiling president and his lovely wife Jacqueline in person.”
People wept openly in the streets. The University of Ottawa, Carleton University and other schools cancelled classes. Churches opened their doors, holding prayer vigils and masses. The flags on Parliament Hill, along with those of Ottawa’s foreign missions, were lowered to half-mast in mourning. Crowds gathered outside the U.S. embassy on Wellington Street. And everywhere, as Finn reported, the “only topic” was the assassination.
“On downtown streets people, horror and disbelief in their faces, stopped to discuss the tragic death of this American who in the brief time he was president had become a popular figure the world over,” Finn said. “‘Oh my God, it can’t be true’ was the main reaction.”
Citizen editor Christopher Young perhaps spoke for everyone when, in a column the day after the assassination, he tried to portray his grief. In a 750-word column, entitled An Evening to Remember, he wrote how as a member of the parliamentary press gallery he was introduced to the young and newly elected president at a state dinner during his visit to Ottawa in the spring of 1961. He goes on to describe the dignitaries and his feeling of awkwardness in wearing a rented tuxedo and then, finally, shaking hands with Kennedy.
Where some would have fawned over the president, Young, ever the journalist, looked for something that revealed Kennedy’s qualities as a man. He found it, too. Unlike many other dinner guests, Kennedy hadn’t “spangled his chest with the trophies of his courage in the Pacific War,” Young observed. Instead — and what most impressed Young — was the president’s decision to shelve the medals and ribbons and wear on his chest “nothing but a white handkerchief against his black tailcoat.”
That was the man Ottawans mourned in November of 1963. Then-prime minister Lester Pearson summed it up not only for the citizens of the nation’s capital, but for Canadians as a whole. “I feel I have lost a friend,” he said in a nationwide television broadcast, describing the assassination as “one of the great tragedies of history.”
Kennedy’s assassination was certainly a shock to the world. And more shocks would follow.
Two days after Kennedy’s death, his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was shot at point-blank range while being taken from a Dallas jail after his arrest. Then came the funeral in Washington, with its heartbreaking images of the widow and her two young children, Caroline and John Jr., standing stiffly as the cortège passed the weeping crowds.
The Citizen editorialists of the time got it partially right when, in the paper’s Nov. 23 edition, they opined that “the shock of President Kennedy’s death will in time wear off.” That is undoubtedly true, but it has not been forgotten by any means.
Even now, 50 years later, historians debate whether the world would have been a better place if Kennedy had lived. Would he have avoided the Vietnam War? Would the civil rights movement have proceeded faster and without all the riots? If Kennedy have lived, so, too, might his brother, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, and who knows how much good they might have done.
Perhaps, then, what has not been forgotten is not so much the memory of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, but the hope he represented.
As the Citizen editorialists put it: “To a world sick of war, sick of poverty in the midst of affluence, sick of racial discrimination and its indignities, sick of injustice, fearful of tomorrow, Mr. Kennedy brought nobility of purpose and a sense of direction.”
On the 50th anniversary of his death, you can’t help but wonder whether we will ever again see leaders who inspire such hope.