Sixty Years Ago
If President John Kennedy were alive today, he’d be 106 years old. But we cannot conceive of such a thing, because he will always be a youthful looking 46…the age he was when he was cut down by an assassin’s bullet on this date 60 years ago.
I was alive then, but barely; not even nine months old. But the impact of the event was something I soon learned, especially in the wake of Robert Kennedy’s murder not even five years later.
The television coverage of the event is fascinating to watch from a historical perspective. It was the first major breaking news event covered by the still-new medium. The first bulletins from the major TV networks were simply the voice of an anchor with a slide on the screen that literally read “news bulletin”…that’s because it took so long to warm up the tube-based cameras and large lights in the studio. The first TV bulletins were no different than radio. Ultimately, makeshift studios were set up in newsrooms…the normal studios were often some distance away from the teletypes pumping out bulletins. So from a broadcasting standpoint, the tragic event was groundbreaking in and of itself.
Yes, presidents had been murdered before then; in fact, four have been killed while in office, and all within a 100 year period…Lincoln in 1865, Garfield in 1881, McKinley in 1901, and Kennedy in 1963.
Each was tragic in its own way, but the television era changed things. We literally saw the president shaking hands at the airport moments before departing in the fatal motorcade. And, of course, before the end of the day, we saw a grieving widow, with her husband’s blood still on her clothing, accompany his casket for a final trip to the White House.
There is much about November 22nd, 1963 that has captured public interest, and led to dispute and controversy. But at its base, a very visual loss of innocence for a nation still in the shadow of World War II and the Korean Conflict…and on the verge of the turbulent decade of the 1960s, triggered in part by events in Dallas sixty years ago today.
(We’ll have a story on the impact of the presidential assassination in Iowa tomorrow on Iowa Almanac.)
