When you undergo a traumatic experience, especially at a young age, you remember details of that experience for the rest of your life.
And so it was for so many on the day of the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on that fateful Friday – November 22, 1963.
I was an eighth grader at Akiba Hebrew Academy in Merion, Pennsylvania.
The day before, we had discussed in our current events club about how JFK and David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s recently resigned prime minister, had a vociferous argument over Israel’s nuclear weapons program, just six weeks after JFK pushed through the nuclear test ban treaty – for the entire world to sign.
JFK didn’t want Israel – or anyone else – to produce nuclear weapons.
Ben-Gurion shot back that Israel’s adversaries wanted genocide – that this was the lesson that the Jews had learned from the Nazis, that this was why the Jews needed nukes (the dialogue is well documented in Avner Cohen’s book Israel And The Bomb, Columbia University Press, 1998
As I walked out of school to catch the bus home that Friday afternoon, a seventh grader down the steps, yelling out the news that the president had been shot dead in Dallas.
First thoughts hit me were that JFK was such a young guy, like a nice uncle who always had new ideas. My mind was racing, and I quickly wrote down my thoughts when I got on the bus to go home.
How would we remember JFK? I remembered listening to him in sixth grade at his inauguration – “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” He had one message: to get involved. Join the Peace Corps. Fight for civil rights. Help Poor Nations Abroad, and act in accordance with “Profiles in Courage”: Be proud to stand for the principles of your country, no matter what.
Getting on the bus at City Line Avenue, people of all ages were sobbing. A black man getting on the bus said to the driver, “Do you know what he did for us?”
The editor of the school paper, known as the Gateway, was also on that bus.
I told her that my dad was commuting these days to Washington DC, as an engineer working on central air conditioning at the big post office in DC. Saying that I could join him there, I asked if I could cover the JFK funeral for the school paper. She said “sure” and I got my first press assignment..
My thoughts on the bus which I wrote down at the time were that we “must do something to help our country” to remember our fallen president. As I sauntered down the sidewalk on Malvern Avenue in Overbrook Park, my Mom was standing outside, her hands folded. She asked me what I thought. My eight-year-old brother, Neal, standing beside her, shrugged his shoulders and said that “hey, we have an old man again,” meaning Lyndon Johnson.
And there was The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin delivered on our door step an hour before, spread out on the couch, with the headline “Kennedy shot in Dallas street,” superimposed over the sub headline: “Nixon, in Dallas, says that Kennedy will drop Johnson in 1964.”
Sitting in the living room for hours, we watched a shaken Walter Cronkite describe everything that he could about JFK and then about the ex-marine Lee Harvey Oswald. The weekly satire show “That Was The Week That Was”, hosted by David Frost, led with a melody that was written on the spot by the usually hilarious staff, now somber and serious. Nancy Ames sang the lyrics:
“A young man rode with his head held high, under the Texas sun, And no one guessed, That a man so blessed, would perish by the gun, Lord, would perish by the gun. A shot rang out like a southern shout. And Heaven held its breath. For a man shot down, In a Southern town, In the summer of his years, Yes, the summer of his years”.
As I psyched myself up that Sunday to cover the funeral the following day in Washington – where my friend Gary and I would accompany my dad at what was then called Pennsylvania Railroad Station at 30th Street – I was glued to the TV screen, to learn anything and everything that could be learned about the assassination and the assassin.