Why the fear from JFK’s assassination lingers

It’s 12:30 p.m. CST, and the 1961 Lincoln Continental limousine carrying President John F. Kennedy at 11 mph turns right from Houston Street onto Elm Street in Dallas

It’s at this moment when a dress manufacturer named Abraham Zapruder begins filming the most watched and famous home movie in history.

For the United States and the world, the Lincoln’s turn onto Elm was a turn into a ghastly detour marked “Before 12:30 p.m. Nov. 22, 1963,” and “After 12:30 p.m. Nov. 22, 1963.”

At 12:30 p.m., Zapruder’s view of the Lincoln is obstructed as the car disappears for two seconds behind a street sign.

What we know now was unknowable that afternoon to Zapruder, Kennedy, first lady Jackie Kennedy, the Secret Service, and the thousands of cheering and waving people lining the streets.

As the car reemerges into view, the president grabs his throat, having been hit by the first assassin’s bullet. Seconds later, he’s struck by the fatal shot to the head.

Jackie Kennedy, instinctively trying to retrieve a fragment of her husband’s head, climbs on the back of the limousine and was in danger of falling onto the street and being hit by other cars in the motorcade.

Clint Hill, the Secret Service agent assigned to protect her, leaps from the trailing vehicle and sprints to the car, which accelerates as he tries to grab a rail on the trunk.

He and the first lady lock hands, she helps pull him into the car, and he pushes her to the floor, spread-eagle over her and her husband as the Lincoln speeds into a tunnel toward Parkland Memorial Hospital, where the president of the United States will be declared dead.

Kennedy had come to Texas to narrow the breach between the liberal and conservative wings in the Texas Democratic Party. On Nov. 21, he received a rousing welcome in San Antonio for the dedication of the Aerospace Medical health Center at Brooks AFB.

In the new National Geographic series “JFK: One Day in America,” Hill, now 91, says, “It’s my belief that the United States lost its innocence on Nov. 22, 1963.”

Others have said that, and it’s fair to counter with: How innocent could a nation that was born in revolution, and survived a civil war and two world wars have been?

But an American president murdered while riding in a car on an American street in front of thousands of his fellow countrymen and countrywomen does despoil innocence.

And it was this president. The youngest, at 43, elected and the youngest, at 46, to die.

No president and his family, until Barack Obama and his family, looked less like any of their predecessors.

Kennedy was the first president to master television, and his assassination and funeral would be television’s first national and global communal event.

The 1960s were visited by a plague of gunshots that destroyed a harvest of young, talented leadership: Kennedy, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy. All killed by assassins choosing bullets and violence over ballots and discourse.

The assassination of leaders, especially those who were elected, is an attempt to overthrow democracies. The reasons Dec. 7, 1941, Nov. 22, 1963, Sept. 11, 2001, and Jan. 6, 2021, resonate with haunting pain is because on those days we were under attack and we feared something might be coming to an end.

That something was our belief that our democracy would always endure.

One hundred years and three days before Kennedy became our last president to be assassinated, the Gettysburg Address was delivered by the American president who would become our first to be assassinated.

On Nov. 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln, who bound this nation together as it was falling apart, spoke of the great task remaining to secure democracy “and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Sixty years ago, a horrified nation grieved for a president and his family, and worried where the country was heading.

In 2023 we remain passengers in that limousine, speeding into a tunnel and no longer sure what’s on the other side.