The Day That Changed America

In the early afternoon of November 22, 1963 I was a Junior at Father Ryan High School in Nashville, Tennessee.  I was taking an English test.  Not too far into the fifth period an announcement came over the intercom that the President had been shot in Dallas.  Father Cunningham gave us permission to stop the test and pray quietly for President Kennedy.  We were so stunned that I’m not sure how many prayers made it out of that room.  Most of us were trying to make some sense of this unbelievable report.  It was not too long, maybe 10 or 15 minutes later, that the second announcement came – the President was dead!  Our  amazement turned to shock.  I felt like all that I knew about my country up until that time had changed.  I think that my feelings were not too different from those experienced when Americans first learned that Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.  As I recall, we did not go to our sixth period class but stayed together and listened to the radio reports. 

 After school was dismissed, I was scheduled to work until closing at the Cooper & Martin grocery on Gallatin Road.  When I arrived, everyone was walking around like zombies.  I don’t remember much about what happened  from 3 pm to 10 pm when the store closed.  But what happened then has stuck with me all these years.  It was my normal responsibility to follow the manager of the store to the bank to make the night deposit after the store closed.  After the deposit, he would drive home to Melrose and I would drive home to Inglewood.  That night, he asked me to ride in his car to the bank with him and he would bring me back to the store to get my car.  He had been listening to the radio as he was preparing to close the store and as he was preparing the deposit.  There was a lot of speculation that the fabric of our society had been rent and no one knew what to expect.  He wanted me with him in his car in case he experienced something entirely different from the normal. 

I think we all knew that something at the very core of our existence as a country had changed.   Yes, there had been presidents who were assassinated before (Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley) but it had been over 60 years since the last and none of us even considered such an occurrence as a possibility.  The Kennedy presidency was the American Camelot – how could it be attacked?  There truly was an age of innocence in America.  It is not that everyone supported President Kennedy – but almost everyone was inspired by the vision of America that he projected: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”  That quote from his inauguration speech resonated with the people.  This was before Viet Nam and there was an expectation of great things that our country could do both internally and internationally.  The Appalachian Regional Commission  and the Peace Corps were vehicles for citizens who could volunteer and become involved in transforming cultures both domestic and abroad.  Somehow the hope for the future was extinguished that day and the spectrum of a conflict between good and evil became part of our DNA as Americans – and it has never left.  The America of the early 1960’s was good and a pleasant time to live.  This is more than a romantic ideal conceived in retrospect – it was very real.  But it no longer exists and may be beyond recovery with our present state of uncivility.  Pushing aside the human failings of a murdered president, the ideal of Camelot is still a worthy goal for our country.  May God have mercy.