They say that when some things happen, we never forget where we are in that moment.. The one that everyone who lived through it, thinks of immediately, is the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and I certainly do… eighth grade US History, presided over by Mr. Saxon at Parrish Junior High, in Salem. The announcement came over the loudspeaker that the president had been shot in Dallas, and they sent us home. I went to our little TV room, watched our black and white TV.. as it was announced that he had passed away. And kept watching, seeing live the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby. Then the funeral, the long procession, John Kennedy Jr. saluting his father’s casket on a caisson as it passed.
There was an overwhelming feeling of sadness, this was the president whose speeches I had listened to, ‘ask not what your country can do for you’, ‘ Ich bin ein Berliner‘ and who to me, at the age of 13 had seemed to epitomize the good in government and in our country. And suddenly, it was all gone. A Texas old school politician was the new president, and I felt a letdown that can only be summed up by the relief I felt five years later when I heard Lyndon Baines Johnson say ‘ I will not seek and will accept my parties nomination for another term as your President’. His heart was heavy, mine soared. Of course, it was the precursor to other assassinations, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy..then the riot at the Chicago Democratic Convention, which appeared to be more of a police riot than anything else. The railroading through of the party bosses’ candidate, Humbert Humphrey, was the ultimate insult, leaving McCarthy, McGovern and the slain RFK all behind in favor of Johnson’s VP. Did I say ultimate, well not quite, the election of Richard M. Nixon would take that honor, and the aspirations and hopes of the generation growing up in what should have been the Kennedy era were all destroyed. The war would rage on another five years, while our president sought ‘peace with honor’ and bombed Laos, Cambodia, North Viet Nam, and of course South Viet Nam.
There’s another ‘where I was when’, a revelation, that I’ve also never forgotten. Perhaps it should have given me a bit of a warning of what was to come, but I was very young, very very naive..
We had our Junior Scholastics magazines in class, a weekly occurrence when I was in elementary school, I was 12 at the time, the assassination a year off, and I learned something I would never forget. My country was involved in a war, one that I knew nothing about, one that wasn’t on the evening news, or if so, was very low profile. The article was about the Plain of Jars 
in Laos, a funny sounding place, in a country of which I had never heard. It seems that our president had been sending advisers there to help the Laotians fight a little battle with communist insurgents. These advisers were in reality, combat troops, the United States Army, and foretold much of what was going to become of my country in the 1960’s.
I remember the first peace sign I saw, crudely painted on a sign post in San Francisco, below it a cryptic, ‘bring our troops home’.. and I thought of the Plain of Jars, and wondered what had happened in the ensuing years. Of course, it stopped being such a private little adviser war and, in time, we would all know about South-East Asia and our war.
When men landed at on the moon for the first time, I was once again watching on a small black and white TV, in the backroom of my first house.. a narrow mobile home (what can I say, it’s not tornado country after all).. and I wondered, out loud in fact.. if this was all staged. With the advent of all color, all definition, all the time TV, its a little hard to imagine squinting at that black and white poor reception and being able to question, let alone clearly see. One small step for man, one giant leap for Nasa’s budget. Now days, the flag blowing straight out in the breeze in those pictures, the seeming narrowness of the stage, all lends towards a more general conspiratorial feeling, one which I share only in retrospect. We did or we didn’t, it doesn’t really matter in the overarching sequence of events.
politics
