Born and raised in Northern Virginia, about six miles west of Washington, D.C., I was nine years old at the time of the assassination. I remember the assassination weekend vividly, not just because of our proximity to the funeral, but also because the Kennedy family was particularly revered in my Irish-American family. For this reason, we experienced his death as a very personal loss.
Washington was a much smaller and much more parochial place in those days and many of the Kennedy family comings and goings were reported as local events. From my grandparents’ house I could see the airfield where presidential helicopters lifted off for the White House. Five months before the assassination, JFK spoke at my uncle’s law school graduation, delivering his famous Peace for All Time speech. Only eight months before that speech, we had been terrified by days of Missile Crisis headlines and local newscasts detailing how or house was in the blast zone of a nuclear strike.
The assassination was announced to my fourth grade class via a public address announcement just prior to our dismissal from school around 3 pm EST. We were vaguely aware of a disruption in the halls prior to the announcement and class activity had stopped until the announcement came. My teacher was called out of the classroom and returned in tears before the announcement.
Except for a young man in my class who saw fit to stand and tastelessly mimic a gunshot wound (yes, I still recall his name), the school and the bus ride home were eerily silent that bright warm afternoon. I got off the bus early and walked most of the way home amid the fallen leaves, attempting to grasp what had just happened. My mother was napping when I arrived home and she had not heard the news. I remember asking her whether this meant that “Eisenhower was now president.” Oh, we should have been so fortunate.
We turned on the television and, like the rest of America, watched nonstop for the next three days. That night, a news report showed that Air Force One had flown directly over our house on its way the Andrews AFB returning from Dallas.
I was in front of the television that Sunday and was the only one in my family who watched live as Jack Ruby shot Oswald. My mother thought that I had gotten confused when I reported that a man had just been shot on live television. “No,” she corrected me, “that was on Friday.” I led her to the television and together we watched the endless replays of Oswald’s murder.
The next day, we watched the funeral on television. When the missing man formation few over the cemetery, I ran into our front yard in time to see the jets pass over our house, exiting to the west.
Our house was only a few miles away from Hickory Hill and from time to time, we would see members of RFK’s family in the local stores. RFK bought many of his clothes from the same mens shop in McLean, Va where I bought mine. Edward Kennedy spoke at my high school on several occasions where I was privileged to meet him. It all furthered our emotional and geographic connection to the Kennedy family.
I moved away from Washington as an adult, but in 1998, took my seven year old daughter on a weekend visit to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. That night, she asked me what is was like to grow up in Washington and my thoughts drifted back to these memories. When she asked the inevitable questions about JFK’s death and burial place, I suddenly realized that the next day was the 35th anniversary of the assassination.
We quickly made a plan to visit Arlington the next morning and we were standing at the JFK gravesite when Senator Kennedy, Ethel Kennedy and Victoria Kennedy appeared and placed flowers on the graves. Senator Kennedy turned and spoke to the crowd briefly, thanking us for remembering, and then disappeared down a path to RFK’s grave.
I grabbed my daughter and hurried down to the spot where we correctly surmised that the Kennedy family had parked. In a few minutes, they returned to the car, which Vicky and Ethel quickly entered. Kennedy himself lingered for a few minuites, talking to the crowd. He quickly focused on my girl, who, then in the midst of a fascination with Amelia Earhart, was wearing my Navy leather flight jacket. Senator Kennedy then began a conversation about her age, her interests, and what she wanted to do when she grew up. When she told him that she wanted to be a pilot, he quietly responded that his brother, Joe, had been a pilot. It was a very emotional moment in a morning that for me was already emotionally charged.
The next day, our local paper ran an AP photo of Senator Kennedy’s party visiting the gravesite and, sure enough, there was my daughter watching them.
JFK’s assassination was the single most impactful event in my life. I adored him as a child, venerated his early sainted memory, adjusted my views when details of his private life emerged, and, in the last 30 years have sorted everything out with an abiding appreciation of a unique, gifted, and historically significant human being, complete with human foibles. In my study, I still keep a photo of him close by and occasionally wonder what it would have been like to have shared cigars with him and my sailing pals.
His assassination also became the immutable measuring point in my life. I still mark events and calculate their significance with reference to 11/22/63.
I have lived through the waves of speculation and fantasy about assassination conspiracies and, having read most of the historical materials, detest the incessant distortion of events and profiteering that have persuaded so many Americans that a speculative and improbable conspiracy was to blame. I am therefore grateful for the Sixth Floor Museum’s stewardship of this history and its fact based curation of these events.