Today, November 22nd, is a date I’ll never forget, but it won’t mean much to most Americans. That’s because most weren’t even born yet when President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot to death on this tragic day, 60 years ago.
But like when the world shut down from Covid, and like 9/11 before that, and like the Challenger calamity before that, and the first moon landing before that, and the assassinations in the short space of just two months of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King before that, almost all of us who were alive when President Kennedy was shot, or on those other fateful days, will always remember where we were and how we felt.
Those events changed history. They changed us.
It doesn’t much matter whether the Kennedy presidency is considered one of the great ones. Many historians say it wasn’t. Yet his murder in a motorcade in Dallas hit us hard as a nation, because what JFK represented was a new generation in America. His shock of hair, his glamorous wife, his beautiful children were a part of it. But a bigger part was his uplifting optimism. We called it all, “Camelot.” Just as Ronald Reagan inspired the free world when he stood at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate in 1987 and demanded, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” Kennedy inspired us with the value of our alliances 24 years earlier, in the midst of the Cold War, when he visited West Berlin, looked over the Wall, and said, “Ich bin ein Berliner”— I am a Berliner.
He inspired us the year that before when he faced off against the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and won. And he inspired us the year before that when he stood before Congress in 1961 and said that the U.S. “should commit itself… before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon.”
Here’s my personal story of where I was and how I felt on that Friday in November when we got the news from Dallas that Kennedy was dead.
I was a high school senior, sitting in Spanish class taking a test. Our teacher was called out of the room. He came back a minute later and said, “The president’s been shot. Now go back to your exams.” We did. Of course when we got out of the test, we learned that the president hadn’t just been shot, he’d been killed. But that news competed with our plans for a Homecoming dance, scheduled for the next night. I was the senior class president, so I got together with the other class officers to figure out whether the assassination was enough to delay the dance. I argued that the dance should go on. Still insulated by the walls of the school, I didn’t yet grasp the scope of the tragedy. Thankfully, saner minds prevailed (and, as memory serves, the principal also intervened). Eventually, along with every other American, I understood that with three rifle shots, America had changed. Camelot had died. It never came back.
The two other assassinations came in 1968, less than five years later. In April, Martin Luther King was killed by a gunman while standing on the balcony of a motel in Memphis, where he’d traveled to support striking sanitation workers who were preparing for a march. There were riots in the wake of King’s death in more than a hundred cities. More than 40 people died.
Two months later, Bobby Kennedy was running for president and celebrating his win in the California primary. But as he was leaving his victory rally via the kitchen at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, a gunman jumped out and shot him at point-blank range. Whether Kennedy would have won the nomination and beaten Richard Nixon in the general election will never be known, but what we do know is that Nixon won in November, and for five years we lived with the tension and the lies of Vietnam and Watergate.
It was Martin Luther King who famously said, “I have a dream.” Sometimes, it was a dream that was hard to hold onto.
The bright moment in my list of unforgettable days for the nation was July 20th, 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first Americans, the first people, to step on the moon. Despite domestic divisions over Vietnam and global divisions in the Cold War, that was a unifying day. Almost everyone alive at the time probably remembers where they were when it happened. As a new producer with ABC News, I had been assigned to produce our coverage of the landing from a town in western Ohio called Wapakoneta. Armstrong, who put the very first footprints on the moon, had been born and raised there. If people around the nation and around the globe were excited and proud of the achievement, I saw it from the proudest place of all.
But then, 17 years later, came space shuttle Challenger, which exploded off the coast of Florida just 73 seconds after liftoff. The seven astronauts onboard died, and the space program that had excited the world went into hiatus. Rubber seals in a solid rocket booster, called O-rings, had stiffened in the cold weather at Cape Canaveral, and failed. There had been warnings that they were defective but the warnings were written off. It was a wake-up call about American technology. We led the world but we weren’t perfect.
This was a crisis for our nation, but I wasn’t there to cry with my countrymen. On the day of the disaster, I was taking a break from reporting on wars and revolutions to cover the semi-annual haute couture fashion week in Paris, where I was based, for Good Morning America. I came out of one of the shows and flagged a taxi to return with my video to ABC’s bureau. When I gave the address in my broken French, the driver heard the American accent and said to me (in French), “I’m sorry about what happened to your spaceship.” When I got into the office and learned what it was, I felt loneliness sweep over me. It was an American catastrophe, I was an American, but I had to mourn from afar.
9/11 will forever be remembered by anyone who was even aware of what happened.
At the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon near Washington, and a field in southwestern Pennsylvania, 2,977 people died, some instantly, some many days later. It led to two horribly costly overseas wars and a war on terrorism that hasn’t abated. It also led to a level of insecurity in our lives from which we might never recover.
As a journalist, I desperately wanted to report from the scenes of the attacks, but I couldn’t. I had been home all of three days from open-heart surgery. On the morning of September 11th, having slept only fitfully, I turned on the TV just in time to see the second plane hit in New York. That night, my wife had to rush me back to the hospital because I had some complications, and as a sign of how rattled this country was, people had gone out drinking and gotten into bar fights and the ER was teeming with drunken and bloodied patients. Although it was a Tuesday night at an emergency room in a quiet suburb west of Denver, almost everyone had to wait for beds to open up.
Then came Covid.
Nobody will ever forget Covid. We don’t all remember the same specific day when our lives changed but what we’ll always remember is that they did. The virus first showed up in January, 2020, and by the middle of March, the world shut down. People were dying daily by the thousands. We were afraid of what we touched, where we went, who we saw. Schools and businesses and offices closed their doors. People we took for granted were heroes. Not just nurses and doctors, EMTs and paramedics, but grocery workers, delivery drivers, people who never signed on to be “essential workers.”
The new landscape lasted for at least two years and to this day, it’s not novel to see supply chain shortages, remote learning, vacant office buildings, and grocery pickup services so we don’t have to go into the stores. To this day we still see people in masks. The death toll is no longer a headline story but just last week I went to a talk by Dr. Anthony Fauci and he told the audience that still, there are about a hundred people in this nation— mostly either unvaccinated or elderly— who die every day.
Three generations of Americans have been born since November 22, 1963, the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. But each of those generations, just like mine, has an earth-changing event that they will never forget.
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
President Kennedy brought inspiration to many people who may have been numbed by World War II and its aftermath. At least that's what I believe. I'm thinking of the Youth Corps and similar programs. Yes, he and his family were charismatic, his words uplifting... but I think that's what this otherwise dull nation wanted and needed at that time. And, yes, here we are again, I believe, at a time when inspiration and dreaming might bring much-needed joy and relief to the nation.
I too was a high school senior when Kennedy was shot. I was in the school newspaper office when a teacher came running down the hall, yelling Kennedy had been shot. We got dismissed and I walked home with a friend. Mom was in front of the small black and white TV and a short time later, the newscaster somberly announced Kennedy was dead. Two days later, we were watching the news and saw Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald in real time. I can still see it all in my head.