November 22, 1963
Just a moment to remember what happened 46 years ago today in Dallas.
I think I have it counted correctly: when the 50th anniversary comes around it'll be on a Friday. It's rare when significant anniversaries fall on the day they happened originally.
It's tough for people born after this watershed event to realized how shattering the assassination of JFK was, but the reverberations still emanate today. It signaled the beginning of the erosion of trust the American people had in their Government, watching the Feds botch the investigation and then try to cover their butts with the Warren Commission Report which would eventually trickle down later in the decade to mistrust over Vietam.
I'm not huge on conspiracy theories, and I'm a believer that often, stuff just happens, I've read the evidence and while the anti-conspiracy theorists may be right and Oswald was the lone assassin, I don't think so. I do believe that JFK was murdered by more than one person that day, and that Oswald was probably a patsy, just like he said.
If this happened today, the Zapruder assassination film and others' photos would have been all over the Internet within hours, if not minutes. Doubtful the police and Feds could have confiscated everyone's cellphones!
For years the actual murder footage was suppressed, though eventually still photos were published in LIFE magazine, and bootleg copies of the actual Zapruder film started making the rounds of college campuses and church halls until eventually in 1975, the film was screened on network TV.
The psychological shock had the country reeling: a young President murdered with his blood and brains spattered all over his wife, and leaving behind two young children and the promise and hope of the era. Also, the symbolism of the murder of the nation's chieftain/father/leader went deep in the human/American psyche. People start to think if it could happen to the most powerful man on Earth, cut down in his prime, what hope for them?
A lot of things would change after that day, as cliched as that might sound, but cliches are often true.