Chronicle of a Death Retold

It will be an anniversary draped in black crêpe and ribboned with old newsreels, a day of somber re-appraisals by the usual bores and lurid speculations by the usual loons. But beneath the cacophony, not all of it generated by Chris Matthews’s yap, will rest the severed feeling of irretrievable, inexplicable loss. Fifty years ago, on November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated riding in a motorcade cruising through Dallas’s Dealey Plaza, the top of his head torn off by a rifle shot fired from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, his brain matter spilling into the lap of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, whose pink suit and pillbox hat colorize our memories of a noir nightmare unfolding under a noonday sun. Like the bombing of Pearl Harbor, in 1941, and the destruction of the Twin Towers, in 2001, J.F.K.’s assassination was one of those unifying, defining moments when everyone alive remembers where they were when the news struck, shattering the glass wall separating before and after. I was in the sixth grade, a member of the safety patrol, with a white sash and official-looking badge: I remember the light at the end of the school hallway reflecting off the floor as word went round and the weight in the air the days after. For kids my age, it was like losing a father, a father who had all of our motley fates in his hands. (During the Cuban missile crisis, of 1962, a lot of us grade-schoolers thought we might be goners, our Twilight Zone atomic nightmares about to come true.)

In those big-three-network days (ABC, CBS, NBC), television was broadcast mostly in black and white, and the images of the coverage that followed—the riderless horse, John-John’s salute as his father’s casket went by, Jacqueline Kennedy’s mourning veil (which Andy Warhol would multiply into a silkscreen montage, deifying her as a widow Madonna)—bled into our consciousness like irremovable ink. A deluge of memoirs, biographies, photo albums, magazine special editions, political reconsiderations, pulpy reconstructions (Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Kennedy), tales of Camelot romance, and pantie-sniffing scandal trawls have followed ever since, a perpetual cottage industry of Kennedyiana, building to November’s golden-anniversary publishing crescendo.

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